How Likely is Josh Rosen to Turn Into a Good QB?

After having watched the parade of pretenders, poseurs, and imposters who have graced the starting lineup over the past score years, I am waiting to see if there is the slightest hint of a possibility that Rosen could become a starter worth tuning in to watch. In spite of the history, I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to watch the next Dolphins game I can get on my television. I may or may not be pleased, but I am encouraged by the new leadership and maybe lightening will strike twice in Dolphindom!

Hearken back to this day......

id=2307416009542723;type=video

That article is pure trash- comparing Rosen to other quarterbacks does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to predict how he'll play a year from now (or even this season). The only fact of that article is that he had the worst line in football by a wide margin, which simply means he had it harder than average to develop as a rookie. He could be just as bad behind an average line...or he could be spectacular. We just don't know until he takes some snaps and proves his worth.

"KeyFin wrote:

That article is pure trash- comparing Rosen to other quarterbacks does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to predict how he'll play a year from now (or even this season). The only fact of that article is that he had the worst line in football by a wide margin, which simply means he had it harder than average to develop as a rookie. He could be just as bad behind an average line...or he could be spectacular. We just don't know until he takes some snaps and proves his worth.

Hypothetically speaking, if someone held a gun to your head and told you you had to bet everything you own on what kind of quarterback Rosen would be, would you not use the information in the article to make your best bet?

If not, what information would you use?

"The Guy wrote:

Hypothetically speaking, if someone held a gun to your head and told you you had to bet everything you own on what kind of quarterback Rosen would be, would you not use the information in the article to make your best bet?

If not, what information would you use?

No...I wouldnt use that information at all.

I'd use my own eyes to evaluate each play, I'd evaluate the pieces around him and how they played into his strengths and weaknesses. I'd look at his throwing motion, his ability to read a defense when given time, his ability to evade pressure and so forth.

If I had to guess based on nothing, I'd refuse to do so and be shot because it would be a blind guess in the dark using someone elses research and I refuse to stand behind something I'm not confident in.

I want to see his answer now though.

"The Guy wrote:

Hypothetically speaking, if someone held a gun to your head and told you you had to bet everything you own on what kind of quarterback Rosen would be, would you not use the information in the article to make your best bet?

If not, what information would you use?

I'd just bet that Rosen will become the type of QB that throws footballs to receivers (technically a valid answer). In general I think you have to play some mental games with the guy holding the gun until you either wiggle out of the situation or you're allowed to make a response choice with a high probability of being correct (or low probability correct but low risk.. either way you got to talk your way out of the situation.. absolutely NO reason to accept the situation as is).

Oh, and you won't need the information in the article to do what I'm suggesting.

"AGuyNamedAlex wrote:

No...I wouldnt use that information at all.

I'd use my own eyes to evaluate each play, I'd evaluate the pieces around him and how they played into his strengths and weaknesses. I'd look at his throwing motion, his ability to read a defense when given time, his ability to evade pressure and so forth.

If I had to guess based on nothing, I'd refuse to do so and be shot because it would be a blind guess in the dark using someone elses research and I refuse to stand behind something I'm not confident in.

I want to see his answer now though.

I didn’t say use the information in the article exclusively; I said simply use the information in the article at all. Certainly the kind of information you’re talking about can be used in conjunction with the information in the article.

In other words, if the matter involved potentially losing everything you own, I doubt the information in the article would be disregarded completely.

"The Guy wrote:

Hypothetically speaking, if someone held a gun to your head and told you you had to bet everything you own on what kind of quarterback Rosen would be, would you not use the information in the article to make your best bet?

If not, what information would you use?

I'd watch film and make my own opinion...which wasn't present in that article at all.

In college, Rosen looked like a potential #1 overall QB. That's what I'd base my "guess" on since Arizona was in full tank mode last season. I mean, you're going to fault a rookie who's under 3 different coordinators his first year? With that line? There's really nothing to evaluate there since it was a pure hot mess. So college tape is really the only true objective material we have....but he had a GREAT LINE in college. So that's not fully objective either on the pro level.

If I HAD TO guess, I'd say he won't develop since the odds are against any QB developing into something special. But if you're just asking for my opinion, then I'd say the kid has talent and could turn into a stud with the right coaching. Do we have that in Miami? Now you're making me guess again....I have no idea. How good will our line be? I have no idea about that either, and those are two of the main criteria for him being a stud.

Talent alone is not enough...but he does throw a BEAUTIFUL pass, strong arm, pretty good pocket presence, etc. But is that enough to translate to being an elite QB? Again, I have absolutely no idea. Which is why that original article was such BS in the first place- nobody has a clue what Rosen can become in a few years. He has talent but there are too many factors to make a blind guess.

Over the modern era of NFL passing, the majority of the destined-to-be-successful quarterbacks who were forced to play as rookies had managed to show something in their rookie years that was far, inarguably so, better than what Josh Rosen put together as a rookie with Arizona in 2018.

• Peyton Manning set rookie records for completions, yards, and touchdowns, was 5th in the NFL in touchdowns, and it only took four games of acclimation before he was out-performing guys like Dan Marino in efficiency for the final 12 games of the year.

• Ben Roethlisberger was 13-0 and had a top 5 passer rating as a rookie.

• Matt Ryan was 11th in passer rating, led a massive turnaround from 4-12 the previous year to 11-5, and had a top 5 QBR.

• Joe Flacco was also a winning quarterback, and was top-half of the NFL in both passer rating in QBR.

• Cam Newton was an outright dynamo in 2011, top-half of the league in passer (both passer rating and QBR) but also adding in 700 yards and 14 more TDs on the ground, total of 35 TDs that year.

• Andrew Luck was already top 10 in QBR even as a rookie, led his team to an 11-5 record, had 28 total TDs that year.

