IF we’re talking about who we’d want as a starter for our teams next year, #5 is as high as Big Ben can really hope to go, assuming Farve returns. The Big Three of Brees, Manning, and Brady are locked in, and Grandpa Farve had a helluva year.
I’d rather have Ben than Romo, no doubt, because Romo hasn’t shown he can win the big games. Warner has, but I don’t think he’s coming back. Rivers has the potential, but he hasn’t shown it in the playoffs yet. The knock on Big Ben is he holds the ball too long, and takes too many big hits. He’s a tough guy, but he’s had concussion issues already, and I wouldn’t bet the farm on him being healthy all season…
Exactly (@Hawkeyeop). The problem with the “choker” label as applied by Gangster Octopus is that it’s effectively indistinguishable from simple failure. So, an awful lot of the time (*arguably *almost all of the time), it means that you’re taking a failure to succeed at sports and imposing upon it an artificial, but more dramatically satisfying, narrative: Player X would have won, but was undone by a character flaw. That’s a much more damning assessment than that the athlete was simply outplayed, and I don’t think there’s any justification for it.
Consider the deciding play of the Pats-Giants Super Bowl. Plaxico Burress fakes the slant and then turns upfield; CB Ellis Hobbs bites on the fake, and Burress runs right by him to make the winning catch. Rightfully, no one talked about Hobbs being someone who gets the yips in big moments: he just got beat on the play. The other guy made an excellent move and he got fooled. It should be no different with Manning last night, except quarterbacks (especially great quarterbacks) have a mythology built up around them that makes the “happened to get outplayed” storyline somehow unsatisfying.
I agree that the Steelers performance over the last few years has been a bit better than the Eagles, Cowboys, and Chargersa. I’m not sure how that relates to who is the best quarterback though with the NFL being a team game and all. You would think Big Ben’s first “big game” winning performance would show that maybe some players other than qb have some say on whether a team wins or loses.
Tracy Porter did his homework and took advantage of something he’d seen on film. I think he deserves credit more than Manning deserves derision. However, I do think Manning was trying to force it on that play, understandably, but got burned for it, and that the timing couldn’t have been worse. He had been throwing beautifully all night.
But this whole thing reminds me of that commercial where Michael Jordan reminds us that he missed the game winning shot x number of times in his career.
Yeah, that’s not a great example. hobbs was left out on an island against Burress. Nobody says he choked because nobody in their right mind ever thought he had a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping Burress from pulling in the touchdown. He had no chance and he knew. and Burress knew it. And Eli knew it. That was a choke job, alright, but it gets laid at the feet of whoever called/adjusted that defensive play.
The reason that people claim clutch doesn’t exist is because the numbers for baseball players are the same in the regular season and the postseason, so clearly there is no clutch aspect to baseball.
This has yet to be proven in football, and it drives me nuts that people think a 1-on-1 competition like picther vs batter demonstrates a universal truth about team sports.
Favre is gleefully saddled with the choker label by many people.
Also, keep in mind that many people hold the view that the only reason Peyton ever got past the Patriots in the first place is because he and/or Bill Polian went whining to the league to get pass interference changed to make it easier for passing teams to be successful. So even his getting over the hump carries some baggage with it the detractors can point to.
I personally cannot stand this new defense-less passing league the Colts created with their rule changes. Brady didn’t help either with his furthering of the QB-can’t-be-touched direction the league is headed, but at least he personally didn’t campaign for it.
Numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story. During the regular season, some of those stats come against pretty weak opponents. In the playoffs, he’s facing the best teams in the league in a given year, so lower numbers aren’t really surprising.
By the same token, getting a pure expansion team dumped in your division pads your regular season stats, especially when they flame out spectactularly with their #1 QB. It took them 8 years to post a winning record fer cryin’ out loud.
When you feast on soft opponents in the regular season and then get beat up by good opponents in the playoffs, well, choking isn’t the worst word in the world to describe it. (Also similar to Favre, who padded his record with the Lions.)
Of course he had a chance. If he doesn’t bite on the fake, then it takes a very good pass/catch to score the touchdown. If Burress actually had been running a slant (which could easily have been the case), then Hobbs jumps the route and potentially picks off the throw (or at least eliminates Burress as a potential target).
