QB Corner: Jake Locker (Week 9 TEN @ STL)

2014 is confusing. I feel like I know less about football after the last two weeks than I did in preseason. Are Atlanta good or bad? Same for New Orleans. What is going on in Ohio? Can we chalk the Pats and Seahawks losses to wrong opponent, wrong time, wrong place? And what happened to Colin Kaepernick and Nick Foles? I know this happens every year, but the number of Jeklyl and Hyde teams/players seems above average. I feel like everyone is on track to go 8-8.

To get away from 2014, I wanted to finish my QB Corner series from 2013. It takes me on average 2 weeks to cut, edit, and write about a QB's games, which is why I don't have anything from 2014 yet. The lucky subject this time is the Tennessee Titan's Jake Locker. I originally planned to look at films of all young QBs, including Mike Glennon, EJ Manuel, and other rookies, but decided not to since rookies are generally very raw in their first year and their performances may not be representative of the QBs they'll become. It's also hard to compare those guys to the more advanced QBs and frankly, it was a lot more work and I needed the hard drive space.

Locker, though, has been in the league a few years now and by the end of last year had started 18 games and had dropped back 610 times. I think that's a decent sample size and also a period over which he should have grown into an adequate NFL starter. Let's run the numbers and see how he stacks:

Stats from Pro-Football Reference.com

2014 NFL Preview and Picks

Isn't football season the best? College football on Friday and Saturday (currently USC @ Stanford) mixed with a little US Open (KEI NISHIKORI!), the a full Sunday slate of games. It's one of the reasons why having the Basketball World Cup this time of year was a horrible idea. I loved watching the 2010 World Championship in the dead of the summer, but with so much going on, it's hard to flip to watch our men's team annihilate Mexico.

As is our tradition, my colleague @BPix03 and I started the season by picking overs and unders on team win totals. This is how it went (I'm not especially proud of myself):

QB Corner: Ryan Tannehill (Week 12 SD @ MIA)

Are you ready for some football!? After a summer filled with basketball free agency, it's nice to be writing about something else. Tomorrow, I'll post my NFL over/under picks. Today, I wanted to continue in my QB Corner film study series. I've looked at film of some exciting young QBs in QB Corner. This time, my subject is Ryan Tannehill, starter for the 8-8 Miami Dolphins. I think he's an especially interesting case because of his conversion from receiver to QB in college. In my mind, that should put him behind many other QBs in footwork, pocket presence, and other throwing mechanics. I still expect him to have a good understanding of offensive and defensive concepts since A) receivers often know more about coverages than QBs and B) many QBs don't learn an advanced progression-based offense in college anyway. Basically, I expect him to know where to put the ball but have occasional accuracy issues and have a tendency to want to escape the pocket.

I always start with the numbers, and they aren't pretty. Miami as a team were 22nd in both total and weighted DVOA last year (per FootballOutsiders.com, with weighted DVOA placing emphasis on the last few games). The team were the definition of mediocre and didn't improve much through the year, eking out 8 wins by virtue of a weak schedule playing in the AFC East. I expect with Cameron Wake their defense would be the strong suit of the team, and that proved true with total/weighted defensive DVOA rankings of 14th/18th, respectively. But the offense ranked only 22nd/17th. Breaking the offense down reveals the passing game produced a 4.0% DVOA (20th) while the run game posted -4.3%/18th. Tannehill specifically was -9.8% on the year, or 26th among all QBs, sitting behind the likes of Sam Bradford, Alex Smith, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Mike Glennon (!), Matt Cassel (!!), Jake Locker, and Kellen Clemens (!!!). Basically, this puts Tannehill in career-backup territory. If you think Football Outsiders are wrong, ESPN has him 26th in total QBR.

Comparing his individual numbers to the other QBs I've analyzed looks like this: