The cardinal sin of the running QB..

Interceptions..

If a QB isn't going to throw for 300 yards and win games often with their arm then it is imperative that they take care of the football and not give it to the other team. In my research i have found that the good QBs have been solid in this respect and that all of them were solid from the beginning, it wasn't something that they developed. Vince young on the other hand has problems..

Passes per int..
Mcnabb--46
Mcnair---38
Cunningham-32
Vick-----31
Culpepper-31
Young---22*

*This year young is throwing a pick for every 19 pass attempts.

Ints per season(13 or more starts)
Mcnabb--11
Mcnair---12
Vick-----12
Cunningham-13
Culpepper---15
Young--17*

*Note that i estimated young's ints this year at 20 based on his averages.

Note also that young has 16 ints this season with 3 games to go and neither mcnabb nor mcnair have ever had that many ints in any one season! Cunningham had 16 once but that was a year when he threw for almost 3900 yards and had 24td passes. I think we would forgive vince's 16 ints if he had 3900 yards and 24tds.

I write this to illustrate that vince young is at the heart of our offensive woes. Yesterday he had just 21 pass attempts but threw 2 ints. Even 1 int would have been too much..

 

I have been one of young's biggest supporters on this board and was the very first person on this entire site to suggest drafting young way back in december of 2005! I started a whole thread on it!

I have never been a young basher but his play is speaking for itself so if you want to keep your head stuck up that dark smelly place be my guest.

Fisher and chow are handcuffed by young. That's why i started this damn thread. I just proved that with facts. If young is throwing a pick every 19 passes(i used comparative stats to prove how bad that is) would the solution be to throw more passes?

As for bad WRs look at the guys mcnair had early in his career, or the thrash-pinkston pair that mcnabb had to work with for years or the bad WRs vick has had. Vick's leading WR were brian finneran, peerless price.

 

Look at jeff's point.

Young is throwing an int every 19 passes in an offense designed primarily to not give the ball up. Obviously we are failing in our objective.

What got me when looking at these other QBs is that none of them had these major problems with ints early in their careers except cunningham in his rookie year when he only played in 6 games . Here was steve mcnair literally off the farm as a rookie in houston and that rookie year mcnair threw 80 passes as a backup and had just one pick. He had just 4 picks in 143 pass attempts his second year. Mcnabb had 39 passes per pick in his first 2 seasons and vick 48 passes per pick in his first 2 seasons.

 

Slamma be my guest. You come up with the data for every QB drafting in the first rd for the last 20 years. Then if the information tells a story we will have it.

I compared vince to those other guys because that's what we wanted vince to be when we drafted him. That's what we thought vince was after last year.

 

Another interesting comparison..

QBs drafted in the 2006 draft.. Exception of ingle martin and charlie whitehurst who have not thrown a pass yet and jacobs who is out of the league..


Passes per int..

Gradkowski--35
Leinart------30
Cutler-------29
Croyle-------26
Clemens-----25
Jackson------25
Young-------22