Senior Bowl wraps; its onto Indy for draft process … The post-season all-star game phase of the draft process came to an end this afternoon with the Orange team defeating the Gray team 16-7 in a rather lacklustre affair. In fact, we had been very much hoping to spend the afternoon analyzing the QB play, but Michael Penix, the guy we really wanted to see, opted not to play at all, while Bo Nix only played a couple of series, although he did mange to lead his team to a TD which culminated with a perfectly placed across the body throw into the end zone for the score. Of the other QBs in the game, South Carolina’s Spencer Rattler easily looked the most comfortable. Like Nix, Rattler only played a couple of series, but made several nice off-platform throws and put his team on the board with an artful 30-yard TD throw downfield. In fact, a pretty good case can be made that no QB in Mobile this week helped themselves as much as Rattler did.
For the other QBs in Mobile this week it was one of those days it might have been better in stay in bed. Tennessee’s Joe Milton at least looked the part. He’s a long, rangy well-built guy with some athleticism and a big arm and a smooth delivery, but there were some obvious issues with his decision-making and pocket awareness. In particular, he threw a pick in the end zone on an ill-advised across the body throw, had a second pick on a badly overthrown ball into triple coverage and took a totally unnecessary sack on a rollout on which he had every chance to throw the ball; one also got the feeling that the ball wasn’t coming out all that quickly with Milton. Meanwhile, Notre Dame’s Sam Hartman is what he is. And that’s a later round longshot type who has some athleticism, but has somewhat limited arm strength; plus his ball placement on the day was all over the place. He was high, he was wide, he was short – sometimes all on the same play – as he finished 7 for 25 for 69 yards. And it was a similar story for both Michael Pratt of Tulane and South Alabama’s Carter Bradley who probably got the invite as he’s a local product.
For the record, its our plan to review the play and post analyses of the offensive and defensive lines in the next day or so and then wrap it up with a summary of the skill people.