• Russell Wilson was #3 in QBR and #4 in passer rating, already as a rookie in 2012, to go along with his 11 wins.

• Dak Prescott was #3 in QBR and #3 in passer rating, 13-3 as a starter, and tacked on 300 yards of rushing and 6 more rushing TDs (for a total of 29 TDs) as a rookie.

• DeShaun Watson was #3 in passer rating and had the #1 QBR in the whole NFL as a rookie in 2017. He only started 6 games but scored 21 total TDs.

• And of course Baker Mayfield ended up doing reasonably well on full season QBR and passer rating, scored 27 TDs, but more importantly he, like Peyton Manning all those years ago, had a pretty discrete increase in effectiveness as the year wore on. For the final 8 games of 2018, he was PFF's 5th highest graded QB with the 5th highest adjusted passer rating.

And yeah, sure, you do have some cases like that of Donovan McNabb, Eli Manning, Alex Smith, Matt Stafford, Carson Wentz, and Jared Goff, where they had poor rookie seasons, but then (at some point) turned things around and had or are having solid careers. But that is clearly the minority.

And most of those guys...aren't really anything to write home about, let's be honest. The higher up the chain you go in terms of qualifying who is actually a really good quarterback and who is not, the more likely it is that guy was successful as a rookie, if he was actually forced to play.

Most often when people state that rookie QBs should be expected to suck, the evidence they cite is from three decades ago, or even longer, when the NFL passing game was virtually unrecognizable compared to today's game.

It's Troy Aikman this, Steve Young that, or Terry Bradshaw.

But the reason they reach this far back is simple: they HAVE TO!

In order to find a quarterback that ended up a truly outstanding player after struggling as a rookie, you really have to go back that far. Nobody's really buying that Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb are elite.

And let's also be honest, many of the above examples, arguably all of them in fact, still had better rookie years than Josh Rosen had.

The best you can say is that they didn't necessarily do something outstanding as rookies...and maybe that means conceptually that Josh Rosen belongs among them, not below them.

I'm really not picky. If you read through the things I cite above for what the QBs did as rookies, I accept many different forms of showing me your potential as a rookie. I try and keep things at the conceptual level with this stuff and avoid getting overly scientific about it for a reason.

If you're a rookie just feeling your way out in the league, just show me something. If you're a dual threat, show me that, and score points. Show me yards per attempt efficiency (which dominates passer rating). Show me situational efficiency (which feeds into QBR). Show me you're a winner. Show me how much you improved as the year went on. Show me that your strengths coming out, were your strengths as a rookie. Show me...SOMETHING.

The problem is, Josh Rosen had one of the worst quarterback seasons in recent memory. Some say, one of the worst quarterback seasons EVER.

His ESPN QBR ranked very close to the bottom of the ~300 total QB seasons they've recorded since 2006.
His passer rating was bad, of course. As was his yards per attempt and net yards per attempt.
His Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt relative to League Year Average was the 2nd worst...since 1932.
His efficiency was even worse while actually ahead or tied, which is an unusual (and not promising) occurrence. His passing production and efficiency actually benefited from being behind so much that teams played looser defense against him, allowing him to pad his stats a little bit.
He did not improve as the season wore on. There was no "First 6/Last 6" type of split that shows marked improvement.
His supposed strengths were NFL weakness-level bad. Analysts thought Rosen would win from a clean pocket. But he had the 2nd-worst passer rating in the NFL from clean pockets.
They also thought he'd be a good play-action passer. But his play-action completion percentage was the worst in the NFL, 5 whole points worse than the 2nd-worst guy (Jeff Driskel).

What does all this mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean the book is closed on Josh Rosen's career, any more than it was closed on Donovan McNabb's when he struggled in 1999, or Jared Goff's when he struggled in 2016.

What it means, though, is that a player who had a previous ~40% chance of success (historical percentage based on his grade and where he was taken) has now had his chances of success diminished...a lot.

That's part of the Bayesian updating you have to constantly be doing if you want to be successful in these sorts of scenario predictions. You update the old information with the new information, not excluding any of it. It's no more appropriate to pretend that 2018 didn't happen than it is to pretend that 2018 is all that matters.

The implied success rate based on historical and contemporary evidence is very much in-line with what NFL teams would draft in the 3rd or 4th rounds. That is why teams generally weren't interested in Josh Rosen at a higher price-point than that. They process this all intuitively, because they've been around it for so long.

This is all stuff you could do without watching any of Josh Rosen play football.

But I have watched Josh Rosen play football, a lot. I watched him come onto the scene at UCLA and do pretty well, for a freshman. I watched him follow that up with what was really a poor year, marked by injuries, losses, and inefficiency. And then I watched him stack another mediocre year up for the pile. I gave him a 1st round grade, despite these things, because there were some attractive core traits.

But now I've seen him fail for yet another year. He's now four years since when he peaked as a football player, which was High School.

I've watched his 3rd down (short to medium) conversion rate go from 47% in 2015, to 42% in 2016, to 38% in 2017, and now 32% in 2018...four consecutive years of degrading situational effectiveness.

The Dolphins have set this trade up as a boom-bust endeavor.

Either Rosen is the guy Chad O'Shea thought when the Patriots reviewed him last year and had him as their best QB in the draft, which means he blows them away in training camp and preseason, earns the starting job, runs the offense like a top, they score a ton of points and win a ton of games...

...or they take a HIGH caliber guy in 2020.

And once that happens, the clock is ticking on Rosen. Maybe he starts ahead of that high caliber guy in 2020...but only for a bit. Rosen's Miami career will effectively be dead, but he could still go on as the starter for a few games.

