NFL Week 15 Open Thread
By 
It’s been an extra fun week to be an Oregon fan. Not only did the Ducks win the Pac-12 Championship on Friday night (stick your asterisk up an orifice of your choice), but Thursday night saw the most fun I’ve ever had watching a football game in which I did not have a specific rooting interest. I watched the Chargers-Raiders game to see the rookie phenom and former Oregon star Justin Herbert play. But then Derek Carr got hurt and Marcus Mariota took over and it was Duck vs. Duck! And they both looked pretty good.
Herbert is just outstanding. What’s interesting is that neither I nor Farley nor any of my other friends thought he would be instantly successful in the NFL. He always had a big arm. But did he have the accuracy? Would he throw a lot of picks? It turns out the answer was that his receivers at Oregon were horrible, or at least had terrible coaching. For his entire career, drops were a huge issues with his receivers. There is a new WR coach this year at Oregon and….that has not been a problem at all, despite the incredibly bad QB who has replaced Herbert. Moreover, Juwan Johnson, who transferred to Penn State to Oregon for last year and was somewhat underwhelming and who also had drop issues, is now playing for the Saints and getting reps despite being a UFA. So a lot of this shows the limits of coaching in college football. Herbert is an absolute stud and promises to be for a long time to come. Now if only the Chargers would replace Anthony Lynn with literally anyone.
As for Marcus Mariota, he’s now in that zone where he is perhaps the best backup QB in the NFL but you really aren’t going to win with him as a starter. All us Oregon fans thought Mariota would be great in the NFL and we were not right about that. I blame the terrible offenses and coaching in Tennessee while he was there. Coach after coach refused to use Mariota’s actual skills and instead tried to fit him into “their system.” As Scott frequently points out in these posts, if you don’t fit your system around your personnel, the problem is you. But that seems to make no difference in the NFL. Mariota got sacked a ton, got hurt a lot, and got tentative. Today, he does some things well. He gave the Raiders a big shot in the arm when he came in. Immediately, Gruden transformed the offense to show off his skills, including RPOs and dedicated QB runs. Amazing how that can work. He threw a beautiful deep ball for a TD to Darren Waller. But….his downfield accuracy has always been an issue and he missed a few passes. He threw a bad pick. Overall, he played quite a great game for not getting any practice reps. Would I as a Seahawks fan love it if Mariota was our backup instead of Geno Smith? Oh yes. If your starter gets hurt, Mariota is going to give you a chance to win the game. But if he’s your starter for a whole season, you are probably going to go 7-9. Of course if Geno is your starter for a whole season, you are going to go 3-13.
In other QB news, Jalen Hurts has replaced Carson Wentz as the Eagles QB. Wentz is upset and has made it clear he wants to start or he wants out. Well, I get that. On the other hand, Wentz is terrible. Even when the Eagles were at their peak, it wasn’t because of Wentz. They won that Super Bowl with Nick Foles for god’s sake. At best, Wentz has always been an average QB and now he has tanked. I assume Doug Pederson will be gone at the end of this year now that the Eagles are a complete disaster. If I was going forward, I would trade Wentz and keep Hurts. But the team itself is behind Wentz, because of his leaderocity or whiteness or whatever. However, they looked far better last week with Hurts than they had all season with Wentz.
Finally, there was a time a few years ago where I was pretty worried about the future of the QB position in the NFL. The aging elite of Brady and Brees and Rodgers and Roethlisberger were very old. Amazingly, they are all still playing. But who was the next set of elite QBs? Jameis Winston and Mariota both were basically busts, at least for being top picks. It’s the same with Jared Goff and Wentz.
But the (finally!!) willingness of NFL coordinators to design systems around quarterbacks who can run the ball and do fun things has changed this. Russell Wilson’s success is a huge reason for this. The Chiefs pairing up Mahomes with Andy Reid solidified this as the path ahead for teams who want to win. The Texans may be a mess but it’s not DeShaun Watson’s fault. Dak Prescott was a great find for the Cowboys (pay the man Jerry!). Lamar Jackson has not had a great season but is clearly an amazing and fun player for the Ravens. The Cardinals basically saved the franchise for a decade by cutting bait on Josh Rosen after one year and drafting Kyler Murray. Meanwhile, Herbert, Tua, and Burrow all look like the real deal in their rookie years, giving three long hopeless franchises a lot of optimism. I was long skeptical of Josh Allen, but the results speak for themselves. Even Baker Mayfield has turned around his awful 2019 with a great 2020. And the Bears traded up and drafted….ha ha ha, I can’t even pretend here. What a joke of a franchise.
And now Trevor Lawrence is about to enter the league. He feels like the surest thing since Andrew Luck (speaking of QBs ruined by horrible management and the worst offensive line this century outside of the Seahawks). The real question is whether he decides playing for the Jets is worth coming out a year early.
So it’s quite a bright time for young QBs and that’s great for the future of the game.