Based on the threads the opinion on JJ is varied, I did a quick dive into numbers for myself and decided to share to see what you all thought.
My personal opinion is I'm of the the mind set of whichever QB gives us the best combination of opportunity to win this year along with their development moving forward contributing the most to winning in future years should get the job. Meaning I'd take our lumps and give up a win or two this year if that meant that moving forward that year of starting experience sets us up to best take advantage of the offense talent were now getting this year, next and future classes due to the vastly improved offensive line and skill player recruitment were seeing.
To me the possibility, as some have mentioned, JJ as somewhat of a stopgap year starting this season only to get beat out by Hooker or Patterson the year after seams difficult for me to argue. You're then starting in 2019 a QB that while more talented has no experience, along with most of his more talented receiving core having 1 or no years of college experience (Turner, Mitchell, Simmons, Payoute, Pinkney, Bowick, maybe Hazel). I like the idea of aligning our skill guys and QB if it's possible rather than constantly going from experience WRs w/inexperienced QB and vice versa which I believe we best and last saw this with the years we had Tyrod, Boykin and Coale together
I'm a believer that you either ride JJ until he leaves or unless Hooker or Patterson bomb out this fall camp and are significantly worse than JJ was last year you start Hooker or QP either game one or a few games into the season (similarly to the nfl now with the new redshirt rule I think you'll see teams playing a vet for the first few games and if they don't like what they see to put in the young guy since they can still stash him if it doesn't go well with him either).
Clemson did something similar to this in 2014 after Tahj Boyd left, Cold Stoudt started their first game and then slowly put DeShaun Watson and by game 3 and 4 against FSU and UNC the job was his and he played well until he got hurt, but they still had Stoudt to hold them over but the team was clearly DeShaun's at that point.
We all with the eye test saw JJ burn up teams early on only to struggle once we got to the ACC part of the schedule. So his great r-freshmen stats were kind of deceiving at the end of the season because of those early games and I think leads to what people argue about since what they saw via the eye test doesn't match with the concept of record breaking numbers. I'm sure this has been done but I dug into some of the numbers out of curiosity a bit to see if the numbers reflected what my eye saw.
JJ's Performance
Only 5 teams we played finished with a winning record and 1 was an FCS team, 3 finished ranked (includes bowl against OK St).
Against P5 teams w/winning record
Teams Combined Record 37-10
Our Record 1-3
Att: 21.5
Comp: 35.8
Pass Yds: 233.8
TD: 0.8
Int: 1.5
Rush Att: 12.8
Rush Yards: 44
Rush TD: 0.8
Against .500 and losing record P5 teams, non-P5 and FCS teams (this was to look at him against talent not just what his performance was in Ws or Ls)
Teams Combined Record: 44-62
Our Record 8-1
Att: 16.7
Comp: 28.1
Pass Yds: 228.9
TD: 1.9
Int: 0.4
Rush Att: 8.7
Rush Yards: 17.3
Rush TD: 0.2
I did a few more comparisons, one that I found interesting as well was if you took what I did above but only kept the P5 teams w/.500 and losing recs and took out the non-P5 and FCS teams.
Teams Combined Record: 29-42
Our Record 5-1
Att: 15.0
Comp: 27.3
Pass Yds: 194.7
TD: 1.2
Int: 0.5
Rush Att: 9.5
Rush Yards: 17.5
Rush TD: 0.3
You see a big drop in Pass TDs and yards, everything else stays about the same. The 3 games against Delaware, ODU and ECU accounted for 892 of his passing yards and 10 TDs. In the other 6 games he threw for a combined 1168 yards and 7 TDs. in these combined 9 games he threw 4 Int total.
In the 4 games against P5 teams w/winning records you obviously expect him to struggle more and threw for a combined 931 yards and 3 TDs and 5 ints.
I mentioned my take before and feel free to decide what you take from this, but I just thought it would be interesting to take a look a bit more quantitatively.
Comments
I'm confident JJ will be the starter and will have a great year. I think he spent all of last season banged up after the WVU game. Couple that with the inexperience at receiver and it's actually impressive to see what he did after the fact regardless of how I felt at the time. I know Cam Phillips is gone, but I'd rather have 4-5 guys with one year of experience than 1 guy with 3 years of experience and the rest with no experience.
Thank you for doing this! Wow, Jackson threw the ball a bunch more against teams with winning records. I am guessing that is a combination of two things: 1) the game was close (WVU) or we were losing (Clemson, Miami, OSU in the 2nd half) so we had to pass more for variety or play catch up. 2) I bet if we look back at how well we ran the ball we'd see that the better teams, with the exception of OSU, made us one-dimensional and forced Jackson into much tougher passing situations. Forcing a r-Fr into pass pro and removing any RPOs and easy throws will make any QB's life a lot tougher. OSU just had such a good offense that we were forced to play catch up after a few mistakes.
If the running game improves I have a feeling that Jackson's production will also improve. That's a big IF, but I am cautiously optimistic.
I really appreciate the effort put into these stats (welcome to TKP by the way), but I also hope this is the last JJ thread we see before the opener. The comments all tend to be the same and nobody's opinions of him seem to have swayed in the offseason.
I'm still mostly neutral on JJ, he played well enough the first 3rd or so of the season that we could play with just about anybody. I think there is definitely something to the rumor that he was playing hurt the 2nd half of the season and it limited what the offense could do.