To the extent that I've criticized the trade, it's been because I think there's a small to not meaningful chance that Rosen goes from the player he was in Arizona in 2018 to the sort of player he would need to be in 2019 (with a team that honestly isn't much better than Arizona) in order to induce Miami to build around him instead of making a major move toward another quarterback.

They've not really given themselves a realistic winning path with this trade. Thus it strikes me as frivolous, and that's a pretty costly impulse buy.

But it's not that big a deal. If the player they'd have taken at 62 overall busts out (which is a better bet than not, at that stage of the draft) then it'll be moot. That's literally how this works.

"ckparrothead wrote:

Over the modern era of NFL passing, the majority of the destined-to-be-successful quarterbacks who were forced to play as rookies had managed to show something in their rookie years that was far, inarguably so, better than what Josh Rosen put together as a rookie with Arizona in 2018.

• Peyton Manning set rookie records for completions, yards, and touchdowns, was 5th in the NFL in touchdowns, and it only took four games of acclimation before he was out-performing guys like Dan Marino in efficiency for the final 12 games of the year.

• Ben Roethlisberger was 13-0 and had a top 5 passer rating as a rookie.

• Matt Ryan was 11th in passer rating, led a massive turnaround from 4-12 the previous year to 11-5, and had a top 5 QBR.

• Joe Flacco was also a winning quarterback, and was top-half of the NFL in both passer rating in QBR.

• Cam Newton was an outright dynamo in 2011, top-half of the league in passer (both passer rating and QBR) but also adding in 700 yards and 14 more TDs on the ground, total of 35 TDs that year.

• Andrew Luck was already top 10 in QBR even as a rookie, led his team to an 11-5 record, had 28 total TDs that year.

• Russell Wilson was #3 in QBR and #4 in passer rating, already as a rookie in 2012, to go along with his 11 wins.

• Dak Prescott was #3 in QBR and #3 in passer rating, 13-3 as a starter, and tacked on 300 yards of rushing and 6 more rushing TDs (for a total of 29 TDs) as a rookie.

• DeShaun Watson was #3 in passer rating and had the #1 QBR in the whole NFL as a rookie in 2017. He only started 6 games but scored 21 total TDs.

• And of course Baker Mayfield ended up doing reasonably well on full season QBR and passer rating, scored 27 TDs, but more importantly he, like Peyton Manning all those years ago, had a pretty discrete increase in effectiveness as the year wore on. For the final 8 games of 2018, he was PFF's 5th highest graded QB with the 5th highest adjusted passer rating.

And yeah, sure, you do have some cases like that of Donovan McNabb, Eli Manning, Alex Smith, Matt Stafford, Carson Wentz, and Jared Goff, where they had poor rookie seasons, but then (at some point) turned things around and had or are having solid careers. But that is clearly the minority.

And most of those guys...aren't really anything to write home about, let's be honest. The higher up the chain you go in terms of qualifying who is actually a really good quarterback and who is not, the more likely it is that guy was successful as a rookie, if he was actually forced to play.

Most often when people state that rookie QBs should be expected to suck, the evidence they cite is from three decades ago, or even longer, when the NFL passing game was virtually unrecognizable compared to today's game.

It's Troy Aikman this, Steve Young that, or Terry Bradshaw.

But the reason they reach this far back is simple: they HAVE TO!

In order to find a quarterback that ended up a truly outstanding player after struggling as a rookie, you really have to go back that far. Nobody's really buying that Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb are elite.

And let's also be honest, many of the above examples, arguably all of them in fact, still had better rookie years than Josh Rosen had.

The best you can say is that they didn't necessarily do something outstanding as rookies...and maybe that means conceptually that Josh Rosen belongs among them, not below them.

I'm really not picky. If you read through the things I cite above for what the QBs did as rookies, I accept many different forms of showing me your potential as a rookie. I try and keep things at the conceptual level with this stuff and avoid getting overly scientific about it for a reason.

If you're a rookie just feeling your way out in the league, just show me something. If you're a dual threat, show me that, and score points. Show me yards per attempt efficiency (which dominates passer rating). Show me situational efficiency (which feeds into QBR). Show me you're a winner. Show me how much you improved as the year went on. Show me that your strengths coming out, were your strengths as a rookie. Show me...SOMETHING.

The problem is, Josh Rosen had one of the worst quarterback seasons in recent memory. Some say, one of the worst quarterback seasons EVER.

His ESPN QBR ranked very close to the bottom of the ~300 total QB seasons they've recorded since 2006.
His passer rating was bad, of course. As was his yards per attempt and net yards per attempt.
His Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt relative to League Year Average was the 2nd worst...since 1932.
His efficiency was even worse while actually ahead or tied, which is an unusual (and not promising) occurrence. His passing production and efficiency actually benefited from being behind so much that teams played looser defense against him, allowing him to pad his stats a little bit.
He did not improve as the season wore on. There was no "First 6/Last 6" type of split that shows marked improvement.
His supposed strengths were NFL weakness-level bad. Analysts thought Rosen would win from a clean pocket. But he had the 2nd-worst passer rating in the NFL from clean pockets.
They also thought he'd be a good play-action passer. But his play-action completion percentage was the worst in the NFL, 5 whole points worse than the 2nd-worst guy (Jeff Driskel).

What does all this mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean the book is closed on Josh Rosen's career, any more than it was closed on Donovan McNabb's when he struggled in 1999, or Jared Goff's when he struggled in 2016.

What it means, though, is that a player who had a previous ~40% chance of success (historical percentage based on his grade and where he was taken) has now had his chances of success diminished...a lot.

That's part of the Bayesian updating you have to constantly be doing if you want to be successful in these sorts of scenario predictions. You update the old information with the new information, not excluding any of it. It's no more appropriate to pretend that 2018 didn't happen than it is to pretend that 2018 is all that matters.

The implied success rate based on historical and contemporary evidence is very much in-line with what NFL teams would draft in the 3rd or 4th rounds. That is why teams generally weren't interested in Josh Rosen at a higher price-point than that. They process this all intuitively, because they've been around it for so long.

This is all stuff you could do without watching any of Josh Rosen play football.

But I have watched Josh Rosen play football, a lot. I watched him come onto the scene at UCLA and do pretty well, for a freshman. I watched him follow that up with what was really a poor year, marked by injuries, losses, and inefficiency. And then I watched him stack another mediocre year up for the pile. I gave him a 1st round grade, despite these things, because there were some attractive core traits.

But now I've seen him fail for yet another year. He's now four years since when he peaked as a football player, which was High School.

I've watched his 3rd down (short to medium) conversion rate go from 47% in 2015, to 42% in 2016, to 38% in 2017, and now 32% in 2018...four consecutive years of degrading situational effectiveness.

The Dolphins have set this trade up as a boom-bust endeavor.

Either Rosen is the guy Chad O'Shea thought when the Patriots reviewed him last year and had him as their best QB in the draft, which means he blows them away in training camp and preseason, earns the starting job, runs the offense like a top, they score a ton of points and win a ton of games...

...or they take a HIGH caliber guy in 2020.

And once that happens, the clock is ticking on Rosen. Maybe he starts ahead of that high caliber guy in 2020...but only for a bit. Rosen's Miami career will effectively be dead, but he could still go on as the starter for a few games.

To the extent that I've criticized the trade, it's been because I think there's a small to not meaningful chance that Rosen goes from the player he was in Arizona in 2018 to the sort of player he would need to be in 2019 (with a team that honestly isn't much better than Arizona) in order to induce Miami to build around him instead of making a major move toward another quarterback.

They've not really given themselves a realistic winning path with this trade. Thus it strikes me as frivolous, and that's a pretty costly impulse buy.

But it's not that big a deal. If the player they'd have taken at 62 overall busts out (which is a better bet than not, at that stage of the draft) then it'll be moot. That's literally how this works.

Lots of good points in there. The Barnwell article linked above outlines the tremendous upside potentially involved, mainly centering on Rosen's meager cap hit. And I'm with you that the 2nd-rounder traded is far more likely than not to be worthless.

The danger as I see it is that Rosen plays in a Tannehill-esque manner, where he flashes some good qualities, and his overall inadequate play can be attributed to other factors that the team believes it can fix as the new team management hones itself and the roster. Then Rosen potentially teases the team along, playing at an average level and giving the team little chance to win a Super Bowl.

To address that issue, the team needs to give itself a deadline -- precisely the remaining length of Rosen's current contract -- to fix those factors to the degree that Rosen begins to play significantly above average. If that doesn't happen by then, he doesn't get another contract with the team. We can't do Tannehill 2.0 and get ourselves stuck in no better than the average range as a team. Don't spend another seven years trying to fix a quarterback.

"ckparrothead wrote:

Over the modern era of NFL passing, the majority of the destined-to-be-successful quarterbacks who were forced to play as rookies had managed to show something in their rookie years that was far, inarguably so, better than what Josh Rosen put together as a rookie with Arizona in 2018.

• Peyton Manning set rookie records for completions, yards, and touchdowns, was 5th in the NFL in touchdowns, and it only took four games of acclimation before he was out-performing guys like Dan Marino in efficiency for the final 12 games of the year.

• Ben Roethlisberger was 13-0 and had a top 5 passer rating as a rookie.

• Matt Ryan was 11th in passer rating, led a massive turnaround from 4-12 the previous year to 11-5, and had a top 5 QBR.

• Joe Flacco was also a winning quarterback, and was top-half of the NFL in both passer rating in QBR.

• Cam Newton was an outright dynamo in 2011, top-half of the league in passer (both passer rating and QBR) but also adding in 700 yards and 14 more TDs on the ground, total of 35 TDs that year.

• Andrew Luck was already top 10 in QBR even as a rookie, led his team to an 11-5 record, had 28 total TDs that year.

• Russell Wilson was #3 in QBR and #4 in passer rating, already as a rookie in 2012, to go along with his 11 wins.

• Dak Prescott was #3 in QBR and #3 in passer rating, 13-3 as a starter, and tacked on 300 yards of rushing and 6 more rushing TDs (for a total of 29 TDs) as a rookie.

• DeShaun Watson was #3 in passer rating and had the #1 QBR in the whole NFL as a rookie in 2017. He only started 6 games but scored 21 total TDs.

• And of course Baker Mayfield ended up doing reasonably well on full season QBR and passer rating, scored 27 TDs, but more importantly he, like Peyton Manning all those years ago, had a pretty discrete increase in effectiveness as the year wore on. For the final 8 games of 2018, he was PFF's 5th highest graded QB with the 5th highest adjusted passer rating.

And yeah, sure, you do have some cases like that of Donovan McNabb, Eli Manning, Alex Smith, Matt Stafford, Carson Wentz, and Jared Goff, where they had poor rookie seasons, but then (at some point) turned things around and had or are having solid careers. But that is clearly the minority.

And most of those guys...aren't really anything to write home about, let's be honest. The higher up the chain you go in terms of qualifying who is actually a really good quarterback and who is not, the more likely it is that guy was successful as a rookie, if he was actually forced to play.

Most often when people state that rookie QBs should be expected to suck, the evidence they cite is from three decades ago, or even longer, when the NFL passing game was virtually unrecognizable compared to today's game.

It's Troy Aikman this, Steve Young that, or Terry Bradshaw.

But the reason they reach this far back is simple: they HAVE TO!

In order to find a quarterback that ended up a truly outstanding player after struggling as a rookie, you really have to go back that far. Nobody's really buying that Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb are elite.

