Bold prediction: Josh Allen’s NFL career will be 3-7 years shorter than Patrick Mahomes’s, and he will never win a Super Bowl.
You’re good!
Aw, I hope that’s not the case. I’d like to see the Bills win a Superbowl, and it feels like Josh Allen is their best hope for the next couple decades.
Mahomes will never attempt to leap a defender. If I were a Bills fan, I would be cringing every time Allen does so.
I was really surprised when I checked and found Cam Newton is just 33 years old now, and hasn’t been good since he turned about 28. That’s shocking to me, and unless Allen changes how he plays (although it may be too late), I worry the same may happen for him.
Andrew Luck retired at age 30 after several bouts of injury and rehab. And he was still a good QB at the time but had to deal with years of mediocre to bad offensive lines and was one of the more sacked QBs in the league.
There’s just no way Allen is going to play at a high level even to age 30 without losing significant time to injury unless he can avoid more hits.
There is a reason why QBs are protected so much in today’s NFL. The way the game is played now, a team’s chances often rest on how good the QB is. And a QB can’t take a lot of abuse over a long periof of time and still perform. So the running QB is something to be wary of, unless it’s a player who protects himself while doing so.
I wonder how long Lamar Jackson will continue to perform at a high level. He’s still doing fairly well, but he’s only 25.
The crazy thing is that they are ALL running quarterbacks. Who is the youngest traditional pocket passer in the league? Tom Brady? Maybe Kirk Cousins, but he’s already 34.
My hypothesis is that this is largely driven by the fact that relatively few major college quarterbacks are pocket passers these days. Most current NFL quarterbacks were running spread offenses, and run-pass options, when they were in college. Many of them were rarely, or never, taking direct snaps from the center in college, playing exclusively from the shotgun or pistol.
Either they learn how to avoid hits when they run the ball in the NFL, start to run less, or burn out early due to injuries.
Well, there are running QBs and QBs that run. I would not call Jared Allen a running QB. It’s just something he has in his skillset. Lamar Jackson is definitely a running QB, as was Cam Newton. Russell Wilson has never been a running QB, he used to be described as a “scrambling QB” (he was opportunistic about it) and even he doesn’t have the legs anymore. Mahomes is a fantastic passer and he can use his legs to good effect when necessary but his game isn’t mostly about running.
Anyway, the QBs that are often called “statues” these days are a relic of the past. Once the “opportunistic” run play was shown to be so effective, all QBs do it now. Kirk Cousins is probably the only outlier I can think of. (I’ll be honest, Brady is a relic who still plays, and I say this as someone slightly older than him.) Cousins has rushing yards in the double digits for most of the seasons he has played. The most he ever had in a single year was 179 in 2017. By comparison, last year Jackson had over 60 rushing yards average per game.
But you can run and run smart. Most of the better QBs can do that. Russell Wilson spent more than a decade not missing a single game due to injury. Mahomes has been pretty good about it. A smart QB can run but avoids contact. Those who don’t play that way are the ones who have shorter careers.
I assume you mean Josh Allen?
In watching the Bills, it appears to me that they have a certain subset of plays designed specifically for Allen to run the ball, and not just a QB sneak up the middle.
Whereas Mahomes rarely runs the ball by design, at least not any more. His rushing yards are primarily via scrambles, very similar to Russell Wilson, as you mentioned.
This chart shows QB stats this year. While Allen does not have the most rushes by a quarterback, he has more than double the number of rushes by Mahomes.
And yet ironically, Mahomes has missed three games from injury whereas Allen never missed a start. I think I remember the injury that cost Mahomes two of those games a couple seasons ago. If I remember correctly, he got hurt scrambling for time, not running, but that’s still not really something a traditional pocket passer would have been exposed to.
Thanks to the linked chart I think I have my answer for the youngest pocket passer: Matthew Stafford, unless you count Baker Mayfield.
Yeah, gah, brain fart.
There’s a difference though between getting injured and not being able to play anymore. Mahomes missed a few games. Cam Newton and Andrew Luck don’t play anymore.
(Luck wasn’t a running QB but he got a hit a crap ton as previously mentioned, because his team really had an “offensive” OL.) You can’t be hit over and over again and be able to play QB very long. You’re probably going to retire by 30.
