Developing Quarterbacks

JohnB, another good analysis. My comment is that we also lost Grady Sizemore to baseball. Not sure what class he was in, but he would probably have battled for playing timeirregardless of class.
       Also, I disagree that Gilby wasted a year with Isaiah Stanback. He really wasted 2 with the first year at WR, and the second with John Pettas ignoring him at QB. I still remember how much IS improved under Lappano’s mentoring in 2 years, but alas, it wasn’t long enough to overcome the wasted early years as IS was a project from the start.

The UW got its share of recruits, we just failed to turn them into quarterbacks. I think Neuheisel was okay in this area — both Tuiasosopo and Pickett improved over their careers (Pickett’s injury was unfortunate, obviously).

Stanback played better once he was put in a box. Willingham helped him eliminate a lot of mistakes, but like you I’m not sure he ever became a quarterback. The Cowboys share our skepticism.

Looking at Locker, its not easy to separate the signal from the noise. His receivers are gone. His running back is gone. There’s no defense. So you tell me, has Locker improved or not? I don’t know. But I was expecting the kind of jump we saw from Tebow between his freshman and sophomore seasons, and when it’s all said and done, I don’t see it.

Jake has improved in his mid and short game so in regards to that he shows touch which Isaiah didn’t until his senior year. The long ball is where JL still either gets too excited and overthrows or his receivers also quit running. I wish we played JL more under center where the handoffs to RBs would be less obvious and also JL wouldn’t have to be concentrating 60/40 on snap dribbling back to him, thus negating the shotgun time to see defense developing. Garcia needs to be money on snaps, but I have been saying that for 2 years now. BTW, Sedillos snaps to Fouch were all good when he played in 4th qtr against OK. JL is also very prone to running first rather than looking for 2nd/3rd options, which is probably caused by the poor pass protection, so egg/chicken argument. We need to get the team involved this weekend and rest of season, for right now we are truly too one dimensional (Jake).

It hit me that if you wanted to look for one event that started this little football recession, and if you didn’t think that event should be Neuheisel’s gambling pool, then I think you have to look at Matt Tuiasosopo taking the baseball money. That loss robbed Gilby of his one big-time recruit, the guy who was supposed to lead the next wave of Husky football. Who knows how it would’ve turned out (he had some injury questions, if I recall), but you can certainly make the case that had he stayed, things would’ve been better than they are now.

The bottom line is that the Mariners are such a large vacuum of suck that they’re affecting other sports, even. Ugh.

He was just starting to realize some of that quarterback potential when he got hurt. I think teams were split about 50/50 on whether to draft him as a QB or a WR; I’m bummed that the team that actually picked him (Dallas) was on the WR side of the debate. I think he could’ve followed the Seneca Wallace career path and developed — under the right QB coaching — into a very solid backup with a chance to be a starter a few years down the road. I guess we’ll never know.

But scout.com shows that he was a 2003 recruit that ended up grayshirting. Also, his page shows a scholarship offer from UW. No idea how accurate any of that info is, of course.

And yeah, I had gone back to take a look at Ty’s first two recruiting classes to try to understand how they got in this mess where there’s no upper-class talent… and the conclusion I came to was that Gilby’s class is the #1 problem here. (Ty’s small first class is problem #2, but considering when he was hired, I’m not sure he could’ve been expected to do much better.) This team is getting no help from 5th-year seniors and that’s where they should’ve come from. Like you said, that entire class was basically one big whiff.

Although I bet we’d look at Ty’s first class with a little more mercy if E.J. and J.R. had developed and stuck around. Point being, it was a small class that didn’t look horrible on letter-of-intent day, given the circumstances of the coaching change; it just looks much worse in hindsight because the two blue-chippers flamed out spectacularly. Maybe those guys would’ve had better careers in other situations, who knows… no sense crying about it now, though.