[stupac2]

I'm not a big fan of appealing to authority, but on this topic I do believe it's valid to point out that while human, NFL personnel folks are probably more qualified to discuss this than you and I.  If they are saying college quarterbacks are unprepared, I am inclined to believe them.

While this is true to some extent, it's not true of the topic here. Actually, it might not be true at all, given how bad the NFL is at sorting the good QBs from the bad during the draft, but never mind that. The key thing about the article is "Quarterbacks are less prepared than they used to be", which is a projection through time, and the sort of thing that humans are terrible at. Like, horrifically bad. Abysmal. Absurdly ridiculously horrendously awful.

For instance, every single people year say "Wow it sure does seem like there are more injuries this year!" and then someone looks at the numbers and, sure enough, there weren't. Recency bias is so brobdingnagian that unless there's an actual quantification of the trend under question, you just have to assume the person's statement is wrong. Because it usually will be.

That out of the way, how would you even quantify this? For one thing, as others have pointed out, the NFL treats QBs a lot differently than they used to, throwing them into the fire a lot earlier. The NFL of today also expects a lot more from a QB than it did even 10 years ago. Would Brady have gotten as good if he were starting right away in today's NFL? Would Rodgers have washed out if the 49ers had drafted and started him? He's said that he used those years sitting to learn a lot, so I'm really not sure.

Then you have the fact that it wasn't too long ago that people were writing the opposite, that the success of Luck and Wilson and pre-injury RG3 and Cam and to some extent Carr and Bridgewater was showing that the college game was producing better QBs than ever. These things can't all be true.

What I think is happening is that people are overreacting to the struggles of Luck and Wilson this year, combined with the fact that the QB is so important now. But there has never been a point in modern NFL history (that I'm aware of, anyway) where every team has been satisfied with its QB options. It's just that standards have changed. Look at Archie Manning's stats, he took until his seventh year playing to throw more TDs than INTs, and over his career he has nearly 50 more INTs than TDs. Do you think someone doing that now would start more than 4 years?

[stupac2]

I'm not a big fan of appealing to authority, but on this topic I do believe it's valid to point out that while human, NFL personnel folks are probably more qualified to discuss this than you and I.  If they are saying college quarterbacks are unprepared, I am inclined to believe them.

While this is true to some extent, it's not true of the topic here. Actually, it might not be true at all, given how bad the NFL is at sorting the good QBs from the bad during the draft, but never mind that. The key thing about the article is "Quarterbacks are less prepared than they used to be", which is a projection through time, and the sort of thing that humans are terrible at. Like, horrifically bad. Abysmal. Absurdly ridiculously horrendously awful.

For instance, every single people year say "Wow it sure does seem like there are more injuries this year!" and then someone looks at the numbers and, sure enough, there weren't. Recency bias is so brobdingnagian that unless there's an actual quantification of the trend under question, you just have to assume the person's statement is wrong. Because it usually will be.

That out of the way, how would you even quantify this? For one thing, as others have pointed out, the NFL treats QBs a lot differently than they used to, throwing them into the fire a lot earlier. The NFL of today also expects a lot more from a QB than it did even 10 years ago. Would Brady have gotten as good if he were starting right away in today's NFL? Would Rodgers have washed out if the 49ers had drafted and started him? He's said that he used those years sitting to learn a lot, so I'm really not sure.

Then you have the fact that it wasn't too long ago that people were writing the opposite, that the success of Luck and Wilson and pre-injury RG3 and Cam and to some extent Carr and Bridgewater was showing that the college game was producing better QBs than ever. These things can't all be true.

What I think is happening is that people are overreacting to the struggles of Luck and Wilson this year, combined with the fact that the QB is so important now. But there has never been a point in modern NFL history (that I'm aware of, anyway) where every team has been satisfied with its QB options. It's just that standards have changed. Look at Archie Manning's stats, he took until his seventh year playing to throw more TDs than INTs, and over his career he has nearly 50 more INTs than TDs. Do you think someone doing that now would start more than 4 years?