DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum It's the Browns Board! Lets Talk QBs!

Well training camp is upon us. Let's talk about the most important position battle of the preseason.

QB!

The challengers:

The incumbent: Brandon Weeden - Last year's starter struggled to the tune of 14 TDs, 17 INTs and a 72.6 rating. However, the Ginger Gunslinger was very misplaced in the WCO. Now, our coaching staff supports the vertical passing game and playing out of the shotgun...what Brandon loves to do, and has been very successful doing. Will this change of philosophy benefit our 30 yr old 2nd year QB?

The veteran challenger: Jason Campbell - A guy who has lost starting positions in 2 different cities, been a backup in a different city, and has not had a single favorable situation in his entire career. At 31, he isn't much older than our starter, but has a winning career record and also has thrown more TDs than INTs. He also has a skill set that could work favorably in the vertical passing game.

The Wild Card: Brian Hoyer - He started as a backup in NE, then when he was released he bounced around a bit in Pittsburgh and Arizona, before settling in Cleveland. The FO likes him, but that seems to be the only people that do...Arizona the QB disaster place thought he wasn't good enough to stick around...What?


What I do feel, is that this is the best stable of QBs we've had since the return. Weeden has the first crack, and Jason Campbell, if he plays well enough could steal it.

I'm intrigued by what Weeders could do in this offense though.


Your thoughts? Who wins...who benefits from the new philosophy, predictions for the season?

I think Weeden will start 14 games (2 lost to injury) and throw 26 TDs and 16 INTs...

Weeden wins competition...hands down!

I think it is pretty well set in stone.

Bra-dy! Bra-dy! Bra-dy! Bra-dy! Bra-dy!


Wait... what?

the only competition is for the backup job IMO.

i don't know what to think about Hoyer as the only real game experience he had was last year and it was against the 49ers.

" What I do feel, is that this is the best stable of QBs we've had since the return. Weeden has the first crack, and Jason Campbell, if he plays well enough could steal it. "

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First off that is not saying much. When you still have a question of who your starter is; you have issues.

I would love to start a season when the position of quarterback is not a topic.

I die for the day when I have confidence that in crunch time when you have to score we have a guy that can lead a team to victory.

Weeden is going to start. How he performs is anyones guess.

I want Couch. If Holcomb wins, I'll eat my shoe.

We had that in 2008. We had a returning Pro-Bowler and Chud in charge of the offense. Can't quite remember how that all turned out.

Weeds is the starter.. He'd have to mess up pretty badly or get injured for Campbell to make it. I know so little about Hoyer that I'll steer clear of that.

Either way, if Weeds can't keep the job for reasons other than injury, we're in trouble long term. We'll need to find a new guy next year.

jc...

I do want to see Jason Campbell in this offense...I have always liked Campbell from his days playing at Auburn. With Chud and Norv coaching him he could do well.

I'm not saying he will be the starter but I would feel much better if he too excelled in this offense.

You never know when your starting QB might go down with an injury...quality depth at QB is a must have.

jc

What is there to say about the QBs? Weeden is granted the job in a system where really there is no excuse for him to be unproductive. Jason lingering, waiting for Weeden to fail and takes over if Weeden is unsuccessful at/around midseason. Jason probably be serviceable behind our line with protection he hasn't even been given in his NFL career.

Hoyer a backup with unknown talents. Probably more a "project". Our QB situation isn't great, good or any of the above. I think we are in shape to "just get by" until we see what we have and until better options become available via free agency or the draft.

Just my two cents.

The upgrade from Shurmur/Childress to Chudzinski/Turner might be life altering.

meh, Im just gonna flip a coin. Is Thad still available?

Im banking on Weeden having a decent season.

If Weeden doesn't succeed this season It's virtually certain we WILL be drafting one next year. That's why every Browns fan should PRAY that Weeden thrives in Norvs offense. Or we are right back to having a rookie under center next year.

I'd almost prefer making a big trade for Rivers if Weeden doesn't cut it.

