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David J. Phillip/Associated Press

While on the subject of Watson and the other quarterbacks who teams scrambled to draft in the top 12 picks of the first round on Thursday, there is an important two-pronged issue playing out.

First, can they actually play? Second, will they be ready to fill the coming void, as the greatest era of quarterback play comes to an end soon?

Start with the second question for a moment. The NFL is in the early stages of a quarterback drain that figures to rival the late 1990s, when Jim Kelly, John Elway, Dan Marino, Steve Young, Troy Aikman and others retired. In the past two offseasons, Peyton Manning and Tony Romo have quit.

Over the next three years, the league could lose Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Philip Rivers and Carson Palmer. That figures to be four or five Hall of Famers and a handful of very good passers.

The problem with answering those two questions about Watson, Patrick Mahomes and Mitchell Trubisky is they are complicated by the fact all three come from spread offenses. That wide-ranging system is increasingly creating a gap between what quarterbacks know about how to play coming out of college and what they need to know to play in the NFL.

Jordan Palmer, Carson's brother, sees it all too clearly. Jordan helped train Watson in advance of the draft.

“It would be really interesting if you could build a graph with one line that represented what college quarterbacks know coming out of college and what NFL quarterbacks are expected to know,” said Palmer, who spent part of six seasons in the NFL.

“The line with what they know would be steadily decreasing each year and the line with what they are expected to know would be increasing really sharply. The interesting part with the gap between the two … I’m not trying to downgrade the guys in this draft. It’s just that what they’re being asked to do at the college level is less and less every year.”

Palmer, 32, has seen the quick progression of the spread. From quarterbacks taking signals and then calling the play in the huddle to only calling the protection for the offensive linemen to having the entire team look to the sidelines.

Or now, to the entire team looking at cards that have pictures or colors.

“It’s amazing how little the colleges ask the players to know,” Palmer said.

The problem starts with things that most fans don’t look at. From calling a play in the huddle accurately and convincingly to making changes and reads at the line of scrimmage, so much more goes into quarterbacking than simply the act of throwing.

Former longtime NFL assistant coach Mike Sheppard, who worked with Mahomes, laid out an 11-step process that the quarterback has to go through from the time the play is called in to before the snap. When Jim Zorn worked with Cal’s Davis Webb, another spread quarterback who went in the third round to the Giants, Zorn had to break down the whole process from the huddle to simply taking a snap from center.

But the biggest issue is that the spread, particularly when played at a high pace, exacerbates the knowledge gap because it further limits what the defense can do. Talk to the likes of Denver VP of football operations John Elway, Tampa Bay general manager Jason Licht, Buccaneers coach Dirk Koetter and Stanford coach David Shaw, and you get one factor after another.

There are only so many ways that defenses can play in college. The wide line splits and spread-out formations mean that offensive linemen don’t have to be developed. The wider placement of the hash marks in college forces safeties to declare where they are going to cover long before the snap and also creates easy throws to the wide side of the field. Quarterbacks rarely have to read the entire field because reads are predetermined.

“You’re always isolating the other’s teams worst defender,” Elway said. “You’re typical college defense is lucky to have one guy who can cover. Now you’re asking them to have four. It just makes it easy to figure out who you’re going after. And then nobody plays bump coverage in college, so you don’t ever go against that.”

Said Koetter: “I thought when I came to the pros that it was going to be so much easier because the hash marks were so much closer together. I found out just the opposite cause the safeties at this level can disguise what they’re doing right up to the snap.”

Finally, there was Shaw describing the hard part of trying to distinguish one quarterback from another. While quarterbacks such as Alex Smith and Cam Newton have had success as pros, other spread quarterbacks such as Robert Griffin III and Johnny Manziel have been colossal flops. While the success rate for pro-style quarterbacks is not a lot better, the overall results are generally more positive.

“It’s almost impossible,” Shaw said. “The one thing I look for is can a guy read the field. Does he naturally know how to scan from one side to the other to go through progressions. I saw that last year with Dak Prescott, and he was able to have success. I see that with one of those guys this year.”

Who?

“Watson.”