Doesn’t Gilette Stadium have natural grass? He seems to have done rather well there.
If Randy Moss fails, it’ll be some combination of the fact that he’s indeed getting older, he still takes plays off, is a douchebag, won’t have a good to great QB throwing him the ball, butting heads with a strong-willed coach like Jeff Fisher…and some variant of a locker room implosion.
OK, now give me stats comparing the league average turf-vs-grass, and let’s see if Moss is adversely affected by grass more than is normal for any receiver. Plus, you should account for AstroTurf (Vikings 98-03) vs FieldTurf (Vikings 04 and Patriots).
No, regardless of how that affects his play, his success in Tennessee will be determined by how much he’s a whiny little bitch.
I’m not a Titans fan, but I live and breathe among them, and I can tell you they are stoked (if comments to the Tennessean are indicative).
Nope, they laid down artficial turf – mid-season – the year prior to Moss’ arrival. The grass got all torn to hell during a game with the Jets and it was kind of a fiasco, so they just up and installed an artificial surface.
Well, yes, one could frame it any number of ways – the way I chose to frame it was that those sorts of things are the obvious obstacles to his success, and he’ll be unable to overcome those obstacles because, on grass, he’s just not good enough.
I will point out, however, two things. First, he’s been a douchebag who takes plays off his whole career and has had Hall of Fame-level production regardless. Second, I think the notion that he’s generally had great (or even especially good) QBs throwing the ball to him is a bit suspect. There’s no dispute about Tom Brady, of course, but during his time with the Vikings ('98-'04) his QBs were Randall Cunningham, Jeff George, and Daunte Culpepper. Cunningham had been floundering for four years prior to ‘98, frequently injured and otherwise generally ineffective. Then he gets a shot to play with Randy Moss (and an admittedly all-around talented offense) and has a career-year at the age of 35. The next season Cunningham gets hurt and Moss’ QB for most of the year is Jeff George, who at age 32 has probably his best season (best QB Rating, best Win%, and by a mile his best Y/A); he’s out of football two years later. Culpepper takes over in 2000, and for the most part is very successful for 5 years – a “meh” '01 and a poor '02, but otherwise good to excellent. Moss is traded to Oakland before the '05 season, during which Culpepper suffers a career-altering knee injury … but not before playing very poorly for 7 games without Randy Moss.
The point being that, while Moss’ QBs have generally put up good passing statistics, there’s reason to believe that those numbers (and, consequently, those Quarterbacks) would look significantly worse if Moss had not been on their teams. Hell, even with Tom Brady, the difference in his apparent effectiveness between his first season with Moss and the year prior is pretty staggering.
Sure, that’s a fair point; I’ll likely try and get a sense of that in a bit.
That’s both harder (having to keep track of which away games were played on which surface) and methodologically iffier (there are a lot of other variables involved if we basically cut Moss’ career in half like that; we wouldn’t necessarily know what we were looking at).
Well, see, that’s really hard to quantify, pretty much unfalsifiable given our means, and also kind of a boring dead-end as far as conversation goes. So, I prefer to stick to the numbers and such to whatever extent is possible.
BTW Adrian Peteson’s stats gor worse when Randy joined the team, not better.
That’s def on Chilly. And perhaps on Brett as well. AP should be the beginning of everything they do. I concur that 1) Randy is a dick… but that’s like saying Kim K loves the cameras… (thats why she wears yoga pants all the damn time) 2) This is Randy’s last shot to get a multi year deal next year.
Randy is like a kid who needs to be in a catholic school… when he plays in a strong org. with a strong coach (Denny Green… Bill B) he does great… when things are in chaos he tends to create more chaos(Vikes after Denny… Raiders… Vikes with Chilly)
But one point does need to be clear… the Vikes were in a soap opera prior to their hiring Randy to come do a walk on… and his leaving will not change a 7-9 season to a 10-6 one… these guys are a year past their due date and no one is worried about handling them…
Ok, so I’ve done what I could in this area. As far as I know, there aren’t any readily available sources (for us) that break down the average difference in production for Receivers or passing games in general between games played on grass and those played on turf. So, I basically grabbed a sample of convenient WRs and did the same thing with their numbers that I did with Moss’. This is fairly time consuming no matter what, and the only way to stop it from being prohibitively so was to select only from WRs who’ve played their entire careers (at home) on one type of surface, and who have a player card on Yahoo – they’re the only site I found that both lists grass/turf splits AND gives you the option to view those splits for a player’s entire career. It wasn’t easy to find receivers who qualified and had a tolerably large sample size, especially for turf players.
Anyway, I sampled 8 WRs, 4 of whom have played home games on grass, the other 4 on turf. I didn’t exclude any results or seek out any particular kind of player (other than what I described above), but no doubt one could find a different set of 8 WRs which would yield somewhat different numbers, one way or another.
Below I’ll give the each player’s average performance over a 16 game “season” on the surface they play on at home, then their average performance over a season played on the road and on artificial surfaces, then for an average season on the road and on natural grass. The last two rows should be compared (as it’s the only real “apples to apples” comparison), but the first row is still valuable since in each case it represents the most robust sample size.
Larry Fitzgerald
Grass ----- 88 / 1,187 / 11
Turf ------- 94 / 1,251 / 8
R. Grass – 85 / 1,194 / 11
Andre Johnson
Grass ----- 92 / 1,270 / 7
Turf ------- 94 / 1,248 / 5
R. Grass – 80 / 1,037 / 7
Donald Driver
Grass ----- 62 / 849 / 4
Turf ------- 80/1,155/7
R. Grass – 62 / 816 / 5
Steve Smith 1.0
Grass ----- 80 / 1,122 / 7
Turf ------- 73 / 1,128 / 6
R. Grass – 81 / 1,124 / 8
Reggie Wayne
Turf ------- 81 / 1,077 / 8
R. Turf ---- 68 / 1,019 / 6
Grass ----- 79 / 1,157 / 7
Marvin Harrison
Turf ------- 91 / 1,249 / 11
R. Turf ---- 85 / 1,127 / 10
Grass ----- 96 / 1,187 / 10
Roy Williams
Turf ------- 60 / 878 / 7
R. Turf ----53 / 801 / 8
Grass ----- 60 / 883 / 8
Roddy White
Turf ------- 63 / 935 / 6
R. Turf ---- 58 / 781 / 4
Grass ----- 84 / 1,209 / 5
If this sample is representative, it would suggest that some Wide Receivers perform better on grass, some perform better on turf, and most do about equally well on either. In my estimation Fitzerald, Smith, Wayne, Harrison, and Williams are within the margin of error and can be said to do as well on one surface as another.
Andre Johnson’s yardage differential between turf and grass is comparable to Moss’, though his TDs go up on grass as opposed to Moss’ huge drop (but that’s probably just noise).
Donald Driver is apparently much better on artificial turf than grass, and his sample size is large enough that I think we can say that with some real confidence. He gains over 40% more yardage playing on turf. Damn, that’s a shame for him; if he’d been in a reasonably good passing offense that played on turf all this time, he might well be getting some Hall of Fame buzz right now.
I assume that sample size plays *some *part in Roddy White’s ridiculous split (he’s got 24 road games on grass, 19 on turf), but it’s such a large split that I think we have to assume it’s real to one extent or another: it’s probable that he really does produce more on grass.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. But to get back the original point: yes, I’m pretty sure that Randy Moss has an unusually large turf/grass split. A team that played on FieldTurf would have probably gotten more out of him that Tennessee figures to.