Anthony Richardson
 

I am liking the idea of Richardson more and more. Only 13 games under his belt you would be betting in traits and intelligence, both of which this man seems to have. His physical abilities are off the chart. If the mental qualities are what people say they are I think he is worth the risk. I am certain that some will disagree big time, but all of these top QBs have question marks. He has the biggest ceiling and the lowest floor so the interview process will be huge (if he is someone Steichen believes he can work with I think there is a good chance Ballard takes him as Ballard does love him physical freaks). Myself, I would enjoy watching him develop. He looked like a man playing with boys at times at Florida, playing against a ton of players sure to be drafted.

I'm certainly no expert when it comes to selecting a good QB, so I won't pretend to be one. I do know there are some here who are experts, (at least in their own mind) but I'm here to tell you that nobody bats a thousand or even .500 when it comes to picking a QB. There have been many QBs selected in the first Round since Y2K. I'm pretty sure that most of them have not been worth the pick. These QBs were selected after they were reviewed, tested, measured and worked out by so called experts and still more sucked than blossomed in the NFL.

So, I'll just hope that the QB selected by the Colts proves worthy of the fanatical, faithful and devoted fans cheering him on. I am one of those fans.

He feels like a pick I would prefer later in the first round than 4.

I think a big reason why 1st round QB's don't pan out, is the huge expectations placed upon them to be a franchise saviour, especially the really high picks. Those pressures are things that often just can't be "scouted". Until someone is really put into a pressure cooker situation, you can't know how they will react. QB is the position above all others, probably in any sport in the world, that is so incredibly mentally challenging.

A 2nd round pick, has so much less pressure placed upon them from day one. Sure once they eventually enter the starters role, then they have the typical pressures of leading a franchise, but usually you have proven yourself worthy of being the starter by this time, rather than being thrust into the sink or swim position of a high draft pick.

Two years from now he is a legit first round pick. His skill set gives him an extremely high ceiling. Right now he is a project and late first to middle 2nd. round. Trading up to take him #1 will certainly get Ballard out of here on a bullet train. I have said all along none of these QB's this year are worth moving out of our #4 spot and giving up future picks. Contrary to the drum Dam keeps beating Stroud is not a legit 1st. overall pick. A look back at some of Dam's sure fire can't miss prospects will let you know he knows X's & O's better than talent evaluation. I'm no expert on any level, but I know what my eyes tell me.

sure he may bust


but he is by far the most intriguing prospect to me. i take that chance and don't look back.

You can't take the chance at #4. He's shown virtually nothing.

If you think he’s the best long term option available you can. It’s less risky than trading next years #1 to move up to the first pick this year. And you can’t gamble on a trade back and possibly missing out on one of the QBs. Stay at 4 and take whoever you think the best long term QB is.

I don’t want Richardson, athletic but he’s no Lamar Jackson. Completion percentage is terrible. Most of the highlights I seen of him the gators were getting blown out so basically padding stats at garbage time

The problem with Richardson is his floor is a bottomless pit, and he hasn't shown enough of the Cam Newton ceiling to really believe in it. That's why I like Stroud the best. IMO his floor is mid-tier starter with an Aaron Rodgers ceiling. That's someone I draft at 1 every time and never look back.

That said, I think Richardson could be the solution to the Ravens' Lamar Jackson problem if they're willing to be patient with him and franchise Lamar twice.

No way Richardson drops to the second round. Some have him ranked in the 2 or 3rd best QB in the draft.

I watched enough video of him throwing picks in a perfectly clean pocket and zero pressure. No thanks on AR.

If your guy is there you take him.
I'm on the AR15 train

sure i can


i have no problem taking that risk. with the caveat that the coaches think they can develop him.

And so, 1 article makes us think AR can be the man.

Nope, every article makes me think the can (not would) be the man. Every article talks about his incredible physical traits and a quality young man. He is a gamble but so are all the other QBs we could draft. If the interview process is positive I would like to bet on greatness rather than just being ok.

Is Cam Newton the ceiling? Or is that just a physical comparison?

Because what did Cam Newton have, three good years? Maybe four?

If after the interview process the Colts think he is the second Cam Newton then no thanks. It is why it is so damn difficult to get this correct. It is impossible to get into anyone's head. All you can do is make your best guess and it truly is a guess. So I am hoping that this franchise gets some good luck from the football gods.

My opinion is he is more talented than Cam Newton. Make no mistake about it, he is a project with just as high of risk to bust as make it beyond 2nd. or 3rd. string. Throwing him into a starting role right away will be an absolute disaster. They're just as many lowlight videos as highlight videos. Watching him throw picks in a perfect pocket, or underthrowing and overthrowing receivers in the same scenario is nauseating. Everything you read says he is an absolutely solid person and is really community grounded. We don't need a boy scout who can lift a train. We need a M'fer with some attitude who can deliver a ball on time and on target. I am thankful a lot of dudes on this board are not our GM. It would be the 80's all over again with fans wearing bags on their head.

