Lamar Jackson, the NFL and a system that de-emphasizes his greatest attribute
After next weekend, Lamar Jackson will all but certainly have a multimillion-dollar check to cash.
The NFL draft’s first round is Thursday, April 26, meaning the University of Louisville’s high-flying Heisman Trophy winner has one more week of battling an imperfect science guiding a slow-changing sport and the decision-makers who run it. He is not the first to do so.
Jackson totaled the fourth-most rushing yards of any major-conference quarterback this century, but he breaks the mold of his peers.
This may, in the end, be the most intriguing case study yet: What is the value of being a mobile quarterback in the NFL? And how much will Jackson be able to capitalize on that value?
As much as the game has changed, a comprehensive study of statistics and career earnings shows that there is no connection between a quarterback’s rushing success in college and profitability in the NFL.
The advent of the spread-option offense has built new powerhouses, won championships and made the legacies of the most successful quarterbacks who have run it. But football has not consistently compensated those quarterbacks for their abilities.
There may be no skill in any other major sport valued so disparately from one level to the next. There may still be no other major sport with such a disconnect between the amateur and pro levels.
That is Jackson’s challenge: Can he be a star in a league that de-emphasizes his greatest skill?
The run for dollars
Jackson has largely made a career with his legs. They brought thousands of fans to stadiums, landed him in TV highlight reels and forced two different coaches to transform their offenses to fit him.
But the NFL team that drafts Jackson will almost certainly depend more on his arm.
“It’s a passing league, so you’ve got to be able to make plays from within the pocket,” said Chris Landry, a former pro scout and coach in the NFL and in college. “To be able to work the entire field, you’ve got to make plays, drop back in the pocket, survey the entire field and be able to get the ball out quickly.”
There is, as one might expect, a diminishing financial payoff to being a high-volume rusher.
The top 33 percent of rushing college quarterbacks drafted this century have combined to make about $1.08 billion in the NFL, according to the salary-tracking website spotrac.com. The bottom 33 percent have made about $747 million in the NFL. The difference between the elite running quarterbacks and the bottom third, $305 million, is hardly significant when you consider Peyton Manning and Tom Brady made almost $446 million and would have fit into the bottom third.
Mobile quarterbacks can be No. 1 draft picks and succeed in the NFL, as Michael Vick and Cam Newton have proven. At the NFL scouting combine last month, Baltimore Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome predicted that trend would continue, citing Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, the top two picks in the 2015 NFL draft.
Three years earlier, in 2012, the Seattle Seahawks drafted Wisconsin’s Russell Wilson in the third round. Five other quarterbacks went ahead of Wilson, who earned a rookie signing bonus of $619,400, according to spotrac.com, after running for 1,421 yards in four college seasons. In the same year, first-round selection Brandon Weeden received a bonus of roughly $4.3 million after a prolific college passing career at Oklahoma State. Weeden has since bounced around teams and hasn’t played in a regular-season NFL game since 2015.
Meanwhile, Wilson has rushed for 3,275 yards in six NFL seasons with Seattle.
“I think it has to do with the coach’s background and how much appreciation they have for that style of play,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told reporters at this year’s NFL scouting combine when asked about the league’s use of mobile quarterbacks. “Do they have any experience with it? Guys that haven’t had those guys, they would be more reluctant, maybe more hesitant. … You just have to embrace the dynamic of that player and what he can do and what he’s capable of doing and figure it out.”
In the history of the NFL, only one quarterback has reached the 1,000-yard rushing mark in a season. Vick, to whom Jackson is often compared, rushed for 1,039 yards in 2006. Jackson won a Heisman Trophy in large part by scrambling from the pocket and making plays on the run, totaling 1,571 rushing yards.
His new team is unlikely to be as interested in that skill. College teams build their offenses around a quarterback’s running ability. The NFL almost neutralizes it.
“So then the question becomes, if there’s at least a baseline of ability to win from the pocket, how much do you value that extra running ability?” said Steve Palazzolo, a senior analyst at Pro Football Focus. “And I think teams are mixed on it.”
But why?
A different game
One day in practice, Rick Swain, Jackson’s coach at Boynton Beach (Florida) High School, put his quarterbacks through option drills. He saw Jackson cut upfield and run 60 yards for a touchdown and went back to his office to remodel his entire offense.
Louisville coach Bobby Petrino made a similar but less drastic transformation after Jackson enrolled.
“The college game is about recruiting and putting guys in space,” said Landry, who worked as a scout for the Houston Oilers and Tennessee Titans. “The pro game is about having talent, developing talent, but being able to use that talent and make defenses defend the entire field.”
Swain illustrated that division when he said, “You got the best athlete on the field, he needs to have the ball in his hands.”
The NFL tends to disagree. In that league, the athletes are better at every position. When a quarterback rolls from the pocket, a college coach sees a player who can cause problems for the defense in space. A pro coach sees one who limits the area of the field the team can use to attack the defense.
Palazzolo and other analysts have used metrics to compare passing and rushing, placing more value on an 8-yard pass than an 8-yard run. If a quarterback throws 8 yards through the air, the receiver could still turn it into a bigger gain. If he rushes eight yards, it’s an 8-yard gain.
