Hustle culture has enough fans already and doesn’t need to count us among them. However, when you’re a starting quarterback in the NFL you don’t have much choice but to grind your game 365 days a year.
Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith is every bit as hustle-happy as Seattle’s last franchise QB and his private quarterbacks coach Quincy Avery says he’s been stacking great days this offseason.
Smith had a brilliant first half of the 2022 season and would have at least been in the NFL MVP conversation had he been able to sustain it all year. Unfortunately, over-aggression and poor interior pass protection dropped his game off quite a bit in the second half of the year.
If the Seahawks can improve that interior OL’s pass blocking and Smith can dial back his aggression by a notch or two, their QB play could be as high as any team outside of the top-seven superstars around the league.
With just a few days to go before training camp begins, Smith is hard at work on his game.
If the Seahawks were to start their 2022 season today, Geno Smith would most likely be starting at quarterback. While that might not produce a lot of excitement for Seattle fans, Smith is better than most analysts have given him credit for this offseason.
With just a few days to go before training camp begins, Smith is hard at work on his game. Last night he shared a few clips of himself training with renowned quarterbacks coach Quincy Avery.
The last time Deshaun Watson played in an NFL game, it was Jan. 3, 2021, when the former Houston Texans quarterback completed 28-of-39 passes for 365 yards and three touchdowns with an interception against the Tennessee Titans in the final week of …
The last time Deshaun Watson played in an NFL game, it was Jan. 3, 2021, when the former Houston Texans quarterback completed 28-of-39 passes for 365 yards and three touchdowns with an interception against the Tennessee Titans in the final week of the 2020 regular season.
Of course, last season, Watson was a healthy scratch for all 17 of the Texans’ games amid his trade request and legal issues, and last week, he was traded to the Cleveland Browns for a total of six draft picks including three first-round picks.
Cleveland gave the former Clemson signal-caller a new fully guaranteed five-year, $230 million contract (the record for the highest guarantee given to an NFL player), and whenever he returns to the field — despite his long layoff from game action — the Browns will still be getting one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks, according to Watson’s personal quarterback coach, Quincy Avery.
Avery, who also trains Liberty QB Malik Willis, said during an interview with NFL Network’s Steve Wyche at Liberty’s Pro Day that Watson has looked as good as ever during their training sessions.
“Deshaun is looking the best I’ve ever seen him, and I’ve been working with Deshaun since 11th grade,” Avery said. “He’s healthy, he’s fresh, his arm is live. When he gets to the Cleveland Browns, they’re going to be getting one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. And I think people have forgotten just how talented he is, but he’s sure to remind them very, very quickly.”
A three-time Pro Bowler, Watson led the NFL with 4,823 passing yards in 2020.
For his career (2017-20), the 2017 first-round draft pick (12th overall) has completed 67.8 percent of his passes for 14,539 yards and 104 touchdowns with 36 interceptions.
Following @LibertyFootball QB Malik Willis’s Pro Day, I spoke with his personal QB Coach @QuincyAvery. He took us through Willis’s performance and how another one of his clients, DeShaun Watson, has looked in private workouts @nflnetworkpic.twitter.com/kMtI8PHmpL
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Former Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson didn’t take the field for the Houston Texans in 2021 as he dealt with legal issues. But if/when he is able to return to action, he could be even better than before, according to his personal quarterback …
Former Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson didn’t take the field for the Houston Texans in 2021 as he dealt with legal issues. But if/when he is able to return to action, he could be even better than before, according to his personal quarterback coach, Quincy Avery.
Avery had a message for the NFL this week, putting the league on notice while praising Watson during an apperance on The Ryen Russillo podcast.
Avery spoke about how good Watson has looked during their training sessions of late and how he believes Watson will play next season and remind people that he is still one of the NFL’s top QBs.
“Deshaun is throwing the ball better than I think I’ve ever seen him throw a football,” Avery said, via the Houston Chronicle. “And, I’m not just saying this, but he’s super healthy, he’s super focused, he’s super locked in.
“When it comes to like putting on his cleats, walking on a field, Sunday at one o’clock? The first time that he does that, I think that people are going to be reminded very, very quickly that Deshaun Watson is one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL.”
During the interview with Russillo, Avery also took a shot at Watson’s Texans “Walmart” receivers from the 2020 season, when Watson led the NFL with 4,823 passing yards.
“[People] might have forgot that his last year in Houston, when he played, he was carrying like three guys who could have been working at your local Walmart at the receiver position and he went absolutely berserk,” Avery said. “If he gets on a team with any sort of talent around him, somebody’s going to have to really watch out.”
