With just a month from the 2021 NFL Draft, we are entering full-on silly season, especially around quarterbacks. Justin Fields of Ohio State Football is falling victim to an extremely flawed logic of comparing his future success to other players who went to the same school. Example: “Justin Fields will not be good because no other Ohio State quarterback has been good in the NFL.”
Imagine looking Justin Herbert in the eye and telling him he will not be good because Joey Harrington busted. Take a look directly at Patrick Mahomes and let him know that Kliff Kingsbury’s lack of success as an NFL quarterback had a bearing on his future as a professional.
In fact, we are now getting to the point where Alabama’s accurate but physically lacking Mac Jones is being talked about ahead of the vastly superior Fields. Taking a closer look at Fields and previous Ohio State quarterbacks, it is even more silly to look at the prospective top-five pick in the same light.
Fields unlike any other Ohio State Football QB
For starters to the ludicrous “quarterbacks from school X has not faired well, so player Y will not either,” Fields is playing under a completely different system than all but one Ohio State quarterback. Troy Smith, Craig Krenzel, Terrelle Pryor, and every other quarterback before Fields have not played in the same system. Literally, the only similarity is the uniform they wear, which is a silly way to evaluate a quarterback.
The only quarterback to play in the same offensive system as Fields in Columbus, Ohio has been Dwayne Haskins. And even then, the play-style of Fields and Haskins are nothing alike. Fields is the most accurate passer in one of the deepest quarterback classes we have seen in recent years, while Haskins was erratic with his placement of the football in an incredibly weak 2019 class.
And to a further extent, head coach Ryan Day was just the offensive coordinator when Haskins was at Ohio State, so his play-calls had a leash on them. With Fields under-center and with Day as head coach, the system at Ohio State took a shift in 2019 when Urban Meyer left the school. Needless to say, stating that a quarterback will not make it because of the school they went to is a truly awful way to evaluate gunslingers.
Fields holds no similarities to that of Haskins, Pryor, J.T. Barrett, Cardale Jones, or any other quarterback to come through the Ohio State Football program. Stating that Fields will be a bust because Craig Krenzel did not make it in the NFL is a surefire way to miss out on a truly talented prospect who could be the first overall pick in any other year where Trevor Lawrence is not involved.