And let's also be honest, many of the above examples, arguably all of them in fact, still had better rookie years than Josh Rosen had.

The best you can say is that they didn't necessarily do something outstanding as rookies...and maybe that means conceptually that Josh Rosen belongs among them, not below them.

I'm really not picky. If you read through the things I cite above for what the QBs did as rookies, I accept many different forms of showing me your potential as a rookie. I try and keep things at the conceptual level with this stuff and avoid getting overly scientific about it for a reason.

If you're a rookie just feeling your way out in the league, just show me something. If you're a dual threat, show me that, and score points. Show me yards per attempt efficiency (which dominates passer rating). Show me situational efficiency (which feeds into QBR). Show me you're a winner. Show me how much you improved as the year went on. Show me that your strengths coming out, were your strengths as a rookie. Show me...SOMETHING.

The problem is, Josh Rosen had one of the worst quarterback seasons in recent memory. Some say, one of the worst quarterback seasons EVER.

His ESPN QBR ranked very close to the bottom of the ~300 total QB seasons they've recorded since 2006.
His passer rating was bad, of course. As was his yards per attempt and net yards per attempt.
His Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt relative to League Year Average was the 2nd worst...since 1932.
His efficiency was even worse while actually ahead or tied, which is an unusual (and not promising) occurrence. His passing production and efficiency actually benefited from being behind so much that teams played looser defense against him, allowing him to pad his stats a little bit.
He did not improve as the season wore on. There was no "First 6/Last 6" type of split that shows marked improvement.
His supposed strengths were NFL weakness-level bad. Analysts thought Rosen would win from a clean pocket. But he had the 2nd-worst passer rating in the NFL from clean pockets.
They also thought he'd be a good play-action passer. But his play-action completion percentage was the worst in the NFL, 5 whole points worse than the 2nd-worst guy (Jeff Driskel).

What does all this mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean the book is closed on Josh Rosen's career, any more than it was closed on Donovan McNabb's when he struggled in 1999, or Jared Goff's when he struggled in 2016.

What it means, though, is that a player who had a previous ~40% chance of success (historical percentage based on his grade and where he was taken) has now had his chances of success diminished...a lot.

That's part of the Bayesian updating you have to constantly be doing if you want to be successful in these sorts of scenario predictions. You update the old information with the new information, not excluding any of it. It's no more appropriate to pretend that 2018 didn't happen than it is to pretend that 2018 is all that matters.

The implied success rate based on historical and contemporary evidence is very much in-line with what NFL teams would draft in the 3rd or 4th rounds. That is why teams generally weren't interested in Josh Rosen at a higher price-point than that. They process this all intuitively, because they've been around it for so long.

This is all stuff you could do without watching any of Josh Rosen play football.

But I have watched Josh Rosen play football, a lot. I watched him come onto the scene at UCLA and do pretty well, for a freshman. I watched him follow that up with what was really a poor year, marked by injuries, losses, and inefficiency. And then I watched him stack another mediocre year up for the pile. I gave him a 1st round grade, despite these things, because there were some attractive core traits.

But now I've seen him fail for yet another year. He's now four years since when he peaked as a football player, which was High School.

I've watched his 3rd down (short to medium) conversion rate go from 47% in 2015, to 42% in 2016, to 38% in 2017, and now 32% in 2018...four consecutive years of degrading situational effectiveness.

The Dolphins have set this trade up as a boom-bust endeavor.

Either Rosen is the guy Chad O'Shea thought when the Patriots reviewed him last year and had him as their best QB in the draft, which means he blows them away in training camp and preseason, earns the starting job, runs the offense like a top, they score a ton of points and win a ton of games...

...or they take a HIGH caliber guy in 2020.

And once that happens, the clock is ticking on Rosen. Maybe he starts ahead of that high caliber guy in 2020...but only for a bit. Rosen's Miami career will effectively be dead, but he could still go on as the starter for a few games.

To the extent that I've criticized the trade, it's been because I think there's a small to not meaningful chance that Rosen goes from the player he was in Arizona in 2018 to the sort of player he would need to be in 2019 (with a team that honestly isn't much better than Arizona) in order to induce Miami to build around him instead of making a major move toward another quarterback.

They've not really given themselves a realistic winning path with this trade. Thus it strikes me as frivolous, and that's a pretty costly impulse buy.

But it's not that big a deal. If the player they'd have taken at 62 overall busts out (which is a better bet than not, at that stage of the draft) then it'll be moot. That's literally how this works.

Curious on your thoughts of Josh Allen and Sam Darnold and how they played last season. I liked Allen's rookie year more than most, personally.

"ckparrothead wrote:

They've not really given themselves a realistic winning path with this trade. Thus it strikes me as frivolous, and that's a pretty costly impulse buy.

I WHOLEHEARTEDLY disagree. Frivolous would be signing Foles or some other flavor of the month veteran to a max contract hoping he lives up to it. We essentially gave a 5th rounder next season for Rosen in exchange for having 90% of his salary pre-paid. Or if you want to look at it another way, we sold next year's 5th for $11M and got a top QB prospect try-out in the process.

The 2nd rounder we traded was free so I don't count that- yes we could have landed another impact lineman there, but the need is much greater at QB. If Rosen ends up being a 10 year backup like Matt Moore, that trade was an absolute STEAL. He certainly doesn't have to be a long-term starter for the peanuts we paid for him. But if he does get there, then there's little doubt that this goes down as the trade of the decade for Miami.

It was a brilliant move no matter what happens and I applaud them for it.

"The Guy wrote:

I didn’t say use the information in the article exclusively; I said simply use the information in the article at all. Certainly the kind of information you’re talking about can be used in conjunction with the information in the article.

In other words, if the matter involved potentially losing everything you own, I doubt the information in the article would be disregarded completely.

