The Other 44 Guys Have an Effect, Too
Mac Jones has been perfectly acceptable in his first two games as starting quarterback for the Patriots. There might be some quibbles about the offense in the red zone on his watch (3 TDs and 7 field goals is not a good ratio), but Jones has done what he's been told by Bill Belichick. Execute the Herodotus playbook and first do no harm.
Trevor Lawrence and Zach Wilson have been perfectly horrid in their first two games as starting quarterbacks for the Jaguars and Jets respectively. Wilson's four interception game against New England last Sunday was the worst of their combined four efforts, but not by much. Their teams are each 0-2 and haven't really been in any of those four defeats.
Does this mean the number one and two picks in the 2021 draft are worse quarterbacks than Jones? No. Maybe they'll turn out to have less successful NFL careers, and maybe they'll be a pair of those rookie starting QBs who struggle in the learning experience and eventually wind up with an ugly yellow blazer in Canton.
All we know for sure is that Lawrence and Wilson were made the starters for a pair of truly horrible football teams, while Jones had the good fortune to inherit a team coming off a merely mediocre year. He has the luxury of being on a team that while it hasn't been all that impressive, isn't bad enough to drag Jones down by asking him to do the impossible, lift up a team of 45 men, 30 of whom should be in other lines of work than professional football.
In an earlier post, I noted that the only Hall of Fame QB who came in and dominated as a rookie starter was Dan Marino. I must apologize for omitting the most relevant context to that fact. Due to unfounded rumors about drug use that turned out to be one of the luckiest breaks of his career, Marino wasn't drafted by a bad team or even a mediocre one. He went to a Dolphins team that had made the Super Bowl the previous season. He got a Maserati to drive. Wilson and Lawrence have 1980s used cars from the Soviet Union.
One of the worst mistakes fans and many commentators make about the NFL is mistaking the truth "the quarterback is the most important player on the team" for the falsehood "the quarterback is more important than the rest of the team put together." Off the top of my head, I think maybe the all-time great QBs are like 25 percent of their team's overall value in their best years. A rookie starter is like maybe 5 percent of the whole.
Jones went out Sunday and was allowed to be the best five percent he could be against the Jets. It's ridiculous to think he can't make big throws deep. Didn't anyone see Alabama play last year? But he didn't have to. There was no need for New England to take the slightest risk against the Jets.
Poor Wilson on the other hand, is playing for a team that knows it needs its quarterback to TRY and be at least 15 percent of team value if it's to have a chance against any opponent except perhaps, well, the Jaguars. The Jets are going to face a good many two touchdown deficits this year, and if they are to have a shot of overcoming any, Wilson's gonna have to make the throws. Many many throws. Might as well let him start now.
Wilson knows all this as well as anyone. If there's a better formula for pressing than being thrust into a low percentage situation from jump street, I can't think of one. The results were predictable. While one of his interceptions was just a panic throw, the rest fell into that lethal category "that one always worked against Utah State."
Some rookie QBs take that kind of humiliation and end up as stars. More of 'em break. Every NFL rookie QB was the big star for their whole lives, always successful, always the hero. Personal and group failure is more than many of them can bear. A couple of seasons being buried under large pass rushers often breaks them physically, too.
Sooner or later the Pats will need to make up two touchdowns or more and the dipsy-doo back pages of the Josh McDaniels playbook used against the Jets won't cut it. Jones will have to throw often and take risks doing so. No one has the slightest idea how he'll perform, which is why Belichick wants to postpone that evil day as long as he can.
Few teams are good enough to carry a bad quarterback to a successful season. The Pats seem to believe they're good enough to carry one who's not hurting them out there. So far, results are mixed at 1-1.
That's way better than the results Lawrence and Wilson are part of this morning. All they can do is wait for reinforcements. Or rather, hope for reinforcements.
Reply Hazy, Try Again Later
Every sports reporter or commentator on the planet does preseason predictions. Every sports media outlet does them for every sport. They are insanely popular. They are also smart, knowledgeable people engaged in an insane endeavor.
For eons, the inevitable ratio of sports bookmaking has been that to be profitable, the house need only to have more bettors be right less than 55 percent of the time. That's folks betting on individual games that're happening in the immediate future. Or consider this. In all the NFL survivor pools conducted across this fair land, the week where the most participants will be eliminated is this one. Given a blank slate and full rosters, it remains damnably hard to forecast an outcome of a single game with no point spread involved at all.
Of the four major team sports, one wonders why anyone writes/reads NHL previews at all. This is a league who actually markets the idea that its regular season is essentially a preseason of kind of exhibition games leading up to the playoffs, which are all that count. Even lifelong hockey fans, coaches, executives, etc. take as a given that one or more teams that barely stumbled into the postseason will get hot and contend for the Stanley Cup. No one dares guess who those teams will be. Few if any were long the Canadiens back in April.
Basketball is a sport dominated by its top players, so one would think NBA previews would be both easy to create and pretty accurate in terms of results. To an extent, this is true. The team with Kevin Durant on it is likely to do well. Same for James Harden. But which team will that be? The, ah, fluid nature of superstar employment in pro basketball is approaching that of European soccer. How is anyone supposed to predict a Celtics future without knowing if Jayson Tatum really likes playing in Boston? He may not know himself.
