The Lions' Pride

And who do the Redskins have or could possibly get after Luck and Griffin are taken with the top two picks that COULD lead them to the Super Bowl. Go back and look at what "franchise" QBs mean to a team. If Griffin turns out to be one the deal will be a steal for the Redskins. How many other positions on the field are worth that kind of trade? One. QB. Don't judge it until after 3 years.

Donald Trump too. No one knows what he will do. Ego driven.

Lol at college QB rating. Tebow had a great one.

Spread offense, relies much on his legs, injury concern.

Luck comes from a pro-style offense, coached by a successful pro HC, and moves fine without having to rely on his legs.

Are you implying RG3 is better than Luck, who many scouts believe is the best prospect in 30 years?

Compare the stats of Luck and RG3 straight up. RG3 did more with less. That is the reason RG3 won the Heisman.

If RG3 runs a spread in the pros it will be similar to what Manning did at Indy. Since he will be playing at Washington I would assume he will be under center more than he would like to be, but I think he will be in the shotgun a lot more than people think. Yes he can run, that is a positive not a negative. Any QB can get injured and Luck will be taking just as many shots as RG3 with Luck playing for a horrid Indy team next year. An Indy team that just cut Dallas Clark and Joseph Addai and will have no returning QB's to help him pick up the offense since Manning and Painter are both gone as well.

I am implying that they are 1A and 1B and I don't know what order they "should" be in, but the people that say it must be Luck aren't analyzing the two QBs honestly. We will figure that one out in around 10 years. In my mind it is more a matter of what offense you want to run. If the Colts are going to go back to a more traditional pro style attack instead of the hurry-up spread passing game under Manning then Luck may be the right guy.

I do think RG3 has the better physical tools. He is just as accurate and reads plays just as well as Luck, but he has better speed and has a stronger arm and therefore a much better deep ball. The kid throws some amazing bombs. Luck has also had the hype train going for 2 season.

The Redskins think RG3 is as good or better than any other QBs that will be coming out in the foreseeable future and paid dearly for him. Rumor mill says Vincent Jackson to Washington which would be a huge boost for RG3 because of his deep ball ability.

Spread tendencies:
Heavy Shotgun – Peyton threw 510 passes from shotgun in 2010 out of 679 attempts
Often no-huddle – Manning ran the best ever
Spread the field horizontally with 3/4/5 WR sets - Indy ran 3+WR sets 76.1% of the time in 2010 and passed the ball 63.8% of their plays
Sometimes Utilize Wide Offensive Linemen Splits –Don’t care

What do Indy fans like you call the recent 3-5 receiver shotgun heavy no-huddle offense Manning ran the last few years if it was not a spread variant? It did not seem to be the same offense he ran in years prior where, yes, they were a heavy run and play action team (Edgerrin James = freak and early Addai was solid). Perhaps I hadn’t been playing close enough attention or it is a tomato / tomahto situation where you say “pro is our base” and I say yeah but your base has a lot of spread tendencies, and the way you use what used to be a TE says spread. Heck even ESPN calls it a spread offense in many of their articles when discussing the move to shotgun or no huddle or passing attacks in general.

To me the recent Colts offenses have not been much different than or have been become closer to New England’s offenses, which I thought most people considered a spread-based system even though, yes it can utilize pro and multiple “TE” sets. To me a spread-based system isn’t just about running 3/4/5 WR sets, it seems to have morphed more into spreading the field with receivers regardless of their position. I don’t think too many people are going to mistake NE’s two TE packages as traditional pro sets.

I put TE in parenthesis above because neither team uses their TEs in the traditional sense as they had in year’s prior (NE this last year more than Indy at any point). Just because a player often lines up in the TE position does not mean he is a TE in every formation he lines up in. That is the whole point of using the hurry-up with freaks like Dallas Clark, Gronk and Hernandez, or the Cowboys splitting out Jason Witten when they go no huddle. When you put player X in the backfield what is he? TE or RB? When you split player X out what is he? Slot or TE? Offenses are exploiting very large athletic receivers by moving them around and/or spreading the defense to create desired mismatches. Running a no huddle compounds the problem for the defense because of their inability to substitute.

The Colts primarily run 3WR/1TE/1RB and 2WR/2TE packages with some Pro sets sprinkled in right? For the last several years have they not been using Clark all over the place? In my mind when you take the guy you call your TE in your Posee set and split him out you really have a 4 receiver set. When you put him in the backfield he isn’t a TE anymore, now you have a 3WR / 2RB set, and a lot of the time he is the motion man and ends up a receiver anyhow.

Aren’t these really the same spread principles in use at New England and didn’t the Colts really start or master the no huddle H-back craze that seems to be going around in the NFL earlier than anyone else? I get that NE has recently had better receivers and now has two receiving threats at TE instead of just Clark at Indy, but the systems seems similar in a lot of ways. Perhaps I am selectively remembering the how much the Colts incorporated Clark into their offense. But I would bet that of the 76.1% 3+WR sets they ran in 2010 Clark was functioning as a receiver in many of those plays to spread the field and create mismatches and that the real 3 receiver set percentage was north of 80%.

On RG3:
How about stronger arm AND better deep ball then? Living in Nebraska I have watched RG3 plenty over the last few years. When I saw him as a freshman I thought he was going to blow the Big 12 away before he left for the NFL, and he has gotten better each year. Luck went to Stanford and RG3 had the offer from Stanford to match – he told Harbaugh no. He didn’t have to settle for a bottom feeding Big 12 team because he couldn’t get the grades or test scores. He has a GPA > 3.5 and will pickup on Washington’s offense quickly, which as a Cowboys fan I am not excited about. The NFL is moving more towards RG3’s game (shotgun) than towards Luck’s (west-coast).