Well, what else has anyone claimed he could be? A big, athletic, dual-threat QB with great arm strength, but lacking accuracy? Admittedly I haven't watched much of Richardson at all, but I don't think I've heard anything positive about him aside from his athleticism and measurables.

Cam Newton had a perfect 10.0 RAS, measured elite in basically every category, and is taller and bigger than Richardson. So any athletic comparison is going to be splitting hairs at best. And obviously Cam Newton had proof of concept by winning the Heisman and a National Championship.

And it seems to me to be a stretch to expect him to even be Cam Newton. So if we're going to gamble on a guy, I don't know if we want to do it with a guy who is (unlikely best case) in that mold. I think these other guys have a playstyle more conducive to long term success if they work out.

Physical comparisons don't mean much when you are talking QB position, by that I mean as far a how great or shitty a QB will be. This guy is so raw (only 13 starts) that there is no way to know what he will eventually be. That depends a lot on who he is as a person. How many people (including themselves) actually know they will react under pressure or how much they can improve? I have heard that he is a quick study who seems to understand what is going on on the football field. I am not sold on him but expect that our front office can figure it out.

The only measurement, IMO, that matters for an NFL QB exists in the 6 inches between his ears.

Drew Brees was too short.

Tom Brady was too unathletic.

Brett Farve was too inaccurate (best completion percentage in college was 55.8%!?!).

What made them superior franchise QBs was the 6 inches between their ears.

An NFL smart QB can make it work no matter what his roster or physical limitations.

I want the smartest QB of the group. Not the most physically gifted.

Can i get an AMEN!

amen!

This from a recent mock draft analysis….4.0 good enough for you?

Selection (No. 4 overall): Will Levis, QB, Kentucky
Expert: Jason McIntyre, FOX Sports
Date of mock draft: February 13 (link)
Analysis: "He will rise during the draft process, despite a poor final month of stats with the Wildcats (6 TDs, 5 INTs, zero games over 215 passing yards). Above the shoulders, he's a big winner: Levis had a 4.0 high school GPA, graduated college in three years with a finance degree and was slated to compete his Master's degree in business in December with another 4.0. At 6-foot-3, 230 pounds, he's the most sturdy of the elite QBs in this draft."

There are plenty of smart people who can’t process information fast enough to be an NFL QB. GPA tells us very, very little.

I bet you there are more stupid people that can’t process the information fast enough!:D

I wouldn't be upset, mostly because I think the Colts could get him at 4 and not spend any draft capital to move up.

I would still rather have there other three though. Though not by much when it comes to Levis.

It tells you that they can learn. Take in a lot of information and act on it.
There was a qb for the colts who finished college football career after one year of graduate school.

Unitas was no Phi Betta Kappa. Book smart he wasn't but the man knew how to run a football team. I agree that it is almost all about the head. I am 5'8'. I could have the greatest head in the world and I still couldn't see shit and would get the crap beaten out of me. Size, arm strength matter. Luckily those can be measured. It the heart/head that people make the big bucks evaluating. The head is the hardest to evaluate therefore is the most important. You need both however, otherwise Manning would still be our QB.

It may tell you they can learn the play book, it doesn’t tell you they can make the snap judgements necessary for a high level NFL QB. They have developed specialized tests to try more accurately predict that ability. Yes you need to be smart to be an NFL QB, but GPA means very, very little and it doesn’t measure where most QBs fail.

Can I add to the “smartest QB” comment by saying I also want a guy that’s not afraid of big moments and from everything I’ve read Bryce young has had the spotlight on him since he was young so he’s more comfortable under the brightest lights. I read at the Manning academy he threw in front of thousands of on lookers like it was no big deal

Collage degree indicates:

Ability to learn and have a expert understanding in a particular field. The ability to adopt, adapt, alter, synthesize, and improve a concept.

And every position on a football team needs men who have these traits. All the talent in the world wont keep a guy in the NFL is he’s an idiot. Peyton Manning wasnt the best athlete when he was taken number one. About 50% of everyone thought Ryan Leaf was a better talent.

Sounds like the best way to be a good team is to draft from the Ivy League every year.

And I’m not saying a QB doesn’t need to be smart - that’s obvious. I’m saying there are different aspects to intelligence and the ability to recognize and process information EXTREMELY quickly is different than the intelligence necessary to maintain a high GPA. And there are other aspects as well. The ability to focus on what is important and tune out what isn’t is big as well. Again that has little to nothing to do with GPA. Teams use other tests to measure those traits.

