By the time Jared Goff had finished his tumultuous rookie season with the Rams, Football Outsiders had charted enough games to amass opponent-adjusted metrics for every quarterback going back to 1987. And in that time, no qualifying quarterback (200 attempts or more) had a worse season that Goff’s 2016 campaign, with a DVOA of -74.7%. Basically, this put Goff, once adjusted for opponent, below such rock stars as Ryan Leaf, JaMarcus Russell, Akili Smith, and David Carr.
We know what happened next. The Rams fired Jeff Fisher and replaced Rob Boras’s old-school offense with the genius of Sean McVay, McVay gave Goff the schemes he needed to succeed, and while Goff hasn’t really been a world-beater, it took just two years for him to help the team to a Super Bowl berth.
Two years after Goff’s first-year disaster, the Cardinals selected UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen with the 10th overall pick and put him in an offense run by Mike McCoy that seemed to be an equivalent problem. McCoy seemed unable to use star running back David Johnson as a receiving threat, instead mysteriously running him into the middle of a horrid offensive line over and over. That line failed to protect Rosen at the most basic level, and though McCoy was mercifully relieved of his duties halfway through the season, the damage was done. Interim offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich was working from the same playbook, the route concepts were not any more favorable, and Rosen took the brunt of it.
Last season, Rosen’s -53.0% DVOA was by far the league’s worst among qualifying quarterbacks, and historically, it ranks third-worst going back to 1987 among first-year quarterbacks selected in the top 10 picks, behind Goff and Seattle’s Kelly Stouffer in 1992. In 14 games and 13 starts, Rosen completed 217 of 393 passes for 2,278 yards, 11 touchdowns and 14 interceptions, and he frequently looked overwhelmed by the defenses he was facing. Not that it was his fault—like Goff in 2016 or Stouffer on one of the worst Seahawks teams in franchise history, Rosen was doomed to failure before he showed up at the facility.
And now, with Rosen traded to Miami in the wake of the Cardinals making the highly unorthodox move of selecting first-round quarterbacks in two straight drafts and Kyler Murray clearly established as Kliff Kingsbury’s main man, Rosen gets that well-earned second opportunity. He’ll have a better offensive line and a deeper class of receivers than he did in Arizona, and though there’s nobody with the talent of David Johnson in Miami’s running back rotation, it’s not like Arizona was using Johnson last season in ways that maximized his effectiveness.
“The talent is obviously there,” Kingsbury said of Rosen at the combine. “He’s very cerebral and I just like the way he fought at the end of the year through some adverse conditions. He never turned it down, he continued to get up, and he continued to fight and compete his tail off until the end.”
Miami’s offense is now run by former Patriots receivers coach Chad O’Shea, a longtime confidant of Josh McDaniels and Tom Brady, and someone who knows how to put a complex yet efficient offense on the field.
Having done a fairly comprehensive study of Rosen during his UCLA career, I’m confident that if he’s given half the improvement in circumstances Goff got a couple years ago, Rosen has the potential and the raw tools to make even more of a difference for the Dolphins than Goff has done. Rosen is better under pressure, he throws with more consistent velocity, and even among the schematic garbage he had to deal with in 2018, Rosen was able to show the elements demanded of a top-level quarterback at the NFL level. Goff is very much a product of McVay’s system; Rosen has the ability to be more scheme-transcendent.
Before we get to the good stuff, this incompletion to Larry Fitzgerald in Arizona’s Week 17 loss to Seattle is one example of perhaps Rosen’s most obvious flaw—he has convinced himself that he has the talent to eschew the easy completion for something far more complex with a lower percentage of success. This is a fourth-and-1 play; all Rosen needs is the quick completion to keep the drive going. Fitzgerald is running a crossing route from right to left and then heading up the left boundary with cornerback Shaquill Griffin following him in man coverage. Griffin has outside leverage on Fitzgerald, and the sideline hems the veteran in. Rosen has an open target in receiver Chad Williams on an quick comeback route, but he blows that off for the hero throw, and the incompletion.
NFL coaches will tell you that no matter how gifted your quarterback may be, coverages are complex enough, and pass defenders are talented enough, that you want that quarterback to take the profit as often as he can. The big play is not always the best one. Per Pro Football Focus, Rosen completed just 16 of 50 passes traveling 20 or more yards downfield, and only two were intercepted. This lines up with the tape which tells you that many of Rosen’s deep passes failed due more to his own athletic hubris than anything else.
But this 15-yard touchdown to Fitzgerald in the same game reveals one of many adavanced attributes Rosen brings to the field. Fitzgerald fakes a run block before releasing for the fade, but watch how Rosen perfectly conceals the ball on the play-fake, drawing Seattle’s defense in and allowing an easy pitch-and-cateh for the score.
Rosen was pressured on 40.4% of his passes last season, and he threw one touchdown to six interceptions when pressured. This is the touchdown in Arizona’s Week 12 loss to the Chargers, and it shows something Rosen was very good at during his college career–stepping up to avoid pressure, re-setting, and making the timing throw. Rosen does a great job here of throwing the ball over linebacker Jatavis Brown, and timing the ball for Fitzgerald to catch it ahead of cornerback Michael Davis. When you have a young quarterback who can keep a semblance of anticipation under pressure, that’s something you can build on, as opposed to an average young thrower who can only throw the quick bailout.
This 18-yard touchdown to Fitzgerald in Week 11 against the Raiders is another nice anticipation throw–this time, from a rare clean pocket. Rosen is trusting his receiver here; he lets go of the ball as Fitzgerald is even with cornerback Nick Nelson, and then Fitzgerald turns Nelson inside out on his way to the end zone. It obviously benefits Rosen to have one of the NFL’s all-time route-runners on this play, but he still has to throw the ball before he sees the route develop fully. There are NFL quarterbacks on their second and third contracts who have never developed beyond the “see it and throw it” stage; Rosen is already ahead of the pack there.
And here’s a Week 10 touchdown to David Johnson against the Chiefs when Arizona’s coaching staff actually allowed Rosen to be creative with his running back. Watch Rosen audible pre-snap, setting up Johnson’s wheel route for the score. It’s a simple play, and we don’t know the nature of the audible per se, but you like to see a young quarterback showing command of an offense that was frequently falling apart around him.
Should the Cardinals have stuck with Rosen and either taken another position with the first overall pick or considered trading down? I’m not sure about that. Based on my evaluation, I think Murray is a very special quarterback, and I’d take him over Rosen 10 times out of 10—I believe his physical tools and on-field acumen show a higher level of NFL potential. But that’s not to say that Josh Rosen is a bust. He isn’t. He’s not a Ryan Leaf or Jamarcus Russell, no matter what the stats show. And he won’t need as much of a schematic buttress as Goff did in order to succeed.
Josh Rosen is a good quarterback who survived a very bad situation, and actually showed marked improvement throughout his rookie season despite it. That alone should have the Dolphins encouraged about his potential.
