My main problem with this is not that these descriptions are wrong - Luck has a great football mind, as you'd expect from the son of an NFL quarterback and Griffin is a fantastic athlete, having won medals at a national level in hurdles while at Baylor. My problem is that these attributes are assumed to not be there in the other quarterback, an assumption that is often even turned into a flaw by so-called analysts.
I will deal first of all with the assumptions levelled at Robert Griffin. Journalists and talking heads are quick to point out his speed and his ability to throw the deep ball, certainly traits that adhere well to the "athletic" stereotype, but even on a show as prominent as ESPN's Pardon the Interruption you see Tony Kornheiser, who was in the Monday Night Football booth as recently as 2008, say that Griffin's weakness is his accuracy. One of the most startling statistics of the early part of this year's college football season was Griffin's impressive ratio (through his first three games) of 13 touchdowns to 12 incompletions. That's incompletions, not interceptions. The man had more passes find the opponents end zone than he did fall incomplete, despite all the variables that contribute to an incomplete pass. Yet talking heads of some stature continue to doubt his accuracy. That ridiculous streak of course came to an end, but Griffin still finished the season with a completion percentage of 72.4, a respectable mark that actually bests (albeit not by much) the score of the supposedly more accurate Luck at 71.3%.
People are quick to point to the spread-based offence that Baylor ran in order to suggest these figures are inflated somewhat by a more passer-friendly scheme than the pro-style ran by Luck at Stanford. However, Luck actually attempted almost the same number of passes as Griffin, two more in fact. Luck threw 404 times, Griffin 402. Given Griffin's reputation for throwing a deep pass as well, a significantly riskier throw, the fact that they threw for roughly the same amount of passes and completed those passes at roughly the same rate, then to state that one quarterback is more accurate than the other can be seen to be making quite a leap of faith. Unless these pundits are weighing in on a hunch taken from some kind of stereotype.
Furthermore, I would argue that Luck's athleticism is downplayed because of the colour of his skin as well. At this year's NFL Scouting Combine, while Griffin did indeed run one of the fastest 40 yard dash times of a quarterback ever seen at the event - between 4.38 and 4.41 seconds depending on what source you find - Luck posted a time that, any other year, would have had jaws dropping. Luck ran the distance in 4.59 seconds, the same time as Cam Newton did the year before. Newton was drafted first overall with his athleticism seen as his main selling point, and in fact set a new record for total touchdowns in a season by a rookie, mostly due to his 14 rushing touchdowns, the most by any quarterback in a single season in the history of the NFL. Though Luck does seem to prefer to throw from the pocket, he actually posted a 3.2 yards per carry mark over the season at Stanford, a number not as astronomically different as some would have you believe from Griffin's own mark of 3.9. Not to mention Luck did this.
Once more, I am not writing this to make the case that Luck is inaccurate, or Griffin not athletic, they are both supremely talented players, it just galls me that, given the evidence outlined above, people are overlooking just how talented these players are in order to try and shoehorn them into predetermined boxes that just don't fit. Boxes that are scarily similar to the stereotypes attached to quarterbacks of different races.
Statistics from sports-reference.com and nfl.com
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