I can only believe you’d be citing statistics if you could find some that backed up your claims. Otherwise, I really don’t know what you’re trying to argue. You’re just making halfeay nonsensical statements like “make Vick a running back”.
His raison d’etre is that he can win.
The fact that he’s a quarterback who CAN RUN WELL changes the defensive schemes needed to stop him.
That does things like enable Atlanta to rush the ball well with their backs. When linebackers can’t shoot gaps (run blitz) because Vick’s will get outside and torch them, it opens up the running game that much more. When you need to SPY him, that’s one more guy that’s not in pass coverage.
As a passer, he’s not great, but let’s not act like he’s some chump. He has a lifetime 53. 8% completion percentage, 54 TD passes, and 42 INTS. 6.7 yards per attempt.
Those aren’t Favre and Manning numbers, but they’re better than a lot of guys who have been around the league for MANY years drawing good paychecks. . .Trent Dilfer, Steve Deberg, Drew Bledsoe, but Vick gives you so much more than any one of them.
All I know is that the Falcons were perennial losers before Vick. In their 36-year history prior to Vick taking over as starter, the Falcons had a grand total of 6 playoff appearances (average of once every 6 years), and a 4-6 postseason record.
The Falcons have made the playoffs in two of the three years they’ve had a healthy Vick starting at QB, with a 2-2 postseason record. If the Falcons make the playoffs this year, that’ll be three out of four. Believe me, Atlanta fans have no grounds for complaint.
Besides which, it’s just fun to watch the guy play.
Too many responses to gather them all together and respond to them individually. So I’ll just go with a stream-of-consciousness approach.
Jimmy, you always hated my argument because it was a dig on McNabb. Are you honestly telling me you would rather have the scrambling McNabb of old over the current pocket-passer McNabb? If so, you nead to have your head examined.
As for the “Vick is just a winner” garbage, you guys are disappointing me. Next you’ll be arguing that Big Ben and Trent Dilfer are better QBs than Dan Marino because they have rings while Danny Boy does not.
Unless you’re talking about regular season winning percentage. If that’s your angle, then I present to you Jay Fiedler, who has the the fifth-best starting record (minimum 25 starts) among active quarterbacks.
So if you’re arguing that Dilfer was better than Marino and Fielder is currently a top-5 QB in the league, then I concede that Vick is great. If you aren’t arguing both of those points, then, well, the stats don’t lie. Vick is not a good quarterback.
…and then immediately returned to losing. One Super Bowl trip in frnchise history doesn’t change things. In fact, it was only that Super Bowl run that allowed them to have an overall postseason record as good as 4-6.
Vick, in three full seasons, already has half as many playoff wins as all Falcon quarterbacks before him combined. (Including the talented Steve Bartkowski.)
As I’m sure you remember, you held that McNabb would never become a pocket passer, because his growth was being inhibited by his “cowardice” in refusing to throw the ball. I contended that he’d throw the ball if and when his receivers got open; until then, he was going to run when he could to keep his team in the game rather than throw picks. If you wish to revisit that argument in light of the last three seasons, maybe you need to have your head examined.
Trunk provided the stats and records for the Falcons with vs. the Falcons without Vick. His impact on his own team is what’s at issue, not his winning percentage versus the winning percentages of NFL quarterbacks at large. So, no, Fiedler’s winning percentage doesn’t have anything to do with anything. When Vick plays, his team’s way better than when he doesn’t. Isn’t that the point? Reread the thread. Nobody on the anti-anti-Vick bandwagon here is saying he’s the most unstoppable and flawless force in the history of quarterbacking. We’re just saying, jesus, for a terrible quarterback, he sure does keep tricking them.
I know you’re not really a basketball guy, but the Vick thing is a lot like the way Shaq was treated during his dominant years (not that Vick’s anywhere near that level of play, of course). You had a significant subset of basketball fans (old white people) who would say “Oh, all he can do is dunk!” and bitch and moan about how he couldn’t shoot free throws, never made any shots from outside of 5 feet, and how he just pushed people around. Meanwhile, he just keeps dunking, and the other team is taking running karate chops at his head, and they can’t stop him. It’s like, if a guy is a phenomenal physical specimen, his physical abilities immediately get taken for granted, and people start asking “what else does he do?” Oh, Vick can’t throw the ball; he’s only a 50% passer – but every time he runs with the ball he gets nine yards!
