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Sometimes there is a disconnect between headlines and stories . .
Seeing this a lot more the last couple of years.
The New York Post had a headline this week – “The signs Sam Darnold is ready to make jump Jets are counting on.”
This headline definitely drew me in. What are the signs?
Now, I’m not saying he’s not ready to take a jump. Good chance it happens, especially with Adam Gase in town. He’s considered a very good QB coach and also an innovative offensive play-caller.
But we haven’t seen any game action yet where the marriage of Darnold and Gase is on full display.
In the spring, I thought Darnold looked average, but who cares? It means squat. He was learning an entirely new offense. His head was spinning. Honestly, the spring is about teaching and learning, not style points. QB stats in the spring are foolish.
But my point is, even though Darnold’s uneven play in the spring means little, I wondered how the Post determined that, “Signs Sam Darnold is ready to make jump.”
The story never told us.
And I don’t blame writer Brian Costello one bit. The story was solid. It was a balanced look at Darnold’s positives and negatives at this point.
The story was fine.
The problem was the headline.
And Costello doesn’t write the headlines.
There have been a number of headlines on his stories the last couple of years that didn’t necessarily jibe with what he wrote.
Maybe the New York Post, like so many others, are obsessed with click-bait and getting people to click on stories, so this leads to misleading headlines to draw people in.
Where did Darnold display tangible signs this off-season of “making the jump the Jets are counting on?”
Once again, don’t take that as me going negative on Darnold. I’m not.
I’m making a nuanced point here.
He could make a big jump this year, but where are the signs that Post is talking about?
I think Gase will be great for Darnold.
Not only is he a very good QB coach, but he’s very good at dialing up what football people call “confidence building play-calling.”
He will be very good at keeping Sam in his comfort zone and not ask him to do a lot that makes him uncomfortable. Gase isn’t a coach who tries to force a square peg in a round hole.
Gase has more upside than Ryan Tannehill who is kind of robot out there. He usually needs the play to go exactly as called. He’s not great at improvising.
A league source told me that one thing Gase loves about Darnold is that he’s very good at “making plays off-schedule.”
In other words, if the play breaks down, he can make something out of nothing. The amazing play at Buffalo is an example of that, and his TD to Robby Anderson against Houston in the middle of the end zone, where he stepped up under pressure, and hit the speedster on a crossing route, are two examples of “off-schedule” plays.
So I think the Gase/Darnold marriage should work well.
I’m just saying that headline was very confusing because Darnold was pedestrian at best in the spring practices (which is fine), so where were the “signs?”
Strange headline.
July 19, 2019
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