I'm sure that yes I'd look at it at the very least but Id probably be looking at every single statistic whether I believed in its validity or not.

I mean...the guy has a gun!

Edit: Also want to add, I do appreciate your well thought out posts. I'm just generally a contrarian and like to look at things from different angles.

Statistics are very important but I also believe when it comes to humans there is usually a story behind their performance and it's important to figure out the context of said stats when applied to individual players.

"ckparrothead wrote:

Over the modern era of NFL passing, the majority of the destined-to-be-successful quarterbacks who were forced to play as rookies had managed to show something in their rookie years that was far, inarguably so, better than what Josh Rosen put together as a rookie with Arizona in 2018.

• Peyton Manning set rookie records for completions, yards, and touchdowns, was 5th in the NFL in touchdowns, and it only took four games of acclimation before he was out-performing guys like Dan Marino in efficiency for the final 12 games of the year.

• Ben Roethlisberger was 13-0 and had a top 5 passer rating as a rookie.

• Matt Ryan was 11th in passer rating, led a massive turnaround from 4-12 the previous year to 11-5, and had a top 5 QBR.

• Joe Flacco was also a winning quarterback, and was top-half of the NFL in both passer rating in QBR.

• Cam Newton was an outright dynamo in 2011, top-half of the league in passer (both passer rating and QBR) but also adding in 700 yards and 14 more TDs on the ground, total of 35 TDs that year.

• Andrew Luck was already top 10 in QBR even as a rookie, led his team to an 11-5 record, had 28 total TDs that year.

• Russell Wilson was #3 in QBR and #4 in passer rating, already as a rookie in 2012, to go along with his 11 wins.

• Dak Prescott was #3 in QBR and #3 in passer rating, 13-3 as a starter, and tacked on 300 yards of rushing and 6 more rushing TDs (for a total of 29 TDs) as a rookie.

• DeShaun Watson was #3 in passer rating and had the #1 QBR in the whole NFL as a rookie in 2017. He only started 6 games but scored 21 total TDs.

• And of course Baker Mayfield ended up doing reasonably well on full season QBR and passer rating, scored 27 TDs, but more importantly he, like Peyton Manning all those years ago, had a pretty discrete increase in effectiveness as the year wore on. For the final 8 games of 2018, he was PFF's 5th highest graded QB with the 5th highest adjusted passer rating.

And yeah, sure, you do have some cases like that of Donovan McNabb, Eli Manning, Alex Smith, Matt Stafford, Carson Wentz, and Jared Goff, where they had poor rookie seasons, but then (at some point) turned things around and had or are having solid careers. But that is clearly the minority.

And most of those guys...aren't really anything to write home about, let's be honest. The higher up the chain you go in terms of qualifying who is actually a really good quarterback and who is not, the more likely it is that guy was successful as a rookie, if he was actually forced to play.

Most often when people state that rookie QBs should be expected to suck, the evidence they cite is from three decades ago, or even longer, when the NFL passing game was virtually unrecognizable compared to today's game.

It's Troy Aikman this, Steve Young that, or Terry Bradshaw.

But the reason they reach this far back is simple: they HAVE TO!

In order to find a quarterback that ended up a truly outstanding player after struggling as a rookie, you really have to go back that far. Nobody's really buying that Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb are elite.

And let's also be honest, many of the above examples, arguably all of them in fact, still had better rookie years than Josh Rosen had.

The best you can say is that they didn't necessarily do something outstanding as rookies...and maybe that means conceptually that Josh Rosen belongs among them, not below them.

I'm really not picky. If you read through the things I cite above for what the QBs did as rookies, I accept many different forms of showing me your potential as a rookie. I try and keep things at the conceptual level with this stuff and avoid getting overly scientific about it for a reason.

If you're a rookie just feeling your way out in the league, just show me something. If you're a dual threat, show me that, and score points. Show me yards per attempt efficiency (which dominates passer rating). Show me situational efficiency (which feeds into QBR). Show me you're a winner. Show me how much you improved as the year went on. Show me that your strengths coming out, were your strengths as a rookie. Show me...SOMETHING.

The problem is, Josh Rosen had one of the worst quarterback seasons in recent memory. Some say, one of the worst quarterback seasons EVER.

His ESPN QBR ranked very close to the bottom of the ~300 total QB seasons they've recorded since 2006.
His passer rating was bad, of course. As was his yards per attempt and net yards per attempt.
His Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt relative to League Year Average was the 2nd worst...since 1932.
His efficiency was even worse while actually ahead or tied, which is an unusual (and not promising) occurrence. His passing production and efficiency actually benefited from being behind so much that teams played looser defense against him, allowing him to pad his stats a little bit.
He did not improve as the season wore on. There was no "First 6/Last 6" type of split that shows marked improvement.
His supposed strengths were NFL weakness-level bad. Analysts thought Rosen would win from a clean pocket. But he had the 2nd-worst passer rating in the NFL from clean pockets.
They also thought he'd be a good play-action passer. But his play-action completion percentage was the worst in the NFL, 5 whole points worse than the 2nd-worst guy (Jeff Driskel).

What does all this mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean the book is closed on Josh Rosen's career, any more than it was closed on Donovan McNabb's when he struggled in 1999, or Jared Goff's when he struggled in 2016.

What it means, though, is that a player who had a previous ~40% chance of success (historical percentage based on his grade and where he was taken) has now had his chances of success diminished...a lot.

That's part of the Bayesian updating you have to constantly be doing if you want to be successful in these sorts of scenario predictions. You update the old information with the new information, not excluding any of it. It's no more appropriate to pretend that 2018 didn't happen than it is to pretend that 2018 is all that matters.

The implied success rate based on historical and contemporary evidence is very much in-line with what NFL teams would draft in the 3rd or 4th rounds. That is why teams generally weren't interested in Josh Rosen at a higher price-point than that. They process this all intuitively, because they've been around it for so long.

