Jones vs. Jones: a tale of two franchises

There are two young quarterbacks in the NFL named Jones right now, and they have a lot in common. Both were relatively unheralded in college, both were projected as late first round picks, and they both were picked sooner than expected. Both are regarded as extremely strong on the intangibles: very smart, very coachable, and very hard-working. Both are accurate passers.

From there things diverge. The first to enter the league, Daniel (“Danny Dimes”) Jones of the New York Giants, has played for parts of three seasons behind a disaster of an offensive line within a dysfunctional franchise. The second, Mac Jones, has played one season for the NFL’s flagship franchise of the past two decades in the Patriots.

Of the two, Daniel is regarded as having the greater physical gifts: he’s taller, more mobile, and has a stronger arm; he throws a nice deep ball and regularly makes big plays with his legs. Arguably more upside there. The results have told a different story, however. Mac led the Patriots to the playoffs in his one opportunity, and Daniel has been under .500 every year.

Not surprisingly, the narrative around the two quarterbacks has followed the results. Despite a rocky finish to his rookie season, a great many Pats fans believe they’ve found their franchise quarterback of the future. Rookies get better, and Mac has done just fine at 10-7. It’s not unreasonable to think that as he improves, the Patriots will resume contending every season. (Please settle down and hold the Brady comparisons, though.)

Just down I-95, the mood is different. Many fans and pundits are calling for the Giants to move on from Daniel and draft his replacement, because look at his results! As a Giants fan I cringe when I hear that. I think Daniel Jones has the potential to be regarded as the equal of Phil Simms or Eli Manning when he’s done, if only they can clean up their offensive line problems.

Consider poor Mike Glennon. For seven seasons he looked like the prototype NFL backup, functioning serviceably or even well for a variety of teams, with rating stats at or near the league average. Then he came to the Giants and took over when Jones went down with injury. Jones’ stats had been mediocre, with a 4-7 record and a career-low 41.7 QBR (the league average is 50) when he went down. Enter the formerly average Glennon, who promptly went 0-4 in his four starts with a comically bad QBR of 11.9. It was a nightmare. Jake Fromm wasn’t much better, at 0-2 with a 15.4 QBR.

So if Daniel could at least compete when his replacements couldn’t, why does everybody want to get rid of him? If he’d played for the Patriots this season, he might have done quite nicely, and we might be bullish on his future. I shudder to think of what the less experienced and less mobile Mac would have looked like behind the Giants line.

Ditto whoever comes next if things don’t improve. Why should the Giants roll the dice on another college quarterback with less experience and less upside than Daniel, burning a high first round draft pick in the process, to watch that guy fail too? Please no. Call me crazy, but maybe instead they should draft a couple of offensive linemen and give their quarterback a couple of seconds to look downfield on occasion. I like what I’ve seen from Jones, and he makes me at least a little bit hopeful about the future, provided that the once-proud Giants don’t screw it up for us fans yet again.

Some people think that Mac is the Patriots’ franchise QB of the future, and Daniel should be thrown out with yesterday’s leftover fish. But if I were new Giants GM Joe Schoen, I wouldn’t trade Daniel for Mac straight up if given the opportunity. I only hope the Giants get good enough under Schoen and new coach Brian Daboll to give Danny Dimes the chance to prove me right.

Can the GOAT be overrated?

 Tom Brady is retiring, and he is by acclamation the GOAT, the greatest of all time. Certainly the greatest quarterback, and maybe the greatest football player. Maybe the greatest American athlete of all time. (Most Americans wouldn’t bother with the national modifier.) If he really is the greatest, is it even possible for him to be overrated?

Let’s consider. If you look at results, it’s a no-brainer. Nobody else is even close statistically during the regular season, and the comparisons get even more absurd when you look at the post-season.

But results in a team sport are tied to the team. Brady was coached by Bill Belichick, who is just as arguably the GOAT among coaches. Josh McDaniels, the offensive coordinator, is given a lot of credit for the Patriots offense, and he made sure that Brady could get rid of the ball quickly. Wes Welker and Julian Edelman were the kind of quick receivers that could consistently get open when needed. Some people consider Rob Gronkowski the GOAT among tight ends. Dante Scarnecchia, the offensive line coach, was a huge factor in the Patriots’ success. He put a line in front of Brady that was consistently among the better units in the league. This Giants fan could only look on in envy as Eli Manning was getting pounded behind a lousy line for most of the last half of his career. (And he didn’t even have the worst of it in his family—read up on Archie’s career some time.)