BEREA: With a new regime at the helm, Brandon Weeden knows he must drastically improve in his second NFL season if he wants to convince the Browns he can be their quarterback of the future.

So Weeden, the projected starter, embarked on a mission this offseason to evolve on and off the field. As he continued to take all the first-team snaps Saturday during training camp, the changes he adopted might not have been obvious to the untrained eye.

His hope, though, is that the results of those adjustments will become apparent once the Browns open the regular season Sept. 8 at home against the Miami Dolphins.

If Weeden can make the big leap in progression he’s shooting for, the Browns’ path to redemption could be significantly shorter than some expect. If not, the chances for a sixth consecutive losing season will dramatically increase, and the front office will likely look to hit the reset button on the quarterback position next year.

Weeden, the 22nd overall pick in last year’s NFL Draft, realizes what’s at stake for his career and for the Browns, who went 5-11 this past season. He’ll turn 30 on Oct. 14, so he needs to earn the organization’s trust in a hurry. Two quarterbacks, Jason Campbell and Brian Hoyer, were signed this spring to push him.

“I threw more this offseason than I’ve thrown probably in any offseason,” Weeden told the Beacon Journal last week during an interview at the team’s headquarters. … “I busted my tail because I knew I had to. There’s a lot of guys that are counting on me, and this city’s counting on me. And I want to prove that I can be the guy.”

It remains to be seen whether Weeden can show he’s a bona fide franchise quarterback. Still, he believes it’s a realistic expectation not only because his confidence remains intact, but also because of the seeds he planted this offseason.

Polishing fundamentals

After owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner hired coach Rob Chudzinski to replace Pat Shurmur in January, Weeden became invigorated by the thought of operating the vertical, downfield passing attack that Chudzinski and new offensive coordinator Norv Turner want to feature. With his strong arm and history of playing almost exclusively in the shotgun at Oklahoma State University, Weeden believes the new offense suits him “a lot better” than the short passing game used in Shurmur’s West Coast system.

“It was a difficult situation I think,” said Weeden, who started 15 games last season, completing 297-of-517 passes (57.4 percent) for 3,385 yards and 14 touchdowns with 17 interceptions and posting a passer rating of 72.6, fourth-worst in the league. “I was in positions where I maybe had never been before. That’s part of being in a new system, part of being on a new team, part of being with new guys, a new regime. That’s just the system they’re comfortable with. It’s not that I don’t like being under center or I didn’t like doing some of the stuff we did. I just felt like there was more there. I felt like I could do more as a quarterback.”

But Weeden also knew he needed to tweak his mechanics to maximize his abilities under Chudzinski and Turner, so he sought advice from Chris Weinke.

As the director of IMG Academy’s football program in Bradenton, Fla., Weinke tutors some of the top quarterback prospects each year. During the NFL lockout in 2011, he helped No. 1 overall pick Cam Newton prepare for his rookie season with Chudzinski, the offensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers at the time.

Like Weeden, Weinke was a minor-league pitcher before becoming a college football star and NFL quarterback. So when Weeden was preparing for last year’s draft, he had a 35-minute phone conversation with Weinke about their similar backgrounds, and Weinke encouraged him to reach out if he ever needed anything.

Weeden took Weinke up on his offer and trained with him in Florida for three days this past March. The focus was on two key issues that Weinke identified while watching film from last season: Weeden needed to drop back faster and avoid patting the ball with his left hand before throwing it with his right.

“My whole goal with him was to really do drills that reinforced the sense of urgency in his feet while he maintained great balance and good power position at the top of his drop,” Weinke said last week in a phone interview. “So some of the things I did was put a resistance cord on him and pulled him back to do some overspeed training in his drop where he had to fight it and still stay in a good, balanced position. I wanted him to get the feel of being able to get back much quicker and get set to throw the football quicker than he was previously. So I did a number of drills with him just in footwork, working in a small area. I talk about working in a telephone booth. The pocket in the National Football League is not very big, so you have to have a sense of urgency, being able to flip your feet and your hips to throw the ball accurately.”

