NFL - Are You Ready For Some Football?! - Off Season

[Ben Kenobi]

This piece of **** is a girly man who has no interest in football yet he comes in here to follow me.

Look, dude, you solicited my opinion.

[Al B. Sure!]

What does that have to do with gribbler? gribbler has no reason to be in this thread. He has on previous occasions denigrated football and football fans.

Apparently, he thinks I put saltwater in his vagina because he's always following me around to contradict me.

[Ben Kenobi]

Sorry, I thought you were referring to me.

[Demonbinder]

Details of the proposal currently before the owners (supposedly).

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=6687485

Players to basically get 48% of "all revenue" and no $1B+ credit for the owners. Players share can't dip below 46.5% during deal (and players seem willing to do ten years) and more money for retired players, cap for new players and 18 game season on hold for at least two years. Seems like a good deal but some owners may not like it because they will have to spend almost all cap money plus $27M in benefits. Hope they can get it done soon so they'll have full camp and games.

[Al B. Sure!]

The abbreviated free agency period is what's of concern to me.

The Giants have a lot of starters hitting free agency... Bradshaw, Steve Smith, Kevin Boss, Kiwanuka, Barry Cofield... not to mention like half the linebackers (Keith Bulluck, Gerris Wilkinson, Chase Blackburn)... then Umenyiora is rumbling about a hold-out and Brandon Jacobs keeps talking about playing somewhere else if he's second-fiddle to Bradshaw who would presumably get a big payday.

As an interesting twist, both Steve Smith and Kiwanuka had potentially career-damaging injuries that will surely deflate their value considerably.

[Al B. Sure!]

This is an ESPN insider article from KC Joyner so I can't quote the whole thing but remember what I said before about Joe Flacco being very underrated and better than the so-called Matty Ice?

The provocatively-titled "Why Flacco is as good as Rivers"

http://insider.espn.go.com/nfl/insider/columns/story?columnist=joyner_kc&id=6667673&action=login&appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fnfl%2finsider%2fcolumns%2fstory%3fcolumnist%3djoyner_kc%26id%3d6667673

Here it is:

Spoiler:

One of the most difficult things for an athlete to do is to change the perception people had of him when he first came to their attention.

Take the case of Roger Staubach. Roger the Dodger took the sporting world by storm when he won the Heisman Trophy for an unheralded Navy team in 1963. He did this as much via running the ball as he did by passing (he averaged 14 rush attempts per game), and in doing so garnered a reputation as a scrambling quarterback.

Over the course of his pro career, Staubach averaged 3.1 rushing attempts per game. To put that into perspective, Staubach ran the ball roughly one more time per game than Ken Anderson and Joe Ferguson, Staubach contemporaries who both were known as pocket passers, yet he couldn't shake the perception that he was a runner. He had made that reputation in college, and anything he did after that was going to be viewed through the "scrambling quarterback" prism.

Joe Flacco is struggling through a similar type of misperception of his skills. It is thought by many that he is a superb game manager who has yet to make the jump to being an elite passer.

However, a closer look at the metrics shows that Flacco has already made that jump. In fact, they show that Flacco displayed a Philip Rivers-type ability to get his team's vertical passing game in gear regardless of the talent level of his receivers.

Let's illustrate, starting with Rivers. Last year, the San Diego receiving corps suffered through a slew of injuries and suspensions that cost them the services of starting wideouts Vincent Jackson and Malcom Floyd and starting tight end Antonio Gates for a total of 22 games.

Those losses meant that Rivers ended up throwing a total of 189 pass attempts to the following receivers: Seyi Ajirotutu, Patrick Crayton, Buster Davis, Randy McMichael, Legedu Naanee and Kelley Washington. Those six players would be lucky to crack the starting lineup of any NFL team, yet Rivers ended up committing 34.9 percent of his targets to them last season.

For most quarterbacks, a situation of this nature would cause a significant drop-off in yards per attempt (YPA) production in the areas of vertical (aerials thrown 11 or more yards downfield) and stretch vertical (20 or more yards) passing, but that didn't happen with Rivers. He ranked fourth in the league in vertical YPA (12.1) and seventh in stretch vertical YPA (14.8).

One of the reasons he was able to do this was by getting quality YPA figures from both the big-name and non-big-name pass-catchers. His 13.0 vertical YPA on passes to Floyd, Gates and Jackson alone would have been good enough to rank second in the league in that category, but his 11.2 YPA on vertical targets to other pass-catchers would have been good enough to rank 13th in that same category.

This shows that Rivers is capable of finding a way to get above-average vertical performance from backups. That ability kept the Chargers' downfield passing offense moving even when injuries and suspensions could have hamstrung it.

Flacco was faced with a somewhat different situation in that his wideouts and tight ends were healthy, but they all had vertical receiving limitations.

Anquan Boldin has a very limited history of being a vertical threat and he was paired up with Derrick Mason and T.J. Houshmandzadeh, a tandem of aging possession receivers.

Flacco was able to do more than just work around these limitations. He actually excelled with this trio, evidenced by 1,472 yards on the 133 vertical targets aimed at these three.

That equates to an 11.1 vertical YPA overall, but what is more impressive is that each of the three ended up posting a double-digit vertical YPA mark (11.3 for Boldin, 11.9 for Houshmandzadeh, 10.4 for Mason). To put that into perspective, consider that only five other teams ended up with three qualifying pass-catchers in double digits in vertical YPA (47 total targets needed to qualify).

Flacco's downfield passing expertise did not stop there. He posted a 12.5 vertical YPA and 15.1 stretch vertical YPA on throws to targets other than the aforementioned three. Both of those figures are more than a yard higher than what the possession trio posted, and they should increase further with a legitimate deep-threat possibility this year in second-round pick Torrey Smith.

It is also worth noting that these totals were not the result of a relatively small sample size. In fact, the opposite is true, as Flacco ranked eighth in vertical targets (182), second in stretch vertical targets (81) and topped the league in stretch vertical yards (1,130).

This clearly shows Flacco took a huge step forward last season, but he has yet to get full credit for it, in large part because people still focus too much on his superb game-management skills. His reputation in that area precedes him, but it shouldn't prevent Flacco from getting credit as an elite quarterback for showcasing a Rivers-like ability to jerry-rig an elite downfield passing game.

[Al B. Sure!]

Well even if there's no season, we can still catch Peyton and Eli on Football Cops

[Ben Kenobi]

I might actually go see that...

[Al B. Sure!]

I might actually go see that...

It's just an advertising campaign. It's not going to be a real tv show or movie.

[Ben Kenobi]

Disappointing. Better then what's actually out there.

[SlowwHand]

What do you think of this?

[Al B. Sure!]

The best college QB's always suck in the NFL...

Although what happened to Jason White? How did no NFL team even give him a chance?!

[SlowwHand]

But who did the best? Testaverde, Palmer and Flutie. Someone has been talking about 2 of the 3.

[-Jrabbit]

So about 1 in 5 Heisman-winning QBs prove to be viable NFL starters.
And zero Super Bowls in the group afaik.

Bradford, however, has a chance to be pretty awesome.

[Demonbinder]

Palmer has more wins in less time played. Only six plus seasons in total games whereas Flutie and Testaverde were both around for 20 years?