It is difficult to find many accredited appraisers willing to officially go on to suggest that Trevor Lawrence de Clemson is not the best candidate for QB in the 2021 draft of the NFL.
But we find one that doesn’t even have Lawrence has one of his two better QB prospects this year.
June Jones, the former Atlanta Falcons and San Diego Chargers coach, watched many of the best defenders available for the 2021 NFL draft. He didn’t see them all. But he saw enough of Lawrence to be less impressed by the overwhelming favorite for overall choice # 1 to know that if it were Jones’ choice at that location, he would be plotting some other plans.
“Hey, I like him. But I wouldn’t choose him with the first choice, however,” Jones told Yahoo Sports by phone from his home in Honolulu. “Everyone is saying that this is the guy from 1. But I would trade that choice and catch one of those other defenders in the future.”
The two quarterbacks he prefers? Well, one is now almost a household name – at least among those included in the NFL recruitment process. BYU’s Zach Wilson, who could be the second overall choice for the New York Jets, is higher in his hierarchy than Lawrence.
But Wilson is not Jones’ No. 1 prospect in QB this year. He has Mac Jones from Alabama at the top.
We had supplementary questions about Lawrence, Wilson and Jones. And he had answers.
What could hold Trevor Lawrence back
We asked Jones: Why is he so (relatively) low on Lawrence?
“He’s a very talented kid, don’t get me wrong, and I think he’s a winner,” said Jones. “He can do things that other defenders cannot, like running.
“But what I noticed is, when you see him fall backwards and launch, say, a route 9 on the field, in those finishes that he had more than 20 yards, his receivers often make great plays on those balls. And they were not sure about the money, they weren’t sure. The receivers sometimes had to work for the deep ball with him from what (would be expected from) a great defender. “
Jones is not wrong about this fact, as Lawrence had a strong percentage of overall completion this season (69.2) and was right on 51 percent of his passes that covered at least 20 meters in the air. And Jones is keen to say that Lawrence’s deepest passes are not as accurate and limit the yardage potential after receiving his receivers.
“He obviously can work on it and improve it. But right now, I kind of like some of the other guys better,” said Jones.
Are they ball watchers? Or an observer receiver?
One of the things that June Jones looks for in defenders when they are throwing the ball vertically is the eyes. Jones’ number one criterion as to whether he thinks a quarterback can achieve greatness in the NFL is accuracy, and Jones believes that a QB’s visual behavior is a critical key in this.
It’s something that started when Jones was supporting Steve Bartkowski in Atlanta, realizing that Bartkowski used to watch the ball during his flight and not the receiver he was playing for. And he was just knocking over his receivers, sometimes by a foot or less.
After Jones made this suggestion to his teammate, Bartkowski’s deep ball became one of the best in the NFL in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And when Jones started training Warren Moon, the same thing kept happening: Moon badly he would bring down his man and lose a long gain.
The improvement came when Moon focused on keeping his eyes on the receiver, not the ball.
“The big ones never take their eyes off the receiver naturally,” said Jones. “It’s a difficult thing to change. But you can change. Bart and Moon said that (helped them), and it was something (pioneer of the run and shoot attack) Mouse (Davis) told me years ago. It just makes a difference. “
Jones tried to look into Lawrence’s eyes to see if that was the problem, realizing that even in his long conclusions, these pitches could be more accurate. Based on what he saw on the tape, it’s difficult for Jones to say for sure.
“You really need to watch the quarterback closely to know this,” he said. “If I saw this with him, it would be the first thing that I would work with him.
“It is such a simple thing, but coaches are almost never heard of talking about it. This thing is more valuable for quarterbacks, and some people don’t even realize it.”
Why so high on Mac Jones?
No, it is not just a matter of surname. June Jones believes that Mac Jones – who started just 17 games in Alabama – is the best potential defender in this category because of his accuracy on the field.
Many reviewers that Yahoo Sports spoke with lamented Mac Jones’ lack of double threat capability. He is simply not a scrambler of any grade, and his athletic characteristics (including brute arm strength) will almost certainly be rated as average to below average compared to other candidates in this class and the top NFL QBs.
But June Jones doesn’t see it that way.
“Mac’s deep ball accuracy is probably the best I have assessed in my years as a defender,” said June Jones. “He’s almost 55 percent over 20 yards, which is unbelievable.”
Face check: true. Last season, Jones hit 58.9 percent of his attempts to pass more than 20 yards on the field. And taking into account missed passes, Pro Football Focus had Jones at an adjusted completion percentage in those scorching 67.1 attempts.
Interestingly, Wilson was superior to Jones in both metrics – 62.5 percent and 67.9, respectively. But both defenders made exactly 56 attempts last season, and Mac Jones threw more yards (1,355 to 1,286) on deep balls in 2020.
June Jones believes that it is this small difference, making shots a little more accurate on the field, that beats Mac Jones one notch ahead of Zach Wilson.
“(Mac Jones) is a receiver observer,” said June Jones. “I could tell when I watched him on television when they had the right camera angle. And I really think this is great for him. It’s how he naturally launches the ball deep.”
With this level of hot shot, June Jones understands that he will be in the minority in his take on Mac-over-Trevor. But ask if he cares.
“Some people are going to have problems with me saying this because he only did it a year, blah blah blah,” said June Jones. “But I saw enough in a year where you say, if this is his only year, wow, that guy is going to be something else.”
Justin Fields of Ohio and Trey Lance of North Dakota intrigued June Jones when he watched them, but he was unable to overcome some of the missed passes they both had on the tape. He likes them both as developmental defenders, but he believes the other three should rank higher.
The idea of Lance going to Round 1, and potentially high in Round 1, is not something Jones is interested in.
“In a perfect world, you summon it at the end of the second or third round and it develops,” he said. “You can work with him and have something. The tools are all there. But I don’t know how anyone could know that he is worth taking up. He could certainly become a great defender in time, but he is not over there.”
June Jones’ running and recorded teaching videos
One of the pet projects that Jones wanted to work on was to explore the vast knowledge of Mouse Davis, his mentor for almost 50 years, and create training videos to pass on to future generations.
Because, as Jones said, “You can talk about offensive innovation as much as you like … but everything we do now in football comes from something someone else did before.
“All those chic things that the Kansas City Chiefs do with their short moves and their pitches and sneaky moves and disorientations and such, it all came from the race and pitches that ‘Tiger’ Ellison trained and wrote for the first time in the 1960s. It’s all taken from elsewhere. “
Then he joined coachtube.com and created the Official Shooting and Running Certification program there. Jones is thrilled with the results.
“It’s really kind of taken on a life of its own,” said Jones. “One of my coaches approached me because we were always having trouble doing it, from college coaches and college coaches, for years. He thought about doing something with all this film that we have available, which people usually can’t get.
“Mouse is 88 years old, so we knew we wanted to get together and do something about it. It was fun to talk about all the routes and concepts, and it was fun to hear all the positive comments.”
Viewers can learn all the concepts of the run-n-shoot attack, from its origins to its modern application, and take tests at the end of the program to be certified.
More from Yahoo Sports: