America's favorite dystopian pastime - 'out of the darkness' NFL 2023-24

was never good

I’d like to thank the Jets and @SeanFennessey for taking an offensive guard at no. 14 over trading down so someone else could take Mac Jones instead of the SIX TIME SUPER BOWL CHAMPION NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) August 31, 2021

He's been roasted today because he posted some exasperated shit about Jones

Jags and Bills was a good game. Lawrence moves really well, he is much more agile than you would think.

Ravens won everything but the final score. They should not have lost that game.

Joe B. looked pretty good today and gave Jamarr Chase fantasy team holders a bit of a reprieve after a rough month.

Watched the Rams v Eagles and was a decent for about 3 quarters. Eagles are a really good team

49ers v Cowboys is going to be great

yes

brock 'pretty' purdy

This 49ers defense is impressive

still find the Purdy thing unbelievable I mean how do you find a franchise quarterback with literally the last pick. especially since like half the teams in the league don't really have one!

god I dunno maybe this offense is just that back to front good that anyone decent could succeed

Purdy's delivery is so weird too. he throws the football the way Mario shoots a fireball

their offense is so nice to watch, it just ticks along beautifully

i'm sure this performance by Dak will go unremarked upon by the Dallas sports media

that's fine as long as i am not bludgeoned with stephen a.'s take

Wasn't even a contest, was not expecting that

oooh one very funny storyline is Sean Payton unnecessarily shittalking Nathaniel Hackett in the preseason and then losing to his offense, an offense which famously was forced into starting Zach Wilson at quarterback

ok but it would be a lot more funny if nathaniel hackett weren't a singularly terrible head coach now grasping at straws

oh he was definitely right just fun to watch Payton eat shit

god I dunno maybe this offense is just that back to front good that anyone decent could succeed

Like Trey Lance and Jimmy G. did? My favorite thing about the Purdy saga is that the more evidence we get that he's a great QB; the more preposterous and unbelievable the whole thing is.

The only reference Collinsworth could think of was Cousins, but he never looked as good as Purdy has.

good point, I mean I thought Jimmy and Trey looked decent enough in that offense, but yeah with Purdy they clearly have kicked it into another gear. I mean the Dallas defense is tough and he just tore them apart. pardon me for saying so but the only comparison would be like Tom Brady right? how many QBs drafted past the 3rd round even get a chance to start?

trevor siemian was 7th rounder so it happens, but you expect on a team in collapse/disarray

yeah, it's usually a 'hey we're rebuilding and Joe Journeyman is not cutting it anymore, we're tanking anyway, let's put you in - oh hey, wait, you're good!'.

not "hey you're a contender and BOOM starter's leg is broken, hey here's the keys rook, try not to fuck us too much" and having him suddenly light the league up.

Kurt Warner probably the closest comparison as far as a star franchise QB showing up out of nowhere.

ah yeah I was looking at late draft choices, didn't think about Warner cuz he wasn't drafted at all lol

Trevor Siemian about as good as you can reasonably hope these guys could be, but yeah even then his good performances seemed kind of lucky. Purdy on the other hand went 20 for 21 last week and carved up a very good Dallas defense this week, and as he approaches an entire season worth of stats (counting playoffs) his numbers actually look real close to one of Aaron Rodgers' MVP seasons. I don't wanna jinx the guy by pointing this out, but on the other hand I don't think there's ever been a QB putting up numbers like this who didn't turn out to be really good

Marc Bulger was a 6th rounder but he kinda turned out to be a fraud

arguably he panned out vv well for the Eagles, much moreso than their more highly touted top pick, but i wouldn't suggest he was *really* good.

