BakoSaint

Derek Carr outplayed Tommy Devito today, but on the season DeVito had a better QB rating. Unheralded 7th round pick Brock Purdy is contending for MVP. Tons of random backups like O'Connell, Browning, etc are playing fairly well.

I wonder if something could be systematically changing about the talent to explain this. A rookie QB coming into the league today is probably about 23 years old. That means he was born in about 2000. One thing comes to mind that might be different for this QB. Youtube was founded in 2005. In 2006 it was bought by Google and really took off. In 2007 the first iPhone was released. What all this means is that access to instructional content really took off when today's rookies were 5-7 years old starting in pop warner and organized sports. It took off not just for them but for their parents, their siblings, their coaches. What required mailing a check for $39.95 to Delaware in before was suddenly available on everyone's phones. QB could be the most complicated position in sports, and the generation of young QBs coming into the league today grew up with an infinite supply of material at their fingertips. Peyton and Eli Manning had access to all this decades earlier because their dad was an NFL QB, but now in some sense every amateur coach and every amateur player have access if they know how to pick out the good advice from the bad. At the same time as more information has become available, protections for QBs have increased, so the game has become more mental and less a test of the ability to take big hits.

In light of this, I think the Saints may have picked the worst time to buy high on an aging mediocre ok QB when they do not have the team around him to win without him being great in big games. At the same time, I think Carolina for example may have picked the wrong time to pay an extreme premium of future draft picks for an undersized QB who has acquired all the right skills and had the opportunity to be in the right place to showcase them in college, because we may be in an era where there are more QBs with the right skills than colleges that are the right place to showcase them, leaving more gems in the later rounds of the draft.

Carr is alright, but I don't think he will ever win the big game, or get younger. But I don't think we need to break the bank to get the #1 prospect in the draft. I think the freedom of information that this new generation has had could close the gap between the top QBs who had the family resources or standout physical tools to get access to all the instruction early, versus the lesser prospects that formerly did not. I think there will be more surprises in the draft, because sometimes that elite 6-5 prospect who gets all the instruction and goes to the top school is not as good as the ok 6-3 prospect who now has access to a lot more instruction and a lot more informed coaches in this new information age, and turns out to be able to absorb it all a little better than that 6-5 prospect, even after attending a small school and not flashing as much without elite talent around him. I think as we move on past Carr in the long run, we can stand pat in the draft or at least avoid a future mortgaging trade up, and eventually find the right talent and succeed if we are smart. What we will need is the oline to protect them, and the coaches who are not still running pre-youtube pre-iphone pre-historic offenses.