Quote:I think his floor at this point looks something like Garrard and his ceiling is Brett Favre. He will be on this team for a long time even if he never becomes a super star. And even if he does get to elite QB status his gunslinger mentality will be frustrating sometimes. Overall He is fun to watch and I love how he elevates his play when it matters most.

At this point it's really kind'a hard to tell if BB2 will be 'da man' or a bust. He certainly has 'positives' going for him;

*he's very mobile and not afraid to tuck the ball and run,

*he has the ability to 'extend' plays and turn nothing into something, and

*I think that when not confined by conservative play calling he's not afraid to take risk and go down field.

 

The flip side of that coin is that;

*running quarterbacks in the NFL tend to end up injured quarterbacks. 

*he 'bails' out of the pocket too quickly at times and for no reason

*his throwing accuracy is particularly bad at times. This might be a by-product of the 'bad footwork' so often mentioned on here.

*in trying to 'extend' plays he too often gets sacked! He needs to learn to throw the ball away rather than an interception or sack for a loss.

*while a 'gunslinger' mentality is entertaining, it's also a recipe for lots of interceptions. He needs to dramatically improve his passing accuracy if he is going to go the 'gunslinger' route or he will quickly be on 'boot hill'.

 

But I digress... at present it's hard to say about Bortles because our o-line is just ... a.(really bad), b.(very inexperienced), or c.(both). We suffered an outrageous amount of sacks this season and, while it can be truthfully said that some of those sacks were indeed Bortles own fault, the lion's share of responsibility for those sacks were on the o-line. Earlier on in the season, our rookie receivers were obviously not confident in running their routes and it reflected in getting little or no separation most of the time. At some point not long after he became the starting QB, the play calling clearly became more conservative. The net result was that other teams no longer respected the down field play from us and stacked the line. The result is reflected in our 3-13 record. Plus now we have to consider that our whole offense is back at square one with Fisch gone. This isn't the ideal situation for a struggling rookie quarterback. We've seen this before and the possible results with blaine (he who shall not be named).

 

So is Bortles the answer? We're going to have to wait until our o-line gets patched up to at least a respectable level before we'll be able to honestly see if BB2 is the long term answer. Until then, just hope he works on his footwork and throwing accuracy.

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