Foles finished the 2013 regular season with 27 touchdown passes and only 2 interceptions, just behind Tom Brady's 2016 record of 28 touchdown passes and 2 interceptions for the best TD-INT ratio in NFL history, and a season leading 119.0 passer rating and third in NFL history trailing only to Aaron Rodgers' 122.5 rating in 2011 and Peyton Manning's 121.1 rating in 2004.[

QB is really one position which seems to come with a higher possibility of being a one-year wonder, particularly if you weren't drafted or signed to be "the guy" and you come in mid-year due to injury or benching. QB is just basically the hardest job and having little to no expectations can initially have the QB playing loose and achieving immediate success due to lack of game film or schematics on him, and then the moment they achieve repeated success across multiple weeks to months, now expectations are setting in and their strengths become crutches where they become less adaptable. whereas those that are the de facto starter from Week 1 are already facing the pressure from Day 1 and facing defenses that are already gameplanned against them so if they achieve success they probably already had to be pretty flexible and patient with themselves.

who are the biggest flukey QBs of all time, that had a few good years and then weren't shit after?

Scott Mitchell?

I was tempted to say Michael Vick, because I can't think of anyone with greater talent who flamed out so spectacularly, but his numbers in Philly after his suspension were actually better than they were in Atlanta.

lol yeah, he actually had a little bit of a renaissance for a bit

kind of a different situation though

I always think of Matt Flynn, who has 2 of the all-time best statistical games in Green Bay Packers history (throwing 6 TDs in one!), who was utterly garbage otherwise

but thats a very different thing as well. only one that comes to mind now is Nick Foles

xpost it is still amusing to me that "running QBs will be the thing of the future" was so believed by us all for so long despite the fact that so many of them got seriously hurt or easily defeated by defensive adjustments to take away the run because they weren't great pocket passers. and then we settled on "ok it's cool when you have QBs that can make plays with their feet but we're never going to see full-on college-style option offenses in the NFL".

for a few years Lamar Jackson actually looked like what our vision of the QB of the future back in 2001 looked like, he married the two better than anybody I'd ever seen. but now he's faded. Fields could maybe get there if he finds consistency.

really think we should seek to teach offensive lineman sized people how to play QB, have a QB that can't really run but nobody can tackle them either

for a minute it looked like Tebow was that sort of guy, he was pretty slow for a running QB but remarkably hard to take down

remarkably hard to stop laughing when he threw a pass, unfortunately

who are the biggest flukey QBs of all time, that had a few good years and then weren't shit after?

Flacco?

ha yeah that's a pretty good one

we're definitely in lean quarterbacking years now, mostly due to the mass retirement of the last wave of QBs (debuting in late 20th-early 21st century). probably be another 4-5 years before we have another QB renaissance

Flacco had 7 decent years I think, maybe comprable to some of Brett Favre's less good seasons

the Elvis Grbac we never knew we wanted

RG3 was a phenom his rookie year, maybe one of the best QB seasons in Hatcat history, pretty unfortunate how that turned out

Derek Anderson in '07? him and Braylon Edwards had a really good thing going, he was also fairly mobile, but he was garbage after that

I always felt like Anderson was overrated. he turned a ball over a LOT, even in his good year.

he was also one of the reasons they missed the playoffs due to throwing 4 picks in a game. I'll defer to brownie's opinion on Anderson though as I didn't see him play every week!

Steve Beuerlein, no one noticed his fluky career year because of Warner.

Beuerlein's 4,436 passing yards led the league, and at the time was the 11th-highest passing yardage total ever.[47][48] He also led the NFL with 343 completions, and his 94.6 passer rating and 36 touchdown passes were second only to the 1999 MVP Kurt Warner.[47]

Beuerlein made the Pro Bowl for the first and only time in his career, tying offensive guard Bob Young for the most seasons in the league (13) before making his first Pro Bowl.[49]

tbh Daunte Culpepper kinda qualifies for this

xpost I completely forgot about that Beuerlein year!

xp does it really run in cycles, seems to me like it'd be totally random. the next brady could be in the league already and we just dont have the long view yet

despite Jay Cutler being a guy you'd think could have sleptwalk into breaking his team records due to the era, Erik Kramer still holds some of them for the Bears:

Kramer currently holds the Bears' single-season record for passing yards (3,838) and touchdown passes (29),[8] and attempts in a single game with 60 on November 16, 1997.

and i wouldn't call it a "good" year necessarily (completion percentage of 58.6!) but Blake Bortles bortled his way into 4400+ yds passing and 35 TDs in 2015.