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Mobile – Had a chance to watch Baylor quarterback Bryce Petty extensively this week. Also had a chance to talk to him. Interesting prospect . . .
I saw a report that the Jets are showing interesting in Bryce Petty.
I’m not shooting this down, but we need to keep this in context.
Just because teams meet with prospects at the Senior Bowl, NFL Combine, East-West Shrine Game, at their complex, whatever, it doesn’t mean they are showing interest. It means they are doing their due diligence.
They interview hundreds of players.
Do they pick hundreds of players?
You are going to see a lot of “interest” reports over the next few months.
Take them with a grain of salt.
I think Petty can be very good if he sits for a couple of years.
That eclectic Baylor offensive system he played in, doesn’t translate to the NFL.
Did you know, Petty’s first two years with the Bears, they had no offensive playbook.
The coaches, led by the head coach Art Briles a smart offensive mind, drew a few plays on the board, and they practiced them over-and-over.
Petty’s last few years they had a playbook, but not much of one.
Going from a system like that, to the NFL, where playbooks are as thick as War-and-Peace, is a different world
Petty knows he has a lot of work to do.
“We were in the gun, so the footwork part of it and playing under center, calling out protections, reading defenses, and those sort of things (I need to work on),” Petty said at the Senior Bowl. “Baylor was based on tempo. [An NFL offense] is not something I can’t do, [the Baylor offense] was just something I was told to do. Here you have to read defense and know what to do with the ball based on it.”
Has he talked to Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, who has struggled making the transition from Baylor to the NFL?
“Me and Robert talked a little bit,” Petty said. “It’s different for everybody. I’m a different quarterback than Robert. He is different than me.”
I’d sit this guy for a couple of years, but most NFL teams don’t have any patience these days with quarterbacks. It’s ridiculous and short-sighted.
Petty is smart and driven. Given the guy time to transform for Baylor’s funky college offense to an conventional NFL offense, I think he can do it.
“It’s not a different language to me,” Petty said about moving from his college offense to the NFL. “It’s not like I’m speaking Spanish. I was writing in print and now I’m in cursive. It’s going to take me a second to kind of learn things and get in a rhythm of what is going on and what they want, but I have no doubt intelligence wise and athleticism-wise I will be able to pick it up.”
But it’s going to take time.
And in the NFL, that is in short supply.
January 22, 2015
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