The success of Nick Foles has reiterated how important a veteran backup quarterback can be. It’s time for the Green Bay Packers to follow that blueprint.
Aaron Rodgers is great. No one is denying that. It’s safe to say he’s one of the greatest of all-time in fact. He’s not much use to a team when he’s hurt though — that much was proven in 2017. With Rodgers down, the Green Bay Packers had to go to backup Brett Hundley.
With a 4-1 start to the season, the Packers were cruising early in the year. An injury to Rodgers completely derailed their season though, as they turned to someone with 10 career pass attempts.
Green Bay ended the season 7-9, and while they had quite a few problems, the deer-in-the-headlights play of Hundley on multiple occasions is easy to point to. Growing pains for a young quarterback with no experience is expected. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating when a team that was supposed to win is losing though.
The Philadelphia Eagles also had their star quarterback go down. They were 11-2 when he went down (already playoff bound). This left them to Nick Foles for a playoff run.
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Foles didn’t do much except complete 72.6 percent of his postseason passes while throwing six touchdowns compared to one interception. His incredible run led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl win in franchise history. It also brought up an important point, having a veteran backup quarterback can do a lot for your team.
Other than that ridiculous 2013 season, Foles has been unremarkable throughout his career. While he was never dreadful (maybe 2015 with the
St. Louis
Los Angeles Rams), Foles never excelled after 2013. What he did have was experience though.
Foles had nearly 800 career regular season pass attempts heading into 2017. He also had one playoff start (2013). All this came out to a quarterback who had seen it all. There really wasn’t much a defense could throw at Foles that he wouldn’t be at least a little familiar with. So while he may not have always been perfect in 2017, he was someone they were confident could lead them.
A veteran backup quarterback is something the Green Bay Packers haven’t had in years (unless you want to say Matt Flynn was at the end of his run). This time it really came back to bite them in a major way.
No quarterback is perfect. Hundley has his mistakes, but so does everyone else. The problem however, was that when he played poorly, he didn’t have the ability to find a way to still help the team win.
In his four multi-interception games, he only eclipsed 200 passing yards in one of them. He never threw for multiple touchdowns in any of them either, and never posted higher than a 58.3 completion percentage. Hundley also had two separate sub-100 yard games with no passing touchdowns and one interception.
There are plenty of proven veteran quarterbacks available who have been there before. They’ve led teams to big time wins, had bad games, and had great ones. Names like Josh McCown and Ryan Fitzpatrick come to mind. There’s Colin Kaepernick, Matt Moore, Robert Griffin III (more on him later), Derek Anderson, Drew Stanton, and Mark Sanchez are available as well. Finding one who can find a way to contribute every week shouldn’t be that much of a problem.
Next: 2018 NFL Mock Draft: Post-Super Bowl edition
The Green Bay Packers were in the playoff hunt until week 16 of last season. It felt like they were out of it well before that though didn’t it? Having a veteran quarterback in the reserves might’ve changed all that.