Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Don’t believe QB tease
This Sunday’s unlikely trio does not mean new era is dawning
There’s no surprise what wins in this league: Passing or stopping the pass.
Randomness is no blueprint, and luck isn’t logical, so you have a growing analysis of the absurd spewing before Sunday’s NFL Championship Games.
Because Philadelphia’s Nick Foles inherited injured starter Carson Wentz’s season … because Minnesota and Case Keenum advanced on a miracle play … because Jacksonville’s Blake Bortles is still around … not needing a star quarterback is being touted as some new-age script. Hooey. But this is what’s being sold before these big games. A new path is being advanced. A different way to build a team. You don’t need a great quarterback like New England’s Tom Brady, the fourth one playing Sunday. You can build everything else and prop up any quarterback like plywood.
The academics have a term for this sort of hot-take babble. Recency Bias, they call this use of the here and now as some baseline for all decisions. Trent Dilfer Bias sounds better considering he’s the poster quarterback for those saying you don’t need a great one to win.
Maybe you won’t need a great one again this year. Maybe this is the outlier of this NFL generation, just as it was for Dilfer winning with Baltimore in 2001.
Maybe Brady’s injured thumb prevents him from throwing tight spirals, and Bor-
tles becomes a Super Bowl quarterback, because science and analytics don’t factor in something as random as a midweek collision.
Don’t be fooled, though. You can stumble into success even with a bad quarterback. Ask the New York Jets. In the 2009 and 2010 seasons they made it to back-to-back AFC Championship games with Mark Sanchez as their quarterback.
Did that make them annual contenders? They were a two-hit wonder, because even Bortles back-up, former Dolphins quarterback Chad Henne (75.5 passer rating), has better career numbers than Sanchez (73.9).
In the 2010 season, Jay Cutler played in the NFC Championship game for Chicago, too. Another one-hit wonder team, if you want to be nice and call Chicago that.
So was 2010 some trend about marginal quarterbacks? Or just proof of what we all know about needing a great one?
The Dolphins, of all teams, need to cover their ears and hum a tune so as not to even listen to this theory in building around nobodies. They seem to have built in year-to-year mode for the last 17 years instead of with some grand design.
Can Ryan Tannehill be great, at 30, coming off knee surgery? That’s the prime question this front office must ask this draft. The Dolphins seem to play the build-around-a-decent quarterback theory. Except their building blocks aren’t enough.
In the last two drafts, they watched other teams boldly maneuver to get Wentz, Patrick Mahomes and DeShaun Watson. They’ll have a shot at a top quarterback again this spring. Do they take it? That’s the first question of the offseason.
It’s common for NFL executives to upload all the positional values — height, weight, speed, etc. — of Sunday’s four surviving teams as a basis of information to study. It’s not clear if that will help with these quarterbacks.
Still, there’s no surprise what wins in this league: Passing or stopping the pass. The Patriots are the league’s top passing team. The Jaguars and Vikings are the league’s top passing defenses. The Eagles, under Wentz, were the top team converting third-andlong passes.
Wentz had a 74 percent completion rate on third-and-9 or longer and a staggering 12.7-yard pass average. Foles, with a small sample size, has completed 55.3 percent of such passes for a 4.89-yard average.
Maybe Foles and Bortles win to advance Trent Dilfer Bias. Keenum? He’s more of a work in progress. He has 22 touchdowns and seven interceptions, a 98.3 rating and a respectable 7.37-yard per attempt average this season.
Maybe this is the start of something for Keenum’s career. We’ll see. But if he doesn’t have a lastsecond prayer answered against the New Orleans Saints, Drew Brees is in this game. Brees and Brady, great quarterbacks, are then favored to get to the Super Bowl.
You see, Sunday isn’t a rolling out of some new blueprint involving borderline quarterbacks. It’s a celebration of the randomness and luck in sports.