Mac Jones playoff collapse doesn’t bode well for Buccaneers Kyle Trask
By Rob Leeds
Where does Buccaneers QB Kyle Trask rate with accuracy?
“But they were both incredibly smart, accurate quarterbacks in college!”
This is probably the most common defense of Trask and Jones, and it is easily the most dangerous. Every NFL quarterback is football smart. You can disagree with off-field decisions, but most of these guys have been playing the game for a decade by this point in their lives, and they are all incredibly smart on the field.
This statement also creates the ability to back up harmful quarterback stereotypes when using “smart” as an adjective to describe one type of quarterback and “athletic” to characterize another.
With smart being a weak support of either quarterback, the accurate statement also doesn’t hold weight. Justin Fields was more accurate than Jones and Trask in college, yet his biggest detractors would believe that his stats in college resembled his NFL stats on a team with an inept head coach.
This is just one example of reasoning why Jones and Trask weren’t the first quarterbacks off the board in their classes. The first four quarterbacks in the class (Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, and Justin Fields) showed modern NFL talent, game knowledge, and accuracy, which is why teams took chances on them first.
Teams value traits far more than they value stats, and teams that break the mold are quickly finding out that they are inching closer to needing a new quarterback sooner than later.