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Let’s continue our deep dive into the Jets draft minus the foolish immediate grades . . .
To give a team a draft grade, right after a draft concludes, is mindless.
You really can’t discern how a successful a team’s draft is until two or three years after a particular draft.
So what we’re trying to do in this multi-part series, is look at a few of the Jets 2020 picks every day, and speculate on how they might help the Jets.
Let’s continue with the fourth-round selection of FIU quarterback James Morgan. For the unititated, FIU stands for Florida International University. It’s located in Miami, Florida, and is a lot bigger school than most people realize. They have around 60,000 enrolled students. The football team competes on the Division I level in Conference USA and is coached by former NFL coach Butch Davis.
Morgan is from Green Bay, Wisconsin, not an area where FIU recruits. The majority of their roster is from the football fertile state of Florida. Even with all the power programs recruiting the heck of the Florida, it’s such a great football state that FIU finds plenty of decent leftovers.
Morgan actually started out at Bowling Green University in Ohio, but when the man who recruited him, Dino Babers, left for Syracuse, the QB eventually left for FIU, after not fitting into the new coach’s spread offense. He was eligible immediately, because he graduated after just three years, so he qualified as a grad transfer. So he played his two years at FIU as a grad student.
Morgan had two terrific seasons at FIU, and was a hot commodity on the NFL in-person interview and virtual circuit prior to the draft. Almost every team in the league talked to him.
So how might he help the Jets?
Well first off all, while it’s hard to know how any college player’s game will translate to the NFL (that is why immediate grades are crazy), quarterback might be the hardest position to know. Playing QB in college is almost like a different position than playing QB in the NFL. Why do you think there are so many busts at QB?
Morgan has impressive raw skills, is extremely bright and has a great work ethic, however, he has a lot to work on. He needs to work on his pocket presence, accuracy and going through his progressive scans. The stuff he could get away with against Old Dominion, Charlotte and Western Kentucky, isn’t going to fly against NFL defenses.
He definitely needs a couple of red-shirt years on the NFL level. He doesn’t look like he will be ready to be the primary backup in 2020.
But with his great size (6-4, 230), rocket arm and intangibles, after a year or two of development, the Jets could have something here.
If the best case scenario comes to pass, and Morgan takes the next step as a QB after being molded over the next year or two, the Jets could have a good backup, or perhaps a possible replacement for Sam Darnold, if he, for whatever reason, regresses (not saying that’s going to happen, just being objective).
April 30, 2020
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