It just seems crazy to me that NFL teams are actually embracing this running quarterback thing. Particularly designed quarterback runs, but also even RPOs.
If I were running a team I’d want to look for the most coachable quarterback to draft who I could then sit on the bench for 3 years teaching them how to be a pocket passer. Like back in the day.
I saw in a recent game broadcast a cute stat about how no running quarterback has ever won a Superbowl except Russell Wilson, and Steve Young if you count it. But Wilson ran for like three times as many yards in his Superbowl win as Steve Young did, so it’s basically Wilson alone, then a huge dropoff.
The point they were making is that the injury concerns are prohibitive. I think the game was between the Bears and maybe the 49ers. Two teams with young running quarterbacks who were both injured, anyway.
The problem is that pocket passers are aging out. Soon there will be only running quarterbacks left, so all Superbowls will be won by running quarterbacks from then on. Or their backups, I guess.
Josh Allen missed 4 games due to injury his rookie season.
He didn’t start the first game of that 2018 season but started all the others that he wasn’t injured.
Well, to be fair, by the time he won the Super Bowl as the Niners’ starting QB, Young was 33 years old, and he wasn’t running with the ball as often as he had been when he was younger: he only carried the ball 58 times in that regular season (3.6 carries a game). Young was probably still considered a “running quarterback” by NFL standards of that time, but I suspect that may have been because few quarterbacks of that era ran even that much.
Wilson won the Super Bowl at age 25, in his second season, and he carried the ball 96 times that season (6 carries a game).
The real challenge here is that GMs and coaches turn over even more often now than they did back then. Few GMs are willing to spend much draft capital on a “project” quarterback anymore, in large part because that will look like an unproductive draft choice for several years, and the GM may well no longer even be with the team by the time that QB has matured into a pocket passer.
It’s because it works. It works well. And if you have a QB who knows how and when and where to slide or go out of bounds or anything else to protect himself, it is sustainable.
These days having a QB who can’t run is like having a QB with only one arm. I mean, it could work, just not as well. If your offense has a triple threat QB (pass, hand off, or run) then the defense has to waste a player on being a spy, or you can just be less certain about your defensive strategy overall. I think the genie is out of the bottle.
Wanting to go back to having pocket passers is like wanting to go back to the game before the forward pass was a thing. Ain’t gonna happen.
My bad, thanks for the correction. I had assumed the games he missed were the start of the season when he wasn’t the starter yet. But now in hindsight I kind of think he was the starter day one.
Good point.
That’s a great point. Maybe Kenny Pickett can be the next great pocket passer. Does he run?
The last two Superbowls were won by pocket passers. Of the modern era running or scrambling quarterbacks, only Mahomes has managed to win. Then Russell Wilson was the anomaly before this new running quarterback age.
So it is not determined yet that pocket passers can’t succeed. Going by recent championships, the opposite remains true: It’s the runners that still need to demonstrate they can win it all.
I concede that it really does feel like this year will begin a never-ending dominance of running quarterbacks winning Superbowls. But I dispute that the dominance will be because running quarterbacks are better, but rather that there will just not be any more pocket passers left. Despite the fact that they still disproportionately win championships compared to the runners.
It’s true that a running quarterback opens up more potential plays, and gives the defense additional headaches. What I’m not convinced of is that that benefit is greater than the downside of missing games from preventable injury. (Preventable as in just don’t call those quarterback running plays or RPOs. Mahomes’ injury doesn’t count here; he was scrambling to buy time with his eyes firmly downfield, IIRC.)
So in the context of this debate, are there any pocket passers this season with playoff aspirations? Who should I be rooting for to back up my position? I don’t think there are any.
EDIT: Looking at the list again that was linked upthread, I guess Jimmy G with the 49ers, Kirk Cousins with the Vikings, or Tua down in Miami, surprisingly enough. I thought he got injured running, but in 9 starts this year he only has 19 rushes for 35 yards. I’m guessing half of those were QB sneaks. (Oh no, duh, now I remember those brutal sacks Tua where he was badly concussed. That was not scrambling.)
Would you say that about Tua?