I personally believe that Henne should start sooner than later but other people think he should sit and wait because it can damage him long term. My question is to the people who want him to sit for longer. When people say that it can hurt him to start too early I'm curious what specifically they think would happen to him that would damage is psyche? This isn't sarcasm or anything I am honestly curious. Are people afraid he is going to throw a lot of interceptions or get sacked a lot?
Its pretty easy to understand if you look at the same phenomenon, but a different scenario.
Consider a teenager who is just starting to get into the dating scene. He goes and asks a girl out, she says no. He asks another girl, she says no. He asks 5 girls, they all say no. What happens? He loses confidence in himself. He now expects girls to say no when he asks. He goes up to ask another girl, but this time he is extremely nervous, he doesn't really look at her, maybe even starts to stutter when he talks. What happens? She says no. Maybe she would have said yes, but he looked pretty pathetic, so she changed her mind. His reluctance made the situation turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. He is now psychologically unable to successfully ask women out.
Now a second teenager asks a girl, she says yes. In fact, when asking girls out, he gets told yes rather than no more often than not, lets say 75% yes rate. His confidence is soaring. He can walk up to any girl, completely confident, smiling wide, and ask her out. Its also a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the women respond to his confidence. Sure, he gets a no once in a while, but the fact that he gets yes more often than not makes him shrug off the times he gets a no.
Its the same thing with Henne playing QB. If we throw him to the wolves, and he performs badly, its like the teenager that kept getting shot down. Eventually, he is going to go out there and expect to not perform well, because thats his history. Its going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has very little to do with mental toughness during the learning process. You can take the most confident person in the world, throw them in a scenario where they are learning for the first time, and consistent failures would do the exact same thing to them.
Now, the important thing to keep in mind here, is that no one is saying he is going to go out there and suck. Fact is, he may very well go out and play lights out. However, what the Dolphins want as a team, and the fans SHOULD want, is to minimize the risk of him going out there and flopping. How do we do that? We sit him a season or two, let him watch Pennington. Let him learn the playbook inside-out. Let him watch game film and learn how to recognize defenses, blitz packages, coverage tendencies, etc. This way, when he finally sees the field, he is in a good position to succeed initially. If he succeeds initially, then his confidence is going to sky-rocket. It'll be like the confident teenager. He'll succeed most of the time, and even when he fails, it won't phase him as much because he has had prior successes, and *believes* that he will just succeed the next time, like he normally does. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy again.
Hopefully that made it clear. Sorry its so long, I have a BA in psych and am in grad school for it, so I tend to ramble when the subject comes up......
