I think in he was claiming that Mallett 'beat out' Fitz at one point recently. The guy is all over the place.
No, I was pointing out that Hoyer didn't beat out Mallett, BOB just gifted him the job which was an obvious mistake. Instead of going with the guy who looked better in actual preseason games, he went with the guy he wanted to give the job to no matter what. He's always been high on Hoyer and that biased his view. Anyone who looked at their performances in preseason would have said that Mallett looked better....because he's simply the better QB in actual games. Hoyer may be awesome when not wearing pads during OTA's, but that means nothing. If you weigh that as equal to an actual game setting, you make the wrong decision as BOB did.
Neither one of them outperformed the other in actual games during pre-season. Hell Savage looked better than both at times.
I strongly disagree with both statements. Savage had his moments against super weak competition, but even then he didn't look great. Savage was improved from what he was last year, but he was never in the conversation to start, even if it was a fair competition.
It's not about Mallett being the "savior." Personally I was very pessimistic about his acquisition in the first place, it signaled to me that BOB cares more about someone knowing the system or fitting his mold than actually acquiring some talent at the position. I'm sure this argument's been made in this thread 100 times, but it's that we pretty much have a read on who Hoyer is. He's started 18 games at the NFL level now, which isn't a big sample size except that we're talking about a 29 year old undrafted guy here. People are generally too quick to give up on rookie QB's these days, some take a couple seasons to get going. But this guy has no pedigree and has little hope for improvement. I was hoping for him today based on getting off to a good start in Cleveland last year, but that was about as bad a game as can be imagined, and his leash should be burnt up. Mallett has a decent draft day pedigree, and has looked interesting in a really small sample size of actual games, and it's time to expand that and see if we've got anything. It's really that simple.
KC is a lot better than anyone here gave them credit for, and the guy that pays for that miscalculation here will of course be Hoyer. Give Hoyer Foster and this game is a lot different, like Smith had Charles, Kelce, and Maclin. The Texan offense has no chance without Foster.
^This right here. KC is an excellent football team. Hoyer played really, really badly, but KC beat us up and down. Charles, Kelce, and Maclin are all great players. They rolled our D in the first half.
Right... But they don't have Foster. And even in the individual plays where they did have a chance Hoyer looked pretty pedestrian (well, worse really). This performance can't possibly surprise anyone. They surprise would have been if Hoyer went out here and looked great. That would have been the unexpected. How he played is in line with how he plays. And yes, the Chiefs probably are pretty good this year. But you actually have to play good teams sometimes and the goal is obviously to win those too. I don't like putting everything on the QB. So I won't. The coaching didn't help him much. And the decision to start Hoyer in the first place was pretty odd. But at the end of the day a mediocre QB is a mediocre QB. It's f'ing crazy that we have countless threads throughout the offseason. And preseason discussing and debating this crap...
Neither QB is going to survive very long without an effective running game... but if this team gets in an early large deficit, and the QB is basically forced to air it out, you might as well go with the stronger arm/quicker release regardless of decision making. If Mallett is indeed named the starter next week, he too runs the risk of getting pulled if ineffective or mistake-prone. In the end, they need a QB that doesn't turn the ball over... and can get the offense quickly to the line where you rely on their ability to read the defense and burn them for their inability to substitute. A running game will help with these aspects as well.
Im not saying Savage was ever in the mix or should have been, just that at times during the preseason I was more confident in him than Hoyer or Mallett, even if he was playing against 2nd and 3rd stringers. But as to Hoyer and Mallett, if you think the latter had any kind of clear and decisive edge over the former by the time the starter was announced, than maybe it's not Obrien who's biased. Their stats from Preseason: Mallett: 24/35 190 yards 1td Hoyer: 16/26 201 yards 1td Both had some good flashes but neither gave me any confidence the offense would be in good shape to start the season. When Hoyer was announced I was indifferent. Now maybe, all things equal, you go with the guy that's more of a question mark. I can buy that argument, but not the one where somehow Mallett outplayed Hoyer.
Everybody should know by now that preseason means, and I mean this in the most literal of senses, nothing at all.
Hell, with the amount of players around the league getting signed and playing in week 1... perhaps OTA's and training camp means very little as well.
OTA's, practices and preseason means everything to the texans that's why Hoyer is the starter. Eventhough O'Brien preaches it's all about winning and changing the culture around here... he still picked what seemed to him the safer qb. Dude change the culture around here and roll the dice with Mallet practice what you preach. I like O'Brien though he knows he made a mistake and Mallet will be starting week 2 because O'Brien really wants to win.