Weinke filmed Weeden going through drills and reviewed the tape with him to emphasize what he needed to do differently.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re moving fast but you’re really not,” Weeden said. “You start with doing bag drills. You start with doing ladder drills. I always start with a three-step drop and just try to be as quick as you can. … When you get real long, like I was last year, you get real drawn and then you’re too deep. I was 10 yards deep last year, which makes it hard on those [offensive] tackles. So now I try to stay at 8, 8½ yards, no matter what, whether I’m in shotgun or under center. It’s just picking your feet up and putting them down. So you’ve just got to train yourself mentally. I do a lot of jump rope just to speed those things up.”

Weeden said the steps in his drop are “definitely shorter” now than they were last year, and he thinks the new pace will lead to better timing for the entire offense.

“He’s quickened his footwork,” Chudzinski said. “It’s more consistent, and he’s getting the ball out quicker because of it.”

As for patting the ball, Weeden conceded that it’s a habit he should’ve broken a long time ago because it throws him “out of whack.”

“He would get to the top of his drop and start to make his move to throw the football with his legs, but he would pat the ball once or twice, which caused a disconnection,” Weinke said. “The body’s connected, and to create maximum power it has to stay connected. And I think what he saw was throughout the course of the few days that I worked with him, I never let him take his left hand off the ball until it was ready to be thrown. In his drop, he would pat the ball and then right prior to him releasing the football, he would pat the football. I told him to put some glue on his left hand and keep the left hand on the ball so he can set it in the position to throw it.”

Weeden had a league-high 21 passes batted down at the line of scrimmage last season, according to ProFootballFocus.com, and patting the ball was a culprit.

“It definitely can’t help,” Weeden said. “I think when you pat and those defensive linemen see that, they’re going to jump when they see your hands separate. In this league, that’s what those corners, safeties, linebackers do. When they see your hands separate, that’s when they break because if you’re separating, usually the ball’s coming out. So that has to be some of it.”

Now Weeden must prove he can consistently stick with sound fundamentals under pressure.

“You hope that you’ve created enough muscle memory in your preparation and your practice time to be able to have that carry over into the heat of the battle,” Weinke said. … “So I think the true test for Brandon is now how does he make that jump to the next year and has he made the changes he needed to make and does he feel more comfortable in the speed of the game at the National Football League level? I think he’s wired the right way. I think he has the opportunity to have a very successful career.”

Setting example

Weeden believes developing the right mindset is also vital to achieving success.

He thinks avoiding Twitter until the end of the season is one way he can help himself maintain focus and a good attitude. He started his ban July 19, the day he reported to training camp.

“I want to be surrounded with people that are positive,” Weeden said. “I don’t need negativity. I don’t need all the other crap, and a good way to do that is just get rid of social media because it’s turned into a negative. Like LeBron, I don’t know how he does it, or Kobe, or A-Rod, whoever it may be, I don’t know how they do it because as good as they are they still have people that want to be negative. You could say, ‘I’m going out to dinner with my wife,’ and [people on Twitter] turn it into a negative thing. It’s just stupid, so I’m done with it. It’s too much of a distraction. I can live perfectly fine without having Twitter.”

Weeden said he wouldn’t encourage his teammates to quit using social media, but he added, “We can all go without Twitter for six months, seven months.”

Stepping up as a leader, he said, is a “huge” priority for him, and he hopes to show his teammates the right way to conduct business.

“I lead by example,” Weeden said. “I’m not a huge vocal guy. I’m not going to chew you out. I’m not going to do all that. But I treat each guy different because you have to. Each guy you have to kind of know how to treat. But it’s big. You’ve got to be a leader. You’ve got to lead by example. You’ve got to do all the right things. You’ve got to work hard, be the first one in the building, you’ve got to be the last one to leave, all those things that you always hear. It’s a big piece to playing this position.”

Weeden spent three days working out with Browns receivers Greg Little and Josh Cooper earlier this month in Oklahoma. Chudzinski said he has seen “a big improvement” in Weeden from a leadership standpoint.

