Trent Edwards the next Bills Starter?

[Orton's Arm]

Jeff Hostetler, Trent Dilfer, Doug Williams, Mark Rypien and Brad Johnson are the first ones that spring to mind.........funny, two of those guys beat us in the superbowl

I agree with your general point that you can with the Super Bowl with an average QB. But I feel you're a lot more likely to do so if you have an elite QB playing on a reasonably complete team.

 

Take the QBs you mentioned. The most recent one was Brad Johnson. In the year the Bucs won the Super Bowl, Brad Johnson threw for 22 TDs to just 6 INTs, averaged 6.7 yards per pass attempt, had a QB rating of 92.9, and was invited to the Pro Bowl. That passer rating was actually comparable to Tom Brady's career rating of 93.3. (Though Brady did better on the yards per attempt stat, at 7.3.) During the year the Bucs won the Super Bowl, Johnson played like a significantly above-average QB; and his play was an important factor in the Bucs' win.

 

The second-most recent QB you mentioned was Trent Dilfer; who QB'd the Ravens during their Super Bowl win in 2000. I'll readily grant that Dilfer was the very soul of average at QB. But to make up for their deficiency at QB, the Ravens needed one of the three best defenses in NFL history, a Hall-of-Fame level LT in Ogden, and Jamal Lewis at RB. Overall, the Ravens were a clear case of an all-time-great NFL defense making up for the severe limitations of the offense. Limitations which began at the QB position.

 

The third-most-recent QB you mentioned was Mark Rypien. In the 1991 season--the year he led the Redskins to their Super Bowl win --he threw for over 3,500 yards, had 8.5 yards per pass attempt (1.2 yards better than Brady's career average), had 28 TDs to just 11 INTs, and had a passer rating of 97.9. The high level of quarterbacking he provided that particular year was a critical factor in the Redskins' really irksome triumph in that Super Bowl.

 

The fourth-most-recent QB you mentioned was Jeff Hostetler. In his five playoff games, Hostetler had 9.0 yards per pass attempt, 7 TDs to 0 INTs, and a 112 passer rating. ESPN ranked his performance against the Bills in the Super Bowl the 30th-best all-time Super Bowl performance by a QB. With 44 Super Bowls having been played, and with two QBs per Super Bowl, being 30th best is above-average for Super Bowl QBs. I'll grant that Hostetler's performances in the regular season were less inspired than his post-season performances. Also he was only invited to one Pro Bowl. (He was with the Raiders at the time.) But the point remains that without the high level of play he provided in the postseason, the Giants would not have won that Super Bowl.

 

Doug Williams was the least-recent QB you mentioned. During the year the Redskins won that Super Bowl (1987), Williams averaged 8.1 yards per pass attempt, and had a QB rating of 94.0. In the Super Bowl, he averaged 11.4 yards per pass attempt, and threw for four TDs.

 

I also checked Jim McMahon's stats, to see if perhaps the Bears' defense had helped mask deficiencies at QB, as would later happen with the Ravens. It turns out that the year the Bears won the Super Bowl, McMahon had 7.5 yards per pass attempt, and a QB rating of 82.6.

 

Since 1980, there appears to have been exactly one instance of a team overcoming mediocre play from the QB position to win the Super Bowl. That one instance was the Ravens of 2000, with Trent Dilfer at QB. In literally every other case, the Super Bowl win was either earned by a team with an elite-level QB like Montana or Warner or Manning, or else by a team with a reasonably good QB who happened to be playing at or near an elite level for a season or a postseason.