Baseball has the most games of the team sports. It also has a tremendous innate bias towards reversion to the mean. Most players are what they are until they fade at career's twilight, so their teams usually are what you thought they were in March. This is not universal. The Giants are way way better than anyone thought this winter and the Yankees nowhere near as good. But the norm are teams like the Red Sox, who were seen as a team that could be a playoff contender and are, or my Phillies, who figured to be a .500 outfit and may hit that mark on the nose.
Of course, the sport that's drowning in preseason previews today is pro football, seeing as the NFL starts real games tonight. These, of which I've written a few, tend to somewhat formulaic. The defending Super Bowl champion, loser, and the losers of last year's conference title games receive bullish assessments. So do teams that were active in free agency (hence the sunny forecasts for the Patriots, not just from New England media either).
These previews are all earnest, well-meaning and futile. A real NFL preview would go as follows. As always, injuries will be the largest determining factor in how teams perform. The healthiest team entering the playoffs is the Super Bowl favorite. One possible contender will be ruined by a rash of injuries to vital personnel. An irreplaceable player will get hurt DURING the playoffs, spoiling a possible dream season.
That's my preview. That's exactly what happened last season. The Bucs were healthy in January, the 49ers had an horrific casualty rate, and the Chiefs offensive line got hurt down the stretch. But I'm not a soothsayer nor is anyone else. Everyone who follows football knows injuries are an unhappy but inevitable part of the sport. Whose injuries will spoil it for which teams in 2021 is beyond our ken.
As a result, NFL previews are written on the unmentioned assumption no important player will get hurt, a forecast so obviously absurd it cannot be said, but an assumption that renders previews silly on their face. Don't blame the preview authors. The entire league operates on the same premise. The Saints did not build their franchise for 2020 assuming THIS was to be the year Drew Brees suffered a disabling injury ending his fabulous career. How could they? Human beings aren't built that way.
It is my profound wish nobody gets a season-ending injury in the NFL in 2021. That wish is already inoperative, because this happened more than once in preseason and training camp. It'll become more and more inoperative starting tonight, this weekend, and every week thereafter.
Joe Namath said it over 50 years ago. "The most important person on the team is the doctor." Your Super Bowl 56 champion will be the NFL team for whom that statement is least true.
Give the Kid a Break, Give Him the Freedom to Fail
This morning's Globe had a story by Ben Volin collating predictions from various NFL media, ex-players and such that with Mac Jones as starting quarterback, the Patriots were a cinch to make the playoffs and maybe make some noise in them, too.
Later on I was channel surfing and caught an NFL Network talking head predict that Jones would throw more touchdown passes against the Dolphins come Sunday than would Aaron Rodgers against the Saints.
These sunshiny forecasts are inevitable. Nobody's ever as good as the QB who hasn't played yet. They are also unfair to the point of cruelty to Jones himself. All things are possible, but some are rather less possible than others. In the NFL, a starting rookie quarterback finding instant success has always been on the less possible side of that equation.
It's fair to note that rookie starting quarterbacks usually earn that role because their new team was terrible last year and figures to be the same this season. Nobody's going to hold a three-interception game against Trevor Lawrence. Sensible observers will simply hope the Jaguars don't get him killed out there.
It is Jones' good and bad fortune that he inherits not a bad team, but one which was merely mediocre in 2020. On the plus side, he's less likely to face weekly pulverizations. On the down side, this has bred expectations for his performance that are more like daydreams than forecasts.
Only going to say this once, Pats' fans. Cam Newton was poor last season, but he wasn't the only reason the Pats went 7-9. Not by a long shot. Maybe those other reasons were addressed in the offseason, and maybe not.
In any event, to say Jones looked good in preseason is accurate. To say that in a straight line projection this means he'll look good for 17 regular season games is a statement to which pigskin history says, "that's not the way to bet.
Went into pro-football-reference.com and looked up the rookie seasons of Hall of Fame quarterbacks who started most or all of their team's games that year. First thing I noticed is that there weren't that many of 'em. It took Terry Bradshaw four years to become the regular Steelers' starter. Bart Starr rode the pine for several seasons, as did Sonny Jurgensen and Ken Stabler. Bobby Layne got traded by his first team. Johnny Unitas was cut from his. Warren Moon had to go to Canada to play.
But there are Canton residents who were thrown in the fire their first season in the league, and the results were not often happy ones. Troy Aikman went 1-15. Peyton Manning led the league in interceptions, and threw the worst single pass yours truly has ever seen, a kind of sky hook for an incompletion near the Patriots' goal line. John Elway threw twice as many interceptions as touchdown passes. So did Dan Fouts. Going back to the original NFL passer, the father of the modern quarterback, so did Sammy Baugh.
No, only two of the quarterbacks I looked up were dominant performers as rookies. Dan Marino was one. The other was Otto Graham, and we must note that due to World War II, Graham was 25 years old his rookie season.
So while it's POSSIBLE Jones will face smooth sailing this fall, it's way more likely he'll show flashes of brilliance mixed with flashes of game-losing type errors. If that's what happened to a majority of all-time greats, it figures to happen to him, too. I cannot believe NFL historian Bill Belichick hasn't considered and accepted that possibility.
Belichick knows all those struggling rookies I cited turned out just fine, thank you. They played though the experience and became better, much better, for it. My fear is that this week's rosy predictions become a breeding ground for bitter overreactions if Jones has the kind of rookie season most rookie QBs endure. We have a jaded and spoiled NFL fanbase here in New England, and media which excels in pushing its buttons.
You can't wish the future into existence. Let Jones have his future. Don't go confusing it with Tom Brady's past. He'll be happier if you don't. So will you.