If I was picking a team, would he be the first quarterback I took? No. Would he be the fifth? No. Hell, I don’t even like the guy! But to take away what he’s done, what impact he has on the game, and the way he creates avenues to score for his team – which is the whole point of the game – in the way a lot of people do is just ridiculous. He plays quarterback, and he’s better at helping his team at that position than most of the other quarterbacks in the league, no matter how pretty their ball is. How could he be a bad quarterback if he’s the centerpiece of a team, he plays quarterback, and the team’s a good team? How is that possible? Please, explain how a bad quarterback makes his team better.
“The stats don’t lie,” by the way, is possibly the falsest thing anyone ever said in the history of mankind. All stats do is lie. The trick is to get them to lie the right way.
Oh, and one more thing, Ellis. Since you’re a big advocate of passer rating, I figured maybe I should speak your language this one time. I plugged in the numbers, and Vick has a career rating a hair below 75. That’s on par with the following quarterbacks (names cherry-picked for recognizance, and on par meaning give or take 5 points, which is a fairly small difference in rating)
(and in descending order):
Fran Tarkenton
Dan Fouts
John Elway
Mark Rypien
Jim Everett
Phil Simms
Bert Jones
Johnny Unitas
Drew Bledsoe
Jon Kitna
Jake Plummer
Kerry Collins
(Vick would go here)
David Carr
Daryle Lamonica
Sammy Baugh
Trent Dilfer
Terry Bradshaw
Bad quarterbacks all? Seems to me that Vick’s running ability gives him a little bit of added value on top of his QB rating, too, so where does that put him?
Oh I remember. My mind is like a steel trap, and the only thing I remember more vividly than when I’m right is when I’m wrong. I actually created a thread devoted to eating crow about McNabb.
I notice you didn’t answer my direct question. As I recall, my argument was that McNabb’s development as a passer was being stunted by his over-reliance on his legs. The “cowardice” had absolutely nothing to do with scrambling, but I won’t hold a misremembered detail from a years-old debate against you. I contended that dumping the ball off to your running back all day was more cowardly than vertical passes downfield to your wide receivers. You’ll note that the year I said that Mcnabb’s leading receiver was a running back.
I also remember your position. It was specifically that given a choice between a guy who only passes and a guy who both passes and runs, you’ll take the multi-threat any day. So, McNabb is now more one-dimensional in that he pretty much hasn’t been a scrambler for years. Your old argument would lead me to believe you prefer the old McNabb to the new one. Do you?
Fair point. But Fiedler does illustrate the point that you can’t just judge a quarterback by wins.
As for Trunk’s actual assertion that all he needed to know was that Vick was injured in 2003 and the Falcons weren’t good…isn’t it possible that their #32nd ranked defense played as much of a role – or even more – in their problems than just the loss of Vick? Having the worst defense in the league will generally sink your team’s chances no matter who the quarterback is.
A damn site higher, one would think. The passer rating would be greatly improved if the calculation used yards per completion instead of yards per attempt, and the numbers going into were as follows:
Plugging those numbers in is harder because I don’t have career sack and fumble numbers for playoff games. But, combining pro-football-reference with yahoo would get us most of the way there. Of course, these numbers are just about meaningless without a basis for comparison. So I’ll also plug in the numbers for a few guys on your list. To speed things up, I’ll only use guys who have career stats on yahoo and ignore their playoff games:
Michael Vick: 1323 of 2202 (60%) for 12,820 yards, 78 TDs 70 Ints; Rating 74.97 (YPC Rating: 91.09) Jake Plummer: 2782 of 4839 (57%) for 28,148 yards, 169 TDs 182 Ints; Rating: 70.20 (YPC Rating: 88.12) Drew Bledsoe: 4216 of 7552 (56%) for 42,148 yards, 260 TDs 257 Ints; Rating 69.16 (YPC Rating: 87.56) Jon Kitna: 2036 of 3484 (58%) for 19,225, 124 TDs 142 Ints; Rating: 68.66 (YPC Rating: 85.01) David Carr: 1269 of 2221 (57%) for 11,384 yards, 62 TDs 74 Ints; Rating: 66.48 (YPC Rating: 82.50) Kerry Collins: 3191 of 5795 (55%) for 32,851 yards, 183 TDs 220 Ints; Rating 66.30 (YPC Rating: 85.57) Trent Dilfer: 1884 of 3427 (55%) for 18,632, 111 TDs 150 Ints; Rating: 63.11 (YPC Rating: 81.66)
Interesting. The numbers say he’s better than those guys. Of course, he’s the best rushing quarterback the league has ever seen, and by a good margin, so comparing him to middling pocket passers is really missing the point. Since he’s the best at scrambling, if scrambling is really just as legitimate as staying in the pocket, we should be comparing him to the best pocket passers:
Peyton Manning: 3128 of 4920 (64%) for 34,072, 263 TDs 146 Ints; Rating: 89.37 (YPC Rating: 105.90) Carson Palmer: 769 of 1221 (63%) for 7,604 yards, 59 TDs 42 Ints; Rating: 82.29 (YPC Rating: 97.54)
The most elite scrambling passer falls well short of the elite pocket passers, so scrambling is clearly not as useful as throwing. Why anyone would want to accentuate scrambling over passing is simply beyond me.
