The great quarterback portal shuffle of 2024: Vol. I
The movement of veteran quarterbacks has an enormous impact on modern college football. Where are the big time talents moving and who will win the offseason?
The changing nature of quarterback play has been a big theme on America’s War Game for the 2023 season.
I wrote up “Ian’s 4 laws of college quarterback play” before the season, detailing how a penchant by offensive coaches to draw up “shot plays” for their quarterbacks combined with a corresponding rise in complexity among defensive schemes has tilted the game toward veterans.
If you’re not a true dual-threat who can make a consistent impact for his team’s run game, you need either an outstanding mind for the game or else plenty of time to understand how to operate a system well enough to play on a joystick for the offensive coordinator.
Whereas pure dropback passing asks a quarterback to learn a hundred answers on a single play, shot passing asks a quarterback to learn a hundred types of simple play. The latter makes it easier to turn any strong passer into an effective college quarterback, but it takes time. Shot passing is like learning a ton of vocabulary words in order to execute functional Spanish rather than actually learning all the conjugation rules. It’s simpler, but it takes time to absorb the volume.
“Yo quiero tres tacos…por favor.”
As a result of these shifts, the modern game is becoming all about recruiting quarterbacks from the transfer portal. If you need veterans to execute your Spanglish offense, why not take them out of the transfer portal every other year?
There have been a bunch of quarterbacks to enter the transfer portal already this offseason, which is going to lead to major shakeups at several major programs. Let’s talk about some of the early ones to materialize.
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