One former WVU football legend is having a rough go of it in his first season with a new franchise at the NFL level.
Geno Smith has been in the NFL for over a decade, and didn’t truly start to excel at the professional level until a career resurgence in Seattle over the past few seasons. This year, he found himself with the Las Vegas Raiders. And despite an exiciting start to the season, things are unraveling as he seems to be falling back into some of the tendencies that made him an inconsistent NFL quarterback from the minute he was drafted.
Through five games this year, Smith has thrown for 1,176 yards, six touchdowns, and nine interceptions – that latter number is good for the most interceptions among the 63 different NFL players with passing stats this season. He also has earned a PFF grade of just 59.4, which ranks him 43rd out of 55 qualifying quarterbacks.
Smith still has the ability to make explosive plays happen, but they’re often negated by his inconsistency and poor decision making – and that has cost the Raiders early in the season, as they are just 1-4 and in last place in the AFC West.
It may be too early to say late career resurgence of Smith as a reliable starting NFL quarterback is coming to a close, and it may even be too early to say that the Raiders’ experiment with Smith leading their offense has failed. After all, it was just a couple of weeks ago he walked off the field among the highest-graded NFL quarterbacks in the league in Week 3, and maybe the inconsistency are growing pains with a new coaching staff and new weapons around him. But things have looked much better in recent years for Smith than they currently do.
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