This is all stuff you could do without watching any of Josh Rosen play football.

But I have watched Josh Rosen play football, a lot. I watched him come onto the scene at UCLA and do pretty well, for a freshman. I watched him follow that up with what was really a poor year, marked by injuries, losses, and inefficiency. And then I watched him stack another mediocre year up for the pile. I gave him a 1st round grade, despite these things, because there were some attractive core traits.

But now I've seen him fail for yet another year. He's now four years since when he peaked as a football player, which was High School.

I've watched his 3rd down (short to medium) conversion rate go from 47% in 2015, to 42% in 2016, to 38% in 2017, and now 32% in 2018...four consecutive years of degrading situational effectiveness.

The Dolphins have set this trade up as a boom-bust endeavor.

Either Rosen is the guy Chad O'Shea thought when the Patriots reviewed him last year and had him as their best QB in the draft, which means he blows them away in training camp and preseason, earns the starting job, runs the offense like a top, they score a ton of points and win a ton of games...

...or they take a HIGH caliber guy in 2020.

And once that happens, the clock is ticking on Rosen. Maybe he starts ahead of that high caliber guy in 2020...but only for a bit. Rosen's Miami career will effectively be dead, but he could still go on as the starter for a few games.

To the extent that I've criticized the trade, it's been because I think there's a small to not meaningful chance that Rosen goes from the player he was in Arizona in 2018 to the sort of player he would need to be in 2019 (with a team that honestly isn't much better than Arizona) in order to induce Miami to build around him instead of making a major move toward another quarterback.

They've not really given themselves a realistic winning path with this trade. Thus it strikes me as frivolous, and that's a pretty costly impulse buy.

But it's not that big a deal. If the player they'd have taken at 62 overall busts out (which is a better bet than not, at that stage of the draft) then it'll be moot. That's literally how this works.

This is a great post. Do you have any information on the quarterbacks Rosen was very similar to last year, and their career trajectories?

The Rosen situation is an interesting one. I tend to ignore his first year in Zona. He had a terrible line, coaching, and inadequate WRs. I don't even buy the narrative that the Cards gave up on him. I think the perfect guy to fit Kingsbury's system.

I thought he was the second best QB coming out of college last season. He is accurate, has size, has a strong arm, and nice pocket presence. At times in his career, he has shown the ability to throw beyond what I consider an accurate pass. He has ball placement ability that a lot of QB do not have nor will ever have. We are talking guys like Mayfield, Wilson, Rogers, and Brees. Tannehill threw a catchable ball, but he was never a pinpoint guy and never will be. In fact, I do not think that most QBs are pinpoint guys. Rosen has flashed this ability. I do think that this is an elite skillset to have.

Okay, here is the negative, and it is a big one. His processing time is slow. He is late on throws enough to which it is a concern. Despite all of his positive attributes, I think that this is the anchor holding him back. I didn't help that Arizona has a horrible offensive line. Unfortunately, our line is pretty brutal too. Recent history shows us that the Dolphins for whatever reason, do not think that this is a priority. During the entire Tannehill tenure, at best, we had an average line, and that was for a very brief time. By all accounts, Rosen is a smart guy, but I am not necessarily sure that intelligence and processing are even the same thing. I remember taking timed multiplication tests in elementary. There were definitely kids getting the questions right, but just not doing it fast enough. Smart kids, but they just had slow processing time. I think he can get better, but how much better is the question. What makes this different from doing math problems quickly is that students are trying to shave seconds off their time. He needs to make reads quicker by a fraction of a second. That is much harder to do.

Okay, the last piece of the puzzle is his situation. Mark my words. There will be people on this site complaining that Rosen is not getting a fair chance. Let me be 100% frank, he is NOT going to get a fair chance. He has a very short window to prove that he is a franchise QB, and he is doing it with a team that is in the process of a rebuild. Before you feel bad for him, realize there are a ton of backup QBs out there that would kill for a chance to log a few starts just to show teams what they are capable of. He does have better targets in Miami than Arizona, so that is working for him.

How would I handle the situation -
I would try and run plays where he gets rid of the ball quickly. Lots of slants (I think that has worked in New England.). I would try and have his first WR and second WR option on the same side of the field, so he doesn't have to read the whole field at once. The ultimate goal would be for Rosen to get into a rhythm and gain confidence and for us to mitigate our line woes. IF we can get to that point, I would start to open things up.

I was reading through OTA notes and Fitzpatrick is throwing an average of 10 TD passes per day...many of them pinpoint lasers just over Minkah or Xavien. For instance, the other day Rosen has a nice deep TD throw, Fitz came in the next play and chucked a 70 yard bomb that made everyone's jaw drop. It's still super early but I don't see Fitzpatrick being out-played in camp/preseason, so this Rosen conversation is being handled the right way by coaches...he's being allowed to compete without being promised anything. Maybe he gets some playing time but he's definitely going to earn it.

"KeyFin wrote:

I was reading through OTA notes and Fitzpatrick is throwing an average of 10 TD passes per day...many of them pinpoint lasers just over Minkah or Xavien. For instance, the other day Rosen has a nice deep TD throw, Fitz came in the next play and chucked a 70 yard bomb that made everyone's jaw drop. It's still super early but I don't see Fitzpatrick being out-played in camp/preseason, so this Rosen conversation is being handled the right way by coaches...he's being allowed to compete without being promised anything. Maybe he gets some playing time but he's definitely going to earn it.

They are in shorts and t-shirts. With no hitting. I read cutler was real good in the same situations. Fitz had more time to learn the system. And he has been around the league a long time and probably catches on quicker with his experience. Also fitz is real smart which would also help you learn the system quicker.

