Interesting, but not reassuring.
Link: https://slapthesign.com/2018/04/11/notre-dame-football-are-irish-fans-too-tough-on-brandon-wimbush/
There's a BIG difference between completing less than 50% of your passes, and completing almost 60% of your passes, not to mention, being able to avoid getting your receivers killed on every play.
Lewerke was able to keep drives going, as well as presenting a reasonably good passing threat to the point where you couldn't load the box with 8 or 9 and shut down MSU's offense.
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...then from a purely statistical viewpoint, yes. With a genuine passing threat, the spread offense would have worked at peak effectiveness.
Stanford would have been a win for certain. They didn't respect the passing game, and stopped us by loading up the box with 8 or 9. Wimbush missed several easy throws that would have kept drives going, and given us a few more scores.
Georgia could have been a win. That 50% passing completion stat didn't exactly bode well for us. Even completing a couple more passes would have made a significant difference.
At the very worst, we go into the end of the season with only one loss (Miami was playing lights-out, and would probably still have won).
From a character viewpoint? No. Brandon Wimbush is a good man, and a fine representative of the University.
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It is quite normal for QBs to make a sizable jump in completion percentage from year 1 to 2. I think that a mistake that those who are over-critical of BW are making is that they assume he was as good as he'll get last year. They may be right, but it wouldn't be typical.
There's a big difference between the two players' situations, though.
Brandon Wimbush had two years of practice and experience in the system, in addition to those years of strength and conditioning. He also had pretty much all of the first team reps in practice in the spring of 2017. He's also playing in a system that seems to be built for his skill set (assuming he can throw for reasonable accuracy).
Quinn was fresh out of high school, with only a very limited amount of practice, not much S&C, and played in a crippled version of the West Coast, with an inept OC who couldn't recognize a zone blitz, even when neon signs were glaring in his (Bill Diedrick's) face.
Put links to the actual stats at the end.
Agree with your overall observation as think that every QB follows their own development path. Additionally its necessary to look at the supporting cast and coaching.
In Quinn's case: saw his career as three parts: rookie (as mentioned in the thread), more knowledgeable but could not hit receivers in stride the longer the pass the worse the problem, and then a new coach and scheme ... besides assembling a better receiver corps Weiss changed to more passes to a "hooked up" receiver - his jr and sr years with pretty similar but had vastly superior stats vs fr and so years. As a Browns fan had serious doubts about the NFL as he often held onto the ball too long and floated passes his receivers got to faster than defenders. Sadly he was unexpectedly injury prone so to me the jury is out on what kind of a NFL QB he would have been.
BW and BQ did have statistically similar years as a first year starter - actually a bit of a surprise as BQ had a lot more career game time before that. Hopefully BW will make a leap like Brady made in year 2 - if so think it will be the result of way better mechanics and the coaches developing a more effective receiving corps and a scheme that results in more completed long passes. The other concern for me is getting an effective running game given the lack of numbers and loss of talent - do not want to have to throw to win.
BQ: https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/brady-quinn-1.html
BW: https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/brandon-wimbush-1.html
But you're right that the situations are different. Still, I expect an improved BW this year. And if not, we got Book.
As a junior he wasn't really on the national radar. Big improvement as a senior and suddenly he was a consensus top 50 player. So it's happened to him before.