In the midst of all the changes the Browns have gone through this year, Weeden has endured rampant speculation about his future. That won’t go away anytime soon, but perhaps Weeden is actually better suited to lead the team now than before it was overhauled. Only time will tell.

“There’s always going to be new faces on a roster,” Weeden said. “There’s always going to be coaching changes and stuff. That’s just the way this business is. But I feel like I’m in a good position right now. I’m excited about the guys I have around me. I’m excited about everybody in this building. There’s a lot of excitement right now going on. It’s fun to be a part of it. I’m excited to be a part of it, and I’m in a good spot. I’m just ready to get going. I wish Week 1 was next week.”

http://www.ohio.com

My bold prediction fort the year is, we will beat the steelers, ravens and bengals at home. For that to happen I think Brandon Weeden will have a good year, not a great year.

Good thing Weeden ain't on the web looking for comments because he won't like the few I'm going to make...

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“I busted my tail because I knew I had to."

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That's the talk of a lazy guy. When you publicize that you worked hard because you had to you are letting us know that you feel the urgency but only because you have to.

I have two talents I'm pretty good at. Music and art. I earn my living doing artwork. In both cases those were things I loved to do. Because I loved to do them more than anything else I never worked on either of them because I felt that if I wanted to be good I "had to" work at it. I worked on both of those things because I couldn't stop myself from doing so. I loved to do them so I did them with rare abandon.

I would rather Weeden mentioned he worked on some new things in the off-season that he hopes will make him a better quarterback then ok. But doing it because he "had to" smacks of not being particularly all that interested but seeing as how he ccould lose his job and lofty position very easily with this new regime if he doesn't measure up then felt he "had to" work hard to avoid that.

I don't know if anyone can relate to what I'm trying to say but to sum it up I'm saying that anyone who is very good at anything is good because they worked their ass off at getting better because they loved it, not because they had to.

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“I was in positions where I maybe had never been before. That’s part of being in a new system, part of being on a new team, part of being with new guys, a new regime. That’s just the system they’re comfortable with. It’s not that I don’t like being under center or I didn’t like doing some of the stuff we did. I just felt like there was more there. I felt like I could do more as a quarterback.”

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Translation: "They were trying to make me a professional and I couldn't handle it. The routes and reads were too complicated, I couldn't make the decisions fast enough. I had a lot of trouble reading defenses and I hope to God that this new offense, which is more to my experiences, will be easier for me to operate in."

Again, it sounds like a lazy guy. Granted, this new offense is more to his skill-set and experiences and his reads will be less complicated, but he still has to make good decisions based on his ability to read defenses and no new offense is going to automatically make that simpler.

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“I think when you pat and those defensive linemen see that, they’re going to jump when they see your hands separate. In this league, that’s what those corners, safeties, linebackers do. When they see your hands separate, that’s when they break because if you’re separating, usually the ball’s coming out. So that has to be some of it.”

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Even if you keep your left hand on the ball all the way at some point it's going to separate and yes, defenses look for that. But the real key here is the "last pat". It's already been established that he pats the ball just before he throws. That last pat is an advanced notice to the defense that he's going to "separate", (throw), and it gives them that much more time to process it and block the throw.

Now that he finally knows that the separation is a notice that the throw is next, he needs to understand that the last pat is a notice that the separation is next and then the throw is after that.

Something in the way he said it makes me think he's still missing something, the point.

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“We can all go without Twitter for six months, seven months.”

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What?! We can all go without Twitter for the rest of our lives. I can see using it as a means to make yourself more available to your fans. That part of it is a good thing. But if you're going to let your emotions be guided by negativity, which you're gong to get when you play like crap, then it might be a good idea to give it up entirely until after you win a super bowl.

If you can't stand up to the criticisim during the season without it having an effect on your play then that says something about your personality that is not an asset.






I like Brandon Weeden. I'm fully on board rooting for him and think he can be a lot better than he has shown to this point. I hope the best for him and am on his side to succeed. But nearly every time I hear him talk he says things that just don't set well with me. It's not what he's talking about, it's the way he talks about it. It sometimes makes me think he doesn't have a chance.

