Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - PFF's Kevin Cole takes us inside the numbers with Kirk Cousins and the quarterback NFL Draft class

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Matthew Coller and Pro Football Focus' Kevin Cole talk about the Vikings' quarterback situation. If the Vikings were presented with all the analytics on Cousins, would they want him to stay or be traded? What analytics are telling us about the next draft class, including some very cool statistical discoveries about pocket presence. Plus, will the NFL ever get better at drafting quarterbacks? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Folks, before we get into the show, I wanted to tell you that you can save 15% at SodaStick.com by using the promo code PURPLEINSIDER at checkout. That's S-O-T-A-S-T-I-C-K.com for your Minnesota sports-inspired hats, hoodies, shirts. Use the promo code PURPLEINSIDER at SodaStick.com. Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. And I found the one man that Pro Football Focus did not take to LA to do Radio Row and has time to chat with us. That is Kevin Cole of Pro Football Focus. Kevin, until recently, did you know this? I don't know if I told you that your episode with me early in the season had set the record for most downloads and stayed there until the Vikings

fired their coaches. And it was you breaking down Kirk Cousins stats, which I guess shouldn't be all that surprising. So welcome back. Yeah. Yeah. It was just Kevin O'Connell listening to it over and over again, a thousand times. And then afterwards he was just convinced that Kirk, you know, Kirk's his guy going forward. It looks like. All right. So let's start right there because I mean, you, you just, your ability to analyze numbers within the context of actual football is something that makes you stand out as an analyst. Now, if you're crazy, a daffodil Mensah,

which we assume has the same talent of numbers combined with football, a football in this and a front office, and you're looking at cousins numbers and you're in a meeting, the bunch of scouts and your analytics department, and you're presenting his numbers and you say, all right, folks, here's all the numbers on Kirk cousins. What do we think about this? Like, what does this tell us about our decision? Like, what do you think the response would be? Yeah, I think it's

going to be varied. Uh, I think it's going to be very depending upon what sort, what you want to get out of your quarterback, whether you want someone who can execute or whether you want someone who can create, whether you want someone who's going to be good in particular situations versus others, whether you have a particular offense in mind that you want to implement and if he'll be the person for that. I mean, I think with what he's shown

is he can competently, very competently, execute what you want to do, especially in the system that they've had them in, a heavy play action system. So in that way, I think it's good. It probably also comes to philosophically whether you believe that the conversation shifts almost on a weekly basis

as to what you quote unquote need in a quarterback. After the Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes shootout, there were articles saying, scrap going for your normal traditional pocket passer who can game manager, who can execute. You need one of these Superman extra extraordinary athletes who can do things like no one else can do on the planet. And then now we have Joe Burrow in the championship game, who is a good athlete, not the greatest arm. And now he's, we're talking about him being the next Tom Brady. And how he's going to be the face of the league, which kind of goes against what we just heard. So

it's going to change on a week by week basis. It's going to change on exactly who you're talking to. The other thing is that a lot of times what the Kirk discussion comes down to is, well, do you believe in the stats or do you believe in the wins or do you believe in the leadership toughness uh ballerness swags type of thing but i i don't know that that's really necessary to find the gaps in why they haven't gotten as much out of them and there's the cap situation as part of it but also i think when you look under a microscope the one thing that's really hard to find is anything great like you find a lot of really good and so when you put it all together you're like oh well you know he was ninth in this statistic and 13th in that number and i mean think

about where they've been in scoring since he's been here this year they were 14th like that's not terrible and they were eighth in 2019 but the problem is with most of these quarterbacks you can usually find something where you're like whoa matt, Matt Stafford over the last, whatever number of years is number one in third and longs. Like he averages 12 yards on attempt and third and longs. That's crazy. That's the one thing that's always been missing for me is that even if you don't want to go down the path of whether someone is a winner or not, it's just hard to find something that would say, okay, this is the part of his game that takes you there. If you're on the cusp, if you're supposed to be, if you're a 10 and 7, 53-man roster, well, what's going to take you to 12 or 13?

And you can't really find that in his numbers. Yeah, I mean, you can find very high-quality numbers when we talk about these efficiency stats, these rate stats, because even a PFF grade, it is a rate stat. It's a per play grade that's calculated. And then you figure out what someone's grade is. Now, if you're Kirk Cousins and you're throwing the ball 30, 30 something times a game versus your Josh Allen, you're throwing the ball 45 times a game. It's not going to affect those putting those two numbers side by side next to each other, but there's a signal in that. And sometimes it can be the coaches. I mean, coaches are fallible, obviously. But there is something to maybe a Kirk Cousins or a Jimmy Garoppolo or others who have

these great rate stats. But if their coaches are not willing to press on them and to lean on them, then that in and of itself is a downtick. And again, the coaches could be wrong or could be pressing too far in that direction, but you can't just ignore it. And you can't say, well, Kirk Cousins is a top 10 quarterback because he has top 10 metrics in these two categories when he's not being used like a top 10 quarterback would be used by the coaches. So I made this comparison of three-point shooters of the guy who does the set three-point shots from the corner versus Steph Curry, who can do them anywhere. And that, I think that that's appropriate. And the question is, if you have the three point shooter in the corner, who is sort of

only supposed to shoot when he catches it and he's wide open, can you win with that? And that day, because everything draws back to that. As we go through this, sometimes I think that we get lost a little bit in the, well, I like cousins. So I think this stat tells the truth and I don't like them. So I think that the winter thing tells the truth, but we always should be connecting this to what would be best for the franchise to win and go to the super bowl. And it feels like it's really hard if you don't have some element of the Steph

