Elvis wrote:I've always been a big coaching matters guy and the truth of it seems to be more and more evident every year...
Yeah but when you put it that way there's no such thing as a
"coaching doesn't matter". guy.
So that's usually a red herring in discussions like this.
I mean if coaching matters, so does college coaching, which will often determine how behind or advanced a player is when they arrive in the pros.
Not all rookies are the same. Some acclimate more quickly. Doesn't matter who the coach is. Some are on top of it and prepared to acclimate more quickly. Some aren't as. It's the same with offensive linemen, though with them there's no one particular college spread system that has a rep for putting them more behind. It's no accident I think that guys like Kromer do so well with OL from the great college pro-style OL factories (eg. Iowa, Wisconsin).
Back to qbs, since there are
multiple. reasons why the Air Raid is less compatible with pro style play, it's more than fair to pay attention to its effect. Some of the best analysts in the biz have pointed this out. One place it shows up is assessment. It took a while for pro personnel people to figure out how to assess spread and also Air Raid qbs. By the time 2016 rolled around I was completely confident that Goff was a good pick and that the Rams knew what they were getting, though for a long time people complained that it was harder to judge the talent of Air Raid qbs particularly. So there were advances there too.
And of course pro coaching is part of this. I;m on one side of this debate and I have said that myself. One change is that coaches are now more open to adapting to the player along with fitting the player into the pro system. No one in any version of this discussion anywhere argues against that, that I have seen.
So the issue is open to debate and discussion. My own view is, when the first college Air Raid qb plays well as a rookie, I will go "hey look...it's the first one!"
![Cool 8-)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)
And that might happen someday for all we know.
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