It seems to me that there's a highlights and artistry and vibes rubric for judging an athlete that spans across sports, as well as a winner, grinder, leader, clutch gene rubric. Obviously a heavy degree of racial coding there, but historically there has never really been an overlap between those two streams as it pertained to a franchise NFL QB of a great team over a long term. Jackson is just kind of a new and unique discourse object in that sense, he has so clearly achieved Vick-type status that it feels like a bit of a category error to hold him up against the standards for Brady-type status, which is the normal convention for NFL QB's.
Dak, the color of his skin notwithstanding, has just never registered in the "this guy does cool graceful athletic movements" side of sports fandom and so entirely exists within the framework of championship-seeking that a Josh Allen or Joe Burrow does. Plus, as you say, the Cowboys of it all.
Imagine how much everyone would have hated Tim Duncan if he had the exact same regular season career but lost in the 2nd round with the Knicks every year.
Whereas we all want to overrate how good Derrick Rose actually was because of what watching him made us feel.
Yeah, as a Ravens fan it just seems like such a waste to spend his whole career fretting over the playoff thing. Like, in the back of my mind do I doubt he’ll ever lead a game-winning drive in the AFC title game? Sure, probably. But after decades of pretty grimy football even when the team was good, I’d rather just enjoy the show and hope it works out. (And they win plenty of games with him, it’s not as if they’re going 8-8 and you could rationalize blowing it up and starting over — if your guy’s going 12-4 every year all you can really do is hope he gets better in the playoffs one day.)
I'm going to he blunt. There is no racial element to it. None, never has been. This is completely, 100% made up by pundits for an excuse to say pundit-y things. It is totally false and the concerns about him in draft were completely merited.
Anyway I'm a Redskins/WFT/Commies fan. Jayden Daniels plays a similar style. Hopefully he turns the corner and keeps developing. But if he plays for several years, has a lot of good seasons, but can't get it done in the playoffs? Well the narrative that arises from that will be deserved. Ravens fans, as I know from personal experience, are missing a lot of brain cells, but I don't think the chip is due to anything other than it being their nature. They had the same defensiveness over Flacco who, ironically, was up and down during the regular season but clutch in the playoffs. The joke about calling him 'elite' lives on.
So the answer for Lamar is to prove it. Go on a post season run. Shut everyone up. Or don't, and be one of those players that was awesome and fun to watch but never quite got to that truly elite tier.
The concern coming out of Louisville was that he wouldn't be accurate, but in all manner of accuracy metrics he's been among the handful of best QBs since he got to the NFL. He's also remarkably good at avoiding interceptions. It's true that his deep-ball accuracy lags behind his other stats, which is part of what I was saying when I said that he is a B-plus passer.
He has absolutely overcome the concern as an NFL player. But I believe his completion percentage in college was good, but not great, and coming out of the ACC with a lesser level of competition, as a 'running qb' well... the concern didn't come out of nowhere. I think it's no coincidence his success has been at a top 5 or 6 organization and under the tutelage of Greg Roman. I don't want to take anything away from the guy as a player but I also think there are a lot of places Jackson could have landed where it wouldn't have gone as well.
Just re-looking at that draft it's notable Baltimore didn't even use their highest 1st round pick on him. And looking at some of the other teams that took qbs in the 1st round... oof. What if Jackson went to the Jets? Or Cleveland? Or AZ? It's entirely possible he is so special that he overcomes those places. Rosen turned out to be such a head case it's hard to imagine that workong out anywhere but it took going somewhere else for Mayfield and Darnold to suddenly look like they maybe weren't so bad after all.
I also think that Lamar would have much more playoff success if he landed in SF or Buffalo, the Bills inability to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs notwithstanding. It's hard to see Jackson being anything remotely like a falloff from Brock Purdy, who's a pretty good game manager and makes good decisions, but has pro-bowlers all around him. Lamar just doesn't have the supporting cast on offense that other teams who consistently do OK in the playoffs do.
I think the awkward answer is that Lamar often presents as slow-witted and confused. That's not to say that he is -- his stellar performance over the years in one of the most demanding and cerebral positions in sports demonstrates quite the opposite. But you often see him with furrowed brow, looking down or staring blankly into mid-space in the pose of someone uncomfortably searching for a clue. He doesn't express himself artfully or with a quick wit in interviews, as Mahomes does. So he comes off as someone with more brawns than brains.
That is, of course, uncomfortably close to the old trope that Freddie mentions of the gifted but not intelligent black athlete that, frankly, at least 90% of us have gotten beyond long ago. Even though we are past it, we all remain uncomfortably aware of it, so anything that remotely, remotely smells of it, such as justifiable criticism of Lamar's playoff record, makes us uneasy. For me, Lamar's presentation is actually refreshing -- I'm pretty sick of the opposite -- the countless media-trained talking heads who present as smart, witty and glib as they sound bite the day's conventional wisdom and prove to have little ability for self-reflection and analysis.
I know this is a minor nitpick, but calling Mariota a longtime backup is wrong. This is only his second season in that role, though probably should have gotten to the bench faster.
I think a lot of this is one's media diet. The Athletic is one of the more left-leaning major sports publications, yet when I google "The Athletic Lamar Jackson playoffs," the first line of the first result is "Lamar Jackson’s numbers in four career playoff starts (three losses) aren’t great." The comments on pretty much every Ravens story there are "Jackson can't win in the playoffs." If I remember correctly, when the hosts of Good Morning Football did their fantasy draft of quarterbacks before last season, their top three selections were Mahomes, Burrow, and Allen.
With Dak, it's not just the fact that he plays for the Cowboys, but that Jerry Jones has turned into even more of a punching bag over the past couple of years. With Dan Snyder out of the league, Jones is back to being the most hated owner of a major franchise. (The Panthers owner is up there, but he's less famous and no one takes the Panthers seriously.) Jones saying that the Cowboys were "all in" this year didn't help things.