Brandon Brooks gets destroyed here <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Brandon Brooks has to be better than this. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Texans?src=hash">#Texans</a> <a href="https://t.co/r3uzj2yDTk">https://t.co/r3uzj2yDTk</a></p>— PDS (@PatDStat) <a href="https://twitter.com/PatDStat/status/643244385212211200">September 14, 2015</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
With all of the angst created from the poor QB situation at the Texans, there may not be much that the Texans brain trust can do to rectify the situation. Here is an article which explains why it's getting harder and harder to find QBs coming out of college who actually understand the basics of playing QB in the pros. The article is very long but is a good read. This should be a warning to all fans who are placing their hopes on the Texans finding that elusive "franchise QB" in next year's draft: http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-nfl-has-a-quarterback-crisis-1441819454 Why the NFL Has a Quarterback Crisis Coaches see more QB prospects entering the league without the skill sets to excel; Will the classic NFL passer go extinct? By Kevin Clark Since the dawn of the NFL, head coaches and general managers have been calling top college quarterback prospects into conference rooms to pepper them with rudimentary questions: how to attack a certain defense, for instance, or what to do when a play breaks down. The answers were sometimes dull and sometimes brilliant, but there were always answers. This year, according to separate interviews with dozens of NFL coaches and executives, something disturbing happened in these pre-draft quiz sessions. When asked the same basic questions, many quarterback prospects responded with something NFL insiders said they have never seen before: blank stares. Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi said the new crop of college quarterbacks were flummoxed by a simple question about an “under” front, one of the most common defensive alignments. “Whoa, no one’s ever told me ‘front’ before,” he remembers one prospect saying. “No one’s ever talked to me about reading these defenses.” Buffalo Bills general manager Doug Whaley said he had the same results when he asked prospects a question about defenses shifting from a common scheme called “cover 2” to an equally mundane tactic called “cover 3.” Hue Jackson, the offensive coordinator from the Bengals, said he had to dumb down his questions, while Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton said some QBs failed to grasp things as basic as understanding a common play call. “You have to teach these kids the absolute basics,” he said. The knowledge base was so low, Buffalo’s Whaley said, that it left him feeling “a little nervous about the long-term future of this game.” As the 2015 NFL season begins, the league’s decision makers say they are daunted by what they see as a widening gulf between the college game and the pro game, one that has existed for a while but is now starting to affect the quality of the league’s most-cherished commodity: Quarterbacks. The kinds of passers the NFL thrives on are those who can survey the field before the snap to “read” the defense and make any necessary adjustments, then drop back and dissect the coverage again, picking through a number of passing options to find the open receiver. For years, this brand of preparation has been regenerated from Joe Montana to Tom Brady to relative newcomers like Seattle’s Russell Wilson and Andrew Luck of the Indianapolis Colts. Spoiled by their immense talent and football intelligence, the NFL has organized itself around quarterbacks to the point where it is hard to imagine the sport without them. The five most productive individual passing seasons in history have happened since 2011. But if current trends continue, NFL insiders say, quarterbacks who have the sophistication to outfox NFL defenses to deliver the ball to open receivers are “going to be on the endangered species list,” said Cleveland Browns coach Mike Pettine. “The quarterback may not be gone yet,” he added, “but if you have one, protect it.” “It’s doomsday if we don’t adapt and evolve,” said St. Louis Rams general manager Les Snead. In the last decade, many college football teams have embraced a form of offense that runs at a furious tempo with no breaks for huddles, the goal being to grind down and exhaust the defense. Teams that play this way don’t bother trying to fool their opponents with complex schemes and trickery, they just bull forward as fast as they can. College defenses have been forced to adapt to this “hurry-up” mode by simplifying their fronts and coverage packages to help the players keep pace. The learning curve, at the NFL level, NFL people say, is so massive that it’s hard to overcome for all but the best college quarterbacks. The trouble with this trend, NFL experts say, is that many of the players coming from the college ranks have spent their entire careers playing in this high-throttle system, which is completely different from the slower, deliberate and more complex nature of the NFL. When they come to the NFL, it’s as if they’re being told to stop playing speed checkers and start playing chess. And the NFL, which doesn’t have a minor league of its own, has no influence over college coaches. “They don’t coach anything,” said Rex Ryan, the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, when discussing college defenses. At Baylor, quarterback Bryce Petty was one of the most prolific passers in the country. He led the Bears to two conference