Hagios said:Making reads: I don't think this skill can be taught unless you have it. Take Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning. At the speed of the college game I'll bet they both could see the whole field and track the action of all the players. But only one of the two could do this at the speed of the pro game. It's that Wayne Gretzky sixth sense of "I don't skate to the puck, I skate to where the puck is going to be." You can never know which quarterback can do this at NFL speeds until they've been in the NFL. If RG3 doesn't have fast enough real-time information processing to keep up with the NFL then 100 hours of film study per week won't make a difference.
I think the bolded is an important point. [SIZE=14.4444446563721px]The making reads part of being an NFL QB is probably the most important skill for an NFL QB, but I hate seeing people equate it with intelligence. Making correct reads is essentially high-speed visual pattern recognition under stress conditions. It has almost nothing to do with intelligence as we normally conceptualize it. Reading defenses is a very different mental skill from having a thorough intellectual/conceptual understanding of everything that's going on. You could have the playbook and all the reads down cold -- you could know exactly that X play out of Y formation/personnel group is designed to get the tight end matched up against a Cover-2 linebacker b/c linebacker coverage is this week's opponent's weakness, using an out-breaking route because that MLB likes to play with inside leverage, but if the safety shades to that side then the split end on the backside should be open on the post route, etc. and you could know that stuff thoroughly for every play in the game plan -- but if you can't rapidly process visual information in real-time while 280 LB men try to rip your head off, all that knowledge is useless. There have been very bright guys who failed at QB because they couldn't do that, and relatively dim guys who were excellent.[/SIZE]