Somebody needs to train him in the PC way to say things so when he does talk nothing can be taken from it other than he's a team player who works hard to improve. He can relax and be himself around others but in public he needs to be more attentive to what he's doing and be careful how he talks.

In a way his public personality and comments reminds me of the guy in the Clint Eastwood movie "Heartbreak Ridge" when Eastwood says to him, "Are you always that slack-eyed and silly in the afternoon or did you just do the neighbor's dog".

I think you are picking to pick. I don't think him saying he worked hard is in some way a negative or shows a lack of passion. You also have to consider he was answering a question. I doubt he called up Ulrich and said he worked his butt off this past season. Ulrich called him up or sat down with him and asked him a question about working in the offseason. At least that is how I envision how the process started.

Now, I would be concerned if Ulrich asked him a question and BW sat there stone faced or said he didn't do anything this past offseason.

I'm glad he is working harder. That's important.

I'll just have to wait and see w/him. I have my doubts, but perhaps he can be an effective qb. I just hope he learns to read coverages, because if he can't.............the rest doesn't matter.

+ 1

We should be thankful he realizes he needs to put in work, and has been evidently. Along with some other players. IMO they ALL should be putting in work even when it's not mandatory. Maybe except for Joe Thomas, but something tells me Joe never stops working cause that is just the person/man he is.

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I think you are picking to pick.

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Maybe. Did you notice the time I posted that last night? Might not be too odd for that late on a Saturday night, if you know what I mean.

Great article and thanks for sharing !

On paper we've got better coaching all round - specifically we have better play calling and a scheme to suit a big armed QB. We've got the QB saying and training with the right attitude. I am very hopeful - but the proof comes on the football field.

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I was there last night as well,, had a wee bit too much of the bubbly as they say...

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Shoulda jumped on here. We'd have tore this board UP!

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And to what were both of you guys toasting?

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Nothing to toast. Just made toast of myself.

All you need is a few good friends and an unlimited supply.

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...specifically we have better play calling...

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Amen.

One of the things that should be missing here is the Sunday night bitching about the bad play calling which has been going on for years.

Oh come on, every great play caller hands their 3rd string TE the ball even when they have never taken a handoff in their life.

...and isn't expecting it either.

Sorry man, but Bill knows his personal and I doubt he'd ever even consider calling that play given the same situation that Pat was in, same time and etc. Pat's clueless'ness shined on that play call and his "uhh duhh's" afterwards during his press conference were annoying. Same when Colt got obliterated and Pat kept him in the game. I doubt any "good" coach would have handled that the same, would you? I could go on and on...

But, fact is Pat is bye bye and it really is/was a "see ya and good riddance" departure from Cleveland. I doubt anyone here would ever want Pat back, even as something so trivial as an "advisory" role. IMO, he should be happy he's got a job dealing with offenses after his fiasco here, but as I said, JMO.

I agree, it absolutely amazed me some of the plays PS would call. Constantly late on play calling, having a play work then not see it again the whole game. It was like, are we watching the same game?
For PS not to know Colt was knocked out on his feet was the final straw for me. I couldn't wait until his days were numbered, then I knew we could finally move this franchise forward. At least we have a new staff we can believe in. ( we hope )
More importantly a new owner that understands stability.

So the coach doesnt have a role in how prepared the players are? If the coach calls plays and doesnt know if the player is capable of executing - thats on the player and nothing at all to do with the coach? .... Needless to say I disagree.

I'll give you a different example along the same lines - penalties. We've had awful coaching and the penalties have been terrible. Is that 100% down to the players not executing as you suggest - or do the coaches take some of the blame coz its happening week in week out. One of my pet hates and I blame weak coaching.

Fine, Pat Shurmur is an idiot that knows nothing about the game of football. Tom Heckert is an idiot that knows nothing about the game of football. Thus, I am filled with abundant confidence in our new fearless leader, Joe Banner. A man that kept both of them around so long in Philadelphia.