Connor Blumrick was a raw but talented QB coming out of high school – tall, cannon-armed, and with good wheels – it’s not surprising he got attention in things like Elite 11 camps. A Lisfranc injury ruined his senior year at Pearland High, and along with coaching changes at A&M, a talented QB room, and other issues, his quarterback ambitions got waylaid. In his last season at A&M, he was part of the RB group, but you could probably more accurately give him a more amorphous “eligible receiver” label, given how he was talked about by coaches and players. His biggest contributions to the team came on special teams, where he both covered and blocked; his highlights include recovering a fumbled punt in a win over LSU.

Blumrick’s coming to Blacksburg as a QB. There’s almost no college game film on him, so we’ll focus on the 2019 spring game, where he led A&M’s Maroon squad. We’ll look at a few different parts of his game, including one of the trickiest to cover: throwing technique.

Throwing a football is one of the most—maybe, the most, depending on who you ask—complicated movements in sports. The implement is unwieldy, the target is moving, the movement requires the whole body, there’s complex mental processing going on behind the throw, and it’s done under threat of physical harm. Because it’s and the offenses it helps fuel are so complicated, there are a lot of different ways to teach a guy how to throw, and they can all be “right.” There’s sort of a “funnel of uniformity” when it comes to throwing mechanics in that the more advanced the sport, the more alike the teachings and expectations are. For my money, that funnel’s pretty wide for grade school, high school, and even college, and narrows down fast in the pros. With that in mind, consistency in throwing technique is probably more important than what technique you choose.

All that said, there’s some big, basic stuff that’s improved in Blumrick’s throwing motion. His delivery used to be disjointed, with his hips, torso, and arm not being in synch. It’d look a little like a shot-put motion, but he’s smoother in the spring game. He also had a long wind-up in high school, but by the spring game most of that’s been ironed out. That tells me he’s teachable, which is very important.

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