Joe Flacco Can Help New York Jets QB Sam Darnold—But Only So Much

Joe Flacco said all the right things about being Sam Darnold’s backup this season when he spoke to reporters on a Zoom call Thursday. 

True, the 35-year-old quarterback also expressed a desire to start again before his NFL career is finished. Would you expect anything else? Flacco, a first-round pick of the Baltimore Ravens in 2008, has started every professional game he has ever played. He also became a starter on opening day of his rookie season, just as Darnold did in 2018. 

“I obviously still believe that I’m a starting quarterback,” said Flacco, who still is rehabbing from April neck surgery which makes it unclear when he will be able to get on the field. “And, you never know what three years down the line is going to look like. So I still have that confidence and I still have the want-to to do that.”

Flacco, like everyone else at the professional level, is a competitor. And competitors want to play. They don’t want to wear a baseball cap and a headset.

“But, at this moment, that’s not my role (to be a starter),” he added. “My role is to help the team get better and to help a young quarterback see things as clearly as possible and helping along his journey to being a longtime NFL quarterback.”

Can Flacco help Darnold in this role? Yes, to some extent. As Flacco said, “the biggest thing is to get (Darnold) to play as fast as possible so he can use all those things that he has in his toolbox, all those natural talents he has, to be able to get out there and play football the way he knows how to.”

But in the violent, high-speed world of pro football, a mentor can help a quarterback only so much.  

Yes, Flacco can help in the meeting rooms and on the practice field, in terms of imparting wisdom he’s gleaned in his 12 NFL seasons about reading defenses and unloading the ball quickly against the blitz and making his pre-snap checks, etc. Obviously, head coach and playcaller Adam Gase and offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains can assist Darnold with all of those things too. 

And on the field, Darnold will get help from his line and receivers. And in between offensive series, he can get advice and counsel from Flacco on the sidelines. But when he gets up to the line of scrimmage, it will be up to Darnold to make his pre-snap checks and adjust the play accordingly. (That is, if he has that leeway from Gase.) 

And once the ball is snapped, it will be up to Darnold to read the defense on pass plays and get the ball to the open man. Darnold has shown a knack for finding secondary targets after escaping the pocket, a trait Flacco seemed to be praising when he noted Darnold’s ability to “move in the pocket” and “move out of the pocket.” But even Gase said last December that Darnold’s ability to work through his progressions while still in the pocket is something “we can get better at.”

Perhaps pre-game and in-game advice from Flacco can help Darnold slightly, but it will be up to him to sort everything out in the heat of the moment, with pass rushers in his face and an oft-confusing maze of receivers and defenders downfield. That’s why quarterback is the most difficult position in football. 

It’s also why mentors, coached and paid “gurus” simply can’t be as much help to a quarterback in football as they are to, for instance, a baseball pitcher. Of course, being a successful pitcher is very hard, too. But there simply aren’t as many moving parts. 

The catcher and the batter are stationary, and there’s no 300-pound guy in your face when you are trying to throw. It therefore becomes easier to translates the advice you got in the bullpen or the dugout to the mound. Not so in football, where the landscape for a quarterback can be radically different from one play to the next. 

This does not mean that Flacco cannot help Darnold, or that he won’t try. But if Sam Darnold is to take a major step forward in his third NFL season, it will be because of Sam Darnold.