If there is an issue that many Jacksonville Jaguars fans can agree on about the team’s quarterbacks of the last decade or so, it’s the number of checkdowns that have been utilized. Veterans David Garrard and Chad Henne especially were two players who received criticism for their lack of ability for explosive plays, but according to Pro Football Focus, it’s still something often utilized by the franchise even in recent times.
In a recent post, PFF looked at the top-10 checkdown quarterbacks of the last two years and it consisted of a former Jag in Blake Bortles and a current one in Gardner Minshew. The former first-round selection in Bortles found himself atop the list with a checkdown rate of 13.3% while Minshew came in fourth place with a rate of 10.1%.
Here is what analyst Sam Monson had to say about both signal-callers:
The NFL’s reigning checkdown king is Blake Bortles, whose stint as a starter devolved into him throwing a checkdown on 13.3% of his pass attempts by the time he lost his job. Bortles earned just a 64.7 overall PFF grade over the past two seasons, plying his trade as a backup for the Los Angeles Rams in 2019.
As for Minshew, his rookie season was impressive and certainly reset expectations for the sixth-round draft pick going forward. He could still improve his processing speed and the number of plays in which he gets himself into trouble, though. He has among the highest checkdown rates in the league but took his time before doing so — among the 10 highest checkdown rates, only Watson took longer to throw on those plays. That’s a good sign because it means that as much as Minshew has been checking down a lot, it has been very much a last resort after giving the rest of the play a chance to unfold.
One thing I’d like to add about Bortles is that he had accuracy issues and registered a career completion percentage of 59.3% with the Jags, so one could see how that would make him resort to dump-offs often.
As for Minshew, as PFF pointed out, his checkdown rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he used his dump-off options as a last resort often. However, they did mention that this could indicate that Minshew may have missed an open receiver before going to the checkdown option, but clearly he doesn’t alarmingly rely on his dump-offs