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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • William Stephen Belichick started Drew McQueen Bledsoe over Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr so the answer is no. No one knows anything. This isn’t Madden, there’s no database of ‘actual’ ratings. You can win with backups and Joe Flacco and Joe Namath and sometimes even with Tim Tebow or Urban Meyer.

    They figure it out and second guess themselves constantly. Even now, reasonable coaches can argue about how good Russell Wilson really was in his prime, and how bad Zach Wilson actually is.

    Even Brady, the acknowledged greatest QB of all time, was barely winning games early on but was on a great team with excellent coaching. BTW, Brady has good size and throw but his real super power seems to be that he out-homeworked everyone else, to get rid of the ball fast because he had a good coaching staff early and worked on reading the defenses and connecting with receivers. He trained constantly with receivers before there was a limit on it, until the timing was perfect, and he got receivers to buy into it, no doubt helped by an early Super Bowl and ‘bad cop’ Belichick. He also bribed the OL and later in his career was obsessive about his health. NONE OF THAT could be measured in college, it didn’t even exist.

    Manning came in with ‘pedigree’ and knew how to run an offense by himself, at al all-star level. But Eli did too, and he was a goofy lucky turnover machine with excellent mentoring. Everyone ‘knew’ you couldn’t teach accuracy until Josh Allen happened. Everyone ‘knew’ that Doug Flutie was ‘too short’ 20 years ago but Bryce Young still got drafted last year. Nick Foles was a backup, Wentz was an excellent starter, Jimmy G was a good QB, and Mac Jones was considered an all-star.











  • NO, you know why? Because the league will not go back in time to ground and pound and defensive slopfests currently featuring in the AFCN, for example. The ratings are as good as they’ve ever been, but they’re not going to take this lying down.

    This is like the neutral zone trap in hockey or the bully ball in basketball both about 2 decades ago, and both those leagues came to their senses slowly without a lot of analytics and internet comments.

    This time, the NFL will not wait around. Not only because high scoring games are more fun for casual fans, not only because they’re more fun to bet on, but because they can’t market defensive players the way they can market Mahomes, Wilson, Rogers, Brady, Allen, Manningses, Tua, etc.

    The only counter argument I can see is that they really hate guaranteed contracts, and they want QBs to flail around until that goes away. But there’s no math in that imo.

    They’ll wait to see if it’s a statistical fluke, and I’m sure they’re happy to return some physical play back, but no way there isn’t a course correction.