The Jets can’t let Sam Darnold’s flashes of potential set them back for years

The 2020 season is make-or-break for Sam Darnold. The Jets should see it that way, at least.

Look, Jets fans. I get it.

Look through my post history and you’ll find dozens of them arguing that Jameis Winston just needed a little more time to figure things out. Eventually, the mistakes would stop and all of those flashes of brilliance would become the norm.

The Buccaneers spent five years waiting for it to happen. It never did.

Jets fans seem to be headed down the same road with Sam Darnold, and I can’t blame them. It wouldn’t take much effort to put together a cut-up of plays that make Darnold look like a quarterback on the brink of superstardom.

This article is going to get real cynical real quick, but every now and then, I’ll drop in one of those talismanic plays just to balance things out a bit.

Those plays will illustrate why Jets fans are so willing to believe — the team’s track record with quarterbacks probably plays a role, as well — while the rest of the article will explain why those fans may want to put their guard up and maybe temper their expectations. Darnold certainly has the talent to develop into something great but he’ll need to take some pretty big steps in order to get there. In the NFL, we’ve seen that movie over and over again and it rarely ends happily.

The numbers overwhelmingly suggest that Darnold will not be an exception and the tape doesn’t paint a brighter picture. Let’s use both to figure out what to make of one of the more enigmatic young quarterbacks in the NFL.

I brought up Jameis Winston at the top of his article and I think that’s an obvious comparison for Darnold. Both were 21 when they entered the league and immediately thrust into the starting lineup of bad teams. Both have wildly talented arms and a penchant for putting that arm to the test on tight-window throws down the field. And both can be a tad reckless with the football.

But that’s where the comparison should end.

While the comparison makes sense superficially, Winston is miles ahead of Darnold in most aspects of playing the quarterback position. Jameis’ splash plays occur within the context of the offense, while a lot of Darnold’s highlights come on broken plays or throws that didn’t require much thought leading up to them.

To get a better idea of how Darnold’s “process” works, I watched all of his un-pressured dropbacks during the 2019 season. With the Jets offensive line being the mess that it was last season, I figured that would be the only way to get a fair assessment of where he is on his developmental track.

Based on the highlights I had seen on Twitter, I expected more.

Over the course of those 120 plays, there wasn’t a lot of quarterbacking to be found. It was all quick passes to his first read or backyard football and little in between. Darnold is actually really good in both areas. He was at his most accurate in the quick game, when he pretty much knew where he was going with the ball before the snap.

When Darnold had to hold onto the ball a bit longer his play — and accuracy — diminished. The problem starts with his feet. While the 23-year-old is certainly athletic and able to navigate the pocket, there seems to be a disconnect between his eyes and his lower half. It’s as if they’re working independently. Now, Darnold has the arm talent to make it work on occasion:

But more often than not, the poor footwork led to accuracy issues on throws to the intermediate and deeper parts of the field. The numbers back this up. Darnold finished eighth in on-target throw percentage on passes aimed 0-9 yards downfield, per Sports Info Solutions. On passes deeper than 10 yards, he ranked 30th … right behind Mitch Trubisky.

But after watching him misplace a handful of intermediate pass, he’ll throw a perfectly weighted ball over the second level of the defense and you’ll want to believe in him again.

Jets coach Adam Gase deserves all the criticism he gets, but he does deserve some credit for adjusting things to help mitigate Darnold’s footwork issues when going through progressions. In the second half of the season, Gase called a lot of plays where Darnold would read one side of the field with his second read, usually coming from the opposite side, running into his field of vision. Here’s an example:

That allowed Darnold to progress to his next read without having to readjust his base too much, leading to more accurate throws.

Darnold has earned the gunslinger reputation but it doesn’t really show up on film. At least when he’s working within the structure of the offense. He’s got a little Derek Carr in him where he’ll take an underneath option a beat or two early and miss out on an opportunity to push the ball downfield.

I wouldn’t say the 2018 third-overall pick is conservative — especially when things break down — but he isn’t any more aggressive than your average NFL quarterback. Pro Football Focus’ “Expected Average Depth of Target” metric backs this up. This chart comes from PFF’s 2020 Quarterback Annual:

You can see Darnold right there on the line of best fit. Perfectly average.

