10-26-2018, 08:59 AM
(10-26-2018, 01:01 AM)Austroturf Wrote: Yes, that's a fair conclusion. I am just bemused to see how long it takes Stanford to get a QB ready for prime-time. It means you only have a QB in his prime for maybe a 1 1/2 to 2 seasons, unless it's an Andrew Luck-type phenom who also decides to stick around for his senior year despite being the prospective #1 draft pick. Hogan was also a bit of an exception, but experienced serious regression for the first three-quarters of the 2014 season (certainly partially due to poor O-line play). Last year, Costello came on and looked excellent in his first two games (UCLA and ASU), but there was all this banter about how he didn't have a full grasp of the playbook and could only run an excerpted version. I sometimes feel Stanford's system shackles a QB and doesn't let him show what he is capable of. Too complex, even though much of the actual execution is a hand-off to a back running up the middle.
Well, to pick a prominent example, Josh Rosen's freshman PER was 134, which is lower than Hogan's was in 2012 (148) or Costello's was last year (140) and was the same as Chrsyt's was in 2016. JT Daniel's PER this year is even worse (125). Browning's in 2015 was 139. Jared Goff's was 123. The difference is that those QB's were true freshmen, whereas our guys were redshirt freshmen.
Looking at other prominent redshirt freshmen in the league to make an apples-to-apples comparison: Sam Darnold in 2016 had a PER of 161. Justin Herbert's in 2016 was 149. So really stellar redshirt freshmen can do really well in their first year (but of course Darnold was a first round draft pick, and Herbert is a future a first round draft pick), whereas I don't know where Costello will be drafted and Hogan was a mid-round draft pick whose redshirt freshman PER was similar to Herbert's.
All that is to say that for non-air raid type offenses, our QB's don't seem to have an out of the ordinary learning curve.
BC