Posts tagged David Carr

Quarterback Development: When Practice Reports Are Useless

0 Comments read Matt Waldman
Tom Brady succeeds because he doesn’t avoid risking failure every day. It’s how great decision-making is developed and refined in the NFL. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

 

“A lot of times you learn from your mistakes. You know, you gotta make the mistakes to learn from them,” he said. “And you never know how tight a window is until you throw it, and it was too tight. You try to force a ball into certain areas and then you learn from it, you say, ‘I can’t do that.’ You install new plays and you try to run them over and over and you try to identify all the problems where they come up and then really make good decisions.

“We’re out here running a ton of plays every day, 75, 80 plays a day,” he continued. “Believe me, they’re not all perfect, there’s a lot of learning every day in a lot of the situational stuff that we do. All of it is a good learning experience, whether Ryan or Brian are in there taking the snap, I’m paying attention to see what I would do if I was in there and vice versa. And that’s the only way to play football, you can’t sit here and only concentrate when you’re in. You gotta learn from every day on the field, every rep in practice, mentally and then physically when you get a chance to go out and do it, you gotta try to execute it as best you can.”

–Tom Brady talking about the value of taking risks and making mistakes in practice. 

This quote from Field Yates’ piece posted yesterday on ESPN’s New England Patriots Report is a perfect example of why readers have to be careful about what beat reporters and analysts observe at practice. Continue reading →

Talent and Production: The Great Emotional Divide

0 Comments read Matt Waldman
Brandon Marshall epitomizes the unpredictability of determining the mental-emotional makeup of a player making a successful transition to professional football. Photo by Geoffrey Beall.

This is my seventh year studying the on-field performance of football players. I can say unequivocally that I know more about the techniques and strategy of the game than I knew when I began. I’m also beginning to realize that I have learned just as much about player evaluation during the four months I have spent creating content for this blog. However, much of what I have learned from my interviews of colleagues has less to do with technique, strategy, or what to physically seek from a player and more to do with what none of us know.

Things that even NFL GMs and personnel directors will never know for sure:

How a player will manage the great emotional divide that must be crossed in order to transition from college talent to productive pro.

The process is something that my friend and colleague Sigmund Bloom describes as trying to gain a complete view of a scene when the vantage point is through a keyhole. We only have clues that help us determine whether a player is equipped to cross this break. Continue reading →