But as we’ve seen when he does improvise, the man is not afraid to take a chance. There are also times when that aggression shows up within the structure of the offense, and it’s beautiful to watch.

This is why it’s so hard to give up on him.

Based on his pre-snap work, I really believe Darnold understands the game of football. Here’s an example: Based on the pre-snap alignment of the defense and the protection call — the line is sliding to the right where Buffalo is overloading the formation — Darnold knows the Bills will have a free runner if the nickel corner blitzes from the left. You can see him pointing it out:

The nickel comes, and Darnold doesn’t hesitate. He knows exactly where to go with the football:

But having that knowledge doesn’t always translate to the field, especially when the picture changes after the snap. You see that with Darnold. There are times when his brain just seems to shut off midplay. Here’s an example where he has an open receiver in the flat on 2nd-and-1. He just needs to flip it out there to keep the chains moving; instead, he holds onto the ball and takes a sack that puts the Jets in third-and-long.

This one is from the infamous “seeing ghosts” game against the Patriots on Monday night. With no pressure on him in the pocket, Darnold panics and just throws it up from grabs to the middle of the field.

But then he’ll recognize a blitz in a flash and hit an open receiver for a big gain and you’re right back on the bandwagon.

We just don’t see it nearly enough and, for the most part, the bad outweighs the good.

You can say ‘Oh, he’s still young and will grow out of this.’ You can say, ‘He just needs a new coach.’ But this is the quarterback he’s been since his days at USC. There hasn’t been a lot of progression, especially in the areas that matter most for a quarterback.

By this point in a quarterback’s career, you can usually find something in the numbers that provides a glimmer of hope. That’s not really the case for Darnold, who has been a bottom-10 quarterback in just about every split you can come up with. In 2019, he ranked 29th in expected points added per play on clean dropbacks with no play-action. That doesn’t bode well.

According to Pro Football Focus’ Kevin Cole, Darnold’s production through two years puts him in a group with two quarterbacks Jets fans know all too well: Mark Sanchez and Geno Smith. Blake Bortles in that cluster along with them.

Cole looked at the quarterbacks whose careers rebounded after a poor start to figure out if there was anything in their stat line to suggest a turnaround was coming. His finding wasn’t the best news for Darnold stockholders.

Shot:

Five of the nine turnaround quarterbacks had above-average completion percentages in their second seasons, versus only two of the 24 who failed to turn around their slow starts … When you run the components through a regression analysis (ridge regression) and compare the coefficients for predicting efficiency in Years 3-7, completion percentage is, by far, the most important, followed by touchdown rate.

Chaser:

The strong predictive power of completion percentage is relatively poor news for Darnold, whose Cmp%+ in the table below was 91 last season … The best component for Darnold in 2019 was sack avoidance, which is negatively correlated with a breakout.

(For those not familiar with Cmp%+, it’s used to compare numbers across eras. Darnold’s 91 is about 10% below the league average of 100.)

There’s a raging debate between Bills and Jets fans about the AFC East’s best young quarterback. Is it Darnold or Josh Allen? I don’t believe there is a simple answer to that question because football is a complicated sport and it’s hard to judge any player in a vacuum. But right now, the stats seem to indicate that Allen is the better player and I’m not sure I’d disagree. If I had to win a football game tomorrow, I think Allen would be my pick, which might come as a surprise to anyone who knows how I feel about him as a quarterback.

I don’t think it will take long for Darnold to surpass Allen in that regard. Playing a season without Mononucleosis should help. But that’s an awfully low bar for a guy who’s seen as the future in Florham Park. If the bar isn’t higher in 2020, and those flashes of what-could-be are still enough to keep their hopes up, the Jets could spend the next few years wasting time in hopes that the light bulb in Darnold’s head flickers on. If the Jets are going to avoid that fate, this next season has to be considered a make-or-break one for the young quarterback.

It may seem like it’s too early to give up on Darnold, but there’s an awfully talented class of quarterbacks entering the league next season and the Jets might willingly miss out on it while waiting for something that all the evidence suggests will never happen.

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