It’s July 14th. I was really wishing that the Indians would be competitive enough at this point in the season that my first exclusively-Browns post wouldn’t have to happen til at least August 1. But as Burgess Meredith said in Grumpy Old Men II, “You can wish in one hand and crap in the other, and see which gets filled first.” So here we are…
Obviously, the Browns quarterback controversy has been going on for…well, basically since the franchise’s reboot. The latest incarnation - the Brady Quinn V. Derek Anderson grudge match - has been running since the Browns drafted the Golden Boy back in 2007. I’ll assume that we’re all up to speed enough on the saga that recapping it step by step isn’t necessary.
Instead, we’ll fast-forward to today. With the first preseason game a little more than a month away, Mangini has publicly stated that he will not name a starter for as long as humanly possible. (I personally hold out a shred of hope that he will actually use both guys for significant portions of the same games, just to completely screw with opposing teams AND the Browns fan base - but I don’t think that even Mangini is that diabolical.) Both DA and The Great Quinn are towing the company line when they talk to the media. And if examined objectively, an argument can be made in either guy’s case.
However, Browns Republic (since one more use of the term ‘Nation’ for a fan base will make my head explode like a ripe jack o’ lantern thrown against someone’s front door) has clearly anointed Quinn as the 2009 starter. Anderson is fully aware of this. It would be hard for him not to be, considering that he was openly booed at a home game early in 2008, less than a half season after he’d been selected to the Pro Bowl and led the Browns to within one Indianapolis Colts / Jim Sorgi stinkbomb of the playoffs.
For all intents and purposes, Anderson is a dead man walking in Berea, and he knows it.
But the truly pathetic aspect of his coming exile is this: Browns Republic isn’t even satisfied with arguing that he’s a lesser quarterback than The Great Quinn, starter of a Brett Favre/Cal Ripken-esque string of 3 consecutive games in a single season.
Instead, if the commenters on the Plain Dealer’s Browns blog are any indication, Browns fans have decided that Anderson is now also a lesser quarterback than a guy who ISN’T EVEN IN THE LEAGUE: the one, the only, Graham Harrell of Texas Tech.
Let me repeat this for emphasis…It’s not just that Harrell isn’t on the Browns’ roster. He does not have an NFL contract. He was worked out by the Browns during their rookie minicamp in the spring, and at the end of it, they decided he wasn’t even worth keeping on the practice squad. Harrell has reportedly spun around to a couple of other organizations since then, but as of this moment, he is not a professional football player. In an absolute, “one or zero” binary way of looking at the NFL’s players, Graham Harrell and I are in the same category right now: unemployed by any of the 32 franchises.
And yet, every Sunday when I read Tony Grossi’s “Hey, Tony” column on the Plain Dealer’s website, multiple people lament the fact that ManKok didn’t give Harrell “a longer look” because we need “more options” at QB. And Harrell was such a good quarterback in college that it’s IMPOSSIBLE that he could suck in the NFL…right?
Dead wrong. Suffice it to say that thoughtful scouts, GMs, and analysts have essentially agreed that the current evaluation systems make it impossible to determine to any degree whether or not a college quarterback’s skills will translate to the NFL.
For a better look inside the details of this, I recommend reading this Malcolm Gladwell column. For those who don’t have the time to read a 7-page New Yorker article, Gladwell focuses on Chase Daniel of Missouri, and you can distill his point by saying that some NFL scouts believe that Daniel’s back-up, who has never played a snap in the NCAA, will be a better NFL quarterback than Daniel, who was in the discussion for the Heisman. No one really knows because there is no proven system.
How can this be? Part of the problem is the rise of the “spread” offense, which distills the quarterback’s job into the simplest possible form. Assuming he has good arm strength and accuracy, any college quarterback leading the spread can basically know before he takes the snap what the defense is doing, and therefore, which of his receivers will be open. The reason being that the spread literally spreads the linemen and 5 receivers out equally across the field. This leaves significant gaps in the quarterback’s protection, but it also forces the defense to show their hand. And with so many receivers running quick routes and the quarterback taking the ball from the shotgun, all he has to do is catch the snap, immediately plant, and throw. Because of the overall simplication, most times he will have no problem getting the ball to an open man well in advance of the oncoming rush.
But since it would basically be suicidal to run the spread in the NFL due to the dramatically faster defensive players, the QB’s job evolves into something much more advanced. The linemen have to bunch together to close the gaps. The defense can thus disguise its intentions. Traditional snaps with drop-backs are the norm rather than the shotgun. And with most NFL sets maxing out at 3-4 receivers rather than 5, the quarterback ends up having to read the defense and make the decision about where the ball is going only AFTER the play has begun.
To draw an analogy, trying to hire a spread quarterback to run your NFL franchise would be equivalent to hiring a Subway “sandwich” artist to be the master chef of a gourmet restaurant, or assuming that because your 12 year-old cousin kicks ass at Halo III, he is prepared to be an Army Ranger.
I mention all of this to get us back to this fact: no one has any idea how good Harrell is based on how he played in college. But if we include him in the conversation, the three candidates look like this…
Derek Anderson: 31 career starts, over 6,000 yards passing, 43 TD, 35 INT, 54.6% completions. In his Pro-Bowl season, he threw 29 TD to 19 INT and had a shade under 3,800 yards passing with a 56.5% completion rate.
Brady Quinn: 4 career starts, 563 yards passing, 2 TD, 2 INT, and a completion percentage south of 50%. Also lost his starting job with Myoplex to Matt Hasselbeck.
Graham Harrell: all stats accumulated at Texas Tech acknowledged as useless. 100% pass rating, by which I mean all NFL teams who have tried him out have decided to pass rather than pay him money to play for them.
I am an admitted Anderson guy. I also know that he will not be the starter. But let’s get realistic about this Graham Harrell thing. If you’re going to contribute to the mob trying to chase Anderson out of town, don’t do it by claiming that he’s worse than a guy who, very literally, is the NFL equivalent of a hobo. I would rather have Quinn, if that’s the choice. And for me to say that with a straight face, you know the other option is truly, truly awful.
-T
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