Josh Rosen criticism says more about coaches, NFL

UCLA star Josh Rosen faces critics, including his former coach Jim Mora, but the criticisms are more about what’s wrong in the NFL than Rosen.

Imagine interviewing for a job and hearing afterward, the hiring manager feared you were too smart for the position, that your intelligence and interest in ideas beyond your work actually you potentially harmful to the workplace environment.

That would be absurd right?

That’s exactly what is happening to Josh Rosen, and it says more about NFL and football’s broken culture than it does about the UCLA star.

Here’s a note from Peter King’s MMQB after the combine, where he damns with the faintest, weirdest praise I can remember reading about an NFL player.

“After speaking to three coaches and two respected personnel people with an interest in quarterbacks in this draft, I can say this: Rosen helped his cause this weekend, both as a thrower of the football and in getting his point across that being well-rounded and smart is not poisonous to a football team.” 

That last sentence bears repeating. Rosen had to prove to NFL teams his intellect and being a well-round person was not “poisonous” to his team.

I get paid to write words for a living and the only ones I could come up with after reading that were expletives.

If being smart and well-rounded is toxic to your culture, then your culture is the thing we should be criticizing. Think of places where that might be the case. Where could you possibly go where being intelligent and three-dimensional as a human is seen as a character flaw? And not just a flaw, but a pernicious one, capable of infecting your surroundings.

I can think of a few places, and most people wouldn’t want to go there.

Even caricatures of bro’d up frats in pop culture couldn’t get away with this level of knuckle-dragging.

Rosen’s former coach, Jim Mora, who has undermined Rosen at every turn, elaborated again Monday for King.

“He needs to be challenged intellectually so he doesn’t get bored. He’s a millennial. He wants to know why. Millennials, once they know why, they’re good. Josh has a lot of interests in life. If you can hold his concentration level and focus only on football for a few years, he will set the world on fire. He has so much ability, and he’s a really good kid.”

It’s important to remember Mora no longer coaches at UCLA, in large part based on his inability to maximize his talent. Brett Hundley didn’t get substantially better despite his vast tools, and neither did Rosen. That’s on Mora. So let’s start there: he’s not the most reliable narrator on what players need. If he knew, he would have had more success.

But he tells on himself here. Rosen wants to know “why?” Really? That’s his character flaw? A quarterback, who has to know what everyone is doing on a given play and how to respond in any situation, wants to know why a play works a certain way, or why his read goes X to Y instead of Y to X. Yes, he must be a witch. Burn him at the stake.

Quarterbacks meticulously dissect every aspect of a play, their own and the defense’s response. The “why” is essential to understanding. If he doesn’t know why a safety acts a certain way reacting to a play, or why the site adjustment is what it is, then he’s acting without being prepared. He’s being a robot, not a football player.

And now we’ve reached the heart of the issue.

Teams expect conformity. A player who needs to be “intellectually stimulated” may ask questions. He may push back on a concept or argue with a coach. Heaven forbid anyone question the authority and power of the head coach.

You know whose players don’t ask “why?”? The Patriots. But that’s because Belichick prepares them for every eventuality, to understand every situation. He wants his players to know why. They don’t have to ask. And if they did, he’d have an answer, because he knows.

Mora doesn’t. And plenty of coaches in the league don’t. They’d rather have a quarterback fail saying “Yes, sir” than a quarterback succeed asking “why?”

Sam Darnold says “I don’t care where I play,” which is what teams want to hear. Rosen says “I want to go to a place where I’ll fit the best,” and he’s the outlier, even if that’s a reasonable and logical thing to say, something we’d all feel in that situation.

The beauty is the teams who won’t like Rosen because he’s smart and well-rounded don’t deserve a cerebral, detail-oriented quarterback. Troglodytes won’t be rewarded.

Does that mean Rosen is a lock to be the best quarterback in the draft? Of course not. But the criticisms of him reflect a flaw in football culture as a whole. If anything is “toxic” it’s a culture that rejects intellectual curiosity in favor of conformity and obedience.

Let guys like Mora and the anonymous coaches/scouts whisper to reporters, but remember it says more about them than it does about Rosen.