I’m not here to say what exactly Georgia is gonna get with its graduate transfer quarterback, only to say that what Todd Monken plans to do with Newman is likely to be vastly different from how Wake Forest deployed him.
In Wake Forest’s vertical passing scheme, 68.2% of Newman’s yards came at the point of the catch. Reminder, the highest clip among the nine SEC returning qualifiers was Jarrett Guarantano’s at 61.6%. Paired with the bombs away attitude, the Demon Deacons’ run game followed an extended mesh read scheme, which is rather peculiar to say the least. But, we aren’t here to dig into that chestnut. The point is, Newman was asked to shoulder quite a bit of Wake Forest’s run game. By the traditional volume stats, he accumulated the 14th most rush yards among D-1 quarterbacks. Furthermore, running the ball in a tiresome scheme paired with chucking it downfield at an insane clip rarely begat efficient numbers. Route tags were common off of these as 14.3% of Newman’s attempts were off RPOs. Screens were inexistent. Being winded from all the heavy lifting certainly played a toll in his numbers failing to take off. And as Wake Forest precipitously began to lose their best pass catchers to injury, Newman’s numbers remained unsatisfactory against his best opponents. Georgia will undoubtedly ask him to play differently. But there’s no denying those troubling stats against his hardest opponents.
How much of those 2019 stats can be attributed to scheme and how much to Newman is a question we don’t have an answer to. But it goes without saying he won’t be utilized in a similar fashion this season, nor will Georgia’s offense be quarterback-centric to the same extent as Wake Forest’s was.
Here are some stats (via cfbstats.com) from last season to ponder:
- Total plays: Wake Forest 1055; Georgia 940
- QB runs: Newman 180; Fromm 38
- QB throws: Fromm 385; Newman 361
- Percentage of total plays: Newman 51.3%; Fromm 45%
In terms of rushing attempts, Jamie Newman was Wake’s leading rusher; Jake Fromm was Georgia’s fifth. It’s pretty much a certainty that Newman won’t come anywhere near having the most rushing attempts on the team this year, which likely means a decline in total play percentage.
Will a better surrounding cast mean he’ll be a better quarterback? We don’t know that. What it will mean, though, is that he won’t have to shoulder nearly the same amount of the load as he did in 2019. Hard to think that won’t help.