Tag: Andy Reid

The first time I talked with an NFL executive about the feeder stream of collegiate quarterbacks coming from various spread and option offenses to the pros was with then-49ers general manager Scot McCloughan at the 2008 scouting combine. Back then, we were still in an era where spread offenses were considered a weird curiosity by a lot of NFL coaches and executives — at that time, McCloughan told me that there were a lot of “false positives” when analyzing players in collegiate offenses.

“It makes it tougher for some positions to figure out,” he told me. “It’s kind of nice when you go watch a college team on tape like USC, when you can see an NFL-style offense. It’s, ‘oh, it’s easy to see what the guy can or can’t do.’ It’s the same for every team.”

Since then, of course, the idea of a “NFL-style offense” has been turned on its head. It was going to be a clear example of market efficiency when NFL teams figured out how to merge spread concepts into their playbooks, and that started to happen through the early 2010s. The Panthers mixed Gene Chizik’s concepts from Auburn with what Rob Chudzinski wanted to run for Cam Newton. Mike and Kyle Shanahan took their play-action, zone-based schemes and added a bit of Baylor for Robert Griffin III. Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman took elements of Chris Ault’s Nevada offense when Colin Kaepernick, who had played for Ault, became San Francisco’s starting quarterback, replacing Alex Smith. And with both Smith and Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid was able to succeed because he had been well ahead of the current curve — not only did he assign a “Spread Game Analyst” title to assistant coach Brad Childress in 2013, he also hired Ault as a consultant.

“He had other teams interested in having him come in, but not to the degree that Kansas City stepped forward,” agent Bob LaMonte said in 2013 — LaMonte counted Reid and Ault among his clients. “It’s a good job, and he’s excited for it. He went with the team that gave him the best opportunity to be a consultant.”

Mahomes sat most of his rookie season in favor of Smith, who was traded to the Redskins after the 2017 campaign so that Mahomes could thrive as the starter. This he obviously did, becoming the third quarterback in NFL history (after Tom Brady and Peyton Manning) to throw 50 touchdown passes in a season. That Mahomes did it in his first full year as a starter was a testament not only to his own ability to thrive beyond his gunslinging days at Texas Tech, but also Reid’s vision in paving the way for a quarterback of Mahomes’ specific skill set. Mahomes’ upcoming appearance in Super Bowl LIV is proof of the same.

And of course, the Ravens went whole-heartedly into a run-based offense with all kinds of passing shot plays available with Roman as its offensive coordinator after selecting Louisville’s Lamar Jackson with the 32nd overall pick in the 2018 draft, and making Jackson the starter over Joe Flacco in Week 10 of Jackson’s rookie season.

As Reid had with Smith and then Mahomes, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh and his staff turned their offense over to Jackson not only literally, but also conceptually. Roman was once again on board as the offensive coordinator for a head coach named Harbaugh, aligning what Jackson did in college with what he needed to do to succeed at the NFL level. Jackson was good in fits and starts in his rookie season, but with a full offseason to put everything together, he was able to not only break Michael Vick’s single-season rushing yardage record for a quarterback, but also to lead the league in touchdown passes with 36 in the regular season, and one more in the 2019 playoffs — though Baltimore’s 28-12 divisional round loss to the expertly-coached Tennessee Titans was not Jackson’s finest day by any stretch.

Not that everybody is on board. During a Wednesday Senior Bowl telecast , the conversation turned to Alabama/Oklahoma quarterback Jalen Hurts, who has already been asked by media this week whether he’d be willing to switch positions. This despite the fact that Hurts threw a total of 80 touchdown passes to 20 interceptions in four seasons for two of the NCAA’s most prominent programs. One analyst said (to paraphrase) that it’s great that Hurts is an athlete who can run, but at a certain point, it’s going to be third down and there won’t be play action (why?) and he’ll have to make a throw. One analyst, a former NFL general manager, then compared Hurts to Brad Smith, the former Missouri quarterback who threw 56 touchdowns to 32 interceptions in college and switched to receiver in the NFL.

Well. Per Sports Info Solutions, in 2019, on plays of third-and-6 or more — the real clutch situations, we’re assuming — Hurts completed 42 of 62 passes for 647 yards, 308 air yards, four touchdowns, and one interception. Under the same conditions, Oregon’s Justin Herbert, who was praised by the same crew for being big and tall and the kind of quarterback you want in bad weather, completed 58 of 71 passes for 489 yards, 271 air yards, five touchdowns, and one interception.

The statistics are relatively similar. The perceptions are most certainly not. Just as there are teams that have adapted to, and thus advanced, the new realities of the position, there are those who will stick with the big guy/big arm/pocket passer paradigm because it’s what’s comfortable for them. It’s what they can work with. And that’s fine. There will always be pocket passers who are big guys with big arms for those teams to develop.

But more and more, teams that want to be on the cutting edge of offensive football will have to open their minds to quarterbacks who can do everything — whether it fits the NFL’s old school or not.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”