Curry-ness. Yeah. I mean, it's hard, but you know, Bengals fans are not very happy with me recently, but I will say that despite all of these things that we talk about with Joe Burrow and Joe Burrow, you know, he had the number one PFF grade so far this year, but as far as how efficient he was during the season, it wasn't quite as much because of sacks largely. And then how efficient he was in the playoffs, it really wasn't quite as much. I mean, this is a team that kind of scraped by to get there. So you can get there.

It's just you have fewer outs. Other things have to go right. Other parts of your game have to be going right. You can't bail your, he can't even bail himself out essentially in some circumstances if other things aren't working. So for that reason, needing to string together multiple wins in a system now which only has one bye team,

yeah, it makes it really, really difficult. But then what's your alternative in these circumstances? Your alternative can be to throw a Hail Mary and spend three draft picks to go get a Trey Lance or someone like that. But that's not a guarantee for how well that they'll perform going forward. So I think with the quarterback, unfortunately, the problems with maybe increasing the Vikings chances to get to the Super Bowl, there are lots of things that can be done outside of the quarterback. A lot of it gets put on the quarterback. So I think when you have that piece in place,

unless you have a great alternative, it's really about just deriving and squeezing all the value you can get in other places. And that's probably somewhere where the Vikings have fell down a little bit with the continuation of trying to run it back season after season at increasingly higher costs. Right. And that's the question always with cousins that we get back to. And there's no way around it. You know, you feel like a broken record saying it, but there's no way around it is to say how does quasi adolfo mensa maybe that's a

better question is if they do decide to stick with cousins because they don't feel like any of these draft picks are a better answer which they felt like with mac jones last year probably should have drafted him but uh but if that's the case they built around him the last two years pretty poorly like you said they tried to do these all-in type of things they trade for yanni kagakwe like i don't get it a fourth round pick for chris herndon that worked out um but is is there a path to doing that because sometimes we act like and i'm guilty of this there's no way to possibly build a team around an expensive quarterback unless that quarterback is elite um but is there a path? Yeah, I mean, I think there is a path. I think what you have to do is, this is kind of the

general game in the NFL, period. When it comes to drafting, when it comes to free agency moves, when it comes to whatever, you're going to want to concentrate on positions that are going to give you relatively more value when you're spending either high draft capital or you're spending high money on them. So you want to concentrate there. And so then you want to be able to fill other positions where you can get competent and sometimes top-notch play more likely from spending less at those positions. And if you accumulate these moves, if you just do them over and over and over again, you don't have to hit on every single one, but the more times you, you execute that plan purposefully. And I know that quasi is hopefully going to be that, that

guy, he's like this empirically minded guy. He wants to be intentional about his decision-making. If you make an intentional decision, each time you make a decision, you don't reach for something. You don't do necessarily the easy thing in every circumstance. You're not looking to have the one last piece of the puzzle because there is no one last piece of the puzzle. It's always accumulating more and more pieces to give you an incrementally better chance of winning. If you do that, then you have to hope on top of all that you get lucky basically, but you want, you kind of, this is one of these situations where you make your own luck.

You make your own luck by making decisions that are going to be right more often than they're going to be wrong versus what other teams do. Right. And everything is a bet. So when it comes to the Cousins thing, here's the bet. It's do you decide that you're going to have to thread a very thin needle, which is not impossible, but difficult. And no one's been able to do it with Cousins yet,, which is like you said, make these intentional decisions, get lucky in the draft, make very savvy signings,

which are always out there still every year, somebody gets somebody good for 2 million bucks. And you go like, wow, why did that guy? I don't, you know, Melvin Ingram was like this,

or it was a Casey Hayward. Like, why isn't anyone paying Casey Hayward? I don't know. But so that does happen, but you got to be the team that gets a lot of those. Or is it a better bet, in your opinion, to go with the let's draft somebody and see what happens?

And then if it fails, we draft somebody else and see what happens. I mean, it would be nice to know what the trade market is like for Kirk Cousins. I think that comes down to part of it in this situation. I don't know. I really have no clue what that might be. And the Vikings have been stuck in this range. As you mentioned, maybe they could have gotten someone like Mac Jones, but you wouldn't have necessarily known that Mac Jones was going to be there at that point in time also.

