Comparing Ryan, Stafford, and Flacco

[NCBirdfan]

COMPARING MATT RYAN, MATTHEW STAFFORD, AND JOE FLACCO

There has been a lot of debate about whether Flacco is worthy of an extention, etc. I have always been on board with keeping Flacco a Raven, because I feel he has the tools to get the Ravens to the Super Bowl. The person, who calls himself the Fantasy ******, has gone at lengths at comparing Flacco with Stafford and Ryan - two quarterbacks that are supposed to be miles ahead of Flacco in talent. He has concluded that that is not true. He did so by comparing targets, ie, receivers. I'm not going to cut and paste too much from his site as you can follow the link to see his reasoning and methodology. But feel free to comment on it - well, at least read/look at it. It is an interesting analysis IMO.

I'll just start with his first two paragraphs:

On the way to making a point on Twitter last night I somehow ended up in a foxhole with Joe Flacco, defending him against an onslaught of comments which basically said that he sucks. That was sort of an odd place for me to be, given that I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about Flacco at all before then. The point I set out to make was basically that NFL teams drafting quarterbacks should look at their rosters and determine whether they would be able to win with a Flacco level quarterback, and if they don’t think that they would be good enough to win with him, then they have bigger problems than just QB. I think Flacco is basically a median level QB that you could expect to get in a draft. Maybe half of the QBs you draft would be worse than Flacco, and half of them would be better than Flacco.

Related to Flacco I also said that I think that if you gave him the receivers that Matt Stafford or Matt Ryan have, there wouldn’t be any difference between Flacco and those other quarterbacks (who largely enjoy the perception of being good quarterbacks, while many perceive Flacco as a bad quarterback). To further this case, let me start out by comparing the three quarterbacks in terms of the quality of their receivers. The easiest way to do this is to just compare the salaries, or salary cap hits, of each QB’s top receivers. Salary gives us some sense as to the relative demand that each player would have in the NFL market. It won’t be a perfect measure, but it will be a good place to start.

[cprenegade]

I don't know that the way you judge a team's receivers should be based on salary. Pitta, Dickson and Smith are all on their first contracts. The Ravens may negotiate their contracts better than other teams. When Tom Brady led the Patriots to their first superbowl win in his era, he was paid less than Bledsoe. It doesn't mean he was less of a QB than those making more than him. I don't think anyone who watches the game thinks that Flacco is a bad QB, but he is inconsistent. That inconsistency leads to some games where he looks like he is in the same category as the best to ever play the game. In others he looks like a guy who may never get it. His biggest problem is leveling out his game so that he plays the same way from game to game, at home and on the road.

[Tru Dat]

There has been a lot of debate about whether Flacco is worthy of an extention, etc. I have always been on board with keeping Flacco a Raven, because I feel he has the tools to get the Ravens to the Super Bowl. The person, who calls himself the Fantasy ******, has gone at lengths at comparing Flacco with Stafford and Ryan - two quarterbacks that are supposed to be miles ahead of Flacco in talent. He has concluded that that is not true. He did so by comparing targets, ie, receivers. I'm not going to cut and paste too much from his site as you can follow the link to see his reasoning and methodology. But feel free to comment on it - well, at least read/look at it. It is an interesting analysis IMO.

I'll just start with his first two paragraphs:

LOL....and you thought this was interesting? Thanks for sparing us from the other paragraphs.