Just remember that a "career backup" usually means the guy will find himself starting a fair number of football games. Otherwise he wouldn't stay a primary backup for long. Take a Sage Rosenfels as a for instance. People can't figure out whether he's a starter or a backup. That's the only way you end up a career backup like Sage has. That's the kind of future I could foresee for Pat White.
As for the Wildcat...I won't pretend it's an easy answer. What I'll say though is that the NFL and NCAA playbooks have been getting further and further apart at a very rapid pace the last 10-15 years. What we call "Wildcat" just means spread and/or option plays. Shotgun split back veer. Single wing. Triple option. Zone read. The NCAA has adopted these concepts to where they've become their bread and butter. As one coach recently said, 80 percent of the NCAA is that stuff right now.
I personally do not think that the NFL can continue to subsist on normal "pro" concepts while the NCAA diverges from them so strongly. That's my theory. It's just a theory. The NFL eats college prospects as cheap labor. Nowadays you hear everyone say, "Rookies have to be able to play quickly" and "you have to hit on your draft picks". In order to do that, you have to pick rookies whose skill sets match what you as a pro football team want to do. That gets harder and harder when 80 percent of the NCAA is filled with option and spread stuff. How many stud QB prospects come out nowadays with a bunch of experience dropping back from under center and throwing pro style routes? Few.
But that means there's a large segment of talent basically going untouched by the NFL simply because they're too reluctant to change their playbooks around.
Look at what Miami did with the Wildcat. They installed the thing mid-season, during a regular season practice schedule. An offense of nobodies and cast-offs embarrassed one of the league's leading defensive minds, one of the league's smartest defenses, with an offense that basically took two days of practice to install! You want to talk about low-hanging fruit? That's low-hanging fruit.
Franchise QBs and "blue goose number one WRs" (to borrow Jerry Reese's language) are more rare than ever...and for the QBs at least it seems, more necessary than ever. How long before the teams that don't have one get fed up with this league becoming a league of haves and have-nots at positions that are extremely hard to find, and turn a different direction?
That's what I think could start to happen in the NFL...and it won't subside until college defenses find an answer for all that spread and option stuff out there. It'll be like the 3-4 and 4-3 defenses. The 4-3 defenses reigned until 3-4 two-gap talent became cheap and ignored, and then teams that ran a 3-4 thrived on the advantage.
I know there's one out there of his drive against the Arizona Cardinals...and honestly, it was a pretty impressive drive.
I don't know if he can be as good as a Rosenfels or a Wallace, I think his ceiling is of a backup type like those guys.
NE did adjust to the WC the 2nd game and Baltimore had no problems in either game. We'll see if it has staying power, obviously Miami thinks it does taking a QB for that system as high as they did.