But, yeah, I think you could think about drafting a quarterback. I do think we're at the point now in Cousins' contract where bringing in someone, even if you're thinking about potentially retaining him, maybe isn't the worst option ever also, especially if you want to bring in someone and look at them during the summer and then see if you can trade C at the end of the summer, a la Sam Bradford type of trade at the end of the summer, if you can move on from him. So yeah, I think those are all options. It's really just going to depend on what your opportunity cost is for doing those types of options. I think this year we clearly do not have a top quarterback. It might be a little bit more difficult difficult though, because at least I haven't

really gone through team by team, but I think there are quite a few more teams when we start to put in the Steelers, the Saints, the Bucks, others that have cores that you could say are one player away, which is starting to make me think there's two different things there. One, the draft market might be a little bit hotter for these quarterbacks than what you would have had in a normal year. And number two, I don't know, maybe the trade market for Kirk cousins is a little bit better because of

that too. If someone wants to install him in there. So yeah, it's really just weighing those two things against each other. And I don't think there's an answer. I don't think you should force any one particular thing to happen without knowing what those variables are. If they were to get a first round pick for cousins, I don't know how you can turn that down

considering how it didn't work for the past regime, considering all the needs you have on your roster, especially on the defensive side. And, and we're going to get into this, but just the general inability of the NFL to decide which quarterbacks are going to be good. I think that that increases your case to say, we don't really know. And we'll talk about some of your studies on these quarterbacks who are coming out, but we just don't really have a good idea. So you can always build around that person if it's a hit though. And that's the thing you, you mentioned the no sure thing. And I, I don't know what is a sure thing when you're, when you're doing anything right. Like they're, they have drafted guys that I thought were great picks that blew up. They've drafted guys that I thought were

terrible picks that turned out to be good. I mean, I thought Brian O'Neill, like what a goofy pick this guy, who's a tight end size at the end of the second round. Why didn't you draft the first round guard? What is your problem? And then the's like the third best player on the team so uh the uncertainty element of it weighs really heavily to me yeah i mean if you can get a first round pick for him i think that's compelling uh however much cap you may need to eat probably as a secondary consideration i would think here uh being that you're going to be locked in anyway and i think the problem so this is the big the big picture picture issue when it comes to cousin inins in this year decision. You don't want to necessarily make a one-year decision into a three-year decision because if you decide to bring Kirk Cousins back for one year, it becomes very tempting to then say, you know what we're going to do?

Let's restructure your contract. Let's bring down that cap number this season and let's figure out the best three-year plan with Kirk Cousins instead of the best one-year plan with Kirk Cousins. So that's the one thing I would really be against because I just don't think you want to limit your flexibility in any situation here. That would be my number one thing. Don't limit your flexibility. Don't limit what you can look at. And that would be the one thing that would really be an X to me to say you're limiting not only what you can do this off season, but potentially next offseason and the offseason after that. If they stay with Cousins on a one-year deal and draft a quarterback, or even just wait and see until 2023,

that to me isn't as exciting for the content, of course. If they draft a quarterback, it's super fun. But we'll set new records after that. But even just getting a year to look at that player, like clearly Green Bay did not look at Jordan Love as Aaron Rodgers' backup and go, can't wait to see him in there. Like they were just down on their knees saying,

please come back, Aaron. If Jordan Love had looked incredible, they probably would have done that. So if you're the Vikings and you draft Desmond Ritter or something, and he comes in as your backup and looks great in practice which they can get a lot out of and training camp and all that and you keep cousins then you could do the alex smith type of thing and then hand the ball over to the next guy and then if he's not good then you can make the decision later what you want to do there or if cousins is kevin o'connell's best friend of all

time and wins mvp and they go to the super bowl then you know that you it is possible um so i've never been against that option it just feels like to me it's sort of kicking the ball down the road on a team that is not good enough to win at this moment without a major overhaul of a lot of different pieces yeah yeah i mean. I mean, I, I, I don't disagree with that assessment, but at the same time, even if you keep cousins around, there are other moves around the periphery. You can start to make, to make it a, not a total, not a total rebuild, but a quasi repositioning for what would happen with, let's say a rookie quarterback on, on the roster at that point in time.

Because at least, I don't know, we don't have the exact opinion from Zimmerman here, but I'm going to say he's not so high on Kellen Mond right now as potentially being that guy next season. I get a lot of questions about Mond. And I don't want to be insulting because he's a young quarterback who was picked in the third round. From the very beginning, this was never really a thing that was going to be a thing. But boy, was it bad in training camp. And if it didn't change by worlds in practice, they should have played Sean Mannion. That was the right decision.

And that's he's not a part of the the long term type of thing. But I was going to say, what did you say? Quasi re, what was it? What did you say? I don't even know what I said. Re, re, re, I wasn't with rebuild. Repositioning or something? Repositioning, yeah. I'm inventing new words here.

I was going to say that Kwesi needs to borrow that when we ask him about rebuilding. It's like, well, it's more of a quasi repositioning. Yeah, I don't know. Quasi probably isn't even necessary there. It's probably just a repositioning. But yeah, let's go for it. Well, let's talk about this quarterback draft class and what some of the numbers say.

