Sturm - Decoding Linehan - Lions

[DogFace]

Dak's success is easy to understand. Most quarterback busts are MENTAL busts. To be a pro quarterback you need a pretty good level of general intelligence to learn the complicated offensive systems, but you also need to be able to make snap decisions very quickly under pressure when your opponent is actively trying to give you false clues about how they're going to defend each play, which is a completely different kind of mental talent. You also need a very high level of emotional stability - things constantly go wrong in football games, and you need to be able to move on to the next play and not let penalties, drops, fumbles, cheap shots, taunting or the defense giving up plays to put the team behind with little time left upset your equilibrium. But temperament and intelligence are often completely disconnected things - there are plenty of calm morons and excitable smart people, but neither of them should be NFL QBs.

All that is kind of just the tip of the iceberg. Being a pro QB in the modern era is a very specialized job that almost nobody has the mental make-up to accomplish. And by the way, nobody knows how to scout for these things in a meaningful way. Dak is simply one of those guys who has everything from the neck up. He has a mind for football. Team draft QBs based on who has 1% more arm velocity or 1" of extra height or a 0.1 second faster 40 time because that's what they can measure, but none of that means very much.

You can point to Dak's situation, but this team had a bunch of guys in basically the same situation last year that totally crapped the bed. Would Zeke have helped them? Sure, but they would have still all been stiffs and the team would have been just a more competitive loser than they were, because those guys were mentally incapable of surviving as an NFL QB in 2016. Adrian Peterson never made the Vikings matter outside 1 season when Favre was playing like it was 1996.

The importance of the mental part of sports is often talked about by many including those that have mastered it. It is still most often the most or one of the most overlooked traits.

 

[sean10mm]

To be fair people look for mental traits, but nobody can reliably predict if a college kid has them at the level needed to succeed as a pro. Also, if you make a mistake, it's easier to rationalize it if you made it based on measurable physical things instead of psychological factors.

RG3 was supposed to be very smart. By normal standards he probably IS smart. But he never learned a pro offense. Hell, he never learned to SLIDE, so he took linebacker killshots for no reason every game. He had injury problems, but a lot of them went back to his apparently having no football IQ at all - he couldn't make a read and get through his progressions before the defense could hit him, he couldn't make the snap decision of when to step out of bounds or slide to avoid needless hits, and so on.

Conversely, on paper Mariota is kind of the same player, except he's vastly smarter in football terms - but everyone seemed to think he was dumber at the time of the draft. He went from pure college gimmick player to effective pro largely running a proper NFL offense pretty fast. Winson was supposed to be mentally ahead of him because of his pro-style experience, but he seemingly can't stop throwing to opposing DBs at a much higher rate than the "dumb college system player" Mariota.

Heck, the entire narrative around Tebow was about his positive mental traits, everyone was so sure that his A+ work ethic would overcome any problems he had coming out of college, but he actually developed his game not one iota from his time on the Gators. His brief run of success on the Broncos was literally a case of "Give up and run the Gator playbook until the league figures it out." Nobody is going to say he had a bad attitude, but he never learned a damn thing at the NFL level.

Tebow was of course the comparison people made to Dak, and it wasn't meant as a compliment. But mentally speaking, Dak had transcended anything Tebow ever did to improve his NFL game before the preseason was even over. That's a difference so stark that it's kind of stunning that people were equating these two human beings.

 

[xwalker]

To be fair people look for mental traits, but nobody can reliably predict if a college kid has them at the level needed to succeed as a pro. Also, if you make a mistake, it's easier to rationalize it if you made it based on measurable physical things instead of psychological factors.

RG3 was supposed to be very smart. By normal standards he probably IS smart. But he never learned a pro offense. Hell, he never learned to SLIDE, so he took linebacker killshots for no reason every game. He had injury problems, but a lot of them went back to his apparently having no football IQ at all - he couldn't make a read and get through his progressions before the defense could hit him, he couldn't make the snap decision of when to step out of bounds or slide to avoid needless hits, and so on.

Conversely, on paper Mariota is kind of the same player, except he's vastly smarter in football terms - but everyone seemed to think he was dumber at the time of the draft. He went from pure college gimmick player to effective pro largely running a proper NFL offense pretty fast. Winson was supposed to be mentally ahead of him because of his pro-style experience, but he seemingly can't stop throwing to opposing DBs at a much higher rate than the "dumb college system player" Mariota.

Heck, the entire narrative around Tebow was about his positive mental traits, everyone was so sure that his A+ work ethic would overcome any problems he had coming out of college, but he actually developed his game not one iota from his time on the Gators. His brief run of success on the Broncos was literally a case of "Give up and run the Gator playbook until the league figures it out." Nobody is going to say he had a bad attitude, but he never learned a damn thing at the NFL level.

Tebow was of course the comparison people made to Dak, and it wasn't meant as a compliment. But mentally speaking, Dak had transcended anything Tebow ever did to improve his NFL game before the preseason was even over. That's a difference so stark that it's kind of stunning that people were equating these two human beings.

Good post.

Being coach-able is a key component to the success or failure of players. RG3 was not coach-able and his owner enabled him.

FYI - Tebow was a high character guy but he seems dumb to me.

The real talent in being a scout or head of personnel is evaluating the mental makeup of players. Sometimes the players that had problems in college turn out fine and were just immature kids when they got into trouble. Sometimes the seemly high character guys like RG3 are just not coach-able. I think this might have been Jimmy's top talent. He could talk to a player once and usually know if the player was a guy he could work with.

 

[jobberone]

Dak is doing something most rookie QBs don't and can't do. He still needs to be able to throw to a spot if he wants to improve. That includes leading his open receivers properly, throwing to windows where they aren't so open (here he's much improved over the season), and hitting receivers before they break. The latter is very important esp in this offense.