I have watched Stick for 3 years now, he Is much closer to Brock Jensen than he would ever be to Wentz. Inconsistent accuracy continues to be a huge problem for him. There isnt an FCS QB in this years draft that will amount to anything IMHO
I'll give you this. You've definitely watched him for the last three years if that's your main criticism. You are 100% correct here. I see so many other guys pick out this or that about his game, and I just think, they haven't really watched him. They don't really have a bead on who he is as a prospect. You do, though.
I just disagree with your conclusions.
I measured his propensity for off-target throws in 2018 at about 16 to 20%, depending on how deep you want to go into the "why" a ball was off-target. I'll give you an example of that. There was a scramble to Easton's left, where he threw the ball straight up the hash to the receiver, but the receiver had his jersey tugged hard by the defensive back (unflagged), knocking his balance off and forcing the receiver to awkwardly fade instead of going straight up the hash. If you watch the play, you know exactly where the receiver intended to go, and it was exactly where Stick threw it. But it looked off-target/uncatchable. How you classify that and plays like it is how you go between 16 and 20%.
As I compare this percentage around the NFL, the average among NFL starters is somewhere around 23%. So Easton Stick's percentages of off-target passes definitely fit into the NFL standard.
However, Stick played in the FCS on a team that was built to dominate that level of competition. There was a comfort level he had on that team, against that competition, in that offense, that developed over the course of 51 starts. There's no denying it. So you'd sort of expect his off-target percentages to be better than the NFL. And the question becomes...were they ENOUGH better?
And then of course, as you say, you've been watching him for three years so YOU have seen that off-target percentage be higher in 2017 and especially 2016, as opposed to 2018. Sometimes I sort of think of that as like having a body-memory of throwing inaccurately. It may show up again when you get stressed. First day of Shrine practice, IT SHOWED UP...because he was stressed. Really calmed down for the rest of the week though.
When he's off, the nose of the ball dips down, as he's gotten too high on his heels, mechanics a bit too clunky. I also noticed a tendency in Shrine practice week to throw a little too shallow when he's driving the football to the sidelines for an out route, or a comeback. That showed up in the Shrine game itself as he threw a 4th down strike about 2-3 feet shy of the sticks. You can afford to do that on 3rd down. You can't on 4th down. It was a turnover on downs.
He strikes me as a guy that can go on streaks with respect to his accuracy. If he's off on one, he's going to be off on another, and then another.
Those streaks never lasted long at NDSU. But you wonder if that was due to management, their offense's ability to get back to running the football, to get back into structure, even in the passing game. They WOULD know Easton Stick very well there. They've had a lot of time to get to know him. They may have become quite adept at managing the streakiness of his accuracy.
It's clear that when he's off, and you can tell he's uncomfortable with his accuracy, what he really WANTS to do at that point is immerse himself in some structure. Run the offense. Execute a play-action with your back turned to the defense. Get moving on your feet. Throw a screen or an RPO, or execute a zone-read run. Get him back INTO structure, and that tricks him out of the bad streak.
At the Shrine practices, he obviously wasn't going to be managed like that. And since reps are limited, and all eyes are on you, he ended up having a bad Monday because of it, and most people stuck with their Monday impressions for the rest of the week. You could see it in the write-ups, how they lacked specifics. They just ceased high-precision evaluation on him, and from then on would only notice a big play going this way or that. And of course, Andrew Wingard got that pick-6 on him in (what was otherwise a good) Tuesday practice, and that sort of sealed it in the eyes of the amateur onlookers and what they reported back to the Twitterverse.