Fashionable or not, pocket is best place for QBs Aug. 18, 2003
By Pete Prisco
SportsLine.com Senior Writer
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It sometimes can produce violent collisions, knee-threatening lunges at a quarterback's legs and body-crashing hits that leave a man buried under a 350-pound lineman.
Yet for all its hazards, one thing can be said about the pocket where NFL passers make their living.
It's still the best and safest place to be.
A broken fibula suffered by Michael Vick in a meaningless preseason game Saturday night is a blow to the Falcons and the league because Vick is the NFL's marquee player, the Tiger Woods-Michael Jordan of the game. It also further enhances the argument that quarterbacks are meant to stay in that pocket.
Vick is a wonderful athlete, a dancer in cleats like no other passer before him, but even he made it a point this summer during an interview to say his goal was to cut down on his running outside the pocket.
"I'd rather throw it," he said. "It's a lot safer that way."
That proved prophetic when Vick suffered the broken leg while being tackled by Ravens defensive end Adalius Thomas on a scramble in the second quarter of last Saturday's preseason game. Vick went down, the leg went crack and the Falcons fans went silent.
Vick is expected to miss six weeks -- that's being optimistic -- but when he does return it's doubtful that he will have the same ability to get outside the pocket he did before the break. Bad wheels have a way of slowing a speeding train.
Seattle QB Matt Hasselbeck faces some pocket fury. (AP)
Vick-mania will have to be put on hold, which is unfortunate because he is indeed a rare and special player. But this injury also underlines what personnel people and many quarterbacks have been saying for years, which is eventually all passers, no matter how nimble early in their careers, eventually have to become pocket passers.
"There are guys out there just waiting to take shots at you when you get outside the pocket," said Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. "One good shot and your season can be over. I guarantee if you ask any quarterback, even the guys who can make plays outside the pocket with their feet, they'd prefer to stay in it and throw it."
The mobile quarterback has become the trendy way of the NFL. A few years back, the mobile quarterback was looked at as a novelty, a guy who could come in and change things up.
When Doug Flutie came out of Boston College in the 1980s, he was viewed as being too small and not good enough in the pocket. Nice feet, good college game tapes, but little more than that.
"I remember everybody ripping on Flutie because he ran around so much," said Falcons receiver Peerless Price. "Now everybody seems to want that guy."
In the process, the pocket passer has come to be discriminated against. What in the name of Dan Marino is going on here?
Marino rarely moved outside the pocket, but with his quick release and ability to avoid the rush, he became the NFL's most-prolific passer of all time. During his career, everybody wanted something similar to him. Now those same scouts and personnel men might be foolish enough to question his mobility, even though he's likely to carve up a defense even now.
"Say what you want, but the guys who are winning Super Bowls are the pocket passers," said Rams quarterback Kurt Warner. "Those guys who can move have awesome and special abilities, but to say that the pocket passers can't be successful. I would have to argue with that."
The last four Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks were all pure pocket passers. There was Warner for the Rams, followed by Baltimore's Trent Dilfer, New England's Tom Brady and Tampa Bay's Brad Johnson. In their four Super Bowl-winning seasons, they combined to run for a total of 240 yards. Last season, Vick ran for 777 yards.
Skeptics will say that the pocket passers take more hits, more sacks. Using the total sacks and total pass attempts, the Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks from the last four seasons were sacked once every 14.3 pass attempts. Vick was sacked once every 12.8 attempts.
The best rushing effort for any Super Bowl-winning passer in a season is 343 yards by Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1971. The next best is 293 by San Francisco's Steve Young in 1994.
Combined, the 37 Super Bowl winning quarterbacks averaged 112.9 rushing yards in the seasons in which they won the Super Bowl, further proof that staying in the pocket is the best way to win games.
Players like Vick and Philadelphia's Donovan McNabb have helped make the mobile quarterback chic again, but the theory is that age and the hits will make them more apt to stay in the pocket. It happened with Philadelphia's Randall Cunningham, a knee injury helping to make that decision for him.
As passers mature, and see the field better, they also become more inclined to wait for patterns and plays to develop than take off and run. In 1989 and 1990, Cunningham ran more than 100 times each season. In 1990, he ran for 942 yards on 118 carries.
After he suffered the knee injury in 1991, Cunningham never ran more than 87 times in a season. When he led the Minnesota Vikings to a 15-1 record and one game from the Super Bowl in 1998, he ran 32 times for 132 yards.
Young was still running effectively when he retired after the 1998 season, but it's probably no coincidence that the 293 yards he rushed for in 1994 were the third fewest of his eight seasons starting with San Francisco.
Even with a runner as talented as Vick, the ball still moves faster in the air than it does underneath his arm. That's why the record of 968 rushing yards by a quarterback, held by Chicago's Bobby Douglass, will likely never be broken.
It's simply too dangerous a pursuit.
"I know getting better in the pocket is something I have to do," Vick said this summer. "That's what I'm working to improve every day."
Manning and Warner might be the prototypes for the pocket passers. Neither has good foot speed -- that's being kind -- but they can move around the pocket to avoid a rush and make plays down the field, which is something Marino did so well.
Manning has run a total of 160 times in his 80 games career for 556 yards for a two-runs-per-game average. Warner has run 77 times for 202 yards in 51 games, meaning he has averaged 1.5 rushes per game. By comparison, Vick averages 6.2 carries per game and McNabb has averaged 5.1 rushes per game in his career.
"Those guys are special," said Manning. "They can do things that we can't. I have to win with my arm and by making the best decision possible. I have to go to my strength, which isn't tucking it in and running.
"The worst thing for a quarterback to do is drop back and then run for 10 yards when your primary receiver is open for a 60-yard touchdown. That's why I go through my progressions, 1-2-3. You don't get many chances for the big play, so you have to take them when they're there, which means waiting for it to develop. Isn't a 60-yard touchdown better than me running for 10 yards or moving around and not knowing where to go with it and dumping it off for a short gain? It's a lot safer that way, too."
And that's the real moral of this story. The quarterback who can run around can truly be a weapon, and Vick is certainly all of that and more. But at the same time that can be a dangerous way to have your quarterback play the game, something the Falcons now know firsthand.
Run-around quarterbacks might get the endorsements and land on the box of the major video games, but history shows the pocket is the way to win Super Bowls and the best place to be. |