Because I realized that me talking about how nobody knows what they're doing when it comes to scouting quarterbacks is it's not even close to draft time yet. And I've already gotten over the top with it. Like I I've gotten to the point where I look up every former, like, or every great quarterback and their draft profiles and go through all the hilarious criticisms, including Derek Carr's tiny hands recently. But like, like what, what, what does the data say in terms of how strong or weak this actually is? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's hard to say that the performance, the on-field performance data can tell you more about how strong it is than just what the perception is and where you're expecting these guys to be drafted. I mean, that is the most important thing. And it's really just separating between that,

how much you're augmenting off of that, whether you can get ideas about guys who are clearly overvalued because of certain traits or clearly undervalued because of certain traits or certain attributes or how they have they played. So I think what we can say though, is if we do just look at this statistically, it is kind of a second tier type of class. There is no first tier prospect when it comes to either our grading or if it comes to an efficiency metric, if you want to use something like expected points added, I've done adjustments based upon the opponents

that have been faced there. And even then when you add these adjustments, no one's getting up in a very, very high level. But I think what's more important sometimes is to dig into the internals and how these guys play. And I'm becoming more and more interested in trying to pick out particular styles of play that have translated better to the nfl either because like college play is so easy sometimes with the mismatches that you can have that you try to find types of plays where you're not having those

mismatches and i think that replicates the pro game a little bit better. But the problem is whenever you do something like that, you're decreasing the evidence that you're looking at further and further and further, and then it can be deceptive. It's not going to be that stable necessarily going forward when you're just looking at smaller and smaller slices of what they've done. Right. That's always the hard thing, because I was looking at what you were saying about guys who scrambled in college and how effective they were at that. And maybe you could talk a

little more about that, because I think that anyone who's watched the last four years of Kirk Cousins, everyone would agree this guy throws a nice football. But the one thing that is sort of impossible to squeeze more out of the orange or whatever the saying is is with his mobility like it's just not there and when you start to look at the even the escapability when he's sort of in the clutches it does not happen at all there's no running whatsoever like joe burrow um who didn't score particularly well on your data from college but he converted what three third downs in that game against k Kansas City because he took off Patrick Mahomes is not fast and runs really funny actually and gained like 50 yards

in the game against Buffalo because that's a part of some of these guys game and I think that with defensive lines being as ruthless as they are in the NFL blitz is being as as effective as they are coming from all over the place with new innovations all the time from defensive minds. It just seems really necessary that escapability more than even running would be valuable. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's like functional mobility though, is what you're using there. And what it does is it, I mean,

it gives you another out for a successful play there. The means with which you can get a successful play, adding scrambling to that is a huge, huge function, or even being able to add throwing effectively on the run is another way where you're saying you're extending the play. I mean, when you look at, for instance, I've looked at these different numbers, like for how many sacks some guys are taking versus how often they're pressured. I mean, if you look at the time to throw for guys like Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, I mean, they hold the ball a very, very long time. But they're not taking a lot of sacks because it is a strategic element of their game.

But it's an element that you can't have if you can't move like that. It's pretty, you could almost say a guy like Baker Mayfield and Russell Wilson. I think they're very, very similar players. But Russell Wilson, by having that escapability that Baker doesn't have, it just gives him an extra element to his game that you can't overcome. So I think that's becoming more and more important. And then, of course, offenses are structuring that more and more on there. And they're also building into their practice reps and others to say, this is when we're going to escape.

We're going to have this part of our game plans to escape and scramble in these circumstances. Right. And then how the receivers react, because with the Vikings, if there's pressure, it's like if the ball doesn't come out quick, the receivers might as well just go back to the sideline. There is no second level to that. But with Wilson, I remember maybe it was Lockett who was talking about this, about how he and Russell Wilson just understand each other.

Like, here's what you do when he rolls left, when he goes backwards, when he's rolling right. And they're just finding different ways to get open on the move. And those things, those things create extra downs. Like the Vikings ranking 24th and third down percentage since 2018. That's a quarterback stat to me that's not like delvin cook is not usually running on third and five or third and seven right and that sort of tells you about like that's when the defensive ends pin their ears back the defensive coordinators spend all week dialing up the third down stuff and that's where one of the reasons i think the

vikings defense has struggled more i think think, I mean, other than, you know, falling apart personnel wise, but I think that like, there's these little edges that you're looking for. If you're going to draft a quarterback that maybe Kirk sort of teaches you about. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, the problem is not only do we have kind of limited data on the quarterbacks that are in college. We have to a degree, fairly limited data of the quarterbacks once they come into the NFL. I mean, only so few quarterbacks are drafted in the first round. So many changes have happened to the NFL systems that, you know, how is that also being incorporated in the success or lack of success that we've seen? So I do think there is also a possibility that the success that we've seen from quarterbacks who have displayed the ability to scramble and the ability also to perform under pressure in college, and that's some stuff that I've been looking at a lot, and to avoid sacks in college.