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Former #Lions QB and current #ESPN #NFL analyst Dan #Orlovsky recently broke down how #Eagles QB Jalen #Hurts has learned to stay one step ahead of opposing defenses
It took a few minutes for Jalen Hurts to shake the rust off against Washington, but once the second-year signal-caller was able to find his rhythm, the Eagles young star carved up the opposition while moving his team much closer to a playoff birth.
Hurts logged two rushing scores and only rushed for 38 yards on 8 carries, but it was his precise passing and sound decisions that carried the Eagles when Philadelphia needed it most.
Hurts completed 20 of 26 passes (77%) for 296 yards, while finally gaining chemistry with Dallas Goedert, who led the Eagles with seven grabs for a career-high 135 yards.
Former NFL quarterback and top NFL analyst, Dan Orlovsky loves to do film study on young quarterbacks and his breakdown of 3 throws from Hurts shows just how far Philadelphia’s 2020 second-round pick has progressed as a passer.
Houston Texan quarterback Deshaun Watson posted a picture to Twitter Tuesday showing that he is preparing for his workouts. Will he hold out?
Quarterback Deshaun Watson does not want to play for the Houston Texans ever again.
So has been the swirling word from sundry reports over the last week. However, the three-time Pro Bowl quarterback posted a picture on Twitter Tuesday with the words “Let’s Go!” accompanied by a heart and praying hands. The image also had the tagline embedded of, “We Back!!!! ‘The work comes 1st!!'” Watson also tagged his personal quarterback coach Quincy Avery in the picture.
If Watson intends to never play another down for the Texans, why is he working out? Shouldn’t he be traveling abroad or surveying tropical beaches somewhere?
The most optimistic assessment is that Watson is bluffing and he will continue to take snaps for the Texans. He has to stay in shape, even as the NFL and the NFLPA work out what the offseason programs will look like amid the ongoing lockdowns.
The more reasonable assessment is Watson has to stay in shape regardless of what happens in 2021, whether the Texans trade him or he has to hold out for the entire season. The former 2017 first-round pick can’t afford to sit around and eat Cheetos and watch documentaries on the sundry streaming services available these days. Watson has to stay at peak level if he takes over a new huddle in a different NFL city. After all, that team will have surrendered a franchise quarterback’s ransom to add what they will consider the missing piece to being a contending team. Watson will need to be in shape and ready to deliver dynamic performances, not spending time in the trainers room.
On Jan. 29, general manager Nick Caserio asserted the Texans have “zero interest” in trading Watson. However, in a meeting with new coach David Culley last week, Watson said he wants to move on from the organization. Houston sports fans are caught in the middle wondering when their beloved NFL team will take the final step towards rebuilding.
Houston has actually asked Watson to do more … and he has thrived.
Deshaun Watson has spent his entire career making other people look smart. So it’s no surprise that it happened again after just about every NFL fan rejoiced when the news of Bill O’Brien’s firing broke. Deshaun was free from what many believed to be an unimaginative offense and would finally be able to flourish.
Since O’Brien’s firing, Watson has more than flourished. He’s been the NFL’s best quarterback no matter the lens you choose to view it through. Since Week 5, Watson is Pro Football Focus’ highest-graded quarterback at 92.7. He leads all quarterbacks in success rate and trails only Patrick Mahomes in EPA per play. He’s averaging 9.0 yards per attempt, which leads the league. He’s thrown 19 touchdown passes — only Mahomes has thrown more — and two interceptions — only Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees (who has missed several games) have thrown fewer.
I could keep going, but you get the picture. He’s been very good.
Watson is thriving but not necessarily for the reasons one might suspect. It’s not that he’s been freed from an offense that put too much on his plate. It’s actually the opposite. With O’Brien out of the picture, Texans offensive coordinator Tim Kelly is heaping even more on that plate, as Watson’s personal quarterback coach Quincy Avery told me this week.
“I think they’re putting more on Deshaun’s shoulders in terms of him figuring situations out to create plays down the field,” Avery said. “I think when your head coach is a play-caller, there’s a tentativeness to your play-call selection. That made it difficult for him to call the game in a way that he necessarily wanted to, but now he’s able to call it as he sees it and there’s not too many chefs in the kitchen.”
Kelly has been smart enough to recognize what he has in Watson and what he has is one of the smartest pocket passers in the NFL. We rarely hear the fourth-year quarterback described in those terms. Beyond the obvious explanation for why that is — good old fashion racial bias — Avery has another theory explaining why the NFL world at large hasn’t recognized that aspect of Watson’s ever-expanding skillset.