Passing is “just more valuable,” Palazzolo said. “It’s more valuable on a play-for-play basis than running the football, both from a design standpoint or from a scramble standpoint. It has to be a complementary piece in the NFL just because of the speed of the game and the fact that you have a franchise quarterback that you have to protect.”
An analysis of 17 years’ worth of data showed no statistically significant correlation between a rushing yardage or rushing average in college and likelihood of being drafted as a quarterback.
Of the major-conference quarterbacks this century, a player who was among the top third in career rushing yards was drafted 25 percent of the time. The middle third was drafted 19 percent of the time and the bottom third was drafted 21 percent of the time.
The draft outcomes are significant because they set the value of players’ rookie contracts, and many players never make more money afterward. Not all money is guaranteed.
In each of the past five seasons, the player who entered the draft ranked last in rushing yards among major-conference quarterbacks was selected. That trend illustrates a quirk in the way the NCAA measures rushing yards — placing negative yardage on sacks — but also shows the NFL’s interest in pocket passers.
“It’s not the fact that they get sacked that you like,” Landry said. “It’s the fact that they’re making plays within the pocket, or at least playing from within the pocket. … That’s the end game — you’ve got to be able to throw the football in this league. If you can’t, you have very little shot.”
The wide receiver question
At Louisville’s pro day, Jackson waited in shorts and flip-flops as his former teammates did the vertical jump and ran the 40-yard dash. At pro day and the NFL scouting combine before it, Jackson threw passes, but he otherwise avoided performing any drill that might prompt NFL teams to label him as a potential wide receiver.
Jackson’s concern was valid. This century, of the 15 players with the most career rushing yards among major-conference quarterbacks, three have been drafted as quarterbacks and seven have been drafted at other positions: running back, wide receiver or defensive back. Four of the top six entered the league as wide receivers.
Former Louisville offensive coordinator Garrick McGee said on the NFL Network’s “Move The Sticks” podcast that Louisville’s coaches considered moving Jackson to wide receiver during his freshman season.
“At the time, and I think a lot of the teams in the league are going to have this issue: We had a quarterback, a guy that we were leaning on, and he was the same type of talent, he had won the previous year,” McGee said. “So we were saying, ‘If Lamar can’t be the starting quarterback, we have to find something else for him to do.’”
Petrino denied that, saying he never thought about moving Jackson to wide receiver, and that he didn’t believe speculation that NFL teams had, either.
“We liked him playing right where he did, right where he led us,” Petrino said. “He’s just such a great player. And he can make all the throws. He understands the game schematically. I’m looking forward to seeing whoever takes him and him having a great, long career.”
When he spoke at the NFL scouting combine — his most recent interview session with reporters — amid rumors he would be asked to play wide receiver in the NFL, Jackson maintained that he was a quarterback. He repeated it like it was part of him since he was a child, because it was.
“Whoever likes me at quarterback, that’s where I’m going,” Jackson said. “That’s strictly my position.”
NFL teams over the years have moved mobile quarterbacks to running back, wide receiver and even defensive back to get them on the field. The players face a risk-reward decision. They will make more money at quarterback than anywhere else if they succeed. But the best opportunity to succeed for some is elsewhere.
One school whose quarterbacks routinely — and surprisingly — show up among draft selections is Oregon State. The Beavers have had Derek Anderson, Sean Canfield and Sean Mannion drafted in the past 15 years. All three were pocket passers with minus-300 rushing yards or worse in their careers. Anderson and Mannion were last in their classes in career rushing yards.
Mike Riley, who coached Anderson, Canfield and Mannion at Oregon State, was also the offensive coordinator at Southern California when he recruited a California high school quarterback named Tom Brady. He was the head coach of the San Diego Chargers four years later when he advocated for the team to draft Brady.
Riley said he thinks Oregon State’s scheme was conducive to grooming pro quarterbacks and that he was fortunate to stumble upon athletes with the necessary “intangibles.”
“It’s not a perfect science,” Riley said.
He said what the NFL’s trends suggest: “What we need first, and what we look for, he has to be a passer. If we can find that guy that is athletic and we can run and we can do some stuff, that is really, really the bonus.”
Riley told a story about a player he recruited to USC in the 1990s. Daylon McCutcheon played offense in high school and “could have played offense at USC,” Riley recalled, but McCutcheon projected that he wouldn’t be as successful as a pro. He asked his coaches early in college to move him to cornerback, where he ended up playing five seasons in the NFL.
“Now that is foresight,” Riley said. “… He was right on it.”
In Jackson’s high school years, meanwhile, Swain recalled a drive toward becoming a quarterback, whatever it took. Jackson would work on Sundays with a private trainer he had known since he was little. They would focus on the finer elements of being a passer that Jackson may not have needed in college but will in the NFL.
“All the kudos goes to Lamar with the amount of effort,” Swain said. “I tried to get him to take a little bit of a break and play high school basketball, ’cause he was — ooh, you ought to see him play basketball. Oh my gosh.”
“Coach, I can’t do it,” Swain recalled Jackson saying. He had 7-on-7 workouts to run, throwing drills to finish, grades to maintain.
Source:-https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/draft/2018/04/19/lamar-jackson-nfl-draft-2018-team-first-round-louisville/532353002/
