Erik Kramer and shudder Scott Mitchell.
spits on the ground
The Browns have a strange number of 4pm starts given that they aren’t playing any west coast teams… the furthest west they travel is Tennessee.
I welcome them, of course - living on the west coast and getting up at 8:30 or 9 for football games is irritating. There’s also less competition for one of the big screens at the sports bar I go to.
Look at the Pats’ schedule. SD, Indy, Pittsburgh, and Seattle are the only good teams they play. Could they go two regular seasons in a row undefeated?
What’s the current regular season game win streak? (didn’t they set it a few years back?)
Edit: The Browns also play the Giants in preseason, coincidentally also a monday night game. How often does it happen that teams are scheduled against regular season opponents in the preseason?
Which part? If you don’t agree that they’re more likely to be a bust than a stud, I invite you to read this piece by ESPN, which examines all the first-round QBs taken '92 to 2001.
I’ll give you the short version:
19 players total.
7 made at least one Pro Bowl, of which three were unquestionably franchise quarterbacks - Manning, McNabb and Drew Bledsoe. You could throw Kerry Collins in too, but he was only a Panther for four years.
9 lasted five years or fewer; 10 if you include Tommy Maddox, who was out of the league for several years before making the Steelers’ roster.
4 played in fewer than 30 NFL games (with any team).
More recent drafts:
2002: David Carr, Joey Harrington, Pat Ramsey - all busts. Two of them severely hamstrung their respective teams for several years.
2003: Carson Palmer, Byron Leftwich, Kyle Boller, Rex Grossman - three busts, one stud.
2004: Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, J.P. Losman - three studs, although the jury was definitely out on Manning prior to the Giants’ Superbowl run, and one bust.
So, between 1992 and 2004, 30 quarterbacks were drafted in Round 1. 16 have proven to be definite busts; I’m not counting Michael Vick or Tommy Maddox. Ergo, first-round QBs are more likely to flame out than set the world on fire.
I’ll give you all thirty names- count for yourself.
1992 draft
David Klingler (Bengals) Dave Brown (Giants) Tommy Maddox (Broncos)
1993 draft
Drew Bledsoe (Patriots) Rick Mirer (Seahawks)
1994 draft
Heath Shuler (Redskins) Trent Dilfer (Bucs)
1995 draft
Steve McNair (Oilers/Titans) Kerry Collins (Panthers)
Surprisingly enough, not a single quarterback was taken in Round 1 in '96.
1997 draft
Jim Druckenmiller (49ers)
1998 draft
Peyton Manning (Colts) Ryan Leaf (Chargers)
1999 draft
Tim Couch (Browns) Donovan McNabb (Eagles) Akili Smith (Bengals) Daunte Culpepper (Vikings) Cade McNown (Bears)
2000 draft
Chad Pennington (Jets)
2001 draft
Michael Vick (Falcons)
2002 draft
David Carr (Texans) Joey Harrington (Lions) Pat Ramsey (Redskins)
2003 draft
Carson Palmer (Bengals) Byron Leftwich (Jaguars) Kyle Boller (Ravens) Rex Grossman (Bears)
2004 draft
Eli Manning (Giants) Philip Rivers (Chargers) Ben Roethlisberger (Steelers) J.P. Losman (Bills)
For rigorous analysis, see above.
I can’t really disagree with either of those points.
Still, the first round is obviously going to turn out better talent percentagewise; that’s where the guys with all the measurables get drafted. We know that most late-round players will become journeymen at best. The difference is that you don’t have to throw them to the wolves in Year 1 or Year 2; and when they do get a few starts, you can yank them. You can’t bench your first-rounder for the rest of the season, though; and if you do, eight per cent of your salary cap is being eaten up by a clipboard holder.
I think the point that Omni was trying to make was that even if there’s a 50% chance a top 15 QB will be a bust, there’s a (making up numbers) 75% chance a 2nd round QB will be a bust, 85% chance a 3rd round QB will be a bust, etc.
So even though it’s a gamble, the first round is still the most likely place to land a good QB.
You seriously think they’ll beat all four of those teams?
I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly Brady comes back to Earth this year. Sure, he’ll be the #1 or #2- rated quarterback, but everyone else who had an uber-season in recent memory had a significant dropoff the next year…
Peyton Manning:
2004 IND 16 67.7 4,557 9.2 49 10 121.0
2005 IND 16 67.3 3,747 8.3 28 10 104.1
Kurt Warner:
1999 St. Louis 16 4,353 .651 41 13 109.2
2000 St. Louis 11 3,429 .677 21 18 98.3
Dan Marino:
1984 Miami 16 64.2 5,084 9.0 48 17 108.9
1985 Miami 16 59.3 4,137 7.3 30 21 84.1
There’s a chance. I was just commenting on how easy their schedule is.
