Why are we talking about Northern Illinois? They have won championships.

I'm not sure what you mean. This will be Isphording's second QB recruiting class. Last year I was very impressed with Maxwell, though I was mostly alone. If you're saying that we can expect another QB of the same quality as Maxwell, I would be most pleased with that, offers or not.

I'm not sure if that is intended to be a rhetorical question or not, but I will try to answer it anyway. First, however, I'll give you some context for it.

Because I believe that recruiting matters, and that better players means better teams, I started closely tracking recruiting rankings back in about 2006 or so. I found three ratings, so I tracked them. I went in with the preconceived notion that the ratings would be imperfect predictors of performance, but that there would be some correlation to later results. I didn't know which service was the best, so I tracked all of them, as well as how many offers each player was reported to have.

Later, I decided to try to correlate the ratings to how the players later performed on the field, and was surprised by what I found. I found essentially no correlation at all between any of the ratings and later performance. I found that no rating service was better than the others - they all sucked. About 2012 or so I decided, well, if these services all suck, maybe I'll try my own eyes. I can't do any worse. So, about 2012 I started watching video on all the recruits myself, and giving each recruit a rating. How am I doing? It's still too early to tell. My ratings for 2012 were very good, actually, and significantly more accurate than the ratings services. My ratings for 2013 were horrible. It's still to early to tell on 2014-15. So, what does that tell us? That my rating of Maxwell could be right, or not, but that it has no particular credibility.

So, now on to your question, what do I like about him. These are things that I see as positives:
1. He has the size. He's not 6'0.5" and 180lbs, which is what Ohio continually recruited under Gdowski. He's 6'3" and 214.
2. He hustles. In fact, he won a hustle award in Basketball
3. He not only doesn't appear afraid to run, when he runs, he looks like he relishes it.
4. He's fast.
5. He has a powerful arm - most of the passes in his highlights were soft passes, but a few he had to throw hard, and he did, and showed he has plenty of arm strength

Now the negative. As you point out, his passing stats were very unimpressive. I tend to disregard that because he played on bad team. On a bad team the blocking won't be good, and that will mean a number of off-balance throws, and those will hurt the stats. It will also mean that the receivers will not get open, and will drop passes when they do get open.

The result was that I decided to treat the stats as meaningless, and trust my eyes on what I saw, and I liked what I saw. Now, over the next year or three I will eventually be proved right, or wrong, so we'll have to see. In the meantime, if you haven't watched the hudl for Maxwell, why not watch it, and keep an open mind. After you watch it, why not report back on what you like and don't like?

I hope I am, too, but until I see him play as a Bobcat, it's just a hope. One way in which your rating is right is this: Playing as a QB for a bad team, in a bad conference, with bad linemen, bad receivers, and probably bad schemes not only led him to have only 100 yards/game of passing, it also didn't prepare him at all for play in in FBS. He has a LOT to learn. There was no circumstance that I could imagine where he would have come in ready to play as a true Freshman. I'm not sure he'll be ready to play next year, either.

My hope is that he'll have enough potential that he'll get some spot duty next fall, and play well enough in that duty to earn more time, and then be ready to start in 2017. Of course, if things happen that way, we'll get threads all fall that "Maxwell should start". ;)

I'll start that thread. If he's the QB of the future, let's see how he does now.

If he's good enough, move some of the guys down the depth charts into other positions where they may be able to contribute. Duckworth screams TE/H-back to me, and Krizancic has been mentioned as a DB.

I find it hard to make a judgement on a player because his "warm ups" look good. A lot of guys can look good in warm ups and do nothing once the ball is kicked off and vice versa. I hope he's as good as people hope.

I think you missed my point. His warm ups are all we have to judge his talent level. It is essentially unreliable and hence the Starbucks comment.

I am really surprised that I need to explain this again since my post on this was so brief.

Are you guys into the eggnog already?

Amazing that we're told to go on the warm-up, eyeball test for this qb but the actual game experience of our leading YPC running back has people okay with Solich and staff not playing this running back.

You're aware, LC, that only Monroe's eyeballs can truly see?

Objection. You're speculating.

Irons.

Speculation is neither the same as knowledge or wisdom.

Monroe,

Get over it ... Irons did not play for a reason. There's more to how much time a player sees than just his ability.