Wednesday morning it was announced that Washington Football Team is sending quarterback Dwayne Haskins to the bench, and calling on Kyle Allen to start their next game. Furthermore, they are promoting Alex Smith to the backup spot, relegating Haskins to the third-string role.
Haskins has struggled this season, to be sure. With 11 starts under his belt, including all four of Washington’s games this season, we have a pretty solid sample size from the second-year quarterback. He has completed just 59.6% of his throws during those 11 games, for 11 touchdowns and ten interceptions. This year, Haskins has just completed 61% of his passes for four touchdowns and three interceptions.
Beyond the production – or lack thereof – is how Haskins is approaching the game. From where I sit, there are two distinct problem areas: Accuracy, and mental execution.
Now remember that completion percentage does not always equal accuracy, but in some cases it can highlight a problem area worthy of further examination. Even quarterbacks with high completion percentages can be inaccurate passers, relying on scheme and talent around them to boost their perceived ability to place throws. Yet in the case of Haskins, those completion percentage numbers do tell a story.
Take this throw from last week:
This is a quarterback-friendly design from offensive coordinator Scott Turner, ideal for a young quarterback. Pre-snap we see motion, and with a defender trailing the receiver across the formation, Haskins can trust that the Baltimore Ravens are in man coverage. They run a vertical double-move with Terry McLaurin, their best receiver.
Then Haskins misses the throw by approximately six yards.
Now precision passing is not the standard on throws of this distance, but you at least want to give your receiver a chance. McLaurin does not have a chance.
Where precision passing matters is in the short area of the field, where the difference in placement between one hip and the other, or one shoulder and the other, can mean the difference between a completion, and an incompletion.
Here are two examples. First, a simple checkdown throw to the running back in the flat:
This is a throw that, apologies to Doug Pederson, is football’s equivalent of a layup. But Haskins misses this by about five feet. I recall missing a throw like this once. Freshman year against Williams College, our starting quarterback got lit up by a defensive tackle who would go on to be an offensive lineman for the Ravens, among other teams. So I trotted onto the field. At some point in that game, I threw a hitch route to the left sideline that looked a lot like this miss from Haskins.
I was on the bench for the next series.
Then there is this incompletion, throwing in the direction of McLaurin:
This is a prime example of how precision matters in the short areas of the field. The slant route is a tough one to throw for a quarterback because it somewhat defies conventional wisdom. As Brian Billick put it in an old Ravens’ playbook, you want to put this throw “as low as possible.” Bill Walsh, in his Stanford quarterback manual, highlighted how you want to put this on the receiver, and not lead him. Leading the receiver on the slant route gets him in trouble. You want to put this throw on the receiver’s frame, so he can shield the defender from the football. On Monday night, Brian Hoyer made a slant route throw to N’Keal Harry and Tony Romo immediately pointed out how he put the throw on Harry’s frame, preventing the defender from making a play on the ball.
But here, Haskins puts this behind McLaurin, and that gives Marlon Humphrey a shot at the football, and he makes a play at the catch point to prevent the reception.
Now, is there a common theme to these throws? On all of them, you can see a bit of a forward body lean from Haskins, most pronounced on the slant route throw. This leads to an inconsistency with his release point, perhaps contributing to the shaky ball placement on these throws. Haskins’ throwing mechanics were a bit of a concern coming out of Ohio State, and while we have long argued here that “mechanics don’t matter until they matter,” this could be a case of them mattering a lot.
Beyond the shaky placement, there is the mental side. This interception against the Cleveland Browns is a prime example. Make sure the volume is on for this video breakdown:
Looking at this Karl Joseph interception of Dwayne Haskins
*Everyone's favorite play, four verticals
*Working your reads against Cover 3 on this
*Move the safety with your eyes…or don't pic.twitter.com/zKf7f6ybML— Mark Schofield (@MarkSchofield) September 28, 2020
This is a rather standard route concept, four verticals out of a 3×1 formation. Now Haskins might think pre-snap, due to the defensive alignments, that the “bender” working from right-to-left is his best read, as it will get matched up against a linebacker. Even if this throw is pre-determined, you still need to move that free safety with your eyes, even if just a few steps, to increase the chance this throw gets completed. If you allow that safety to simply read your eyes and then break on the ball – thereby constricting the throwing lane – you’re putting yourself in a position where you have to make the perfect throw.
Haskins fails to move the safety, he fails to make the perfect throw (perhaps unexpected, given the previous discussion) and the ball is intercepted.
So, can he be fixed?
Lessons of young quarterback development
While the future of the quarterback position looks bright, given the young and talented players such as Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson and yes Josh Allen currently in the league, along with Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert who are off to solid starts this year, there are other young passers who are in more precarious situations. Beyond Haskins, you can look at Daniel Jones and Sam Darnold for example, as QBs who are teetering on the brink of disaster.
