Big C's "Is It the Talent" Poll

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by skinsfan69

GTripp. I'm not insulting your opinion but our passing game, from the end of 05 and almost all of last year has been well below average. How can you say our passing fell off the map? IT WAS NEVER ON THE MAP w/Brunell. That is why he got benched. Brunell could not even throw for 200 yards in most of his starts. For the life of me I can't believe you think our passing game was good last year w/ Brunell. What games were you watching? The one against the NYG. when Brunell threw for 109 yards? Or was it the one against Phil. when he threw for a buck thirty? Can someone tell me how an NFL QB can only throw for 109 yards? That's just ridicules. I swear all you care about is Brunell's completion % and QB rating. Those stats don't tell the real story! Here is the real story. 3-8 and Brunell throws a 4 yards pass to Cooley and hopes he runs for a 1st down. Sorry but I blame that on the QB for not having the confidence in his arm to throw in downfield. Plus in a lot of games he was getting garbage stats at the end of halfs and when games had already been decided. Like against Indy. Stat line looks good but he didn't play well when the game hadn't been decided yet.

We have the talent on offense becasue now we have a QB who can make all the thows and the offense will not be limited to a dink and dunk passing game. When JC is behind center teams don't stack the line. They respect his arm. Opposing defenses don't respect Brunell's arm and that's why the running game sucked. 11 men were lurking around the line. Now Al S. can open it up more. Of couse JC will have to do his part and work getting better at the short passing game. But the guy didn't get any reps with the first offense until week 9 of his 2nd year. Give the guy a freakin break!

I played HS football many years ago. I was a QB. Ya know what my coach use to tell me? If your gonna play Qb for me you better be tough and you better push the ball down the field cause 1/2 the time the ref is going to call a penalty. I swear to god that's what old John Harvill use to tell me. Well at least Brunell is tough as nails. But somewhere along the line I think the guy lost his confidence to push the ball down the field.

Well, not exactly. The only stats I care about are completion % and yards/attempt. Between them they tell pretty much the whole story. QB rating would be a lot better if they just eliminated INT/att and TD/att, since guys who complete a high percentage also throw more touchdowns and less INTs, which is what matters. INT/att and TD/att are redundant ratio stats IMO.

I also played QB in High School. That was two years ago. I wasn't anything special (to say the least), and our team wasn't that good, but we won half our games. Our offense sucked though, and I feel that if I had completed more passes, we may have won another game or two. But my coach wasn't particularly smart, and only cared about the results no matter what the context of the game was, so that may explain why I get as analytical as I can sometimes.

But one of the great things I love about Football Outsiders' stats is that they don't count all yards as equal (they aren't), nor do they worry about factors a player can't control. They just measure successful plays vs unsuccessful plays. If Brunell were to, as you suggest, throw four yards to Cooley on 3-8, and Cooley does not pick up the first, Brunell would be credited with an unsuccessful play. Yet, their system likes his 2006 performance (a lot). This tells me that Brunell was successful FAR more often than he was unsuccessful. So while the situation you suggest certainly happened a few times, you can't discard all the times the guy threw underneath to a wide open player who picked up the first down. It would be hypocritical to blame only the QB for the first scenario and credit only the receiver for the second. And judging by the linked metric, the second scenario probably vastly outweighed the first.

But because of the losing, it does not surprise me in the slightest that the very human memory of most Skins fans remembers every select individual first scenario and only a handful of the second. We were a losing team. Had we won, such as in 2005, people would be remembering the good plays and forgetting the bad. That's just human nature.

In reality, Mark Brunell put together nearly identical years in 2005 and 2006. He was actually a tad better in 2006 per the stats, but whether or not that is accurate is very debateable. But his 2005 season gets a much better rep than his 2006 simply due to the outcome of the games. Defensively, we sucked donkey balls in 2006. This is why we lost games (well, that and some untimely luck).

But the 2005 offense and the 2006 offense were strikingly similar in total end of season DVOA. (4.1% above league average in 2006 compared to 5.1% above league average in 2005) Santana Moss' drop in production (passing game) was offset by Ladell Betts' giant leap in production (running game). It is my best guess that Moss could have done a little better if Brunell had stayed in at QB. He certainly would have had more receptions. And with a guy like Moss, every reception is a threat to go the distance.

Here's the bottom line. From the day Campbell went in at QB, our offense lost a yard and a half per pass attempt and 11% completion. That is a huge dropoff. There's no other way to spin it. Our INT's went up and total TD's down. You yourself (Skinsfan69) said that you thought our offensive line play improved under Campbell (I agree). Was it because of Campbell? Perhaps, but unlikely. Now if you'll remember, our defense didn't exactly get a whole lot better at that point at all. But they did put in two good games, conviently the same number of games we won under Campbell (and yes, it was those two games).

Our offense won us a few games at the beginning of the season. Houston, Jacksonville, and that second Dallas game with the help of some timely good fortune. The two games we won under JC were the two times our D showed up last year.

I do expect that Campbell will improve immensely over the course of next year. I am on record saying that he will be the best QB in the division (better than McNabb, Manning, and Romo) no later than opening day 2008. But he's going to NEED to play better than he did last year. He's got to complete more passes, and get more yards per attempt. He will almost certainly be a better NFL QB than Brunell ever was, but don't make the mistake of believing he's there yet. At this point, he isn't better than Brunell is.

I'm not in complete disagreement that our passing game "wasn't on the map" at the beginning of last year, but to me that sounds like a cop out to nullify the loss of 11% completion and 1.5 yards/att. Because a drop in passing production such as that will cost a team games. Period. We need better QB play than what we got from JC last year.

And I think JC can bring us that improvement.