Defensive coordinators who’ll face Jets quarterback Geno Smith have spent the last seven months studying film of his rookie season. So, in addition to studying his own film, Smith decided on his own to start studying film of the defensive coordinators he’ll be facing.
And the Jets are impressed by that.
Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News explains that Smith got the idea from advisor and friend John Thornton, whose advice was simple: “Watch the guys who are planning on attacking you.”
“That’s smart as hell though,” Ryan told Mehta. “I never even knew about it. . . . He wants to be great. He just doesn’t want to be a guy that gets through. God touched the kid. He’s got so much ability. He can throw, he can run, he can do all that. But it’s that work ethic. As a quarterback, you almost have to be a gym rat. And he’s done it.”
Smith saw it as no big deal.
“I like watching film anyway,” Smith said. “It was one of those things where I didn’t have anything to do anyway, so I just wanted to kind of get ahead of stuff.”
But doesn’t every starting quarterback study in the offseason both his own performances and the strategies and tactics of the teams he’ll be facing in the coming year? Maybe the implicit news here is that not many do.
Of course, a potential disconnect remains between studying film and performing at a high level when the reps are real. Especially when the starting quarterback’s understudy is a guy whose God-given abilities have made it easy for him at times to not give a damn about studying film.