Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

He was so highly touted coming out of college. Not a perfect prospect, but was considered a very good one. Great mechanics and intelligence (though there were questions about his maturity and perhaps if he would be a good leader/field general. But as a pocket passer, footwork, timing, field vision etc...he had it all. Many thought of that class he was the best suited to step in right away and succeed. The most polished

Yet right before the draft his stock plummeted. And since then it's been an absolute nightmare for him. After a rough rookie season the Cardinals gave up on him and went with the more dynamic (and clearly better) Kyler Murray. Rosen has bounced around four other franchises since, never really fitting anywhere or making positive strides. A fringe journeyman already

What do you think went wrong. How did this guy bust so badly so quickly?

Granted yes there is still a chance he can turn it around and be a good NFL QB, he's only 24. But he's practically a non entity at this point.

With concussion problems coming out of college and a rough rookie season, it seems Rosen has a hard time adjusting to pressure from pass rushes ... I am sure with different teams he works on mechanics and getting the ball out quicker but he needs to actually play more to get the proper experience he needs. Maybe his attitude or learning the playbook is a problem but sometimes QBs just float too much and cant keep their concentration downfield because their eyes and feet betray them. Leinart, Mariota, Tua Tags, Brian Griese, Rob Johnson and a number of QBs have had the same problems. You can be a head coach and try to teach your QBs to lead, throw and win but if a QB cannot handle a pass rush or gets too skittish in the pocket, without concentrating downfield and getting rid of the ball, the QB, HC and team simply cant succeed.

Hopefully, Rosen can get on the field on gameday and get better as he keeps playing but right now, he is just pushing a pencil on a clipboard ...

I'll provide full disclosure and state firstly that I was never too high on Rosen as a prospect. However, honestly, I feel to a degree like he was set up to fail, and that's largely why he fell as hard and fast as he did. As a rookie, he was ineffective but far from the worst I've ever seen; one need only see Justin Fields this season for clearly inferior performance out of a first-rounder. But the Cards regressed badly as a team, although the Rosen Cards were also far from the worst #1 overall team I've watched (I don't even think they make the list of the 10 worst Cardinals teams). Nonetheless, they went out and hired Kliff Kingsbury, who was publicly known to be enamored with Kyler Murray, and it very well may be that he was hired for this main reason, because his credentials for the job were rather questionable otherwise, having just been fired by Texas Tech. Obviously, it all ended up going horribly right and they now have one of the best teams and QBs in the NFL, but it was an extremely bold, some may say brazen move to go out and hire a failed-up coach primarily for his infatuation with a 5'9", likely pro baseball player at the time.

So that sent Rosen in a trade to the Dolphins for a second-round pick, already an indication of the depreciation of his value. But here is where things really got bad. No one needs an introduction to the 2019 LOLphins; they were deemed one of the worst teams in NFL history before the season, and rightfully earned the mantle for the first half of it. After a typical Fitztragic game, Rosen found his way into the lineup before long, but with absolutely nothing around him in terms of support, on an even worse team than what he left, no one could possibly expect him to have success. Sure enough, he didn't, and Fitz got his job back. At this point, the team actually turned it around and ended up wrecking the Patriots' crap in week 17, because as we have seen, Fitzmagic is the type of guy who can drop a Seated Liberty half dime on a game-winning drive while getting facemasked into the shadow realm when he's locked in, and he refused to let them tank. Just another further indictment of Rosen, that a notoriously streaky career bridge quarterback made the worst roster in recent memory look competent, and him look decidedly less than competent.

At this point, the league seemed to basically give up on him and he stayed bouncing around practice squads. He certainly had just about every typical young QB issue in spades; lack of accuracy, one-read, holding onto the ball way too long and so forth, so far be it from absolving him of blame, but I feel like he's a guy who never did get a proper chance to develop. Unlike, say, Josh Allen taken three picks before him; the Bills were extremely patient through his early struggles which were as profound as Rosen's, which they were clearly amply rewarded for and, like Arizona, are now one of the NFL's elite teams. I will freely admit that I did not like Allen in the draft either (Lamar was my 1.01 that year), and I will freely admit to being very wrong. However, there is a clear reason for that which I had no way of predicting. Allen did something Rosen didn't that immensely extended his development window: he learned how to be a running QB, something that is extremely unique for a QB to do when already in the NFL. This bought him time on a per-play basis, as it allowed him to extend plays and thus the impact of being slow to release is reduced, and it bought him time on a career level, because the newfound rushing production masked so many of his shortcomings as a passer, allowing the team to be patient in developing his throwing accuracy. Rosen, obviously, never added this mobility aspect to his game, so his teams weren't afforded the luxuries that Buffalo was in taking their time with him. It's not the 70s anymore, a statuesque QB who turns the ball over too much won't get as long of a look in today's NFL once teams see what he has.

However, at the end of it all, I still think Rosen has a chance to be successful in the league. He obviously still has the talents that made him a first round pick, and there have been later bloomers in history. I doubt he'll ever be more than a career backup and occasional spot starter at this point, but hey, they say the best job in football is the backup quarterback. What he needs to do right now is get a comfortable spot on the end of someone's roster and stick there for a while, and eventually he'll earn that primary backup role and keep it. Honestly, I wish he was still on the Bucs; he can't possibly be worse than Blaine Gabbert, who's just Josh Rosen but 8 years older.