So some of these characteristics that we have, whether it is a Patrick Mahomes, a Deshaun Watson, a Kyler Murray, Jackson somewhat, Joe Burrow somewhat, whether it is those sorts of guys, if that's a sticky point going forward, we're still only talking about a handful of players, but at least there is a logical sense to what they're doing. And it is kind of like a real attributes and a real theme that you can see

amongst those guys who have been successful versus maybe your Josh Rosen's, your Baker Mayfield's, your Daniel Jones's to a degree and so on. So does anybody stick out to you then as you're looking at these numbers for this year's draft class? It's hard. And then this one, I mean, I think the two guys who have displayed the most value add when it comes to being able to scramble or to run. Um, I mean, Malik Willis is probably the obvious guy that the people are thinking about when it comes to that, that sort of mold. Uh, but also Matt Corral has been pretty effective when he's been doing that. He's smaller. He's only a little bit over 200 pounds. He's six one. He's not like, he's not a big framed He's smaller. He's only a little bit over 200 pounds. He's 6'1".

He's not a big framed guy like Willis who may get that kind of Josh Allen type of mold when he's been doing it. So I think those two guys, the guys have been effective. Now Corral's been much better, at least over the last season when it came to things like sack avoidance and how he's performed under pressure. But it's a weird thing with him because his grading for us under pressure has been poor, but his results have been pretty good under pressure. So I think that he's made some big mistakes. And I think he's also made plays which there's always a give and take between grading and

the efficiency statistics, because sometimes we'll say a play is a quote unquote zero on a play. We won't give someone any credit for it. But, you know, if you avoid a sack, if you scramble around and then you make an easy throw, not everyone can do that. So it's, it's doing those sorts of things. You know, Patrick Mahomes doesn't necessarily grade particularly well for us in recent years too, sometimes because there's those types of things where you run around a whole bunch, then you make a play where it's not the most difficult play. It's not a Russell Wilson,

you know, dropping it on a dime 30 yards down the field, but it's a play that 90% of quarterbacks can't make leading up to the throw. Right. And that's what I always urge with people is every one of these statistics, whether it's a PFF grade or quarterback rating or anything else, it all requires a bunch of context to understand what ingredients are being thrown in the pot to come out with this statistic to try and glean some truth or evidence out of it which i was going to ask you so of course uh at all times during the off season i have the pff draft guide up in front of me right um it's just it's just it's a tab i am the worst with the tabs i don't know if you're this guy too one two i'm actually

pretty pretty good about that i'm i'm a clear out my inbox clear out my text message uh type of type of anal person i guess i have 13 tabs open as we speak right now and the only reason you see what's on the tabs by the top or are they so squished that you can't have any you have to scroll through them all to figure out where you're actually looking for i i know where stream yard is which is what we're recording this on it's got a little duck but i can't okay so you can at least see the duck i'm ready to get it small enough you can't even see that but and i can also see where my pff uh draft guide is to quickly reference it but as i look through these different numbers so you've got a lot of things to look at you've got your grades your microenter analysis and things like that but there's all sorts of different statistics

adjusted completion percentage depth of target target, big time throws, like lots of stuff, which is great as we get closer and closer to be able to look at different parts of someone's game. But what is meaningful within those statistics from someone's college results as we look at these quarterbacks? Yeah. I mean, for these, don't say nothing, Kevin, because I'm not going to say nothing. I'm not gonna say nothing, but you know, I have my, I have my own system also going on

over here. So it's like one of those things where sometimes this will happen where people will try to like dunk on me on Twitter. They'll be like, well, you have so-and-so is the number one rated quarterback. I'm like, you know, news to me that I own PFF. Like I should tell Chris Collinsworth, he needs to start sending me some checks, uh, basically of what's going on here. But, uh, but I, you know, the, the, the important information. So I'm looking through some of these statistics that we have on there. I mean, I think, um, these pressure rates and

pressure to sack, I found as being more and more important on here because sack avoidance seems to be something. It's one of the metrics that I'm looking at where I look at quarterbacks and I say, based upon their pressure rate, what is their expected sack rate? Based on the pressure rate, based upon how long they hold the ball, what's their expected sack rate and what is the actual sack rate? And when you find that it's low on that basis, I think it shows a couple of different things. One, it shows that they might be a quarterback who knows how to invite pressure. And again, that's what I talk about these guys like a Patrick Mahomes, like a Josh Allen, like a Deshaun Watson.

They take a lot of pressure, but they don't necessarily take a lot of sacks because they they're inviting pressure in order to accomplish a goal. Right. But but then you don't want to take a sack as part of that. And I think it also shows your ability to turn a pressure into a positive play by avoiding a sack or delaying the sack too. So that's one thing that I've gone there. And again, that's something that Corral has probably been the best in according to these numbers. Because you don't want to just look at plays when they're not pressured

and as far as whether they're taking a sack or not, because that's mostly an offensive line sort of statistics. So I think that's good. And I don't know if we have their pressure grading split out here, but again, they're grading under pressure. And what I've looked at is I tried to, to normalize these things by saying, this is how efficient they are. I'm looking at expected points added.

