I think dropped passes, and the balls intentionally thrown in the dirt are causing people to see something that is not there. An honest evaluation of each snap will provide evidence of a green QB who has all the tools to be a franchise QB if given the time to ripen so to speak.
If the WR's had not dropped 9 passes, Mallett's completion percentage would have been 77% vs the Falcons. You can't blame any of the turnovers on him, including the early INT.
Okay, so let's go ahead and give Mallett credit for a completed pass for all those drops. ALL of them. Every single one. If it was a great throw and it was dropped, give him that. If it was a terrible pass that resulted in a drop, give him that too. Don't have a single drop in a game.
Hopefully you now you see how that
might skew things.
You can go back and play with the completion percentage numbers that way, but honestly you could do that with any quarterback. Yes, the Texans lead the league in dropped passes. But they also lead the league in pass attempts. The more you pass, the more drops to likely occur.
Their drop percentage rate is 4th most in the league. They drop the ball
a lot. I'll totally give you that. But the Cardinals, Falcons, and Patriots are also in the top 10 when it comes to drop percentage. Nobody needs to play these kind of games with their quarterbacks because there's no need to. They know. It's evident. But if you want to give Mallett credit for those drops, then do it for those guys too. All you'll be doing is changing the numbers but the gap between Mallett and everyone else is still the same.
Oh, and the Rams, Giants, and Jaguars have a higher drop percentage than the Texans. Yet miraculously Foles, Eli, and Bortes still surpass Mallett in QBR, completion percentage, and (most importantly for me) DVOA. Basically any metric you want to use, Mallett is worse than any of those guys despite having less drops.
I guess it depends on where you draw the line. For me I count games above 90 as good games. Games below 80 as bad games. Rodgers had 4 bad games that season. May not have been at the beginning of the season, may not have been as bad as Mallett's. That's not the point. A lot of the specifics about why Mallett's numbers were so bad & Rodgers so good may have had nothing to do with them at all.
Rodgers stepped into McCarthy's system that the rest of the team already had 2 years experience in. He was the starting QB before OTAs even started. McCarthy is probably a better offensive mind than Bill O'Brien.
First off, you brought this point up to me earlier in another thread and I wanted to touch up on it. Apologizes for not doing so as it's certainly a good talking point.
You argued similarly compared to Mariota in that Mariota was named the starter early on which streamlined his growth a bit. Here you mentioned Rodgers' situation. Yes, Rodgers was named the starting QB before OTAs and yes the system was in place.
But it's not like Mallett is some street free agent we signed after other teams made their last roster cuts. O'Brien
traded for Mallett nearly a year ago, and there were rumblings that he was trying to get him even before that. It was the worst kept secret in Texans history that O'Brien wanted Mallett. Why? Because he saw Mallett as the perfect QB for HIS system, a system that was already in place by the time he arrived.
You could say he was never named the starter prior to week 2 of this season. Okay. But wasn't he involved in a heavy camp battle to become said starter? You'd assume he was preparing just as hard as any originally named starting quarterback would. Heck you could say he was probably preparing even harder because he was fighting to gain that job in the first place. And despite wanting him from the moment he arrived in Houston, despite trading for him and putting him in perhaps the most winnable camp battle of all time, O'Brien still named Hoyer the starter.
Simply put, the vast majority of quarterbacks in this league don't get anywhere near the kind of preparation time Mallett had. He's just not a capable NFL quarterback.
I think we can both safely say McCarthy probably is a better offensive mind than BoB.