It was announced Wednesday night that the Bengals were expected to sign J.T. O'Sullivan. On Thursday, that became reality. Len Pasquarelli reports that the Bengals signed O'Sullivan to a two-year deal -- details are still undisclosed.
O'Sullivan has nine career touchdowns; eight of them in 2008. He's completed 57.3% of his 246 regular season pass attempts. I asked Fooch, author of Niners Nation, our primary Super Bowl enemy, what he thought of O'Sullivan, who spent 2008 in San Francisco.
I think an apt description would be "poor man's Brett Favre," or maybe it should be "homeless man's Brett Favre." O'Sullivan definitely has some of the skills to be a good NFL quarterback. He's got a good arm and has some good scrambling abilities.
However, he's got more of the negative Brett Favre traits, and a few to add on top of that. He can hit some of the deep passes, but his accuracy and decision making on anything under 20 yards is abysmal. I know this YouTube is a compilation of the worst stuff, but it happened more often than not.
His biggest problem is an inability to hold onto the ball before passing. If I saw a pass rusher coming from the blind side, there was probably a 75% chance that if he made contact with O'Sullivan, JTO would cough up the ball. Now, often times he or an offensive lineman would recover the fumble, but still, it was not a good thing.
As a backup QB I think he'd be fine. If the situation came where he had to go in, you know all hell has broken loose. There is definitely talent lurking there, but there's too much crap covering it up.
Oh and there are two nicknames we had for him:
1. J.T. "Just Turnovers" O'Sullivan - in college at UC Davis he was nicknamed "Just Touchdowns," so that was an easy one.
2. J.T. O'Mulligan - a recent development but one I particularly like.
Oh boy.