This is how efficient they are from a clean pocket. What would you expect their efficiencies to be when pressured based on the fact that they're this efficient from a clean pocket? So that kind of normalizes like teammates and normalizes defenses that they've faced and normalizes everything else. And if they're performing at a higher level under pressure than you would expect based upon how well they perform from a clean pocket, that again is a signal to me that under pressure, they know how to use pressure to perform. And is a signal to me that under pressure, they know

how to use pressure to perform. And that's going to be more similar to what they're going to face in the NFL than it is when they're sitting back in a clean pocket, you know, patting the ball four times and throwing it down the field in college. Right. So I used to think that intermediate grade was really important, but then I sort of came along to, well, a lot of that can be schemed, you know, like play actions or RPOs, those are kind of intermediate throws. And then you think, well, deep throws, sometimes there's not enough of them. Short throws are screens. Like, wait, do I, do any of the throws matter? I'm not even sure. We can't like parse those out. So I think that this way of looking at it is really interesting because in the NFL, you are under pressure quickly, all the time, and you have to do something about it.

Now, Kirk Cousins or Tom Brady, these quarterbacks who don't move, one of the things they've done about it is they just try to read the defense and get it out as fast as they can. I think Brady's pocket presence is underappreciated historically. It's thought of as a statue, but him and Peyton Manning, they avoided sacks and they moved around. But a lot of times later in his career, it's getting the ball out quickly. That's not something Kirk is amazing at, but he's not bad when you blitz him. I think his numbers are pretty good. Um, but I just think the league in general is getting faster at pressuring. And I don't know if this is actual evidence statistically or not, but I looked back even five, six years at what the

grades were for offensive linemen. And they were better than they are now. Like the, the whole, the totality of offensive line play has gone down. And I don't think that's because players got worse. I think that's because defenses are getting better at this. Yeah, no, I, they're definitely getting better at this yet. We've heard a lot about, you know, they, they don't coach as well, or the way that they play in college, they're running, you know, they don't coach as well or the way that they play in college. They're running, you know, the different types of pass sets that don't necessarily translate. I mean, that might be part of it, but defense is much, much more complicated. I mean, the one thing that's really taken over the NFL at this point is, you know, it's kind of like the evolution of the zone blitz with the simulated pressures where it's just very difficult to figure out who's

coming from where on any particular play. And when that's happening, it's not, it's, it's hard for these linemen to process and to work together as a cohesive unit. And to, you know, when you're, when you're suddenly going from, I mean, these guys are working before the snap too, on what they think they're going to do. So when you have to think about three different things that you might have to do before the snap versus this one thing that you might have to do for the snap, I think that makes a very, very big difference. And when it comes to the quarterback, again, sometimes your pressure performance, what I like to look at is not just avoiding sacks. It's not just escaping out of the pocket and scrambling. It's also when faced with pressure, do you know how to either A, make a gain or B, minimize a loss? Sometimes if you just dirt the ball into the ground, that may not seem like the most impressive thing to do.

But if you know where the receiver is, where you can just throw the ball at their feet and move on to live for another play, that's another thing that will end up coming through in these numbers where if you're just grading it, you're getting a zero on a play where if you had a very fast pressure come, uh, so your, your, your, your tackle is completely blown away. If you dirt them, if you, if you can sense that coming and you dirt the ball, you get a zero, probably by our grading. If you take a sack, you probably also get a zero because we're going to say it's the offensive line's fault, but those are two highly different outcomes, especially when you throw in the, the probability you could the probability you could strip sack everything else that could potentially happen in there. Right. This is one thing that I really enjoy about the grades, especially when the QB annual comes out is where you can see kind of

all the things that combine for a grade where you have some players that have more big time throws, but more turnover worthy plays. You have some that have less of both but they have similar grades and things like that i think this is a really underrated element of it one of my favorite stats of all time is that one year dan marino took six sacks in a full season i get make that was a huge part of his value is that the guy always got rid of the football and it's something eli manning did extremely well that i did a Twitter thread once, which, you know, irritated people. Cause like you said, everything irritates people, but like there, there were some things

inside of the numbers as you look deeper on Manning, where you could kind of get it. Why during his prime, he could win games and have like the right side of variance because his big time throws were high. His pressure to sack was not very high. Um, and I, I think that this is something that we have to look closer at as pressure increases. Let me ask you this. And then I just want to ask you who thinks going to win the Super Bowl, because, you know, we're not at Radio Row talking all Super Bowl.

But do you think the league ever gets good at this, ever gets good at not drafting Blake Bortles first and having it blow up in their face like is there percentage gains that can be made when it comes to drafting quarterbacks that are somewhere in the numbers in the tape whatever it might be obviously numbers is your thing um or is it always going to be this way where we just come out of the draft and three years later we go huh everybody thought darn old was going to be good and then he wasn't who knows yeah yeah um i think it's more of honestly that there isn't really that that much that that can be done here i mean for instance i was having this discussion on on on my podcast unexpected points check it out um that about

this whole thing of goats in different sports right right? And we think about Tom Brady versus Michael Jordan versus Tiger Woods versus, I don't know, Serena Williams versus Wayne Gretzky. These are all the people in other sports. They're like phenoms from very young age. They immediately come in and are playing at extremely high level. I was playing the Tom Brady had one second team, all pro before he turned 30 years old in the, in the NFL. I mean, we all know about the six round draft pick. We know about everything else, but also a lack of individual accolade success.

