CORONADOCORONADO — There is a football saying that is likely as old as the first film projector used by a coach to evaluate player performance: “The eye in the sky don’t lie.”
Former NFL quarterback J.T. O’Sullivan often expresses a similar sentiment while analyzing clips of college and NFL quarterbacks for his popular YouTube channel, The QB School, from his home office/library.
Then again, popular can mean different things.
O’Sullivan’s five-year-old channel has 25.8 million views and 290,000 subscribers — and not all of them agree with the longtime NFL quarterback’s breakdowns. O’Sullivan often receives pushback on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for his particularly strong assessments. Among his most viewed and widely discussed breakdowns so far are those on young QBs Justin Fields of the Bears, Jordan Love of the Packers and Brock Purdy of the 49ers.
“I just say, ‘Hey, the tape is the tape,'” O’Sullivan said. “It’s right there. You can’t hide it.”
O’Sullivan, 44, would know.
The New Orleans Saints took O’Sullivan, a star quarterback at UC Davis, in the sixth round of the 2002 NFL Draft. Over the next 10 years, he played with 11 NFL teams and in both the Canadian Football League and the now-defunct NFL Europe.
O’Sullivan made eight career NFL starts, all with the San Francisco 49ers, and has one game ball in his office. It’s from his first career touchdown , a seven-yarder thrown to Hall of Fame receiver Calvin Johnson when they were teammates with the Detroit Lions. Now retired from playing, he lives in Coronado with his wife Laura and their three boys: Jack (13), Larkin (10) and Davis (8).
What did O’Sullivan learn from the NFL’s Saints, Packers, Bears, Vikings, Patriots, Panthers, Lions, 49ers, Bengals, Chargers and Raiders?
Well, pretty much everything related to playing quarterback, from the structure of offenses and the way defenses attack them to how to quickly learn the names of his teammates.
“Sometimes you’d get in the huddle and have to introduce yourself,” joked O’Sullivan, a native of Burbank who attended high school in Carmichael. “On scout team, you’d go down the line and tell guys: ‘OK, you are running this. You have this. You have this. If there is a blitz, you have this. Let’s go.'”
A different view
Former NFL quarterback Trent Green once summarized the position this way:
“It’s kind of like being a student in an advanced course knowing that every week you have a big test,” said Green, who threw 162 touchdown es in a 15-season pro career. “Except that ing this test includes getting hit by 250-300 pound people whose job is to knock you out of the game while knowing that any missed answer can cost an entire team a game.”
Watch O’Sullivan’s breakdowns, and you quickly learn that the casual fan can only process a fraction of what actually takes place on each play.
O’Sullivan, who lists former UC Davis coach Bob Biggs, his first NFL offensive coordinator Mike McCarthy and longtime NFL offensive wiz Mike Martz as his mentors, often starts his analysis with a disclaimer.
“OK, there are a lot of moving parts here,” he’ll say — before going into exacting detail on each of those elements.
What are the route combinations for receivers? What is the offensive line’s protection responsibility? Is the defense playing man-to-man, zone or some kind of hybrid? Does the quarterback have a “hot” option in the event of a blitz? Is motion used, how does the defense react to that motion and what is each receiver’s downfield landmark given the down and distance?
It can take several minutes for O’Sullivan to break down a given play.
Quarterbacks have a matter of seconds to figure it out in real time.
“The value I picked up by playing for so many coaches and in so many systems is the ability to quickly translate and process what is happening and why,” O’Sullivan said. “There are unique elements to each system. I try to see it and describe it in universal : what are we trying to accomplish on this play against this defense given this game situation?”
The Big A
One of O’Sullivan’s favorite words in any evaluation is anticipation.
Can a quarterback get his feet set and release the football even before a target is coming out of a break?
The great ones make it look easy. The good ones do it intermittently.
In breaking down C.J. Stroud’s performance in last week’s game at Atlanta, O’Sullivan marveled at the Texans rookie’s combination of anticipation and accuracy on a handful of throws — including a dart over the middle of the field to a receiver who had not even begun to make a break when Stroud ripped a laser up the seam.
“This would be excellent for any QB, let alone for a guy making his fifth career start,” O’Sullivan commented. “Ya’ll, if you don’t like the way C.J. Stroud is playing, you don’t like QB play.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv8AVVTBMEwO’Sullivan’s commentary floats between the technical, using football jargon familiar to coaches, players and hardcore fans, to the casual. “He’s throwing dudes open,” O’Sullivan says of one QB.
The overall vibe is that of watching football clips with a buddy who knows what he’s looking at and wants you to understand it just as well.
In a detailed look at Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert’s 405-yard, three touchdown performance in a win at Minnesota three weeks ago, O’Sullivan marveled at a throw the fourth-year quarterback made to convert a third-and-17 late in the game.
“He throws an out-of-structure, second-window in (route),” he comments. “Let that wash over you. That’s bananas.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRrHB7AHE7s
The growing popularity of O’Sullivan’s YouTube channel and the subscriber-only content on his Patreon account has led some to ask whether the former quarterback wants to get into coaching. Sullivan spent three years (2019-21) as Patrick Henry High School’s coach before going online.
The answer? Well, it’s as complicated as one of those plays.
O’Sullivan’s Coronado lifestyle allows ample time to create content, watch his sons play sports and be involved in other activities while living a normal, relatively stress-free life. But the game still tugs at him.
“I’m not looking to get back into coaching. Having too much fun doing this,” he said. “Plus, I don’t want to move. Coaching is a hard lifestyle. I’ve seen it up close. I’d never say never. Perhaps once the kids are grown. Competing at the highest level would be the draw for me. I can’t replicate that competition anywhere else.”
