Nothing wrong with Andrew Luck's arm strength
Before the 2012 NFL draft a few highly regarded (along with more than a few not-so-highly-regarded) pundits openly questioned Andrew Luck's arm strength leading some to project Robert Griffin III as a better prospect. Luck's camp and preseason thus far has started to answer those questions. George Bremer of the Herald Bulletin notes Adam Vinatieri has seen some of the best and he's got no doubts about the rookie's ability to make the throws:
“He’s impressed me with his arm strength,” said Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri, who has played in six Super Bowls alongside Drew Bledsoe, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. “He has a short little window where he throws the ball in there real pretty. He makes all the throws.”
Yeah, but doofus pundits said the same thing about Peyton Manning back in '98. I won't say that pundits don't know *anything*, but they seem to think they know more than they do about the importance of arm strength.
I'll worry about arm strength when I see a QB fail to make crisp passes beyond a certain distance consistently. Nothing about Luck's college career suggested that there was a problem there.
@AJ_ I think it has more to do with the need to sell copy than anything. "Well, this QB prospect here, he's one of the best prospects we've ever seen and there's not really any cogent criticism we can level against him" sells a whole lot fewer magazines and draws a whole lot fewer eyeballs than a 1st-overall draft battle, even though it was never really a contest. A complaint like arm strength is a great thing for pundits because it's almost entirely unquantifiable (and even if it was, we lack the history to make a lucid analysis of the numbers), and it will always be easy to find game tape of QBs making limp noodle throws that make their arms look weaker than they are. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a real NFL scout that actually felt that Luck's arm strength was a concern going into the draft, and the only people I remember bringing it up were Skip Bayless and his ilk that rely on casual fans who think the game is about passion and emotion and who "wants it" more, rather than talent and work and strategy and all the complexities of the NFL game.
