Why All The Hate for "The System QB"?

Just another cog in the machine---but a machine that works!

Mike Leach has always been a fantastic interview--whether it's telling folks to 'have a happy halftime' or telling folks that in order to win, he'll have to 'score more points than the other team scores' or doing the local weather.


In this month's Texas Monthly sports blog (who would have thought that publication had a sports blog? One day, it's stories on touristy spots and the Top 40 lawyers, the next is the intricacies of the Veer), Leach uses his usual dry wit to poke a little fun at the fact that no one seems to respect his incumbent QB Graham Harrell:

"Graham had one of the best years of anyone in the nation, and as you look at it, I guess most people are rating him as one of the top six quarterbacks in the Big XII. I guess those two thousand more yards he threw more than anyone else don't count as much as they used to. I guess he just did it accidentally. He lucked into those, but the other quarterbacks worked really, really hard for their yards. I don't buy any of that."

While most critics will point out that Harrell benefits from a system that throws the ball often and uses screens and shovel passes to take the place of runs (and thus, increasing the passing yards)--the simple fact is that Leach's QBs DO PUT UP THE NUMBERS. Much like no one complained that Ron Dayne won the Heisman because he ended up as the career rushing leader in college football as the focus of a ground bound Wisconsin under Barry Alvarez or that Earl Campbell ran up totals in a Wishbone set for Darrell Royal, the 'System QB' argument for passing stats is somewhat flimsy.

Yes, typically the throw first quarterback has not done well in the NFL--people are quick to throw out busts like David Klinger and Andre Ware from their days at Houston in the Run and Shoot or the parade of Leach disciples Tim Couch, Kliff Kingsbury, B.J. Symons, Sonny Cumbie or the fact that much of Florida's signal callers under Steve Spurrier have had less than steller NFL careers. However, no one points out that Akili Smith, Ryan Leaf, Trent Dilfer, Todd Marinovich, Cade McNown, Rick Meier were all also busts from more balanced offenses.

Even on the flip side-- running all the time at Nebraska and Oklahoma didn't help the NFL careers of Scott Frost, Eric Crouch, Turner Gill, Charles Thompson, Jamielle Holloway---and not many folks were super excited to step up and draft wide receivers from offensive systems that used them as little more than couriers to run plays or downfield blocks.

Either way, Leach does have a point--his QB had to stand in there and throw the ball and take the hits just as much as the next guy, heck, some would argue that he had to do it even more than the next guy-- yet here he is being told that his player's just not as good as the next. He may not be throwing Molotov cocktails at the opposition to fire up the media, but his darts are right on target.