One of the smarter aspects of baseball analysis in recent years has been the de-emphasis of wins and losses in evaluating pitchers. To suggest that one pitcher “wins” a game and another pitcher “loses” a game, even though many other players are involved in whether a game is won or lost, is silly. Brian Kenny, a broadcaster on Major League Baseball’s cable network, repeated the mantra, “Kill the win,” and other baseball analysts joined in on an effort to give wins less attention in assessing the quality of a pitcher.
Unfortunately, one of the dumber aspects of football analysis in recent years has been an increasing emphasis of wins and losses in evaluating quarterbacks. And if a pitcher doesn’t win or lose a game all by himself, a quarterback has even less of an impact on winning or losing, as football is inherently a more interconnected game, with every player dependent upon his teammates to win or lose.
And yet there was Rams coach Jeff Fisher after Sunday’s 9-6 win over the Jets, insisting that his quarterback, Case Keenum, would remain the starter despite a dreadful performance. Before the game, reports said Keenum could lose his starting job with another bad game, but after the game, merely winning -- even winning by a score of 9-6 -- turned out to be enough to save Keenum’s job.
“I thought Case did a nice job,” Fisher said.
Here’s the truth: No, Case didn’t do a nice job on Sunday. Case did a lousy job on Sunday. Case managed just 165 passing yards, completing 17 of 30 passes, and the Rams’ offense never reached the end zone. I’ve already explained why I think Fisher should bench Keenum for rookie Jared Goff, but what I want to focus on now is this notion that because a team won a game, that somehow means the quarterback played well. Or that because a team lost a game, that somehow means a quarterback played poorly.
All you had to do was watch Sunday afternoon’s game to see how ridiculous this idea about quarterbacks winning or losing a game is.
In New Orleans, we saw Broncos quarterback Trevor Siemian “win” a game in which he averaged 6.4 yards a pass against a lousy Saints pass defense, and we saw Drew Brees “lose” a game in which he averaged 10.4 yards a pass against an excellent Broncos pass defense. Brees played far better than Siemian, but the game-changing play happened while both Brees and Siemian were standing on the sideline: As the Saints lined up for a game-winning extra point, the Broncos blocked it and returned it to the end zone for a two-point return score. Why would we call one quarterback a winner and the other quarterback a loser when the game hinged on a play that happened with both players on the sideline?
In Jacksonville, we saw Texans quarterback Brock Osweiler play an unbelievably bad game, completing 14 of 27 passes for 99 yards -- a disgraceful 3.7 yards per pass! -- but because the Texans won, and because the Texans remain in first place in their terrible division, we are apparently all supposed to pretend Osweiler is a winner.
In Carolina, we saw Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith manage just 178 yards on 25-for-38 passing, with no touchdowns and one interception. But because the Chiefs won the game -- powered by the defense scoring on a pick-six and forcing a turnover to set up the game-winning field goal -- we won’t hear anyone talk about what a miserable game Smith played.
The narrative gets even worse in the playoffs, when every game seems to become a referendum on a quarterback’s quality, simplistically judged by whether his team wins or loses. But we should be smarter than that. We should see that the quarterback, while undeniably the most important player on the field, is just one of 22 players on the field at any given time. He doesn’t win a game by himself, he doesn’t lose a game by himself, and his team’s results often don’t tell us much about whether he individually played well. We really should kill the quarterback win.
Here are my other thoughts from Sunday.
Ezekiel Elliott is amazing. We all know the Cowboys’ rookie running back is doing great things this season, but do you realize just how unusual it is for a player to make plays like Elliott is making, week in and week out? With his 83-yard touchdown catch on Sunday in Pittsburgh -- a catch on which he blew past the speedy Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier -- Elliott became the first rookie running back since Gale Sayers in 1965 to have both a touchdown run of longer than 60 yards and a touchdown catch of longer than 80 yards. Elliott is also just the third player in NFL history (after Eric Dickerson and Adrian Peterson) to rush for over 1,000 yards in his first nine games. And it’s not just that Elliott makes big plays: He also consistently churns out the tough yards, which is why he’s leading the league in first downs. He’s an incredible young player.
I still like Mike Tomlin’s approach to going for two. Just so you know I’m not going to second-guess him when it doesn’t work, I’d like to praise Tomlin, the Steelers’ head coach, for once again going for two at a time when no other NFL coach would have on Sunday. When the Steelers scored their first touchdown of the game on Sunday to take a 6-0 lead over the Cowboys, Tomlin went for two. When the Steelers scored their second touchdown to take a 12-3 lead, Tomlin went for two. The Steelers failed to convert on those two attempts, and then failed on two later attempts when they were going “by the book,” but I like it despite yesterday’s 0-for-4: NFL coaches are too passive about taking risks, and Tomlin is the only coach who regularly goes for two even if the “by the book” approach would be kicking the extra point. As long as you can score 50 percent of the time that you go for two, you’re ahead of the game, and I believe the Steelers will make more than 50 percent in the long run, even after going 0-for-4 Sunday.
The NFC North is collapsing around the Lions. With Detroit on its bye on Sunday, the other three NFC North teams all lost. A week earlier the Lions beat the Vikings while the Packers lost. All of a sudden the 5-4 Lions are in a first-place tie with the Vikings and own the head-to-head tiebreaker, while the Packers are a game back. How many people expected that when the Lions started 1-3 and the Vikings started 5-0?
Jameis Winston made the play of the year. Yesterday against the Bears, Winston took the snap at the 23-yard line and scrambled backward all the way into his own end zone to avoid the pass rush. He then ran forward to the 10-yard line where he launched the ball downfield, 50 yards in the air, into the hands of Mike Evans for a spectacular 39-yard gain. It looked like something you’d see in an NFL Films clip from the 1950s because it seemed too fun for today’s NFL:
.@Jaboowins escapes the ENTIRE Bears pass rush.
— NFL (@NFL) November 13, 2016
And still finds Mike Evans for 39 yards.
Hoowwwwwww?! #SeigeTheDay https://t.co/5cyOrPqjqZ
Blair Walsh has to go. The Vikings simply can’t allow Walsh to continue being their kicker. He is now 15-for-19 on extra points this season. He’s the first NFL kicker since 1979 to attempt that many extra points and miss more than 20 percent of them. Granted, extra points were a lot easier before last year’s rules change, but still: He’s missing extra points at a rate that simply can’t exist in today’s NFL. He has to go.
Dak Prescott is great. I wrote on Twitter that I think Prescott is the third-best quarterback in the NFL this season, behind only Tom Brady and Matt Ryan. The response was as if I had said Meghan Trainor is the third-best musical act in American history, behind only Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Dozens of people tweeted back at me, insisting I was crazy to overreact to Prescott’s performance through just half of one NFL season. But I stand by that opinion. Yes, Prescott is early in his career. No, I don’t know if Prescott can continue playing at this level. But the fact remains, he has played much better than much more accomplished quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers, Andrew Luck, Cam Newton and Russell Wilson this season. Maybe Prescott will be a flash in the pan like Robert Griffin III and Colin Kaepernick, quarterbacks who were briefly great but no longer are even good. But even if that does happen, I’ll stand by my claim that for the first half of the 2016 season, Prescott has been the third-best quarterback in the NFL. And I said that during the game, regardless of whether the Cowboys won or lost against the Steelers.