 When Brady got pressured, he was still very good, but he wasn’t quite as great. In two Super Bowls against the Giants he put up a total of 31 points. Still good against those defenses, but human.

Did Brady do more with all of his assets than other great quarterbacks would have? Very possibly. But how would Peyton Manning or Dan Marino or Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees or Patrick Mahomes have done if they’d been on those Patriot teams? It’s easy to imagine that they’d have been even more successful than they already were.

What would Brady’s career have looked like if he’d been a Brown or a Lion for his entire career? He still would have been a great quarterback, and might even have dragged one of those franchises kicking and screaming to a Super Bowl, maybe two. Or maybe none. If his offensive line was being beaten consistently and his defenses were terrible, his regular season numbers would have seemed more ordinary, and he might not have even reached the post season. We might look at him somewhat like we look at Marino.

The surrounding pieces make a difference. Brady was still great with the 2019 Patriots, but they didn’t have a lot of offensive weapons for him. At 6.3 he had the lowest yards per attempt since his second full season. And he had the lowest touchdown percentage of his career. He still led them to the playoffs, but they were knocked out in the Wild Card round. The next season he went to the Buccaneers, who were loaded, and poof! He was a Super Bowl champion and looked like the GOAT again. Coincidence?

OK, let’s take a step back and look at the question of quarterback greatness another way. if you had to put together a team from scratch without all of those Patriot assets, which quarterback do you take first? For a lot of Pats fans, the answer is still Tom Brady, and you can’t say they’re wrong. But for other observers it’s at least an interesting question. Certainly other quarterbacks were good in the clutch, smart, and had physical gifts even greater than Brady’s. Maybe he had something they didn’t, but you could make a decent case for several guys as your first pick. If you asked players, coaches, and fans from across the country, Brady might or might not end up on top overall. Even if he came out ahead, you’d get a lot of different answers.

If you wouldn’t take Brady first in an all-time mock draft, is he really the best quarterback? Or is he maybe, despite all of his mind-boggling accomplishments, just a tad overrated?

Good call, Seahawks!

It's the morning after Super Bowl XLIX, and all anyone is talking about is what a monstrously bad call the Seahawks made in throwing a pass, when they could have handed the ball to the best running back on the planet, Marshawn Lynch.  Malcolm Butler intercepts, Patriots win.  It was a shocking moment, and everybody was immediately wondering why Lynch didn't get the ball.

That was my initial reaction, too.  We have this human tendency to judge decisions based on results, but that's not always the right way to look at things.  The easy way, yes, but not necessarily the best way.

The more I look at it, the more convinced I am that the play they called was a great call!

Consider the situation:  2nd and goal on the 1, 26 seconds left, one time out.  If you run Lynch on the first play, you have to call time out to run another play.  If you run him again, either time runs out, or you have to rush to the line so quickly that you give yourself scant chance of executing perfectly.

And let's not assume that he'd make it in.  Vince Wilfork is a great run stuffer, and if the rest of the Patriots are lined up in the box waiting for Lynch to run, they might very easily stop him.  As good as he is, he's sometimes stopped for no gain, or even for a loss.  In this situation, where everyone expects him to run and you have an outstanding defense committed to stopping it, there's a very good chance that he wouldn't have made it in.

Sure, he's good enough that he might make it, especially given two tries, but he coulda/woulda/shoulda gotten two tries anyway!  A run on the first try might very easily have resulted in a two yard loss, in which case Seattle would have to burn their timeout and would have 3rd and 3 with something like 11 seconds left.  In which case they might have to throw anyway, but would lose the element of surprise.

You're throwing a very short, crisp pass on a pick play into single coverage against an undrafted rookie, when nobody is expecting it.  This wasn't a floater into double coverage in the back of the end zone.  This play very often works.  If it had worked this time, everyone would be hailing Carroll as a genius for defying expectations.  And we would have been talking about what stones he had for making the call.  Ask Packer fans what they think of coaches who always go with the obvious, conservative call.

