Sports: NFL

[Dad_Scaper]

Hah hah.

If these two leagues are both expecting to make money on an actual boycott of NFL football, I suspect they'll be disappointed. We'll see.

[NecroBlade]

Personally I think they should sign Kaepernick to one of the AAF teams. He's a fine QB.

[IAmBatman]

What it won't have is the talent of the NFL. That was the main problem with the XFL - all gimmick, no substance. It'll be the same with this.

[dok]

After being out of the league a full year it's unclear if Kaep can ever get back to where he was, but as it stands he's still probably better than a half-dozen current NFL starters... including the guy my Broncos deemed fit to guarantee $25 million to.

[Aldin]

I like Kaep. If Mariota manages to get himself seriously injured again early this year, I hope the Titans grab him to be our starter. That said, I wouldn't want the media circus that having him here as a backup right now would cause.

~Aldin, thinking that the only excuse the Broncos might have is that they already did the media circus QB thing with the far less talented Tebow

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by dok

After being out of the league a full year it's unclear if Kaep can ever get back to where he was, but as it stands he's still probably better than a half-dozen current NFL starters... including the guy my Broncos deemed fit to guarantee $25 million to.

Given the current wealth of quality quarterbacking in the league and remembering how Kaep last looked as a starter, I suspect this number may be high.

[dok]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

Given the current wealth of quality quarterbacking in the league and remembering how Kaep last looked as a starter, I suspect this number may be high.

Kaep was much better as a starter in 2016 then people remember. Some comments on this from last year:

Spoiler Alert!

Originally Posted by dok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I0cUTXwr-k

Originally Posted by dok

Look, I'll happily make fun of you for judging by wins alone, but I'll also freely acknowledge that offensive supporting cast, coaching, and game context all strongly influence QB production. I don't base my analysis of Kaepernick just on the numbers. I also watched him play last year, and I saw a thoroughly decent QB playing behind an awful line and throwing to bad receivers. He's not quite the magician that Russel Wilson is, but he was a solid QB in a bad situation. This is not just my opinion, it's the opinion of multiple different people who know better than me.

I agree that we're at a relative high water mark for QB play in the league. Nevertheless I think that, had he been signed early in the offseason and given a normal training camp, Kaepernick would have been a stronger starter than the actual opening day starter for the Jets, Jaguars, Broncos, Ravens, Bears, Bills, and Giants. That's 7.

[IAmBatman]

I'll agree on the Broncos. Bills and Jets is probably true (who knows) but it's a special situation when you have high first round rookies involved. Each of the others are all subjective, IMO.

[dok]

I agree that you can give the Bills and Jets a pass because they are playing for the future (although I'm highly skeptical of the guy the Bills picked). The Bears are arguably in a similar spot although year 1 was not promising. If we're just going by film or stats as opposed to "potential" then the last we saw of Kaep was worlds better than Trubisky.

Bortles is probably the hardest argument on that list, but he's been pretty bad for pretty much his whole career. Last year was better for him than the year before, so that's something, I guess. Still, Kaepernick was better in 2016 than Bortles was in 2017, and he's shown a much higher peak level of play (or pedestrian things like reading the defense quickly) than Bortles. His resume is better in basically every way except age, and Bortles' age is only really an upside if you think he's going to become consistently good. My guess is that 2017 Bortles is about the best we can expect from him.

Manning and Flacco have been living off their past successes for a long time now. I know it seems like I'm trying to troll D_S when I say it, but Flacco has probably reached the point now where he's the worst starting QB in the league. We'll have to see the rookies to be sure though.

[Dad_Scaper]

Flacco finished the preseason with a QBR of 141.4, the highest in the league. I understand that it's just preseason, and QBR is not the be-all end-all stat, but if it helps, I'm sure he regrets running over your dog. Or whatever he did to draw this out, over a span of years.

[dok]

All Flacco has done to deserve this is be a very bad quarterback over the last 5 seasons. Here's the list of quarterbacks worse than Flacco over that span who started at least a half-season. Geno Smith and Brock Osweiler are the only players on that list who got two full seasons to prove their incompetence before being sent to the bench. Flacco's been doing it for 5 years. It's kind of amazing!

Is the stat I picked there the be-all or end-all? No, of course not. But it's an easy and reasonably accurate measure of a QB's performance (basically just a better version of passer rating), and Flacco's been consistently bad by that measure. You can't paint a similarly bad portrait of any actual good QB using wide-angle stats like this.

There's plenty of film analysis (examples: 1, 2) and stat analyses (examples: 1, 2) to go to if you want more evidence. You actively don't want more evidence. You're not going to read those links. That's fine. I promise, I wasn't trying to argue with you about this; I was just defending my "half dozen" line to Bats. If you can let it go then I can let it go.

(And yes, I realize that that second film analysis identifies the new Broncos starter as the only 2017 starter with a worse deep ball efficiency than Flacco. The Keenum signing was astoundingly bad. Also, my goodness, did the Packers tank their season by going with Hundley and not signing Kaepernick.)

EDIT: for the curious, here's the flip side of that list; i.e. best QBs of the last 5 years by a simple stat. I actually switched to AY/A to adjusted net yards per attempt here, which includes sack yards so it makes Flacco look a little better. (He's relatively good at avoiding sacks.) While many would quibble at the specific order, I doubt most people would have too much issue with the names at the top of the list. What's more interesting is the names that drop down. Eli is, as I said before, another guy kind of living off his reputation. Cam has not been very consistent -and to be fair this stat ignores his very strong (and consistent) rushing production. Flacco is hanging out with Blake Bortles in the "why are we still starters" neighborhood.

[Dad_Scaper]

I'm sorry about your dog, dok. He didn't mean it.

We'll see what happens this year.