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I don't know how deep this rabbit hole goes, to be honest. The David Carr story does come to mind, but at the time I think the conventional wisdom was "they put him behind a terrible line and of course he took 5 sacks a game." It's certainly possible that, with a sharper pencil afforded by a more deeply analytic view, we might say "the line was definitely bad, but Carr didn't have the skill needed to get out of that hole and contributed a lot to the problem."
Back to Howell... I watched a bit of him playing, and that arm is indeed tantalizing to want to think "I could fix him." I also feel (without data to back this up) like the WAS offense last year sorta hung him out to dry a lot, by not putting out any safety/outlet routes on a sizable share of called pass plays. Asking a young QB to have the presence of mind to whip the ball toward an empty part of the line of scrimmage, or safely out of bounds, seems like a lot, to me. Just running a TE in a block-and-release 2y pattern, or having a RB do something similar, might have staved off a slice of those sacks. But yeah he got smothered a ton last year, it was a very real angle for 2023 daily fantasy to just play the "vs. WAS" defense no matter how bad they were.
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