Comparable QB situations and results
I don't want to overreact to the Spring Game, of course, but with our first game still months away, I'm imagining what I might do if I were the coach of our football team, and specifically about the QB situation. Hell, it's the off-season.
Here is one interpretation of the current QB situation: We have an incumbent starter, Speight, who had a good but not great year last year, is a fine leader, works his ass off, but may be near his ceiling. And we have a younger kid, Peters, who probably has more natural talent and who is showing signs of rapid progress. It is possible that if we start Peters, then by the end of the season he will have surpassed Speight and could be on his way to being Andrew Luck 2.0. But there are no guarantees, and Peters could flame out. And if he flames out, we may have caused Speight to regress by shaking his confidence, leaving us worse off.
If I were the coach, I'd look to other examples of this situation around college football, going back at least ten years, and see how those played out. What similar situations could I study? In other words, can anyone think of other situations where either the incumbent kept the job while a promising recruit was kept on the bench for a few years, or where a solid incumbent was benched in favor of a less-skilled but higher-upside kid? And how did those situations work out?
I don't really get all this talk about ceilings and whatnot. How do people judge that Speight somehow is less talented and has a lower ceiling than Peters? If anything, Speight has physical gifts that you can't really teach that Peters doesn't have: height and evasiveness.
April 17th, 2017 at 10:13 PM ^
The spring game will keep us laymen guessing and hypothesizing. Things will sort themselves out in the fall. IMO, Speight just had a bad day and Peters had a good day. One spring scrimmage does not define either QB. We do know this is a two man race and may the best win.
April 17th, 2017 at 11:24 PM ^
Peters starter, Speight backup, O'Korn 3rd string. We have a tough schedule this year anyway, let Peters go in there, make his mistakes so he can learn from them, and then proceed from there for the long haul and look at the bigger picture. I've seen nothing to indicate that Speight has improved and 'm not sure I'll have any hair left if he is here for another 2 seasons.
Pep seemed to be solidly in the Speight camp prior to the Spring Game. I'm paraphrasing, but in one of his interviews he sounded like he was happy to be inheriting a talented QB to work with, and that coaching him up to the next level was his primary focus. There was no mention of Peters. I'd be curious if this will still be the case following Peters' showing on Saturday.
I thought it was interesting that Coach Harbaugh let Peters play all day. My own take is that he wanted to see how he looked in extended action and he got an eye full. Peters looks confident, very athletic, and throws a beautiful ball (long, short, and intermediate). A deep threat could do wonders for our running game.
If we've learned anything about JH, it's that he will let the two compete every day and the better one will start, just as Speight did last year. If all things are equal, Speight will start against Florida, and if he really screws the pooch or, more likely, plays inconsistently, Peters will almost certainly get a look at some point. Having said that, I still see Speight playing well enough in Coach Harbaugh's eyes to keep the job, but I'm confident our coach will pick the best, either way.
Heck, I'm just grateful you read the actual words in the post (which wasn't "Which QB should start?").
You raise a fair point. But in my experience, serious fans of the game have more information to impart than I could find through a bit of internet research. Sure, I can find cases where a younger player was started over a veteran who'd started the year before, or where that didn't happen. But the details—Who was this young kid? How had the veteran really played the previous year?—are far harder to suss out without hours of reading. I figured a few people here who really watch this sort of thing might write in with an anecdote they'd watched more closely.
Twenty years ago, I probably could have done this myself off the top of my head. I watched hours and hours of college football every week, often taping games to watch mid-week that I dind't have time for on Saturday. But these days, I have far less time to watch football. This board, though, is full of people who do now what I did twenty years ago. So I thought it was worth trying to tap that wealth of knowledge. So far, I think I might have been wrong.