You know, I sat through this board abusing me over defending Driskel for almost the entire duration that poor dude was here.

I used to talk about how receivers dropped balls, how our offensive didn't scheme around him, the oline didn't help him and we had no running game -- but I always maintained that he had talent, and was a good player.

And holy shite did I get dumped on, especially here on the Gator board.

He had 23 touchdowns and 20 interceptions, abysmal stats.

In four years, he went 328 for of 552, or 59%

He averaged 7 yards a completion.

His overall rating was 110, more or less.

So, why all these numbers?

Because when he transferred, he went 281 for 450, up 3%.

27 touchdowns (four more than the four years that he had at Florida) and 8 interceptions. He had more completions in his year at LA Tech than he had attempts any year at Florida.

He threw for 4,000+ yards, almost a full thousand more yards than he had at all four years at Florida.

I'm saying this, because sometimes a change in atmosphere and especially a change in coach can make a player much better than they were. Maybe Appleby will be pretty bad, but from what I've seen with Mac -- he can make even the worst quarterbacks at least serviceable, and we literally had the worst last year with Harris.

Sometimes, all it takes is a little change and someone can be special.

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Posted by TJGator1215

FL/TN

Member since Sep 2011

14174 posts

Posted on 9/20/16 at 1:44 am to StrawsDrawnAtRandom

Did you see him against NTX we ran the ball because he was inaccurate and missed badly on 1 throw. Driskel was driskel at La tech and he didn't play a team worth a shite and he still couldn't read a defense. He was the best player on the field a lot of times.
Here's his stats from 2014:
LINK

quote:
Purdue is not Florida. The talent surrounding Appleby should be significantly better. But Appleby did not play well at Purdue by any metric (QB rating of 108.4 in his two years, 19 TD and 19 INT).

The key question is whether graduate transfers play better after they leave one situation for another.

To examine this, I looked at the QB rating of all quarterbacks who were graduate transfers and played at their new school in either 2014 or 2015. I limited the list to those who had at least 100 attempts at both schools and used QB rating because it does show astrong correlation with winning. Understandably, this list is relatively short, but it does seem instructive in terms of what Gators fans should expect from Appleby.

There were eight graduate transfer QBs in 2014 or 2015 who saw significant playing time at their first school. As shown in the table below, two showed significant improvement, one took a significant step back and the other five showed extremely small improvements in their play. On average, the QBs showed a 6.5 percent improvement in their quarterback rating.

quote:
Both of these conclusions do not bode well for Appleby. His QB rating in 2015 for Purdue was 113.6. To put that into perspective, Appleby ranked 104 out of 124 QBs. For even more perspective, he ranked five spots below former Gators QB Treon Harris.

LINK