Here is an article from the Athletic touching on what I'm talking about:

Was Brock Purdy’s emergence predictable? S2 Cognition test has pointed to NFL success
Matt Barrows
Feb 24, 2023

If you watched Brock Purdy at last year’s NFL Scouting Combine, you would have seen a quarterback with below-average height, a merely adequate arm and foot speed that, while good, didn’t separate him from the pack.

The test he absolutely aced — and one that predicted his brilliant rookie season for the 49ers — was administered out of public view. Purdy landed in the mid 90s on something called the S2 Cognition test, a score you might consider Drew Brees-like.

Which is to say, it’s elite.

The S2 isn’t an intelligence test like the 50-question Wonderlic exam but rather measures how quickly and accurately athletes process information. It’s like the 40-yard dash for the brain.

”The game will never be too fast for Brock, I’ll say that,” said Brandon Ally, a neuroscientist and cofounder of Nashville-based S2 Cognition. “I don’t think he’ll ever have trouble adjusting.”

Ally and his partner, Scott Wylie, have tested more than 40,000 athletes, from big-league batsmen to pro golfers, and the company has contracts with 14 NFL teams. The group already has been testing players at college all-star games during the current draft cycle and will do more testing at next week’s combine in Indianapolis. By the time the draft begins in April, S2 will have scores for more than 800 prospects.

“The GMs have become so interested in the data that we start testing as soon as these kids declare,” Ally said.

The exam lasts 40 to 45 minutes. It’s performed on a specially designed gaming laptop and response pad that can record reactions in two milliseconds. To put that in perspective, an eye blink lasts 100 to 150 milliseconds.

In one section of the exam, a series of diamonds flash on the screen for 16 milliseconds each. Every diamond is missing a point, and the test taker must determine — using left, right, up or down keys — which part is missing.

In another, the test seeks to find out how many objects an athlete can keep track of at the same time. In another, there are 22 figures on the screen and the athlete must locate a specific one as quickly as possible. The object might be a red triangle embedded in other shapes that are also red.

“We’re talking about things they have to perceive on the screen within 16/1,000th of a second, which is essentially subliminal and which scientific literature says you shouldn’t be able to process,” Ally said. “And I’ll be honest with you, we’re seeing pro baseball players see something way faster than 16 milliseconds, which has never been reported in literature, all the way to some athletes who may take 150 milliseconds. So our eyes may see the same thing. But for some, it takes longer to process than others.”

Ally and Wylie met at Vanderbilt University in 2011. Wylie was studying Parkinson’s disease while Ally was researching Alzheimer’s disease. While Alzheimer’s is associated with memory loss, Ally noted his patients also had trouble with visual processing. Getting lost in a supermarket parking lot, for example, wasn’t always about forgetting where the car was parked.

“When we actually dug into this, a lot of patients were saying that a lot of the cars looked similar to them,” he said. “Or that things on the shelf all kind of looked similar — the tomatoes looked like the red peppers and those kinds of things.”

The battery of tests they had patients perform then are similar to the ones the athletes take now, only they’re modified to record the differences between brains that are merely healthy and ones that work on another level.

Ally says the results are predictive.

He couldn’t give out Purdy’s exact score because it’s privileged information but said it was in the “mid 90s.” That’s about where Brees, the former Saints quarterback famous for lightning-fast decision-making, scored and where two of the top passers in the league now, the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and the Bills’ Josh Allen, also landed. The Bengals’ Joe Burrow took the test while at LSU and agreed to allow S2 to disclose the information.

Of course he did — he scored in the 97th percentile.

“We consider anything above the 80th percentile to be elite,” Ally said.

For decades the NFL used the Wonderlic to measure intelligence. The questions start out easy — What’s the eighth month of the year?, for example — and get progressively more difficult. Most people can’t finish the 12-minute exam. While a high Wonderlic score suggests a quarterback knows how to study and will remember the playbook, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll hold up well against a zero blitz.

Brock Purdy’s test results revealed his ability to process information at a high speed. (Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images)
Brees is a good example. He got a 28 on the Wonderlic, which is very good, but not superior. His S2 score, meanwhile, was exceptional. Ally said the cognition test not only can forecast whether a quarterback will be successful in the NFL, it comes close to predicting the quarterback’s career passer rating.

The company recently looked at 27 starting quarterbacks. (Some of the older veterans like Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers had entered the league before S2 began testing in 2015 and there are no scores for them; Brees took the test while already playing in the NFL.) Of that group, 13 had a career passer rating above 90. The average S2 score of those players was the 91st percentile. Those with passer ratings below 90 had much lower test results.

“Those 14 guys, the average score was in the low 60s,” Ally said.

Top-tier quarterbacks have the highest average scores, followed closely by safeties. That makes sense considering safeties are known as the “quarterback of the defense” and must keep an eye on multiple moving opponents.

