Josh Rosen - 2018 NFL Draft Scouting Report

It's another year in the NFL offseason which means it's another year of teams dreaming on college prospects that they believe will turn their franchise around. Nowhere is this more prevalent than at quarterback where I have heard smart people claim that quarterbacks could be taken with the first four picks (it would take trades in order for this to happen). Today, I am starting my breakdown of the top quarterbacks with UCLA's hot tub-lovin' boy, Josh Rosen, by taking a look at his games against Washington, USC, Texas A+M, and Arizona State.

I'm going to just get this out of the way to start. I am not about to analyze Rosen as a person. I don't think anything he has said or done publicly should be a red flag as his worst crimes seem to be thinking for himself and putting a hot tub in his room. The former is not a crime, and the latter is totally awesome. So let's focus on his contributions on the field.

The first thing that stood out is the man throws a beautiful deep ball.

You really cannot do a better job than that. Not only does he hit his man in stride, but he leads him towards the sideline away from the defender to make it an easier catch for his receiver. In fact, let's look at another one, just for fun.

Again, that is some beautiful shit right there. There are many quarterbacks who can never throw a ball that well on a deep route, yet Rosen shows pretty tremendous consistency when placing the ball down the field.

On top of that, I thought he did a very good job of leading his receivers on his passes.

His accuracy led his receivers away from defenders or gave them the best opportunity to create yards after the catch. Now, no quarterback is perfect, and when Rosen did miss, he tended to miss high which is dangerous as those tend to be the passes that get intercepted by the defense. Overall, I thought he had plus accuracy, but it's not an elite skill at this point.

Maybe my favorite quality about him is his patience in the pocket.

Here, he shows a great feel for the rush, as he steps up and delivers the pass to his open receiver running underneath the coverage. This was actually an area that could use some improvement as he was usually good at feeling backside pressure, but pressure up the middle or on his front side gave him a lot of issues.

It's really confusing as it's understandable for a guy to not feel pressure on the backside, but he doesn't see it when it is coming right at his chest and seems to freeze up when they collapse the middle of the pocket. Lately, teams have done a much better job of scheming for guys who do not have the best pocket awareness, so it is certainly not a death sentence. I don't think he's anywhere near the level of Blaine Gabbert when it comes to troubles with pressure.

Something else that I noticed is that he had a disproportionately high number of balls batted down at the line of scrimmage. I'm not totally sure if this was an issue of release or awareness, but it there were enough balls batted down that it made me take notice which is not usually a focus of mine.

Rosen also shows a tendency to take chances when that is not advisable. Here, he had driven UCLA down to the red zone against USC but threw a bad interception going for the touchdown.

It's unclear if he's staring down that receiver the whole time or just looking left, but he's making the safety's job pretty damn easy as he has an easy break on the ball for the interception.

When it comes to athleticism, he's not going to set the world on fire. He's more smooth than explosive as an athlete.

It all looks correct, but he's just not moving as fast as you hoped he would be. He will not be considered a mobile quarterback as the man is the very definition of a pocket quarterback. When he was put on the move, even within the pocket, he became incredibly inconsistent with his accuracy. He has to clean that up, move with purpose, and reset his feet so he can still throw accurately when his pocket isn't clean.

With that being said, I'll end on a positive and say that he does a good job of processing information when going through progressions. He's able to quickly scan the field and work to his second and third progressions.

Summary
In the end, I like Rosen as a prospect, but I don't love him. He shows some incredible talent throwing the football, but there are other aspects to being a quarterback. He sometimes tries to force the ball in, he doesn't handle pressure well, and he doesn't show effective mobility at this point. I think the best comparison is to Eli Manning. On the bright side, Manning won two Super Bowls; on the downside, he has driven fans mad since he first started with the Giants due to inconsistency and poor decision making.

I think that drafting Rosen gets you a solid starting quarterback, but probably not a franchise changing one.