"Miamiforlife wrote:

They are in shorts and t-shirts. With no hitting. I read cutler was real good in the same situations. Fitz had more time to learn the system. And he has been around the league a long time and probably catches on quicker with his experience. Also fitz is real smart which would also help you learn the system quicker.

I completely agree with you...it's way too early to determine anything from the practices. However, all QB's are in shorts/tees and all of them weren't throwing 10+ TD's a day. So Fitz is clearly leading early (for whatever that's worth).

Is there any way to measure or predict this?

Nope.

So it's a question we're all interested in but the only definitive answer is - let's watch and find out.

"Miamiforlife wrote:

They are in shorts and t-shirts. With no hitting. I read cutler was real good in the same situations. Fitz had more time to learn the system. And he has been around the league a long time and probably catches on quicker with his experience. Also fitz is real smart which would also help you learn the system quicker.

Fitzpatrick had a tremendous season last year, so there’s that as well.

I have to admit the 10 touchdowns sounds real impressive. Since before this year all we heard was the offense can’t do chit in camp. And fitz had a good season last year? Did you mean camp or first few games. I thought he was awful after a great start? I don’t feel like googling it. I think both fitz and rosen are leaps and bounds above tannehill. I rooted for Tanny. But he is not a good pro qb so far in his career. He is very frustrating. As he had good mobility and a strong arm. Just can’t control the game like a great qb should.

"Miamiforlife wrote:

I have to admit the 10 touchdowns sounds real impressive. Since before this year all we heard was the offense can’t do chit in camp. And fitz had a good season last year? Did you mean camp or first few games. I thought he was awful after a great start? I don’t feel like googling it. I think both fitz and rosen are leaps and bounds above tannehill. I rooted for Tanny. But he is not a good pro qb so far in his career. He is very frustrating. As he had good mobility and a strong arm. Just can’t control the game like a great qb should.

He played in eight games. Three of them featured a performance that could beat almost any team at any time, and two of those were against good competition. One of his games was average. Two of them were below average. And two of them were terrible.

He essentially played a high risk, high reward style in which he passed for a very high number of yards per attempt, but also had too high an interception rate.

If he played more conservatively and shaved off a yard and a half from his number of yards per attempt and it resulted in throwing perhaps 50% the rate of interceptions, he would be performing among the best two or three quarterbacks in the league.

"Galant wrote:

Is there any way to measure or predict this?

Nope.

So it's a question we're all interested in but the only definitive answer is - let's watch and find out.

There are many ways to measure Rosen’s potential and predict his future performance.
- Film study
- Statistical analysis
- Analysis of coaching/scheme fit.
- Analysis of team talent.
- Physical measurements such as height, hand size and ball velocity.
- Running ability.
- Personality traits.
- Pocket presence
- opinions of experts
- Magic 8-ball.

The problem is that NFL performance, especially at QB, is a chaotic environment with many dynamic variables. If there was a simple and easy predictive method everyone would be using that. Now sometimes a person’s system is right so they use that as evidence that their system is valid and reliable, and when their system is wrong they find a reason to discount that outcome as being an outlier or due to a specific situation.

"Pauly wrote:

There are many ways to measure Rosen’s potential and predict his future performance.
- Film study
- Statistical analysis
- Analysis of coaching/scheme fit.
- Analysis of team talent.
- Physical measurements such as height, hand size and ball velocity.
- Running ability.
- Personality traits.
- Pocket presence
- opinions of experts
- Magic 8-ball.

The problem is that NFL performance, especially at QB, is a chaotic environment with many dynamic variables. If there was a simple and easy predictive method everyone would be using that. Now sometimes a person’s system is right so they use that as evidence that their system is valid and reliable, and when their system is wrong they find a reason to discount that outcome as being an outlier or due to a specific situation.

So..... you agree.

I think that people who think that starting the QB who gives us the best chance to win are kind of misguided.

Think about this. If at any point in the season, I told you that you could set the Dolphins' lineup any way you want, and if the Dolphins win, I will give you a million dollars. If I were placed in that scenario, I would pick Fitzmagic 100% of the time. It is simple. Fitz is a 13 year vet. He threw as many TDs in his first three years as Rosen has thrown in his entire career. Fitz has played for what feels like half the league, is Ivy league educated, and has played in many different systems. Fitz is out playing Rosen because he is better than Rosen.

Fitz is also a known commodity. He will ball out some games but will ultimately turn the ball over just too many times. The hope is that Rosen will eventually be better than Fitz. They talk about how things eventually slow down for QBs and things just click. I think you need to see that clicking happen on the field and not in practice.

I am not sure how active you guys are on Twitter, but there are some fans that have posted some clips of Rosen doing some really impressive things on the field while in Arizona. There are the flashes that I remember seeing from in college. It definitely feels like he belongs on the field. It is just a matter of stringing more of those positive plays together, and getting him to read the field faster. He definitely does not look lost out there or like he is in over his head. He looked like a rookie.

We aren't winning the Super Bowl this year. We aren't a playoff team. I have zero problem with calling this the Rosen evaluation period. My expectations are tempered, and I implore you guys to adapt the same bar for evaluation. I wanna see Rosen string together a stretch of solid games. Whether it is 4 or 5 in a row or 4 out 5. I wanna see a relatively high level of play with consistency. I really wanna give him the largest sample size possible (16 games) and as many opportunities as we can give him to get that light bulb to go on in his head. Honestly, I do not care if comes out week 1 and throws 5 INTs. Whatever. Let's see how he is playing around week 12 - 16 and go from there.

I'm telling you guys. He is getting a chance, but it is NOT A FAIR CHANCE. If he doesn't have some solid film and solid games, we are drafting a QB in the first round next year. I think the fairest thing we can do is give him 16 chances and have realistic expectations.