You know, Jordan had three MVPs, Serena had like 10 majors, Tiger had 10 majors. I think Gretzky had nine different heart trophies for the MVP there. So there's just something about football that's very, very difficult to really measure how good someone is and to know how they are going to progress in their career going forward. It's not just Brady. I mean, let's look at Drew Brees as someone where if their career turns a different direction, Drew Brees doesn't become Drew Brees. If Steve Young's career doesn't go a certain way, Steve Young would never have been heard of. All of these guys could have kind of fallen off in one direction or another. So I just think there is a ton of randomness. But what I will say is

that I think the major improvements that can happen when it comes to drafting are draft more often, take shots more often, and not being content with what you already have, even if you think that player is good. And that's why I was like a big advocate of the Jalen Hurts pick when most people were slamming it. It's kind of like not having this binary designation where Carson Wentz is the same thing as having Patrick Mahomes. It's not the same thing as having Patrick Mahomes, right? You don't just have or don't have one. So I think that's a big one. And number two is I know this kind of goes against the idea that you don't know what you have for a long time, but don't be afraid to, after a couple,

even a couple of years of poor performance, not necessarily send whoever your guy is packing, but go ahead and draft another quarterback again. Don't wait around for them. So I think like those are the areas where you can gain more is by duplicating and not just having like quarterback failed, quarterback failed, change this quarterback out, insert new quarterback after so many years and so on. It's just looking at how you can take more shots, like embrace that uncertainty in a sort of way by bringing in more options, knowing what you have is not necessarily what you think you have a year or two down the road and vice versa.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And especially too, that even if someone has a good year, that doesn't mean that they're a great quarterback that you should sign to a huge contract. And you know, Baker Mayfield, I mean, if he switches his years, if he had his 2020 this year, then they're signing him to a huge contract, even though he's just not that good. Like you can get a good season out of someone and then recognize this isn't someone we need to stay with or that he meets a certain baseline that we could also probably meet with somebody else if we bring them in. So there's that, but I don't know that there's ever going to be an answer for how much different it is from college to the NFL. It just feels like the college game is so far behind. It would be like watching somebody play pickup

basketball at the park and then saying, can they play in the NBA? It just seems impossible. There aren't as many clear markers for success. You know what's interesting though is we talk about some other sports where even in basketball, it used to be very much that it's actually gone in the opposite direction they've gotten worse if you want to say worse at drafting because well it was largely like you were just drafting these really tall centers all the time so it's like it's pretty easy to say he's seven foot tall you know draft him so it's a sort of situation but even then if you think about in the past you know whether it's uh you know jordan is the third pick it's like whoa he didn't made all the way to third occurs in the draft with akima lojo and you know magic lebron larry bird

was a top three guy everyone all these guys are in the top of the draft and now you have steph curry who went later now you have yannis who went extremely late now you have uh you know kawaii leonard who went pretty late like it're starting to see, even in this year, when you don't have those very clear markers for success and everything isn't as standardized as it was back in the old college basketball system and standardized in the NBA that it was, now that there are all these different ways for players to win, especially these middle range sort of players, it becomes more difficult, even if they have better tools for evaluating players. Right.

And the thing that you'll never, ever be able to figure out. And I know some teams, if not a lot of teams are doing this, that some teams have sports psychologists who are in the room who are evaluating these things, which, you know, I mean, but that's the, I think it's a clever idea, but that's the thing you'll just never know. mean janice onto takumpo is the most driven person to get better how will you know that like who knew that duane haskins there's another world where duane haskins is really good right like throws throws a good ball put up incredible statistics like you could he was never going to be peyton manning but there's a world where if he really wanted it that he comes to work as the

first guy in and does all those things that he becomes a good NFL quarterback and Washington feels great about themselves now. But the guy was a jackass and didn't seem to care. You know, he didn't follow his COVID rules. He forgot to go out there for victory formation. You just, you know, whatever, clearly didn't know the offense, things like that. Somebody told a story once about Jamarcus Russell and how their quarterback coach, who used to work for the Vikings, he gave him blank DVDs and said, I put a bunch of plays on here. Can you go tell me which play you've heard this one before? Right. Tell me which plays you love. And then he came back and like, oh, they're all good. All good to go. Like, yeah, I didn't

put anything on those DVDs. So like Jam Jamarcus Russell fail because of his skills? Of course not. Or his numbers or his accomplishments is because he didn't care or didn't want it. And I don't know how you could figure that out because every guy in interviews is going to be like, oh yeah, I want to be the next great play. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny.

