This was great. At the 17 minute mark or so, you can see where Mac has Jonnu wide open deep but checks down.
The Michael McCorkle "Mac" Jones Thread
- Thread starter SeoulSoxFan
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I wonder if the NFL is going to investigate Miami for cheating since they called out the Patriots plays before they happened.
<ducks>
Interesting to me that when you look at the seam to Agholor 15:34 into that video JT says the pump fake was bad because it helps bring the safety over to the route but Lazar or Mark (I think it was Lazar but I can't remember - it might have been Mark) pointed it out as pump faking the underneath LB which opened up the lane and therefore was good. JT says you don't pump fake the underneath defender. I thought the underneath defender analysis makes sense and was surprised to hear JT say that.
It seems to me that Jonnu begins to get separation just as Mac begins to throw to Harris.
Someone actually addresses this in the comments on the video and he replies. Screenshot below:
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Nice find. I just watched this now, without having seen the comments from the thread. My QB knowledge is limited to leading my gym class in interceptions four years straight during flag football season (I am pretty sure that record won't be broken, merely tied) But even I saw 55 freeze for a moment after the pump.
The "angled drop back" discussion (11:30 of the video) is fascinating. Drop backs are one of those things I've never given a second thought to; QB drops back, then throws. What else is there? But the way the end zone angle shows Jones see the pressure coming, then alter his drop angle to give himself juuust enough time to get the throw off seems like one of those little things that coaches notice that even knowledgable fans mostly miss.
I'm sorry but if a rookie QB in his first NFL game is confident and sure enough that he is winking at defenders pre snap then he is going to win at least eight Superbowls. The football gods have spoken.
No comment on the 8 superbowls, but, in terms of temperament, he seems to have a rare mix of being a driven competitor but also loose enough to hear the defense call out the play he is about to run and just wink. And in the wake of the game 1 loss, some of his offensive teammates have been quoted as saying they let him down.
1. Jones comes to me like an easy-going psychotic, if that makes any sense. With shades of Newton's confidence during his Carolina heyday.
2. Do you have any links to those quotes?
So I am now a card-carrying member of the "irrationally exuberant about Mac Jones" club. I think we are looking at an elite QB who will ultimately be the second best guy who has ever played the position for the Patriots. But he's still a rookie and will no doubt be humbled at some point, just hopefully not this week. But Brady's rookie year was not all wonderful.
Anyway, point being, if the GOAT has some bad games in his rookie year we can likely expect the same from Jones.
- In his second start, Brady went 12-24 for 86 yards and was sacked 4 times in a 30-10 blowout loss to the Dolphins
- In his 5th start, he went 25 for 38 for only 203 yards and four interceptions (against 2 TDs) in a 31-20 loss to Denver
- In his 8th start, he went 19-27 for 185 yards with a TD and 2 interceptions in a 24-17 loss to the Rams.
Anyway, point being, if the GOAT has some bad games in his rookie year we can likely expect the same from Jones.
That Rams statline was actually encouraging in that passing environment against the best defense in the league. Brady was 11th in DVOA in 2001, looking at raw numbers will always make him look worse than Mac, it was just much harder to throw the ball back then. In this era I don't really expect any QB to throw 4 picks, so Mac's bad games will look a lot better than Brady's bad games in 2001 or Manning's in 1998.
Actually, looking back at Brady's first 3 years, he was 11, 14, and 11 in DVOA in 2001-2003 (similar rankings for DYAR). It wasn't until 2004 when he jumped up to 4th in both categories that you would have ranked him amongst the league's best.
These facts, by the way, lead Mike Tanier to observe around 2007 that Brady embodied the maxim "fake it until you make it", which has to be one of the stupidest things Tanier ever wrote (and I like Tanier's writing, for the most part).
I mean the Pats came out and threw it like 50 times including like 20 straight plays in the 2002 opener. It was obvious at that point they had total confidence in Brady, even if he didn’t take the statistical “leap” until 2007.
Well, two points to that.
One, he took the "leap", such as it was, in 2004, not 2007. Tanier in 2007 was trying to push back against the idea, by writing what he wrote, that Brady was absolutely the greatest ever because he came into the league and was immediately great.
Two, I think the Brady DVOA example is instructive in the sense that even Brady did not carry his team offensively for the first few years. But neither did he kill them, but rather mostly did what needed to be done. So even thought Jones might not carry the Pats offensively, IMO he could be pretty darn effective just by being the player he was last Sunday.
One, he took the "leap", such as it was, in 2004, not 2007. Tanier in 2007 was trying to push back against the idea, by writing what he wrote, that Brady was absolutely the greatest ever because he came into the league and was immediately great.