“The average human being can keep track of about three and a half objects at a time,” Alley said. “The average safety in the NFL, it’s closer to six.”

The positions with the third-highest scores: linebacker and cornerback.

The traditional thinking about cornerback was that it was all about physical skills — being fast and mimicking the movements of a wide receiver. As it turns out, the ability to make rapid decisions and to control impulses are paramount. One of the S2 tests looks at impulse control. Ally said low scores predict substandard play as well as holding and pass-interference penalties.

“If you’re impulsive, you fall prey to that double move,” Ally said. “You make a step in the wrong direction. And second, they just can’t control that impulse to grab a jersey when (the receiver) gets by them. You saw that call in the Super Bowl? We could argue all day long whether that was (a penalty) or not. But you saw him start to get burned and he just couldn’t control that impulse to grab the jersey. That’s very typical of someone with low impulse control.”

The highest S2 score in last year’s draft class, in fact, was turned in by a cornerback, Trent McDuffie, who started 15 games for the Chiefs, including the Super Bowl.

Purdy’s score wasn’t too far behind. According to Ally, the 49ers quarterback did particularly well in three areas. One of them was spatial awareness, which translates in several aspects of the game, including how well a quarterback can assess a defense before the snap.

Another area in which Purdy excelled was distraction control.

“Those are the guys — and Drew Brees was one of those — who, the pocket, the world could be collapsing around them and they can just maintain that steely focus on what they’re supposed to be doing,” Ally said.

Finally, Purdy was especially impressive when it came to depth perception speed.

“He was in some pretty elite company,” Ally said. “I mean, he was in the high 90s on that.”

The 49ers saw that trait in action when Purdy entered for injured Jimmy Garoppolo in a Week 13 game against the Dolphins. San Francisco had entered the contest with a four-game winning streak and the immediate thought was that the offense would sputter under Purdy. And understandably so. Garoppolo was a former second-round pick and a nine-year veteran. Purdy was 22 at the time and the last player chosen in the draft. What’s more, the Dolphins had been calling more all-out blitzes than the 49ers expected and were doing a good job of taking away hot reads. That’s how Garoppolo got hurt in the first quarter.

The offense, however, didn’t miss a beat with Purdy. Instead, the No. 1 takeaway following the 33-17 win was how deftly the rookie handled Miami’s zero blitzes and how quickly and aggressively he made decisions.

“I like when a play is there that guys aren’t scared to make it, they don’t hesitate, they don’t take a second look at it,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said at the time. “They let it rip and they worry about it after. A lot of guys who just guess do that too, so you have to find out whether they’re being aggressive — if they’re deciding then to do it — or if they’re deciding on Wednesday. But Brock has been very good with it. He can explain what he sees and that’s why we’ve got a lot of confidence in him.”

As for the 49ers’ other young quarterback, Trey Lance?

Ally couldn’t reveal the exact number but said Lance “scored well.”

“He’s not in the Brock Purdy range but he didn’t score poorly,” he said.

The question every general manager will be asking between now and the April draft is which quarterback is the next Brock Purdy, the passer everyone overlooks because he’s not physically imposing but whose brain can help salvage a season? Ally said he couldn’t divulge scores, but he did say the 2023 quarterback results were dramatically better than last year when only Purdy and one other quarterback scored above the 90th percentile.

“We’ve been doing the NFL draft for seven years,” Ally said. “From an S2 Cognitive perspective, last year was the worst year we’ve ever had score-wise. And this year is by far and away the best we’ve ever had, score-wise, at the quarterback position.”

He hinted that the quarterback whom many believe will be the first player drafted had an impressive score.

“I do have a feeling that a quarterback from Alabama that we have tested every year since he was in 10th grade may end up sharing his results publicly because he actually owns those results and the NFL does not,” Ally said.

Matt Barrows
Matt Barrows is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the 49ers. He joined The Athletic in 2018 and has covered the 49ers since 2003. He was a reporter with The Sacramento Bee for 19 years, four of them as a Metro reporter. Before that he spent two years in South Carolina with The Hilton Head Island Packet. Follow Matt on Twitter @MattBarrows

When are these tests conducted? It will be very interesting to see how well Will Levis does….I bet he does very well!

You should have gone to college instead of collage

o


Actually, I like collages.




https://www.fulcrumgallery.com/produ...llage-2009.jpg

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o


And while on the subject of college degrees, you always want to make sure that the degree was legitimate. Dexter Manley was granted a bachelor's degree from Oklahoma State University when he was playing there, and he couldn't read. No joke ...... it was the quintessential example of a star athlete getting pushed through the education system with passing grades in order for him to keep on playing for the team.

Manley eventually learned how to read while he was playing for the Redskins.



Manley Finally Gets a Read on the Education That He Missed

(By Steve Jacobson)

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs...145-story.html

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Lol

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