In his first 7 games as the Redskins’ starting QB, Jason Campbell displayed the poise of a seven year veteran in the pocket and the legs of an 18 year old college freshman out of it. Due to his promising performances, expectations for Campbell are sky high this season. But as reasonable football fans, how much should Redskins fans tailor their expectations for Campbell in 2007? What can we expect him to be this year?
Before you can investigate into what you can expect from Campbell this year, its imperative that we set a loose bar for Campbell’s career expectation based on his college stats and what we saw of him last season.
As a four-year starter at the University of Auburn, Jason Campbell managed to overcome an offensive coordinator switch in every season he was there. It’s impossible to know for sure what kind of effect this will have on the young QB’s career, but it is very important to note that 2007 will be the first time since high school that Jason Campbell will go into the offseason knowing all the plays already. While no evidence to suggest that this gives him a significant advantage exists, common sense dictates that this alone should cut down on Campbell’s mental workload this offseason. Early reports out of Redskins minicamp are nothing if not positive regarding his progress.
The college production Campbell posted at Auburn suggests he’s destined for stardom. His 4 years of experience combined with excellent production both individually (completion percentage) and team (winning ballgames) suggests that he will be in the elite company of Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer, and Matt Leinart at the NFL level.
However, maybe this expectation could be reevaluated. In his first five starts in 2007, Campbell played poorly despite showing promise. This is not something one should expect from a second year QB with Campbell’s credentials, as the largest jump in average QB production comes between a player’s rookie year and his second season. Likewise, the smallest jump in QB production on average comes between the second and third seasons, which is exactly where Campbell is in his development right now.
There are many ways to explain the discrepancy between the reports out of Redskins camp which say that Campbell looks brilliant, and the historical expectation for a third year QB compared to his second year production.
The pessimist could argue that Campbell’s coordinator struggles created an extenuating circumstance for a young QB that could cause him to underachieve expectations. Maybe what Campbell did in 2006 was more in line with what he is going to be than what his college production originally suggested. Such a person would claim that minicamp reports should be taken with a grain of salt and that we won’t know if Campbell has improved at all until the regular season. The pessimist could conclude that in his prime, Campbell would be posting numbers comparable to Jon Kitna, or Mark Brunell, or Steve McNair in 2006–generally moving the ball and the sticks, but certainly not among the elite QBs in the league. The same pessimist would expect more of the same from Campbell in 2007 as we saw from him in 2006: poised and calm in the pocket, but inaccurate and erratic decision making at times.
On the contrary, the optimist would suggest that 7 games was too small of a sample to get an accurate estimate of where he was last year. He would point to the last two games of the season and how Campbell played so much smarter and better than he had the previous five, and even suggest that the first five starts be written off as an adjustment period. Such a man would say that minicamp reports are right in line with exactly where you would expect Campbell to be in his development given his college statistics. The optimist would believe that given a sixteen game season, Campbell would play much better than he did a season ago and play right on track with his third year projection, and would be right on pace to grow into the next Carson Palmer. The optimist could even point to Palmer’s career, and suggest that Palmer took the Bengals to the playoffs in his third season, so why not expect Campbell to do something similar.
I believe that both the pessimist and the optimist would have great points, and I think Campbell’s third season in the NFL could quite possibly be one of much turbulence in which he justifies the fears of the pessimist one week, and comes out the next and is everything the optimist could have dreamed of. Such a phenomenon is not uncommon at all in young QBs and like in the case of Rex Grossman last year, would not mean that this team could not win games with performances like that, just that Campbell might just have a season that falls in between the expectations of the pessimist and the optimist. In fact, this is my prediction for him this year. We will see both stints of relative failure (circa 2006) and remarkable success.
When the season is done, I would expect his production in 2007 to lie somewhere in between that of Eli Manning’s and Byron Leftwhich’s.
Campbell is only going to improve with time, but we could be a year away from seeing him outplay the talented QBs of the league like McNabb, Pennington, and Brees.
Source for QB Projection Data: David Lewin, Pro Football Prospectus 2006-GT
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