Two, I think the Brady DVOA example is instructive in the sense that even Brady did not carry his team offensively for the first few years. But neither did he kill them, but rather mostly did what needed to be done. So even thought Jones might not carry the Pats offensively, IMO he could be pretty darn effective just by being the player he was last Sunday.
I was at that Rams game, wasn’t the weather pretty brutal? Also, I think we had a great chance to win that game out of nowhere but messed up a goal line play.
I’m pretty sure most everyone would have Bledsoe and Grogan either 2/3 or 3/2. Ranking the next cluster gets pretty ugly pretty quickly after those three.
Brady, Bledsoe as the clear #2, he got them to one SB, stepped in in the AFCCG vs the Steelers after Brady got hurt to get them a second one, Grogan, Parilli, Eason................Plunkett is 5b; he took a beating here, was traded to the 49ers, ended up with the Raiders and won two Super Bowls, a nice redemption story, from there is a tire fire.
We should distinguish between Brady's ability and Brady's statistics, which are influenced by the former but also a variety of things outside the QB's control. Terry Glenn, who played 4 games, finished 3rd on the 2001 Pats in receiving yards. It was a lousy group, one that had finished bottom 10 in scoring the year before and put up only 20 points in two games with Bledsoe. They wound up 6th in scoring offense, with a middle-of-the-pack NY/A, which was a real accomplishment with that group.
Troy Brown was the MVP of that team. What an incredible, often underappreciated season. The man was IMMENSE.
Absolutely. DVOA is just another metric, and clearly who is catching the ball makes a big difference in it as well for QBs. I don't think it's uncommon, however, for QBs to take a few seasons to make the most of their abilities--see Manning, P. I do note that Brady did not again descend to the levels he was at in DVOA/DYAR in those early seasons until 2019 (which was actually the lowest-ranked season of his career by DVOA) and there were a few other years in there (2006? 2013?) where his receiving corps were pretty thin.
View: https://twitter.com/jeffphowe/status/1439585053932146694?s=20
Jeff Howe: Mac Jones' work ethic has impressed the Patriots from the start, but it sounds like he took it to another level this week as they prepared for the Jets. Despite going 29 of 39 for 281 yards and a TD in his debut, the loss didn't sit well and he thought he should've been better.
Jeff Howe: Mac Jones' work ethic has impressed the Patriots from the start, but it sounds like he took it to another level this week as they prepared for the Jets. Despite going 29 of 39 for 281 yards and a TD in his debut, the loss didn't sit well and he thought he should've been better.
The Jets are in on this scheme somehow based on the comments by their defensive coordinator this week:
The Jets DC isn't talking about how much Mac prepares in that quote, he's talking about his performance. This coupled with the "he was watching Jets film on the plane" stories are basically what I expect from most starting QBs in the league.
My opinion on McCorkle's game today is heavily, heavily dependent on stuff you can't see from the broadcast angle. If there was stuff downfield that he was too conservative to go to, then it was far from great, middling but still safely the second best game that a rookie QB has had this year, if just because all the other rookies have been fairly putrid. Very few if any negative plays, but not enough positive plays for me to be as hyped about his performance that I want to be. However, if either the stuff downfield was covered or it was being called with insufficient frequency (although that could be because the offensive line was a sieve early on), then I think he played pretty great. It's probably little column A, little column B.
It's pretty noteworthy that Jones is just not, or very rarely, making negative plays (and isn't frequently even missing throws when, at least, he takes them), even if he isn't yet putting up the positive plays that you hope to see. Most of his sacks haven't been his fault and I don't think he's had a single throw that was interception worthy. When he throws downfield, the balls are consistently very good; he would/should have had two consecutive beautiful deep dimes to Meyers today if the second one hadn't been broken up by an uncalled DPI.
It's pretty noteworthy that Jones is just not, or very rarely, making negative plays (and isn't frequently even missing throws when, at least, he takes them), even if he isn't yet putting up the positive plays that you hope to see. Most of his sacks haven't been his fault and I don't think he's had a single throw that was interception worthy. When he throws downfield, the balls are consistently very good; he would/should have had two consecutive beautiful deep dimes to Meyers today if the second one hadn't been broken up by an uncalled DPI.
He has made a few mistakes: his first dropback vs Miami, his interntional grounding today, he had a near interception downfield negated by a neutral zone infraction. I'm also not sure what happened on the intended handoff to Harris where Mac got hit in the backfield - did he make a good play there or did he make an awful play that Harris saved. He also threw a short pass to White that nearly got White killed, was off on some of his short throws in ways that didn;t allow receivers to gain yards after catch.