“There’s a bit of racial bias there and then they’ve seen him do these super athletic plays and say ‘Well, he’s just successful because he can do X, Y and Z.’ But his ability to process information and recall things in the middle of a game are as good as it gets.”
That isn’t just the talk of a biased trainer, either. The numbers back up everything Avery is saying there. Strip out all of the scrambles, and all of the schematic shortcuts that reduce a quarterback’s thinking, and Watson stands out from the rest of the league. Here’s a look at how the league’s quarterbacks stack up in EPA on straight dropbacks (so no play-action) that stay in the pocket…
via Sports Info Solutions
You see those two bars towering over the rest of the league? That’s Watson and Mahomes … and Watson isn’t the one in second.
When you strip out two of those most-used schematic shortcuts, screen passes and RPOs — meaning we’re just looking at “pure” dropbacks now — the gap between Watson and the rest of the league, including Mahomes, grows…
Watson hasn’t just developed into a pocket passer. He’s developed into an elite pocket passer while still providing that second threat (his running ability) that every team is looking for in a quarterback. That combination is rare, and it allows him to not just get the most out of what’s around him — which is hard enough for a lot of quarterbacks — but he’s actually elevating it. Avery explained:
“They’re not creating a bunch of situations where people are just open and he’s benefitting from the play-calling being so great. He’s able to quickly diagnose things [without that schematic help]. You see him have to diagnose things and have to create plays within the pocket. He does everything you ask a quarterback to do and you don’t see those other guys — those system guys — do anything outside of what the offense is asking them to do.”
Watson has always had the ability to beat teams with his mind — just not to this extent. But there’s been a natural progression. A slow climb to the summit he’s reached in 2020. How did it happen? Getting the necessary reps to build up that mental Rolodex.
“Teams used to think they could trick him by sending pressure at him,” Avery says. “They’ve realized they can’t do that anymore. He knows exactly where the issues in protection are and where to go with the ball to beat the defense … [Early in his career] he just didn’t have that data to comb through as he was seeing things previously. It’s become a situation where he goes out on a field and he doesn’t feel like there’s any situation he hasn’t seen before.”
Watson’s own assessment of his improvement sounds awfully similar…
“I’ve just been that quarterback — that point guard,” Watson said before the Texans’ 41-25 win over the Lions on Thanksgiving. “Just taking the game in and really learning how to master my craft as a quarterback and read defenses and tell you what the defense is giving me.”
His mastery of the craft is most apparent when the Texans put him in empty. The defense knows he’s passing the ball. They know he only has five blockers in protection and has to get rid of the ball quickly. It doesn’t matter; he still dominates … and that’s been the case for two years running. After finishing second in success rate on empty dropbacks in 2019, he’s leading the NFL in 2020 — and nobody is within five percentage points of him.
Watson is making better (and quicker) decisions, but he hasn’t sacrificed the big-play ability. He’s still making those highlight-reel plays at a high rate.
But he’s found the perfect balance between playing smart and being aggressive. According to PFF, Watson has the lowest “Turnover Worthy Play Percentage” in the league, while only Rodgers ranks ahead of Watson in “Big-time Throw Percentage.”
That Watson has been able to avoid those negative plays — but still make the more difficult ones — while playing for a losing team is quite remarkable.
Everybody already knows Watson is special, but, because of the Texans’ record, I don’t know if the football-watching public has caught on to just how special he’s become. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say he’s already the second-best quarterback in the league and that the gap between him and that alien in Kansas City is almost negligible. The two are already putting up similar numbers and only one of them has Andy Reid, Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce.
Of all of the impressive numbers I offered up throughout this piece, this one might be the most impressive: Watson is only 25 and will only get better from here.
How can Watson get better? With the way he’s playing right now, it’s hard to find a significant deficiency, but Avery says he and Watson have already targeted some areas of his game to work on. He’s just not willing to divulge them publicly.
Obviously, the Texans bringing in a coach who puts Watson in a position to succeed will help — Avery prefers a scheme that puts the mental burden on the quarterback — but with the way he’s trending, it probably doesn’t matter who’s calling the plays.
For truly elite quarterbacks, which Watson has become, it hardly ever does.
Dwayne Haskins’ QB coach took to Twitter to express his disapproval of the news that Washington had benched Haskins for Kyle Allen.
