What's wrong with the QB position at college level?

Originally posted by BobS:
College coaches are paid to win, they aren't paid to develop QBs for the NFL. Since a pro style offense is harder to learn and harder to find a successful candidate to run, they are few and far between. Gimmick offenses that won't work on the next level that rely on superior athletes are the common place. Colleges don't give their QBs 3 years to develop and don't care about a kid's future potential. They want the best player at the position today.

This. And as long as the powerhouses get the best aka most athletic guys with the most talent, they will run easy offenses that thrive thanks to the superior talent.

Originally posted by English:

Maybe it's time for the NFL to stop using the college game as its minor leagues.

I agree completely. Bring back NFL Europe or something simular.

Originally posted by Judge82Dredd:
I'm pretty concerned about the level(or the lack of there of) of the QBs at college level.
The choice of starting QBs in college is growing more and more related to athletic ability and not passing ability, grooming players without a minimum conditions to play in NFL.
Guys like Lamar Jackson or Jalen Hurts or even Watson seemed to be the regular choice over guys like Blake Barnett, Kyle Allen.

This hurts NFL pretty bad in my opinion

Systems like the Zone Read and the Spread are great at putting up numbers in that level of play, especially when you lack real talent but it limits what a QB can do from day 1 once they get into the pros.

QB's in particular are being developed in college to do only the most simple reads, the coaching staff is taking over a lot of the responsibility that QB's traditionally have to make checks at the line, you wind up with situations where the QB is going need a lot of extra work to catch up with running a standard NFL offense but with the current CBA, coaches have less time than ever to work with these guys and develop them.

Its not just the QB position, OL and WR are suffering too. You're getting linemen that simply aren't ready to go at the next level, that are quite limited in terms of what they are asked to do in their jitterbug offenses. Mark Schlereth has gone off on this in recent years in particular. You're getting receivers with extremely limited route trees, guys that struggle with press coverage that fundamentally are very weak.


Its not going to get any better anytime soon, what needs to change is people's expectations that these guys are going to be ready to come and tear it up from out of the box. QB's, WR's and OL coming from the more gimmicky type offenses will need extra time to develop, to sit and watch, have time to get up to speed with the NFL game which in many cases is vastly different from what they are used to in college.


What the NFL really needs is a developmental league, like the NBA has, where you can take those guys from the 5th, 6th and 7th rounds who are longshots at best, who may need complete overhauls and you throw them in let them play, you have coaches working with them frequently, helping them get up to speed on everything they need to be able to contribute at the next level.