championships in his last two seasons on campus and holds 31 Baylor passing records and has the lowest percentage of interceptions per pass in NCAA history. But NFL teams were wary of Petty. Because Baylor played a “spread” offense that forced defenses to fan out across the field, making them unable to disguise anything, many scouts worried he would struggle to master the NFL game. He had to wait until the 103rd pick before the New York Jets scooped him up. Petty said he was “upset and frustrated that I was thrown away like I couldn’t learn it,” he said. “I’m like ‘you’ve got to give me a chance a little bit.’” Petty admits to grappling with tasks such as hearing and calling the play, identifying defensive backs in coverage and identifying which player in the defensive backfield was the “mike” linebacker, the central part of the defense whose location teams base their offensive line protections on. “As crazy as it sounds, at Baylor, we did not point out the ‘mike’ linebacker,” Petty said. Petty was unfamiliar with making adjustments to the play or the formation before the snap. “Honestly, I wish I’d done a little bit more as far as being proactive to get into a pro style [offense],” he said, singling out the need to decipher fronts or coverages. “It was things I have never seen before.” Exactly 101 picks earlier, another quarterback from a spread offense was selected. Marcus Mariota, who won the Heisman Trophy while leading the Oregon Ducks to the national championship game last season, was taken with the second overall pick by the Tennessee Titans. Mariota can run as well as pass, but NFL teams worried about his ability to translate to the pro game. Titans general manager Ruston Webster defended Mariota and the Oregon offense and said they used NFL principles—like the quarterback reading multiple receivers on a play or him staying “in the pocket”—the area behind the offensive line—“more than what people realized. It gave us confidence.” A parade of general managers, like Pittsburgh’s Kevin Colbert, think that if the current model holds, the notion of drafting a quarterback to start right away will need to be scrapped. NFL officials agree that the new wave of quarterbacks will need more time than previous generations, but some fret that today’s roster limits and time constraints may prevent them from getting the time they need to learn or develop. “It might become like major league baseball now, where you take a guy that you think will be able to play in three, four, five years,” said Pettine. Even that can be hard. One general manager admitted that he’s having trouble finding a young quarterback to keep on the roster whose lack of knowledge of the pro game won’t frustrate his team’s established starter. In NFL facilities across the country, the race to figure out what works is on. “It’s on us to adapt, I don’t think any of us want this thing to crash,” said the Rams’ Snead. Cleveland’s Farmer has one idea: What if you could design an offense to minimize the passing deficiencies of modern quarterback prospects? Farmer used the example of Auburn’s Nick Marshall, who threw 20 touchdowns last season but was projected to transition to defensive back in the NFL. What if, Farmer said, you devoted resources to designing an offense where Marshall could thrive? He would cost you almost nothing—Marshall went undrafted—and “you might get your franchise quarterback in the later rounds, and that’s unheard of these days.” “Whoever cracks this code the soonest is going to have a huge, huge advantage,” Farmer said, adding he and his coach, Pettine, have had broad discussions on the topic. Philadelphia Eagles head coach Chip Kelly, center, is one of the few NFL coaches to incorporate the college offense at the pro level. Indeed, Snead has similar thoughts. He recalled the brilliance behind the “Cover 2” or “Tampa 2” defenses, popularized first by the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s then refined by multiple teams in the 1990s, which minimized the importance of “cover” cornerbacks, who could lock up wide receivers in man-to-man coverage and are expensive and hard to find. Snead said the race is on to find a similar strategy that minimizes the importance of the quarterback. “The person who makes the quarterback like they made the cornerback will be a name that will be remembered forever,” Snead said. “But it will take courage to do it.” NFL coaches are still trying to figure out which elements of the college innovations can be used in the NFL. One issue is that NFL rules prohibit teams from snapping the ball as quickly after plays, meaning they cannot run a pure uptempo offense. Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Adam Gase singled out Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly, a former Oregon coach, as bringing positive elements of the spread to the pros. “They do a good job and they haven’t sold out to the scheme and most importantly their quarterbacks don’t take huge hits,” Gase said. “The quarterback position is so valuable you want to adapt to their strengths, they do that.” For his part, Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Todd Haley sees an altogether bleaker future for teams searching for a quarterback. “You do not want to be in the top five pickers in the draft, you really don’t,” Haley said. “Guys are going to get fired. General managers, coaches, they’re going to go because it’s just guessing. It’s harder than ever to find a quarterback.” Write to Kevin Clark at kevin.clark@wsj.com
We need to invest in this O-line a bit. It won't matter who's under Center if he's gonna be on his back.
