An Early Look at FA Quarterbacks

His passer rating right now is 100.2. It only measures passing. He goes through his progressions. When his line collapses, he just avoids the sack and still looks for the pass. He had the league-leading passer rating for a while. It is below Brady and Rivers right now and above Brees, Manning, Freeman and Roethlisberger.

The stat most correlated with winning games for a quarterback is Y/PA (technically it is Adj Y/PA, but I don’t have the time to program Excel to do constant iterations to reveal strength of schedule vs. Y/PA… Trust me, it’s not that different). Vick’s Y/PA is 8.1, 3rd highest in the league. That’s above Roethlisberger, Manning… and Brady. Yes, that Brady. The most common objection to Y/PA as a yardstick is that it is biased towards or against systems. First, that generally either means that those systems are superior… because Y/PA is correlated with winning… or it is normalized across systems because of it’s correlation. Second, it would be biased AGAINST Vick, because while a WCO inflates YPA for quarterbacks, it is the Walsh-style “dink-and-dunk” system with passes in the flat or up the seam, not the more Coryell-esque system the Eagles seem to be running. The Eagle’s don’t seem to care too much about YAC (Vick ranks 15th in Yards After Catch), which is what the YPA is best at missing. 3rd in YPA, but 15th in YAC? Those people above him in YPA? They all have significantly higher YAC. Andy Reid’s system did not improve his passing in significant stats. It probably hurt him. Also, that doesn’t make a lot of sense intuitively. The Eagle’s vertical stretch requires not only arm strength but significant accuracy (especially considering the young receiving corps), both of which are highly valued in a pocket passer.

Yes, his athletic ability has inflated his passing stats, but they have generally increased his pass ATTEMPTS, they do not generally increase his ability to increase his completions per attempt except on the (surprisingly) statistically rare occasion that his athletic ability is such that he actually almost completely gets out of pressure to make the pass. It instead increases his attempts at passing while running, which is notoriously inaccurate for QBs.

Vick “never having been a great passer (until recently)” is sort of an absurd statement, because “recently” includes all 11 games as a starter and finisher. Those stats also include performances that have hurt him but might not be fair: the first ’Skins game and the Green Bay game (you know, the one where he started at half time after being in the same situation as Webb: no practice with the receivers or the system).

This doesn’t speak to whether or not the Vikings should grab him—his age, his criminal background, his propensity for injury, etc. But one of the things we shouldn’t do is accuse Vick of being a poor passer.

I can’t speak to his moral character, but my intuition is that he is genuine in his reform. He’s pretty cocky (we might have had enough of that) even for a QB, but he has otherwise shown a lot of maturity. He doesn’t have a good PR staff (see: “I want to adopt a dog”), if he even has one and that type of immaturity is one of well-meaningness and not idiotic decisionmaking in terms of legal or moral problems (the difference between someone who says something stupid, and who does something stupid and causes genuine harm). I personally believe that regardless of how much Vick has changed internally, any dog he adopts might be the safest dog on the planet. And that same phenomena might apply across a lot of his life.

By the way, the reason I think he’s reformed? I have none. So, that’s just intuition and no reasonable argument can be made by either side. Leslie and Tony Dungy are close, so that increases the likelihood that Leslie wouldn’t think character is a problem, regardless of whether or not it is. Something tells me that Vick responds well to open trust (as opposed to suspicion. See: his reaction to Reid and Dungy), and I doubt Leslie Frazier would give him anything but that. In any case, this is a very reasonable reason to be hesitant.

Age? Maybe. Likely. Can’t turn back the clock, but I think counter-examples like Staubach and Warner illustrate that so long as a quarterback avoid hits (by not playing), they can extend their career beyond what one would expect an average quarterback to do. Now, I don’t think that Vick lasts 10 more years, but we might be surprised. Now, I understand that Vietnam life (Staubach) and prison life (Vick) isn’t peaches, but avoiding the QB life probably net extended their viable years.

Injury prone? Yes. Also a reasonable reason to be hesitant. If we were to hire Vick, that would certainly be a concern, but this does not diminish his value too much if our stated purpose is to hire a veteran to teach Webb/our pick. A couple of starts in the NFL ain’t bad for a rookie, even if you subscribe to the notion that starting a rookie right away for 16 seasons is bad (statistical evidence disagrees. So do Mark Sanchez and Joe Flacco).

Would we get him? Probably not. What we have to offer Vick: Significantly better protection (yea, we don’t like our O-Line, but…), a more mature group, somebody he can mentor one-on-one, the best running back in the business, and a players’ coach probably do not outweigh what the Eagles can offer: a growing squad to also mentor, a completely understanding coach (I believe two of Andy Reid’s sons went to prison), squad chemistry and faith, a really good running back, a year in the system (a significantly different WCO) etc. But if we could, I wouldn’t be against a short term contract.

Seriously, Vick teaching Webb? There are probably not a lot of QB coaches that fully know how to teach running QBs. Do we have one? I don’t know. But Vick would be a great learning aid.

where fans like you can vote? and remember genius, in about 10 years you’ll be craving for him to play for your team, while saying the “i never liked the guy, but i respected his play” BS excuse you gave with favre. and how is it funny to call him erin… the vikings have a guy on the team with the actual name of erin!