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Coming off of arguably the best game in his NFL career, where he threw for 314 yards and zero interceptions, the Washington Football Team made the decision to bench QB Dwayne Haskins in favor of Kyle Allen, sending the second-year QB to the bench behind Alex Smith, who has now been promoted to second string.
Quincy Avery, who is a noted QB coach in the NFL, working with players like Deshaun Watson and Haskins himself, was apparently upset with this decision, expressing his views on Twitter Wednesday morning. To him, this is the type of decision that has kept Washington near the bottom of the NFL for so long.
And that's why the Washington football team will forever be the Washington football team.
While the decision is puzzling, to say the least, it is clear that Washington feels that they have a chance to make a run at a playoff spot with the NFC East so wide open, and they believe that Allen gives them a better chance to win right now than Haskins does. Whether that is true or not will be seen in the coming few weeks, with a stretch of very winnable games on the schedule.
Jalen Hurts working with QB guru Quincy Avery as training camp nears
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Jalen Hurts is set to embark on his first NFL training camp and while the Philadelphia Eagles work on ways to interject the versatile signal-caller into the offense, he’s continued to work with a renowned quarterback guru that should have fully prepared for the rigors of the NFL.
Avery and his QBTakeover work with Hurts, Deshaun Watson, Dwayne Haskins, Josh Dobbs, Cam Newton, and many of today’s top collegiate and NFL quarterbacks.
Hurts has progressed tremendously as a passer thanks to his work with Avery, which dates all the way back to Jalen’s time at Alabama and his journey to Oklahoma.
“His fluidity as a passer — the way he looks throwing now, is so much more fluid than he looked (four years ago),” Avery said. “He’s a true passer now. He’s always been a quarterback, a guy that could make plays. But the way he throws now …
“He looks like a guy that could play in the NFL.”
A “Taysom Hill [package] on steroids,” is what many analysts and pundits suggest Hurts will be as a rookie, but the Eagles will get the most value out the experiment by focusing on his abilities as a quarterback and transitioning that improved skill set into an asset that could fetch a first-round pick or more down the line.
Haskins struggles in 2019 were well documented, but new details about his relationship with Jay Gruden are starting to come out.
Any which way you wish to look at it, Washington quarterback Dwayne Haskins had a tough 2019. It started with him being drafted by a team whose coaching staff reportedly didn’t want him, then it also saw him working to fight his way past two veteran quarterbacks into the QB1 spot on the depth chart, all while dealing with a roster that was full of holes, and a leadership group that was inadequate to lead a young player.
Along the way, coaches were fired, schemes were changed, and a lot of losing took place. As we go forward, the organization seems to be a bit more stable than it was when Dwayne first arrived, but there are still some bumpy roads ahead. While he may be better equipped to handle those challenges now, some details about his struggles as a rookie are coming to light; specifically the details of disarray in Washington that was so great that it was nearly impossible for any QB to succeed, let alone a rookie.
On Tuesday, an episode of The Ringer’s ‘Ryen Russillo Show’ podcast was released, featuring an in-depth interview with Quincy Avery, Haskins’ quarterbacks coach. In the interview, Avery was asked about Haskins and his development going forward, as well as just how difficult of a rookie year he had. His answer shone some light on the real turmoil that was hoisted on the rookie’s shoulders in his first season in the NFL.
“Dwayne went through so much more than someone should have to have put on their shoulders as a rookie quarterback. You go in there and the head coach makes it known that he doesn’t like you and makes it as hard as possible for you to be the guy, and then you’ve got… It’s not like a situation where you’ve got a quarterback who just wants to help him be the guy. He didn’t go to the Washington organization and have Case [Keenum] and all of those guys say ‘Hey let’s help make you the starting quarterback.’ He was kind of on his own. It was him and the OC, Kevin O’Connell, were trying to figure it out, all while the head coach says a lot of nasty stuff about you, not only in the media, but also to the team. And [Dwayne] was trying to learn how to be a starting quarterback. The responsibility level is so much more different than anything I think people can imagine, and you’re doing that at 21 years old, leading a billion dollar franchise. It’s a lot to put on your shoulders. And I’m so excited to see the way he’s bounced back this offseason.”
It was well-known that former Washington head coach Jay Gruden — who was fired midway through the 2019 season — had little desire to groom a rookie quarterback when his job status relied on a winning season. However, hearing about the difficulty that Haskins had navigating his rookie season all while his coach was allegedly talking negatively about him is tough. Let’s just be thankful that Ron Rivera is now in place, and he seems to have a good standing relationship with Haskins and the rest of the team.