It’s not impossible to win a bunch of games as a scrambler, but scrambling is less effective than throwing, increases your risk of injury, forces the passer to expend far more energy, and in the end even if you do it better than anyone else has ever done, it doesn’t amount to being much better overall than Jake Plummer. In short, scrambling is a flawed paradigm.
Also, if anyone can point to any stat where only 1 Superbowl appearance is generated out of 28 playoff appearances, I would absolutely lend credence to it.
Where did you show the most elite scrambling passer?
Where’s Elway?
Where’s Young?
Where’s Tarkenton?
No way would call Vick the most elite scrambling passer. He’s the best scrambler. That’s different.
I thought I posted above where we had 5 superbowl victories from scrambling quarterbacks.
And, that’s not counting two from Favre, who is probably somewhere in between.
That’s over 10% of all Superbowls won by scrambling quarterbacks.
To answer the question of whether they’re more effective or not, you would need to show they’re underrepresented as Superbowl winners. Do you really think that 10% of quarterbacks from the last 40 years could be considered scrambling quarterbacks? No way. That’s probably about the number today, and only starting in the 90s did the bias against the scrambling QB disappear.
So what if Vick’s percentage isn’t as good as Manning’s or Palmer’s? He’s had just as many Superbowl appearances as either one of them (zero). If the Super Bowl is all that matters, citing Manning isn’t really going to strengthen your position. He’s a dominant passer–probably one of the best ever. And he’s been in the league three years longer than Vick. And yet, I refer back to the only stat that seems to matter, and they both have a big, fat goose egg.
Fair enough, but my answer is that there is no “McNabb of old.” I’ve felt all along that the guy I had at quarterback was exactly the guy I wanted at quarterback. What I wanted was the old McNabb plus NFL-caliber receivers, which I’ve gotten for the last three years. I never believed, as you did, that McNabb was ignoring downfield options on a semi-regular basis. If he had been, of course I wouldn’t have wanted him running for 6 yards instead of throwing for 16. But he wasn’t then, and he still isn’t now. So I think the question’s a false dilemma.
Anyway, McNabb ran for 220 yards the Super Bowl year, and is on pace for a little bit more this year (and was hurt in the interim), which puts him near Elway multi-threat territory, though not Steve Young running rampant territory. That’s what I wanted all along – when his receivers are open, he throws it to them; when they aren’t, he runs around a little. Lately they’ve gotten open more often, so he’s thrown it more. I do think he should run a tiny bit more, though. He could get 60 yards in a game basically for free every now and then. So yeah, I still like the guy who’s a threat to run.
But all that’s old news, since I don’t have to bother defending one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the NFL at this point. Getting back to Vick: again, I just want to try to keep things in perspective. Nobody’s saying he’s better than Palmer or Manning*. But it seems fairly obvious to me that if you have a guy who’s a historically average passer (which his rating indicates), and on top of that is the greatest rusher in the history of the game, nobody has any business saying he shouldn’t be playing quarterback. If Vick couldn’t run at all, he’d be a pretty vanilla journeyman starter in the NFL – but an NFL starting quarterback nonetheless. Now, with that in mind, add the running ability. That’s all I’m saying.
*Although, of course, since nobody in the world thinks Vick’s going to be more efficient with his legs than those guys with their arms, it doesn’t move me much to roll rushing attempts into passing efficiency. Nobody’s saying they’re the same thing.