Jamarcus Russell, you know, uh, Bruce Gretkowski does stuff for PFF. He was telling a story where he was on the Raiders back then when uh jamarcus was either in his first or second season he was saying that the coaches would get him to they would like beg him to go over to jamarcus's house and like bring game film and like just put it in for him and like really try to get him and he would have to like go pick up double cheeseburgers or something and bring him over for jamarcus. It was so funny. Yeah, because Jamarcus is a dude, man. Talking about analytics, if you looked up how he performed, he was pretty good. He was pretty good in college. He wasn't just a one-year type of guy either. He

played pretty well for a couple of years. He had some great statistics. So yeah, I think all those things are difficult. The thing is, we don't have evidence to judge that. And I think that what I like from Quazy is what he said is, well, first of all, he said analytics is kind of a loaded word. And I think that there is some loaded word to it. But what he talked about is he he won like empirical decision making. So it's just if you have evidence rather than saying, well, we can't draft this guy because remember, Jamarcus Russell. And so then we can't draft this guy. What you could say is, listen, we have all of these different prospects that we have information on conversations that we've had, and let's figure out a way to kind of systematize this, feed it in and say, what has in the past, what is the evidence that we have in the past? Not the theories, not the logic, not the, you know, the most recent thing that happened. What is the evidence that we have in the past for how well

they're performed? Is it, Is it always going to be right? No, it's not always going to be right, but it's about trying to make better decisions, not just using the bot computer that you click, but getting real information you've collected in a variety of ways and then being able to apply that going forward. Right, which might mean mining the scouting reports

for certain things. Yes, totally mining the scouting reports. Yeah, that would be a big, huge, a huge part of it. It's just when the quote unquote analytics comes into play, it isn't like, oh, I remember that prospect from five years ago. It's let's have everything you've said about a prospect

and rating them on certain attributes, one to 10, maybe with some sort of thing. So we can just bring it all up and study it and look into it, get some ideas. And then we can go and look at different things. It's really just doing things in a more thoughtful way. It's not even doing things differently. Like when a coach is making a fourth down decision, he's doing everything in his head that's being done in a model.

He's just doing it in a way using his own intuition as opposed to taking tons and tons and reams of evidence and really figuring out what may be the right decision. Right. And the thing about that is you plug all that into your supercomputer and it goes boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And it spits out, I don't know, Sam Howell. But you only get to draft Sam Howell. Like you don't get to draft a hundred Sam Howells and 42 work out. And then you're like, you know what I mean?

So if you have, if there's a 42% chance that Sam Howell is a great quarterback and there's a 36% chance that Desmond Ritter is a great quarterback, you're like, Oh, let's pick Sam Howell. It's the right decision. But I mean, that's not that big of a percentage chance. You know what I mean? You can be extremely confident. You've made the right decision while also acknowledging the probability that you are right. Isn't necessarily that high, if that makes sense. Like you should always take, you should always make it. You can be very, very confident.

It's like a fourth down decision. Again, you can be very, very confident that you should go for it on fourth down, but that doesn't mean that you think 98% of the time you're going to get it if you go for it. It's just you be confident in the decision, but not, but just understand that the results aren't necessarily going to be there. And that's what these quarterback picks are all about. And that's why you should never say for any prospect, no matter how good you think they are or how poor you think they are, that, you know, there's no scenario under which you'll see they'll fail. They're, you know, they're, they're a starter, no matter what, or, or any other quarterback, you say, there's no way it can work in the NFL. Neither one of those things should apply to anyone. The second to last question was 15 minutes ago. So real quick, no, it was a really great

discussion. This is why I love having you on the show, Kevin, because we love to peel back the layers of the statistics and you are the best at doing that. Um, but, uh, Superbowl, who are you thinking? I mean, and the Rams. I don't know. I feel like the Rams are kind of strangely undervalued as everyone has a little bit of a crush on Joe Burrow and the Bengals right now. I mean, they're a four and a half point favorite for a reason.

And as good of the teams as the Bengals have beaten, which the Titans maybe weren't that great, but having beaten the Chiefs and do what they did. I mean, the Rams have been very impressive all season. And if it weren't for four fumbles, they would have just really run through the NFC, including running right through the Buccaneers. So I think they they're the high level team. And again, I'm very confident that they're the right team to pick. I still think that still means there's a 35% ish sort of chance that the, the Bengals are going to win. So, you know, it's a better chance than flipping a coin and getting heads twice in a row.

The Bengals have a better chance than that. So I'm not saying, so, you know, again, it's like, everyone wants to come at you afterwards saying like, you can be very, very confident. One team is the better team and still not know what's going to happen necessarily in the Superbowl. Right. Plus sometimes people think if it's below 50, it's just zero. Oh yeah. I mean, did that happen with the election and Nate Silver and everything else? It's like, you were wrong. It's like, well, I said, Trump had a 30% chance to win again,

better than flipping a coin twice and getting heads twice in a row. That's a pretty big chance. Right. But instead of it's, Hey, if the guy only has a 30% chance to be good, then it's zero at, at Kevin Cole, PFF on Twitter and the unexpected points podcast. You do tremendous, tremendous work and a must follow on Twitter for sure during a draft season and everything else. So really thankful that you could take the time to come on Kevin. And I appreciate you, man. Thanks. Okay. Well, I love doing this. So, you know, hit me up anytime.