ckparrothead
Premium Member
Two things I want to see first:
1. How he does versus La Tech in the CUSA Championship and then the Peach Bowl (if they award it to Marshall, which they should)
2. How he does during the week of All Star practices and in the game
He's a genuinely good senior QB prospect. In my opinion he's the best senior in this class.
Probably the biggest weakness to him is his size combined with his scrambling tendencies, which would lead us to believe he could get murdered in the NFL a la Pat White. But on that point I think it's relevant that he has never missed a college game, not a single one not even the three games for which he was benched as a true freshman, and I have also never heard of him missing time in high school due to injury.
On film, he's the anti-Robert Griffin when it comes to taking unnecessary contact. His physical awareness and elusiveness is easily on par with Russell Wilson or Johnny Manziel, and he is even more contact-averse than Wilson. He consciously gives up yardage (depending on the situation) by diving to the ground or running out of bounds. The only exceptions are situational, which means converting on third downs and getting into the end zone. And even in those cases, he's got exceptional body control and so he's uncanny at getting low and/or making himself small in order to minimize the impact of hits.
He's not worried about looking "tough". My guess is this is because he's always been too skinny even going back to high school. He was a true freshman at Marshall playing FBS football and leading the team to a bowl win at 150 pounds. He's never had the luxury of pretending that he could be a tough guy when it comes to taking contact he could've avoided.
All of this is why he's stayed so remarkably healthy despite being too thin and too small at every level.
The other big criticism is that when you get him into an interview setting, he comes off like a kid that was born and raised in Liberty City. There's a cultural divide. Get him talking about football and suddenly there is translation, but there are people that will insinuate that he's dumb. To that I would point to the fact that Bill Legg essentially has Rakeem Cato doing all of the play-calling on the field. Every play he calls has a run component, a pass component, and a Rakeem component, and the receivers run their routes no matter what. I don't know that a dumb player can essentially be the play-caller on the field and lead the most successful offense in all of FBS football.
But that criticism is what we'll start to learn more about in an All Star setting because he'll be in someone else's system trying to run things their way and communicate their way and we'll just have to see how he handles that.
1. How he does versus La Tech in the CUSA Championship and then the Peach Bowl (if they award it to Marshall, which they should)
2. How he does during the week of All Star practices and in the game
He's a genuinely good senior QB prospect. In my opinion he's the best senior in this class.
Probably the biggest weakness to him is his size combined with his scrambling tendencies, which would lead us to believe he could get murdered in the NFL a la Pat White. But on that point I think it's relevant that he has never missed a college game, not a single one not even the three games for which he was benched as a true freshman, and I have also never heard of him missing time in high school due to injury.
On film, he's the anti-Robert Griffin when it comes to taking unnecessary contact. His physical awareness and elusiveness is easily on par with Russell Wilson or Johnny Manziel, and he is even more contact-averse than Wilson. He consciously gives up yardage (depending on the situation) by diving to the ground or running out of bounds. The only exceptions are situational, which means converting on third downs and getting into the end zone. And even in those cases, he's got exceptional body control and so he's uncanny at getting low and/or making himself small in order to minimize the impact of hits.
He's not worried about looking "tough". My guess is this is because he's always been too skinny even going back to high school. He was a true freshman at Marshall playing FBS football and leading the team to a bowl win at 150 pounds. He's never had the luxury of pretending that he could be a tough guy when it comes to taking contact he could've avoided.
All of this is why he's stayed so remarkably healthy despite being too thin and too small at every level.
The other big criticism is that when you get him into an interview setting, he comes off like a kid that was born and raised in Liberty City. There's a cultural divide. Get him talking about football and suddenly there is translation, but there are people that will insinuate that he's dumb. To that I would point to the fact that Bill Legg essentially has Rakeem Cato doing all of the play-calling on the field. Every play he calls has a run component, a pass component, and a Rakeem component, and the receivers run their routes no matter what. I don't know that a dumb player can essentially be the play-caller on the field and lead the most successful offense in all of FBS football.
But that criticism is what we'll start to learn more about in an All Star setting because he'll be in someone else's system trying to run things their way and communicate their way and we'll just have to see how he handles that.