I’m not concerned about pressure - the O-line pass blocking is great and either QB gets the ball out fast, but it’ll be a good game. The Browns haven’t been very good on the road.
Maybe we could meet up somewhere in Vegas for the game and make beer bets on the various things. I could get drunk on your dime as Shaun Rogers snaps off McNabb’s leg at the hip. 
Right, and I agree totally. I just think that when you consider what comes with a high-first QB, the likely benefit is outweighed by the risk.
It has to weigh against the opportunity cost of the potential suckitude a team can go through due to bad QB play for years while they’re trying to hit on late picks, free agents, etc.
Yes, but the likelihood of suckitude with a free agent, for example, is much lower.
Depends. Good QBs in their prime rarely hit free agency - you generally get castoffs for one reason or another. Sometimes that can work decently enough, but you generally won’t land a very good one there.
No it’s not. Most Free Agents are free agents for a reason. They SUCK! There’s almost never a quality free agent on the market and that’s why so many teams have terrible QB play. When a good QB is on the market he’s even more prohibitively expensive than a #1 overall pick.
You said:
This is utterly and completely ridiculous. The vast majority of franchise QBs are first round picks, period, no reasonable argument can be made to the contrary. Teams that sit back and fish for the next Tom Brady end up without a QB for decades. No one is arguing that 1st round QBs don’t flame out often, but almost every QB flames out. But the odds of them flaming out reduces exponentially the closer you get to the top of the draft. The difference between a top 10 QB and all the others is greater than the difference between a top 10 player at any other position and their lower drafted counterparts.
Drafting a QB early has a high opportunity cost, but not drafting one high has a greater opportunity cost. You can’t count on bargains, they are the exception not the rule.
…if you ignore the fact that I’ve already listed the franchise quarterbacks in the NFL, and shown that the number of first-rounders compared to the number who weren’t is about even (if we apply the most liberal possible interpretation of “franchise quarterback” to the first rounders.
The yinzer schedule is brutal. There’s a 7 game span where they:
Play the SB champs
MNF @ Washington
Short week back home vs the Colts
Next week the Chargers at home
4 days later (Thursday) they get the Bengals at home, who’ve mostly done fairly well in Pittsburgh
Then at New England
Then the Cowboys at home
Back to back weeks of SD/Ind and NE/Cowboys. At least their travel schedule isn’t too bad.
The rest of the schedule is pretty daunting, that’s just the toughest stretch.
Then again, I remember when the Browns 2007 schedule looked tough - the AFC North was supposed to be a 3 dog race of good teams (with the Browns in the basement), St Louis, Arizona, NYJ, and SF were all supposed to be good or up and coming.
Yes it would. Please do that.
Really Not All That Bright, you’re being disingenuous. Your original claim:
I refuted every possible interpretation of this statement with this:
Your reply:
If you can’t disagree with either of my points, then you are conceding that your original assertion isn’t true. I don’t think anybody is arguing that there isn’t a huge risk in drafting a QB high. That’s a completely unrelated issue compared to your original statement.
And note that even your own analysis has shown that the claim “a lot more likely to come from the later rounds” is objectively untrue.
My original assertion was that drafting a quarterback in the top of the first round was npt worth it given the risk and cost, and I think I’ve shown that to be true.
I will concede that I have failed to show that finding a quarterback another way is as easy as I made it sound, so I’ll admit defeat there.
For this argument, the ridiculous inflation in high-end rookie contracts is certainly trending that way. I’m not convinced it’s true yet, but at the rate we’re going it’s not far off.
I must say I’m glad the Giants got their guy when they did. I would hate to have paid even more for somebody like Alex Smith.
I’ve got to place the blame equally for the absurd rookie contracts - on Drew Rosenhaus, et al, and the teams who’ve picked first over the last five-odd years. (The team picking first can negotiate with any draft-eligible player, or, say, five of them, which none of the other teams can do)
Except the Texans, who had Mario Williams signed to a reasonable deal before draft day, teams have stupidly decided that even though they couldn’t work out a contract before the draft (when they had all the bargaining power), they’d be able to come to reasonable terms afterward (when they were no longer able to say, “fine, we’ll take the other guy”).
The predictable result has been almost de rigeur training camp holdouts and silly contracts. Obviously, the market isn’t going to correct itself, so I think Omni’s slotting system is the only possible fix. Either that, or a second salary cap strictly for rookies.
While the Jimmy Johnson chart is unofficial, Peter King says every team basically follows it, and all trade discussion on draft day is based on it.
The NFL Live guys were specualting about Bill Parcells and what he might do. As they said, he’s not afraid to buck the trends, and he has enough stature to weather the fallout from going against the chart.
It would be a great day indeed if Parcells would make an unbalanced trade down out of the #1 spot, giving up a bunch of value to get a late first and maybe just a third or something out of it.
I think it more likely that he’ll just use the pick, but take a player who has already agreed to a deal smaller than JaMarcus Russell’s.