Monday, October 19: About That QB Switch…
Posted by Matt Terl on October 19, 2009 – 12:24 pm
It’s one of the great truisms of professional football that the backup quarterback is the most popular guy in town. This is because the backup quarterback represents hope, change, the belief that one minor switch can reverse a season that’s rapidly heading south.
But the backup QB is like the old quantum physics thought experiment about Schroedinger’s cat. Stripping out the details, what you essentially do is construct a situation in which a cat in a box has a precisely 50-50 shot of being dead or alive — and, for as long as that box is sealed, the cat can be considered both dead AND alive. As soon as you open the box, though, the possibilities all collapse into a single truth: either the cat is dead, or he’s alive. The end.
Well, the Redskins opened the box last night to see how Todd Collins was doing, and the results were … mixed.
On the one hand:
Collins generated six points, which was six points more than the offense came up with in the first half. He completed the long pass to Santana Moss, the best Redskins pass play of the day, and was the quarterback for Clinton Portis‘s best run of the day.
On the other hand, Collins fumbled twice, was sacked twice, gave up a safety on the crucial final drive, and — despite the 42-yard pass to Moss — finished with a QB rating of just 60.1. It’s better than Jason Campbell‘s 46.1 rating, but still not exactly what you’d call inspiring.
In the end, Collins looked like he was having many of the same problems that Campbell did, but that he lacked Campbell’s mobility and athleticism to escape from the pressure. All of which would seem to indicate not that Collins (or Campbell, for that matter) is an inherently bad quarterback, but that there are bigger problems with the Redskins offense as currently constituted.
One of those problems, clearly, is the injury-depleted offensive line; the diagnosis on Chris Samuels tomorrow will go a long way toward determining how good either quarterback’s chances for success will be.
And, for those of you who believe that head coach Jim Zorn’s playcalling is the problem … well, that’s being addressed now as well.
But I think that one of the main lessons of yesterday is that the undefined idea of Todd Collins is probably more impressive — at least in this offense — than the actuality of Todd Collins.
It’s a lesson that Santana Moss repeated today, at least in paraphrase. “You look at the game, Todd got in there and it was rough with Todd. That’s how it’s been tough for Jason this whole year. It’s just one of those things … man, I’d hate to be him — I’m not him — because quarterbacks get all of the blame. I think he’s prepared for whatever, to take it head on, and I guess we’ll have to see.”
Another person who seemed to have come to a similar realization? Todd Collins. “You know, I got in there and I was disappointed that I couldn’t help the team come away with a win,” Collins said, “so all in all it was a difficult game for both of us.”
In general, players in the locker room today had mixed reviews of the move.
“I guess it was just a thing,” Fred Davis said, “they wanted to see what would happen, I guess. Pull one guy out to make somebody else work harder? I don’t know. You’re losing, you’re not putting up points, you’re just gonna see whoever can go in and make some plays at the time. I don’t think it was anything against Jason, it’s just a situation where you want to make something happen.”
DeAngelo Hall was a bit more skeptical. “I think if I was the guy, I think that I’d've left Jason in. You know, he had a bad half the first half of the Carolina game, came out, got us goin’ in the second half. You know, I don’t think that was the right move, but Coach made that move, ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. He made that move, he had to live with it. “
And Collins himself was sympathetic. “I was just disappointed for Jason,” he said. “No one likes to see someone get pulled from the game. I told him, ‘I know what that feels like,’ I know what it feels like going in to relieve somebody for performance issues. So it’s kinda hard on both ends.”
Tags: Jason Campbell, JasonCampbell, todd collins, ToddCollins
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