It’s only different if scrambling is less effective than passing, which would support my argument.
John Elway was not a scrambling quarterback; he only broke 300 yards on the ground once in his career.
You had to change the definition to get that. You could just as easily have said that a scrambling quarterback is anyone who scrambles for more than 100 yards, and wow, look how many of those have won Superbowls. 300 yards is fewer than 20 yards a game; I hardly think 13 yards per game qualifies a quarterback as being a scrambler.
300 is the magic number. You have yet to show a single quarterback to ever scramble for 300+ yards and win the Superbowl. Your 10% is actually 0%.
As for Brett Favre, I can only assume that you’re joking. His scrambling numbers resemble Peyton Manning’s.
Steve Young was a bit of a scrambler, having broken 300 yards in 6 of his 15 seasons. His Superbowl win was not one of them.
Fran Tarkenton scrambled for 280+ yards seven times. In those seven years, he has one playoff appearance with no wins. (He played in 14 game seasons. The benchmark I use is 20 yards per game, and give the scramblers a margin of error by rounding down to 300 for 16 game seasons.)
Here’s a quick list of scramblers off the top of my head:
Michael Vick
Randall Cunningham (Injury plagued, oddly enough.)
Daunte Culpepper (How’d he hurt his leg last year? And how’s he looking now?)
Donovan McNabb (Couldn’t win the CC until he stopped scrambling. Also injury-prone when scrambling.)
Steve McNair (Always injured, but he’s an iron bar and played through most of it.)
These guys combined for 0 Superbowl wins, despite making it at least as far as the Conference Championship a crapload of times.
By your criteria, I have indeed shown that 300+ yard scramblers are under-represented in Superbowl winners.
Forgive me if he was mentioned already, but shouldn’t Roger Staubach be included as a scrambing QB who won 2 Super Bowls? The didn’t call him “Roger the Dodger” for nothing.
Why not make it 500 yards? I bet you’d find even more data to support your pre-determined conclusions.
I’m talking about SCRAMBLERS. The quarterbacks that people know are a threat to run. The THREAT to run is paramount here – whether they actually run or not. If you don’t think that opposing defenses were scared of Elway or Young picking up first downs with their feet, and consequently had to scheme against it, then you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Elway rushed for 3407 yards in 16 seasons. Steve Young rushed for 4239.
Those are scrambling quarterbacks. No one gives a shit if they meet “ellis dee’s magic 300 yard cut off for officially determining whether a quarterback is scrambler or not”. They’re scramblers. Defenses know it. They’re winner, in part because of their scrambling.
I’ve got to agree that Elway was definitely a scrambling QB. There were some games (and seasons) when he was one of the leading rushers for the entire team. Yeah, the stats say he only broke 300 yards in a season once, but come on. Stats do not show the whole picture, they merely provide shades of understanding.
And here we have the crux of the biscuit. Scrambling is less effective than passing, period. That’s the reason that no elite passer is scrambling up a storm in the NFL. Once they become elite passers, scrambling becomes counter-productive.
My argument all along has been that pulling the ball down and running is a waste, because you’re going to need to become a passer if you want any kind of sustained success. Injuries are too likely for a scrambler, especially in this era of 16 game seasons with four playoff rounds. And when you have a guy whose second read is his legs, he is almost certainly doomed to fail in the playoffs when he faces the elite defenses.
As for McNabb scrambling for 220 yards in his Superbowl year, that’s 14 yards per game. Fourteen yards is a far cry from being a scrambler. And on a side note, McNabb truly is an elite passer, and I would agree with your top 3 assessment. As much as I hate the Eagles, and have harbored a dislike for McNabb specifically, his superb play has won me over to grudging admiration.
Mobility is great for a quarterback, but it should be utilitized laterally to buy time in order to pass downfield. McNabb is up there as one of the greats at that. That was also Tarkenton’s strength.
Hey, at least I never introduced anything as retarded as the claim that Brett Favre was a scrambler.
But clearly you are uncomfortable with numbers, likely because they are far more objective than “trunk’s magic gut feel of what a scrambler is.”
Every quarterback in the league is schemed against every single game, regardless of whether they run or not. I would say that Michael Vick is probably one of the easier quarterbacks to scheme against; it’s the execution that’s a bitch.