When a play like this doesn't work, it's usually an incompletion, in which case the Seahawks get two more tries with Lynch anyway.  The only reasons it didn't:  (1) the ball was just a hair high and wide, which was the only place it could have gone where Butler would have a play on it, and (2) Butler did a terrific job of recognizing the play, breaking decisively and immediately, and somehow holding on to the ball.

If the ball were anywhere else, or Butler hadn't made such a fantastic play, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  In all probability, Seattle would have won its second consecutive Lombardi Trophy.

Let's not sell Butler short. That play should have worked just fine.  It didn't, thanks to Butler's individual brilliance and things going just right, or just wrong, depending on your perspective.

Let me put it this way:  if were somehow able to simulate this game effectively, and run this pass play a thousand times and an initial run to Lynch a thousand times, I'd bet that the pass play would work out better more of the time.

That's where I'd actually put my money.  You might be regretting that you can't take that bet, but from where I sit, I think the Seahawks made a great call.

Fortune does what it does.  It burned New England in its two previous Super Bowls with miraculous catches by David Tyree and Mario Manningham, and it seemed like it was somehow happening again with that crazy catch by Jermaine Kearse.  Only this time, fortune turned the tables, and the Patriots caught the break.

Joyce had it right!

Wowwww. In my last post I complained that everyone had thrown Jim Joyce under the bus when he made an understandable mistake in the near-perfect game of Armando Galarraga. But this evening, for the first time, I saw the replay from the right angle in real time. Most of the real-time replays have obscured Galarraga's mitt behind his body. And the slow-motion shots that showed him snow-coning the ball also made it look as though he'd held it long enough for it to be an out. But watching it in real time, I now think it was a good old-fashioned bobble. Runner safe!

Maybe that's just me. But it's honestly what it looked like to me, and it absolutely deserved discussion. We didn't get that. In their haste to jump on the bandwagon, the baseball media seems not to want to discuss it. Could they at least have considered the issue, and allowed viewers to decide for themselves whether it was or wasn't a bobble? Nope. They continue to pretend that it never existed.

And I think this explains why Galarraga didn't argue, not his purported good nature. He was aware he'd bobbled it. But he, like everyone else, was content to let Joyce be demonized. Everyone is acting like Galarraga is nobility personified. But now I think just the opposite.

Wow.

Imperfect

We're not a third of the way through it, and this season has already seen two perfect games, one each by Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay. There have only ever been 20 perfect games in baseball history, and never two in one season. Ubaldo Jimenez' regular old no-hitter is an afterthought by comparison.

But things got weirder last night. Armando Galarraga, freshly returned from the minors after a lousy season last year, was throwing what coulda/woulda/shoulda been the third perfect game of 2010. Only umpire Jim Joyce thought otherwise. With two out in the ninth inning, the first baseman went to his right to make a play on a ground ball, and threw back to Galarraga, who collected it and touched first with a grin to complete the perfect game!

Only not.

Jim Joyce called the runner safe, even though the replay clearly showed that he was out. The Tigers were horrified, the announcers were horrified, all of baseball was horrified, and every couch potato like me was horrified. An ump takes a perfect game away from a pitcher? How could he? How could he?

He could, and he did. The only guy who wasn't horrified was Galarraga himself, who remained calm while the rest of his team was losing it. He proceeded to get the next hitter to complete the now one-hit shutout.

Joyce actually apologized to Galaragga for blowing the call (which never happens between umpire and player). Everybody tried to rationalize Joyce's human imperfection, but they certainly haven't let go of it. What not a single announcer has said is that Joyce actually made a perfectly reasonable call. From one angle the result seemed obvious. But from the other, there was room for reasonable doubt. While the replay from the second angle still showed the runner was out, Galaragga had snow-coned the ball (holding it out at the end of his glove), and then snatched it into the middle of his glove after the runner went by. In real time, in which Joyce made the call, it had to look like he had never controlled the ball. In which case Joyce did exactly the right thing. But that doesn't make as good a story.

People are talking about the incident today, and will continue to talk about it for a very long time. But not a peep about the apparent bobble. The press seems content to leave Joyce hanging out to dry. Everyone seems to agree that Jim Joyce is a fine umpire, but this is what he will be remembered for. It will haunt him and cast a shadow over his time in baseball.

Pretty good call, Jim. It's just a damn shame for Armando, and a bigger shame for you that it turned out not to be right.

What's your deal with Favre?