But today mostly seemed like better pass rush and pass defense from the Jets than we saw from Miami and and Mac avoiding any really bad mistakes.
Mac also made a significant block on the reverse to Bourne, and, on Harris' eight-tackle-breaking TD run he was one of the Pats helping to push him over the goal line at the end of the play.
But today mostly seemed like better pass rush and pass defense from the Jets than we saw from Miami and and Mac avoiding any really bad mistakes.
Mac also made a significant block on the reverse to Bourne, and, on Harris' eight-tackle-breaking TD run he was one of the Pats helping to push him over the goal line at the end of the play.
What do you mean by maybe? If the defense jumps offside and the play isn't stopped, then the offense always has a free play.
I assume he means "maybe Mac noticed he had a free play and took a shot, maybe he didn't know he had a free play and made a risky pass into tight coverage." I didn't see the flag and I don't think it was mentioned until after the play was over, but who knows if Mac knew before he threw it up.
Mac definitely needs to work on his passes into the ground ahead of taking a sack. Backwards last week and then to a lineman this week.
Yeah he’s been hesitant to go that deep for two games. I find it hard to believe he’d chuck it that long, up for grabs, without knowing he had a freebie. I give the benefit of the doubt to Mac unless he states otherwise.
I think these first two weeks are incredibly encouraging. A month ago, there was a legitimate debate on this board as to whether a rookie like Mac should even start, or whether it would be detrimental to his development, putting him in the fire without allowing him time to get up to speed, so to speak, on the speed of an NFL game. We've seen a few of the other rookie QBs, frankly, stink it up and maybe head down the Darnold path of good QBs who got thrown to the wolves and then started to see ghosts and lost confidence. I wouldn't be surprised if Zack Wilson or Trevor Laurence are having second thoughts about how quickly the reins were handed to them.
In this context, Mac has come in, and shown himself to be a conservative and adequate game manager, not taking unnecessary risks, and letting the game develop while he acclimates. Do your job over and over again. When you succeed, do your job. And when you fail, do your job. Trust the process. Don't make crazy Zack Wilson throws downfield to the defense. Watch the game in front of you and learn. I am willing to bet that, when all is said and done, Mac will have learned more from Wilson's picks today than Wilson did. That's not to say it's all he can be, but that's pretty good.
For a guy who supposedly has excellent processing and football IQ, this is the best possible road to development. He has now absorbed two NFL games without making any fatal mistakes--and could easily be 2-0. His confidence has to be building. We have seen that he can make the throws, he just hasn't been pressing for them. I honestly don't care whether that's by design, or by instinct, because either reason is a good justification. In the process, he has led the team to a 1-1 record, including a road win against a division rival (I hesitate to call them that...a division mook). So he's learning on the job, and not hurting the team. What else can you ask for?
Seems to me that the OL, the receiving corps, and the run defense are much bigger issues than Jones right now, in terms of top priorities to fix.
In this context, Mac has come in, and shown himself to be a conservative and adequate game manager, not taking unnecessary risks, and letting the game develop while he acclimates. Do your job over and over again. When you succeed, do your job. And when you fail, do your job. Trust the process. Don't make crazy Zack Wilson throws downfield to the defense. Watch the game in front of you and learn. I am willing to bet that, when all is said and done, Mac will have learned more from Wilson's picks today than Wilson did. That's not to say it's all he can be, but that's pretty good.
For a guy who supposedly has excellent processing and football IQ, this is the best possible road to development. He has now absorbed two NFL games without making any fatal mistakes--and could easily be 2-0. His confidence has to be building. We have seen that he can make the throws, he just hasn't been pressing for them. I honestly don't care whether that's by design, or by instinct, because either reason is a good justification. In the process, he has led the team to a 1-1 record, including a road win against a division rival (I hesitate to call them that...a division mook). So he's learning on the job, and not hurting the team. What else can you ask for?
Seems to me that the OL, the receiving corps, and the run defense are much bigger issues than Jones right now, in terms of top priorities to fix.
Yeah this is all incredibly encouraging. We can pretty safely say what his floor will be at this point. Compare that to Lawrence and Wilson who have thrown 5 and 6 picks respectively in two games.
I am more than happy with dink&dunk/"game manager" -- especially seeing what others are doing out there. A posession that ends with a kick of some sort is ok at this point.
100%. People who aren’t happy with Mac so far are out of their mind. We just saw Wilson throw 3 awful INTs out of 4 total. The other rookie QBs look like crap so far (they will get better but just talking so far) and even Burrow threw 3 picks today. The Pats don’t even have guys who can get open downfield and he’s doing well. If the All 22 shows he missed guys this week ill take another stance.