Remember when “Tank for Tua” was a thing?
It wasn’t that long ago. But sometime around the beginning of November we started to realize that Joe Burrow had a chance to jump ahead of Tua Tagovailoa in the pecking order of 2020 NFL draft prospects.
By the time the calendar flipped to December, it was no longer a question.
Burrow was on his way to the most prolific season in college football history and Tua had just suffered a career-threatening hip injury that ended his third and final season at Alabama.
Little has changed in the ensuing months. The Burrow hype ensures that the LSU QB will be the first player off the board next week and, while Tua remains the clear No. 2 guy in this class, some are starting to wonder if he has franchise quarterback potential. We’ve gone from “Tank for Tua” to “I guess we should settle for Tua” in a year’s time.
Obviously, the hip injury played a significant role in Tua’s stock taking that plunge, but questions were starting to arise before that game against Mississippi State. Some wondered if he had enough arm talent to be a star at the next level. They asked if he was capable of transcending and elevating the talent he had around him. It was obvious that Tua could play the position at a high level, but the questions about his ceiling were warranted.
A look at the numbers
So what is Tua’s ceiling? Let’s look at both the film and his advanced stats to try to answer that question.
Let’s appease the nerds and start with the numbers. And we’ll start with the good, because, well, most of it is good.
- Per Sports Info Solutions, he averaged 0.43 EPA per dropback over his first full season as a starter in 2018.
- He followed that up by averaging 0.49 EPA per drop in 2019.
- And he proved that the accuracy he showed as a sophomore was no fluke, posting a 77% accuracy rate in back-to-back seasons.
If we filter out all of the screens and play-action passes, Tua still looks good. On straight dropbacks that resulted in passes traveling further than five yards downfield, Tua finished first or second in the nation in all of the following stats during the 2019 season:
- Completion percentage (70.6%)
- On-Target Throw Percentage (82.4%)
- Yards Per Attempt (14.5)
- Sports Info Solutions’ proprietary Independent QB Rating metric (138.0).
Tua’s clean pocket stats — which carry the most predictive power — are exceptional, as well. He earned a 93.2 clean pocket grade from Pro Football Focus over the last two seasons. In 2018, he earned a 91.4 clean-pocket grade from PFF. In 2019, after Alabama transitioned from Mike Locksley to Steve Sarkisian as offensive coordinator, it was 92.6. That consistency bodes well for his future.
Reasons for concern
It’s not until you really start to drill down into the numbers that you start to find red flags. For instance, Tua has been only average outside of the pocket. The same goes for his production when under pressure — though under pressure stats do not tell us much about a QB’s future performance. And PFF’s Mike Renner has pointed out that he did not grade well when he was forced to go beyond his first read, which did not happen often in Alabama’s star-studded, RPO-heavy offense.
This is a good place to turn to the film because it doesn’t take long to figure out why Tua has struggled in all of those areas: His arm. It’s not particularly strong, which is evident when he has to throw downfield or outside the numbers. The downfield throws hang in the air forever before they just sort of die in midair…
Even quick outs have some arc to their trajectory…
Tua is a good athlete and you’d expect him to be dangerous outside of the pocket, but that really isn’t the case. Even if you ignore the curious decision-making outside of structure, there are times when he just doesn’t have the arm to make a throw on the run.
Sometimes you get a little bit of both…
How do you make up for a weaker arm? Quick processing and accuracy, and those are the areas where Tua shines. He’s one of the smartest college quarterbacks I’ve ever watched. In terms of processing, he’s already a pro. He’ll get through three reads in the time it takes some young NFL quarterbacks to get through one (though often his arm isn’t strong enough to make those throws, which is why his PFF grade suffered there). I covered an example earlier in the week, but here’s another.
By the time Tua hits the back of his drop, he’s on to his second read. It only takes him a second or two to sort out the mess in the middle of the field before finding his checkdown wide open for a big gain.
Checkdowns aren’t sexy, but a quarterback exhausting his progressions in a matter of seconds and hitting his checkdown on time can lead to some big plays.
But you can’t make an offense out of checkdowns — Derek Carr has tried — and Tua can get a little too checkdown-happy, ignoring open receivers downfield to throw a futile pass to the flat. Here, he progresses past TWO open receivers in order to get the ball to a covered running back.
Somewhere, Bruce Arians’ Kangol hat is spinning in the mahogany box I assume he keeps it in. Here, he doesn’t even give the route concept, which puts the free safety in a bind, a chance to play out.
Why throw to a wide-open receiver downfield when you can wait for the easier throw to come open?
Most of the time, Alabama was so good that it didn’t even matter and Tua could still put up monster numbers despite his conservative nature.
What makes it so frustrating is that when Tua is willing to let it rip from the pocket, it can be a thing of beauty.
When he puts it all together, Tua looks like a player worth tanking for.
If you’re looking for another Patrick Mahomes, Tua is not the quarterback for you. He can do all of the little things that make Mahomes so special, but you can’t teach that arm. This looks like Mahomes up until the throw…
You even get a little no-look action here, but, again, the throw isn’t close…
So, yeah, Tua is never going to be THAT guy. But, barring his hip fossilizing over the next few years, he will almost certainly be a good player at the next level. Maybe some coach figures out a way to pry the restrictor plates off and unlocks Tua’s full potential. Maybe he starts using his natural throwing arm (fun fact: he’s actually right-handed) and he starts launching rockets all over the field. But even if none of that happens, you’re still getting a Teddy Bridgewater-type player on a cheap contract for the next five years.
Now that might not be a player worth tanking for, but it’s not a bad consolation prize.
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