I notice that a lot of my sports posts have a grumpy, almost curmudgeonly tone. At the very least, argumentative. Hmmm. Just noting the fact, not analyzing it.

Anyway, I've come to argue with those of you who have issues with Brett Favre. You are angry. You're calling Favre names. You're impugning his character. Frankly, I don't get it.

I do get why Favre waffles.

On the one hand, when he plays, he gets the shit kicked out of his 40-year-old body every week. Every professional football player has to deal with this, but most of them are long gone by 40. It hurts. I remember how backyard football hurt the next day when I was 15, playing against guys who weighed 120 pounds. What Favre is doing hurts a lot. And it keeps hurting when the season is over. He's proven himself, and isn't that likely to get any further in football than he's already gotten. And I'm sure there are times he'd like to just kick back and forget about the NFL.

On the other hand, he gets paid 10 million dollars a year! Sure, he doesn't need it, but it's 10 million dollars a year! When do you stop providing for your family, or your descendants? Or have too much land, or too much to give to charity. There's always room for another 10 million dollars, isn't there? And he's playing in the N freaking FL! What a rush it has to be to hear those roars, to get all of that adulation, to matter to people. And while it still hurts in the offseason, it hurts somewhat less after a while.

So it's no surprise that he has mixed feelings, and has changed his mind several times. But everyone seems to think that he's changed it too many times, and that he should stop jerking everyone around, and make up his damn mind. But why, exactly? Is this really a problem for you or me? I can tell you that it hasn't affected my life one iota. My wife still loves me, I'm still employed, I have my health -- Brett Favre just isn't a problem for me. But he seems to be for you.

Are you worried about the teams that he might or might not play for? Guess what -- it's their demand for his services that's driving the whole thing! If they didn't want to employ him, and didn't keep dangling money in front of him, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Does he owe them a decision? No! It's supply and demand. If they don't want to wait around for an answer, they don't have to. They do wait around because he's good, and because he can put butts in the seats. They're waiting around to serve their best interests. So do me a favor and don't worry about the teams. They can take care of themselves.

Are you just plain tired of hearing about it? Bullshit! You click link after link about this subject, and read story after story about it, and watch segment after segment on television, and complain bitterly every time you do. Which is why they keep writing and producing all of these stories.

So it looks to me like you're complicit with the media and the teams and Favre himself for keeping this story going. As tired as you are of seeing Favre waffle, I can promise you that you're no more tired than I am of hearing you complain about it all.

Feel free to root for or against Favre this fall. But somebody has to play quarterback for the Vikings, and you can bet it will be the best guy that the Vikings can find for the job. And isn't that sort of the idea?

Plax

Am I missing something here? Plaxico Burress has been sentenced to two years of prison for carrying an unregistered firearm. Two years out of his life because he shot himself in the foot. Mind you, nobody ever said he was threatening anybody, or intended to do anybody any harm. It's just that real criminals carry unregistered firearms, and Mayor Bloomberg and whatever that dipshit D.A.'s name is had a burr in their saddle about cracking down on this stuff.

So they took it out on a guy who shot himself in the foot. You can't really call it a victimless crime, because Plax victimized himself. But you can say that he didn't hurt anybody else.

This is your basic perversion of justice, in the interest of either politics, or precedent-setting, or I'm not sure what. But it has nothing to do with the spirit of the law.

I frankly don't blame Plaxico Burress for carrying a gun. Personally, I think it's a bit foolish, but he has seen multiple professional athletes, including a guy who played his own position on his own team, get shot at and in several instances killed by lowlifes who basically wanted their stuff. Given that backdrop, he had every reason to be fearful if not paranoid about being shot. I'm not in his situation, so I can't say exactly what I'd do. But I'd sure as hell be aware of the threat. Plax chose to protect himself with a gun.

No question Plax should have registered it. But he did register a gun in another state in the relatively recent past, so it's not like he has contempt for the law. He screwed up. He actually does a fair amount of screwing up. But he also seems like a decent guy to the people around him.

I can see punishing him for his mistake, especially since there is a real need to have handguns registered. But nowhere in this did I see a hint of common sense when considering Plax's character or his motivations. It was all about the mayor and the D.A. getting their pound of flesh.

So Plax shoots himself in the foot and hurts nobody else. Politicos throw their weight around and trash lives for no good reason. That's the real crime.