quote:
He’ll do ok the first 7/8 games until NFL teams get film. Then he’ll decline as they will take away his scrambles and force him to pass which will lead to errors. His instinct is to run with any pressure. In NFL qbs always get pressure often, so thats where he’ll have to change his instinct.

This is basically what ND did. He destroyed us in 2022, with a lot of Houdini acts/our DEs sorta “over-rushing” him and allowing him to escape. Al Golden with an NFL pedigree made great adjustments in 2023 (and obviously ND’s defensive talent is/was top-notch for college too, which helps) and we were able to significantly limit him.

Quote from one of our LBs post-game:

“Coaches put an awesome game plan in. One of the big things was keeping him in the box. Last year, I mean, we really experienced him getting out, him really playing backyard football where he is scrambling, holding this play, making ten seconds long, and now at that point it's hard to cover downfield and the receivers are getting open. So that was a big emphasis, and I think you could see that we tried to contain him as much as we could in that pocket.“

“We tried to contain him as much as we could in that pocket” is an interesting thing for a college defensive player to say about a QB that’s about to be the #1 pick (and has been touted as “generational”). Caleb has a ton of arm talent and he’s a pretty good athlete. He does have flaws in his game though (that I think are actually kind of weirdly being overlooked because of the weird personality things like the fingernails/crying to his mom, etc. It’s almost like pundits are saying he’s a “perfect” on-field prospect with only character/off-field questions, which I don’t think is true). If he can get them corrected, he could be special. But I think he’s a bit less plug-and-play than some think. We’ll see.