More generally, though, in any big game that’s close in the final minutes, chances are the game will be decided by a player on the losing team failing on a critical play. But failures happen all game long; there’s nothing special about failures at the end of big games that means we should think they’re about choking instead of being about run of the mill failure.
As an aside, could pro-football-reference.com be any more disparately bad than their baseball counterpart? No easily findable post-season numbers for people? Really?
During this past year, Brees spent the regular season throwing more touchdown passes and fewer interceptions than Manning did; Manning beat him out for MVP anyway, and the vote wasn’t at all close. Brees, of course, simply kept on keeping on this past Sunday; he again threw more touchdown passes and fewer interceptions than Manning did, and the Saints beat the Colts such that Brees could get the Super Bowl MVP nod.
So was it just this past Sunday? Or was it that Brees was great this year?
I went poking around looking at regular season vs playoffs for a bunch of QBs just to get a feeling for what the normal change is. Here’s a breakdown by change in passer rating from regular season to postseason, a few of which I found quite surprising.
+11.8 Drew Brees
+9.1 Kurt Warner
+3.3 Joe Montana
-0.2 John Elway
-0.3 Brett Favre
-1.6 Eli Manning
-3.4 Matt Hasselbeck
-4.5 Ben Roethlisberger
-6.5 Donovan McNabb
-7.6 Peyton Manning
-7.8 Tom Brady
-9.3 Dan Marino
-11.0 Steve Young
-13.7 Jeff Garcia
-14.8 Tony Romo
-16.6 Philip Rivers
I tried to include every current QB with a relatively large number of playoff games, plus the historic greats Peyton is usually compared to, especially during the two-week run-up to the Superbowl where it was assumed he’d be crowned best ever.
If you want to look anyone’s numbers up, the best place to look is pro-football-reference. Click on “splits” at the top of the passing numbers for a given player. The first split is regular season, the last section has the total for playoff games.
I thought McNabb would be lower, but the biggest surprise by far was Rivers.
They ran an option route. Whatever Hobbs did he was going to be toast, no ifs, ands or buts about it. The reason Burress didn’t run a slant is because Hobbs bit on it. If he doesn’t bite on it, Burress runs a slant.
Manning’s pick six looked like a major departure from their norm in terms of execution. It did indeed look like a choke.
Also, when he handed it off at the end of the game that was a major mental lapse on his part, then accidentally calling a timeout and trying to give it back? Hilarious mental breakdown. These are extremely unusual for Peyton, and therefore could objectively be classified as a choke job.
Jim Plunkett won two Super Bowls- is he an all-time great?
In any case, “choking” tends to mean “not performing well in the big games.” But that leaves open a major question: What are the “big games”?
Wasn’t the AFC championship game against the Jets a “big game”? Peyton Manning won that one. And, rest assured, IF the Colts had lost to the Jets, Peyton’s detractors WOULD be calling it a “big game.”
Meanwhile, Tom Brady supposedly always comes through in big games. But wait… wasn’t the playoff game against the Ravens a few weeks back a “big game”? It’s safe bet that, IF he’d led the Pats to a big comeback, we’d be hearing that it WAS a big game.
Just once, I’d like to hear what “the big one” is BEFORE it’s played.
:rolleyes:
Maybe you’d like to tell me how what I quoted could be interpreted any differently, since it was a defense of you dogging Manning for the difference between his regular season and postseason numbers. Here, I’ll quote it for you again:
Your attempt to backpedal from the obvious fact that defenses in the postseason are better, so QB ratings go down by distracting us with the hyperbole of “feasting” and “getting beat up” isn’t working, as it’s as empty as you suggest my little recap of your argument was. You brought up those numbers, and you picked those words to describe them.
I’ll also point out that Manning’s coaches have inexplicably run extremely conservative offensives in the post-season, much to the absolute dismay of the Colts’ fanbase - mostly to counterattack traditionally strong AFC defenses throughout the last decade.
Frankly, there aren’t many elite QBs out there that don’t have patsies in their division they get to beat up on. Brees has the Bucs or the Falcons, and the Chiefs and Raiders before that.