dave mcbride

Hey - I love baseball!

Absolutely on Lenny Moore. Nice point! I was born in 1967 so I never saw him play, but as a kid I remember watching Lydell Mitchell make catch after catch from Bert Jones (one of the better QBs I ever watched).

Smith was a top-10 qb this past season by any measure, I think. As we've seen, aging vet QBs tend to get better in their late 30s these days. I think it's a very good trade by the Redskins. Smith is good.

Terrell Davis ABSOLUTELY belongs in the HOF, and it's actually a slam dunk. He had 1200 yards rushing and 12 TDs in 8 playoff games, which is staggering. Prorated, his postseason numbers amount to 2,400 rushing yards and 24 TDs over a 16 game season - and this is against the best competition in the league. Plus he was a SB MVP (deservingly so too). Unlike baseball, postseason performance actually matters in football. Lydell Mitchell too. He was the first to really occupy the sort of role that Craig filled for a sustained period of time. Postseason. It matters. And it should.

I think Beane is pretty smart and realizes this, so I'm not too worried. My gut sense is that he's pretty competent.

I picked the Jets because - strangely - the hire of Dennison. I know he's not the OC, but he'll have a hand in shaping the offense and Cousins is an ideal sort of player for him.

Incognito is a very good player. Talent gets paid, as it should. Why would the Bills ever think of cutting him?? We are not the Browns.

A) I think Cousins is a very good QB. B) I kinda think the point is moot because there are a couple of teams that are better fits - Arizona and Denver. Regardless of their records this past season, they have better rosters than Buffalo at the moment and are in more of a win-now mindset than Buffalo. That's where I expect he ends up. That said, the Bills CAN afford him with relative ease. The thought of this must be one reason why Beane is so bummed about the unanticipated Wood cap charge! I have a feeling the Bills will be in it, but I don't expect them to win. Cousins is going to get a very significant deal from someone given the competition.

Good find - thaanks.

FYI, not sure you caught this because it's not on the college reference site (only his negligible Pitt stats are), but Flacco had 76 rushing yards in two season with Delaware and 7,046 passing yards (1.1 percent by your measure). http://www.totalfootballstats.com/PlayerQB.asp?id=1203436 No worries, and I really do appreciate the work. I'm not exaggerating either. However, I am going to ask you a question: irrespective of the overall numbers you've charted about rushing yardage percentages, do YOU personally think it's a valid metric or just oddly correlative given what we know about who the truly long-term elite drop-back QBs are?

I combined passing and rushing yards (total yards) because I think it's a better measure of ratio with regard to overall productivity, but it really doesn't matter given how small the rushing numbers are. And yeah, I garbled .5 and 5 and ran with it (thank you for assuming that I do know this and garbled it). My apologies; it was lazy because I didn't look back at the OP and was working from memory. Regardless, I strongly believe that any stat in which we're quibbling about 1 percent vs. 0 percent is not indicative of anything other than a rounding error. The fact that Roethlisberger had 200 rushing yards in 3-4 seasons of 11,000 plus total yards and Philip Rivers had 96 out of 13,000 plus and Carson Palmer, Brady, and Manning essentially zero says nothing about whether they're going to be a bust or not. None of them were runners or all anything resembling elusive outside-the-pocket scramblers in college. More broadly, one can find correlation, but correlation is in no way shape or form causation. The correlation one finds can also simply be random chance. Re picks, come on. Where Brady went doesn't matter at this point; what matters is who is elite at the current moment. I believe that all of the people I selected above are elite, and that only a small few had any running ability whatsoever. Some got sacked more than others, which explains the difference between those around 2 percent and those at 0 percent (again, a negligible difference). But that may just be their offensive line and game situations (e.g., always having to pass and play catch-up because the defense is historically terrible, which was Rosen's situation). I do appreciate your effort here. I just don't value this particular metric as a predictive indicator of anything given the current elite QB stratum in the NFL. And I don't understand why anyone would leave out top picks in an analysis because they're assumed to be outliers (which appears to be what you're saying above; let me know if I'm misinterpreting). Should we really leave, say, Eli Manning out (negative rushing yards) simply because he's a #1 overall pick? He's oscillated between near-elite and ordinary, but he is also a lock for the hall of fame. I am admittedly focusing on the elite tier, because that's what the Bills need after all these years. The best dropback qbs' rushing numbers are all pretty negligible save for Brees.

I believe it because I watched Webb play in college. I think he's potentially really good. But of course we'll see. I'm hardly an expert.

Wow - Bucky Gleason writes an entire ill-informed and highly speculative article about this and doesn't mention either "NFLPA" or "salary cap." No one is getting screwed here, and Wood isn't selfish. It's just a bit complicated and nothing more than that. http://buffalonews.com/2018/01/29/bucky-gleason-more-questions-than-answers-emerge-from-woods-retirement-presser/

That's not why they didn't start Webb. They are committed to developing him and not throwing him to the wolves in a bad situation. That's my understanding, at least.

