I think I disagree with all of this except the part about being promised he’d be a 4 year starter. I agree that whole line of thought is crap.
As for Martinez, he has not been good for the past two seasons. Some will argue he had a good competition percentage in 2020 and that’s true and gives me some hope, but his inability to get the ball downfield hurt this offense. Some will say that was on the WRs and we certainly didn’t have great deep threats but when we did have guys open downfield he missed them, either visually or physically. That said, my hope is he will spend the off season working on that part of his game and he will certainly benefit from the bigger receivers he will have available in 2021. That alone will improve this offense.
The other problem I’ve had with Martinez that boggles my mind is that he doesn’t have a winner’s edge to him, at least we don’t see it enough. Too often he has played us into losses with bad decisions and bad play. That has to change. On a positive note, I did see some progress at the end of the season. But this issue is still TBD.
Lastly, the narrative about the backup QB as it relates to 2020 is old and tired and completely wrong. 2019 and early 2020 Martinez had proven that he was not playing winning football from the QB position. He wasn’t getting it done. Even Frost commented on his lack of competitiveness after the 2018 season. He needed to take a seat on the bench if only to light a fire under his azz. I praise Frost for making the decision to bench Martinez. Recall that even some of his teammates publicly said Luke added a spark when he was running the offense. So it was a no brainer. Martinez needed to sit. And if you look at his performance when he returned to the starting role, it appears that the move had the intended benefit. I think he played with more intensity in the latter part of the season. Sometimes QBs benefit from a little bench time, and Martinez certainly did. My only complaint with that series of events is that I wish Frost would have put him back in late in the first half of the Illinois game, or at least the start of the second half. It was clearly needed at the time. That’s on Frost.
So, I think we’re seeing some historical revisionism in the OP. But going forward I agree that our best chance of winning in 2021 is with an improved Martinez pulling the trigger. He has to improve his mental game, and he has to improve his downfield passing (I think he will), and we need to keep him healthy. I still question how much of his issues are due to an accumulation of injuries over several years, and question whether or not his body is capable of being what we need him to be at this point. I don’t know. We had better have a plan B in place in case he’s not physically capable of being the QB we need in 2021.