Diving Deeper Into Taysom Hill's First QB Start

Taysom Hill made his NFL starting quarterback debut on Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons, much to everyone's surprise but the swiss army knife played the position well.

In the first half, Sean Payton seemed to play it safe a bit with Hill, they weren't running a lot of run-pass option plays, he wasn't calling any designed runs, and those are strengths of his. A majority of the time he was a pocket passer, Payton had him reading defenses and dropping back like a regular quarterback.

However, when the second-half began Sean Payton seemed to open things up a bit, Taysom began running the football a little bit more and even scored twice on the ground. Now, he didn't throw any touchdown passes but he also didn't make many mistakes throwing the football as well. Payton and the coaching staff seemed to come up with a solid game-plan for Hill to have success in his debut under center.

Something that Taysom did bring to the table that Drew Brees generally doesn't at this point in his career was the deep ball. Hill threw a couple of them including one to Emmanuel Sanders that he might have underthrown purposefully so that he could come back to the ball and fool the defender. According to Next Gen Stats, he used a ton of air yards to complete the pass as well.

If you turn to Pro Football Focus his grades weren't great, they were rather average and as a passer he was average, he did enough to win the football game and made some plays here and there. In terms of PFF grades, he graded out at about a 52 overall, a 60 as a passer, and 51 running the ball with a fumble.

All in all, though, Hill said he was happy with the way he played.

He also mentioned that he had a lot of help from QB1 in Drew Brees this week preparing.

You could tell the arm strength is there and like anything in life, the more you do it the better you get at it. I guess as the weeks go on we'll see just how much more comfortable and better he gets at playing the position.