Let's look at the best QBs, however -- the current top six, in my humble opinion, based on longevity and consistent success : Brady, Rodgers, Rothlisberger, Ryan, Rivers, and Brees (plus Peyton Manning just because). See Brady's numbers above. For Aaron Rodgers, of his 5805 total yards, 336 came on the ground (0.57 percent). Sure he neatly fits into your scheme (greater than 0.5 percent), but barely; his rushing numbers were genuinely negligible. Of Roelisberger's 11,075 yards, 246 came on the ground (0.22 percent). Of Matt Ryan's 9371 yards, 58 came via rushing (less than 0.1 percent). Philip Rivers had 13,580 total yards, and all of 96 of them came on the ground (under 0.1 percent). Payton Manning had 11,201 passing yards and -181 rushing yards. Even Drew Brees is under one percent (0.78 percent; 900 rushing yards out 12,692 total) and barely qualifies. Brady, Roethlisberger, Ryan, Rivers, and Manning all fall WELL below your threshold. Rodgers is at the bare minimum and Brees is only barely above it. Bottom line: I simply don't buy that metric. If the best qbs are all clear or borderline outliers, then something is wrong with the metric. EDIT: I just looked up Stafford (not elite, but very good) and he's well below the threshold too. So are Goff and Carson Palmer. My basic point is that we need to factor in the fact that just about all of the classic dropback passers who go at the top of the draft and become good to great don't meet the threshold or only barely so. Cousins, a good qb yet a fourth rounder, doesn't fit either. He had negative rushing yards. EDITED AGAIN: I realize that I made ridiculously stupid math errors above which I will let stand as a testament to sloppy thinking and too-fast typing.

See my post above about Davis Webb.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread: Davis Webb. I loved him coming out of Cal (reminded me a little of Aaron Rodgers when he was there, truth be told), and I felt he was seriously under-drafted (3rd round). I think that's partly because he only played one season at Cal after transferring from Texas Tech: https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/davis-webb-1.html. Re: the Giants enthusiasm about him: https://nypost.com/2017/12/13/giants-rave-about-davis-webbs-wow-factor-now-let-him-play/. I think there's a pretty solid chance that they see Webb is their QB of the future.

He didn't drop it - Leigh Bodden made a great play and knocked it out of his hands. That said, Boldin would have held onto it.

The Bills won that game 13-6 though (granted, in my subsequent viewings of that game, I declare victory at halftime and get the hell out).

Re the rushing yards metric, which i admit to being suspicious of as a correlative measure: https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/tom-brady-1.html

Huh?? Williams was an *excellent* run defender in his prime. That's common knowledge, no? And $21 million per for the three good seasons is not money poorly spent at all. Stars get paid. Von Miller and Watt had bigger salaries, and Miller, good as he is, was never any better than Williams was in 2014. Watt is better but the injuries negate it. The Bills had the #4 defense in 2013 and the #2 defense in 2014 using FO's DVOA metric. Mario and Dareus were the best playerson those two defenses.

I'll throw this out there -- I still harbor bitterness toward the NFC and their fans because the Bills lost 4 in a row smack dab in the middle of a 13 game afc losing streak in the SB, and so many people said that the Bills were a weak team relative to the nfc elite. This is despite the fact that that Bills went 14-0 in meaningful games against the nfc in those four seasons (they lost twice in final games of the season when they rested starters after clinching home field: against detroit in OT and the redskins). Anyway, if the pats win, it'll be 26 to 26 afc vs the nfc in 52 SBs. It sucks that it'll be the pats that tie it if they win, but to quote rumsfeld, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. On the other hand, i have a number of close friends and relatives from the philly area who are fanatical eagles fans, and this means a lot to them. Say what you will about philly fans, but at least they are passionate. That counts for almost everything in my book. Jax was my nightmare: a boring team with a terrible fan base.

They paid Mario something like $66 million for one good season, one terrific season season, and one monster season. For a player at a premier position (pass rushing DE), that's not a bad deal at all. Stars get paid. He played like a star for those three seasons. He also had a dog season too, worth about maybe 2.5 million. You figure that he got paid about $21 million per season for his three good seasons. I'll take than any day.

Fitz is a qb that get you to 2-2 if your starter goes down for a four-game stretch. That's what you want in a backup, and I'd sign him in a second. He played reasonably well for TB, this season, and the team went 2-1 in the games he started (and the one they lost went down to the last minute).

He'll get paid and the Bills will get the best deal they can on the salary cap logisitics. It's pretty simple. They can't force him to pay them back or forego guaranteed money because he was very obviously forced out because of injury. The team doctors barred him from playing again! It's pretty simple.