nice board people, seems to have more humour and wit than the other 2 bills boards i post at.
anyhow, the key differnce between palmer, manning, manning, and even carr and harrington is those guys were all drafter VERY high.
they were all drafted with the expectation that they would be a franchise quarterback and soon. they all signed massive contracts with huge bonuses, so the team literaly couldn't afford to keep them on the bench not contributing for longer than perhaps one year or so.
JP was the 4th quarterback taken in the first round of that draft. manning and rothlessburger obviously started, and manning took a while but is playing well now. the second QB taken in that draft is sitting on the bench and no one knows if he is any good, but he isn't playing because we can all be just about certain that he isn't as good as the guy who is.
we aren't paying JP so much that he has to start, he isn't really consting anything more than holcomb is. JP is also not the same kind of prospect that the guys taken before him are, the knock on him is his lack of maturity and the fact that inspite of his physical gifts he is FAR from polished enough to be a first year starter (and from the looks of it he isn't ready to be a second year starter either).
chad pennington was seen as a dissapointment for the jests, who kept vinny for a while longer and left chad on the bench. chad eventually played, but it was his 3rd year.
mcnair spent plenty of time on the bench coming along slowly, and joe frikkin montana didn't start till his 3rd year or so.
so sometimes starting a player too early destroys him, and sometimes guys struggle early and then blossom into fancy little QB flowers, but you can't just say that since you have a 1st round QB he just HAS to play now, inspite of how much he struggles.
there is some big time on the job training when the guy is sitting on the bench and practicing. look how good crowell looks right now, he didn't even have a sniff of a chance of starting at the WILL spot if spikes was healthy, but he has come on strong.
at some point he will have to go in, but when is that?
I think we might have to play kelly against KC, and until it looks like we are mathematically eliminated, but if jp has shown something that makes him look like he won't suck as hard as he did at first (he really was the worst QB in the NFL for 4 games) then perhaps he should be thrown in now.
the god awful game planning and o line play we often get doesn't help him either, if clements has him running plays that give him no chance at all then he won't develope, and he showed zero signs of improvement in his first 4 games, so clements might not be a good enough coach to bring along an unpolished and immature player like JP.
