Shough has spent less time with the starters than Rattler and thrown fewer passes than Haener
We knew the New Orleans Saints would go into training camp with a competition at quarterback, and in theory, the idea of rotating passers each day made sense. Getting Spencer Rattler, Tyler Shough, and Jake Haener into the same situations with the same personnel groupings would give the coaching staff an idea of how each of them compares. That would inform the decision of who should start in September.
But theory and practice are two different things, and it’s been frustrating to see this competition play out the way it has through the first eight days at training camp. Here’s how many days each quarterback has spent with the first-, second-, and third-team offenses:
Spencer Rattler: 3 days with first team, 4 days with second team, 0 days with third teamTyler Shough: 2 days with first team, 3 days with second team, 2 days with third teamJake Haener: 2 days with first team, 0 days with second team, 5 days with third team
After the first eight days of practice, three of them full-contact sessions in pads, the team’s second-round pick has only spent two days of team drills with the starting offense. The expectation when the Saints drafted Shough at No. 40 overall was that he would be ready to play in September. If that’s the case, he should be throwing a lot more passes to the players who will be on the field in Week 1.
Generally speaking, he should be throwing a lot more passes with the defense sharing the practice field. Now let’s look at the number of throws each quarterback has made in team drills, as charted by Locked on Saints host Ross Jackson:
Spencer Rattler: 61 completions on 83 pass attemptsJake Haener: 52 completions on 75 pass attemptsTyler Shough: 34 completions on 58 pass attempts
Shough hasn’t just spent less time with the starters than Rattler. He’s thrown fewer passes in team drills than both Rattler and Haener, who a lot of fans and outside observers wrote off as a threat to even make the roster this summer. The way things stand right now, based off what’s been seen at training camp? Rattler would be the Week 1 starter, Haener would be active as his backup, and the only way Shough would get into a game is as the emergency QB3 if something happens to both of the guys ahead of him.
That’s far from ideal. But guys like Shough fall to the second round for good reasons. In his case age (he turns 26 in September), inexperience (he only threw 200-plus passes once in seven years), and injury history were not on his side. Reports out of training camp describe a quarterback who is overwhelmed by the speed of an NFL defense. He’s made some progress in making plays under pressure and processing more quickly, but it might be too little, too late. He’s dealing with an extremely short runway given how little practice time teams have to work with these days. If Shough can’t leap ahead of Haener and push Rattler for the job soon, and he hasn’t yet, you have to ask if he will at all. He has the month of August to make this competition, well, competitive. Week 1 will be here before we know it. A rookie season spent with a clipboard in hand will have a lot of fans asking why the Saints drafted Shough where they did in the first place.
Here’s one more stat for you. Since the league expanded to 32 teams back in 2002, just 19 quarterbacks have been picked in the second round of the NFL draft. Of those 19 quarterbacks, only 11 of them started at least one game in their rookie season. And out of that group, just four of them were named starters in Week 1. DeShone Kizer went 0-15 with the Cleveland Browns. Derek Carr went 3-13 with the Oakland Raiders. Geno Smith went 8-8 with the New York Jets, and Andy Dalton went 9-7 with the Cincinnati Bengals. They were all 23 years old or younger when their rookie seasons started. There just isn’t a great precedent for second rounders to win the job and hit the ground running. Based off what we’ve seen so far, Shough isn’t ready to buck that trend.