Ruining quarterbacks is perhaps one of the things that the NFL is best at accomplishing. This was becoming less of a fear in recent years, as organizations seemed to buy into the notion of building an offense around the young quarterback rather than forcing them to be something they are not. If your rookie quarterback comes to you from an Air Raid background and is adept at throwing on the move, don’t try and turn him into a pocket passing robot overnight. Work with him, put him on familiar ground, and let him grow by putting him in a position to be successful early.
Has Washington done that with Haskins? Honestly, it is hard to say. He was in a rather quarterback-friendly system at Ohio State, and now he is on his second offensive coordinator in two years as a professional. Which means he has been in three different systems in three years, which is never easy for a quarterback (and is the same exact scenario that Jones faces in New York). History has many examples of similar settings leading to quarterback’s lagging in development, perhaps most recently Marcus Mariota, who was in a number of different systems during his time in Tennessee.
So yes, stability matters for quarterback growth. On a micro level, we often analyze the success or a failure of a quarterback on a given play based on the information they have at their disposal. We point to pre-snap indicators, the use of formations or motion to give them information before the play, and illustrate how either those elements contributed to smart decisions, or how the lack of them doomed the play from the start.
Now extrapolate that to the macro. If additional information matters so much on a down-to-down basis, it stands to reason that it matters just as much on a drive-to-drive, game-to-game, or even a season-to-season basis. The more information you have, from successful plays and even failed ones, the better your decision-making will be in the future.
The better quarterback you will be.
Sitting Haskins down can in the long-term be beneficial for a quarterback’s development. Matt Waldman, who wrote a treatise on this very topic, likes to point at an example of a head coach sitting a young quarterback down not to punish him, but to give him an opportunity to learn, and to avoid this very notion of ruining a young quarterback:
“I give Marty so much credit as far as my maturation as a quarterback in this league and he benched me three times,” says [Drew] Brees on NFL Networks’ Marty Schottenheimer: A Football Life. “But there were times where I needed that. It was part of my growth. [During this interview segment with Brees, the director runs a sideline shot of Schottenheimer telling Brees during a game, “Listen to me, if it’s a one-score game your ass will be out there, but I’m not putting you at risk in this situation. You hear me?”] I was still his guy and I felt that all the way through so I love him for that. That carried over to 2004 where we had one of our better seasons.”
If this is a move made to save Haskins – and not to save those around him – then this could be beneficial. As with the Brees example, sometimes you benefit as a young quarterback by getting a chance to save your breath. During their rookie seasons both Darnold and Josh Allen had to sit out a few games due to injury. When both of them came back, they seemed improved as passers. If the idea here is to let Haskins regroup for a week or two and then give him another shot, it could work.
The problem is, sometimes there is a lack of patience with young passers, due to structural and organizational pressure. There is certainly pressure in Washington to improve this football team. Complicating matters for Haskins is the fact that Ron Rivera did not draft him. We are seeing more examples of teams moving on from highly-drafted quarterbacks if they are a new staff, and the quarterback was not their choice. The new Collective Bargaining Agreement has changed the financial picture, but it is a double-edged sword. Teams want to maximize a young quarterback’s rookie contract, given the relative inexpensive nature and how financial resources can be used to assemble talent around him.
But that inexpensive nature makes it much easier to just move on from what you perceive to be a mistake.
So how does it end for Haskins?
Look, I’m just a chucklehead with a keyboard. What surprises me about this decision, at this time, is that even with the missed throws last week I thought Haskins’s game against Baltimore was one of his best of the season. I thought his mental process was better on a number of plays when compared with the previous week against the Browns, and he did not turn the football over. If you were going to sit him down, doing so after the Cleveland game might have been the better time to do it.
I think if the idea is to sit Haskins, let him watch and observe for a few weeks, and then see if he can apply any newfound knowledge on the field, then Washington might have a solid plan in place that leads to development from him.
Then when he does see the field again, put him in a position to be successful as much as possible. Use play-action (Josh Allen currently leads the league in play-action passing attempts with 61, while Haskins has 36), use motion to give him as much information as possible, but use it effectively. Don’t just send people in motion to check a box, which has led to some circus-style action before some plays. Change the strength of the formation in a way that forces the defense to tip their hands. Give him more empty formations, similar to what the Cincinnati Bengals are doing with Burrow, with half-field reads. A man coverage concept to one side, and a zone coverage concept to the other. Don’t ask him to know what the defense is doing precisely, just ask him to determine man or zone coverage, so he now has one side of the field to read.
If this is the plan, this could work. This could save him.
If not, then we might be looking at another young QB, thrown into the frying pan, with disastrous results.
