When it comes to the care and feeding of rookie quarterbacks, NFL coaches are clueless. They can beat the Tampa 2, they can create endless stunts and blitzes, they can detail the intricacies of the spread offense, but they can’t figure out how to handle a rookie QB. NFL teams spend millions of dollars on wildly successful college QBs and then they turn them over to their coaches and cross their fingers.
Total Agree on the Jets. You mess up with that many rookie QBs, it’s likely not poor drafting that’s to blame, you definitely look at the coaching situation. Take the guy who is starting for my Vikings as an example: Sam Darnold. He failed with the Jets and Panthers, had some good signs of improvement under Shanahan with San Fran but was still backup to Purdy because Purdy is just good, and now (granted only 2-game sample size so far) may be having his comeback moment ala Mayfield last year with Minnesota under KOC, a former quarterbacks coach, who also was able to get a few solid games out of Josh Dobbs with little to no prep time and was himself planning on not throwing JJ McCarthy to the wolves right away. A coach who knows how to handle the QB position can make a world of difference to new QBs coming into the league and supposed “bust” QBs who weren’t handled well early but may still have potential.