Football is a team sport. And there are other contextual variables which are almost impossible to capture. Not being a Ravens (or really NFL team) fan, I don't remember exactly each and every situational report or 3-deep game roster for each (or really any) of their playoff games. But I do know that they haven't exactly been a Pro Bowl factory for WRs. They seem to rely on RB by committee as well, maybe because they have injuries late in the season. Mark Andrews is the only consistent offensive performer *when he's not injured!* I can think of on any recent Ravens playoff teams besides Jackson. I do recall that last season, in addition to Lamar's injury and playing at not quite 100% for much of the year, they also had issues with OL health and depth. Then there's the offensive scheme, play calling, etc. Long story short, I think you put Jackson on the 49ers or Eagles and his playoff EPA is in the middle of the 1st quadrant of the graph.
So I did look and see what the Ravens recent historical Pro Bowl situation's been. From an offensive perspective, it's been slim. And I was shocked to see Devin Duvernay (WR) making it twice (possibly one for ST/returns?). Other than DD, they haven't had a WR in the Pro Bowl in the past 24 seasons. An occasional RB, most recent being Mark Ingram II and Patrick Ricard (FB) seems to get selected often. Not even very many offensive linemen (other than Andrews) have made it since Lamar has been in Baltimore. Yanda (G) made it almost every season from 2014 to 2019, but then no OL until last season w/ Linderbaum (C). The Ravens Pro Bowl selections have been almost entirely the defense with Jackson and Andrews on O and Justin Tucker (K) on ST.
Pretty sure the Cowboys do way better than that on offense since Dak's been in Big D, including the line.
Yeah, quarterbacks. Once they get a rep, whatever it is, that's it. Too good, too bad, not enough pub, way too much; I could give you examples of all of them.
Lamar is a good passer, but his form is not classic, his throws tend to be low-arc, and he's poor on deep balls. Those things have an effect on his rep. It's not just what you do as a QB,it's also how you look. And again, it's not always fair, but once you get a rep for something it tends to stick, so for instance it's cool that Aaron Rodgers throws off a ridiculous base a lot, because he was already a great QB.
Also, bottom line: no matter how many yards you run for, you gotta hit your receiver 90+% of the time, preferably in the chest, and that tends to come up in the playoffs when defenses key on keeping the QB behind the line and in the pocket.
"preferably in the chest" is not really true tho. Watch this Sunday with an eye towards where the windows the QBs are throwing to are. It hit me when I was throwing around with a D1 quarterback one summer and every ball was above my head. You gotta go get it.
No way do QBs have more influence on winning and losing than any other position in sports. They're not even on the field more than half the game and when they are, they're one of 11 players. Compare to the stroke in double scull rowing.
I think Dak has 2 years longer in the league. He also plays in Dalllas which gets constant national coverage.
No racism in Lamar draft grades. Countless black qbs do not get those comments. He presents that way, and the stats show he arguably plays in a way that lends itself more to raw athleticism than picking apart defenses from the pocket.
As an old fart, high school backup, and 55-year Packer fan, it’s interesting but weird to infuse QB discussions with such an abundance of crunched #s. Football is better in the mind’s eye as something that transcends the delusional hyper-specificity of a surfeit of data-driven conclusions. At least it seems that way over the long haul that I’m working on. Hey, have any of you young whippersnappers ever checked out Sonny Jurgensen? Give him a play on YouTube sometime. He was probably never in any better shape than the bartender at your favorite watering hole but had a tremendous arm, with great touch and long-ball accuracy. Lombardi had won 5 championships with my idol, Bart Starr, but called Jurgensen the best passer he’d ever seen. He coached him for a year before dying of cancer. Sonny could kind of throw his belly into his motion and deliver strikes downfield but also whip an outlet pass behind his back. Played with single bar face mask and no chin strap. Was on the 1960 Eagles team that Norm Van Brocklin QBd to a championship and sat on the bench watching Bill Kilmer, a guy who struggled to throw a spiral, start ahead of him in the ‘72/‘73 Super Bowl. Sonny is one of many such greats who never won it all. As far as black QBs go, Doug Williams put the old prejudices to rest years ago. He may have had the strongest arm ever, and it was on great display when he and his Redskins teammates squashed the Broncos in the SB in 1988. Of course, old, bad habits die hard, but it is one of the great gratifying ironies of the game that he did it with a franchise that had been the last to sign black players. Is there a quantifiable formula to measure that? Didn’t think so.
“ People forget that John Elway’s reputation was as a phenomenal athlete who couldn’t put it together and win the big game, a choker”
Uh, no. His legacy would have been willing mediocre teams to the big game where they were generally obliterated by whatever juggernaut emerged from the harsh fires of the NFC to accept its AFC sacrifice.
QB’s get more credit than they probably deserve, generally, when they win. And they take more of the blame than they deserve, when they lose. As you say, it’s part of the territory.
And agreed, you can “advanced stats” all day long, but unless and until you get a ring, you’re not reaching the very highest heights in the pantheon. Just ask folks like Marino, or Moon.
It seems to me that there's a highlights and artistry and vibes rubric for judging an athlete that spans across sports, as well as a winner, grinder, leader, clutch gene rubric. Obviously a heavy degree of racial coding there, but historically there has never really been an overlap between those two streams as it pertained to a franchise NFL QB of a great team over a long term. Jackson is just kind of a new and unique discourse object in that sense, he has so clearly achieved Vick-type status that it feels like a bit of a category error to hold him up against the standards for Brady-type status, which is the normal convention for NFL QB's.
Dak, the color of his skin notwithstanding, has just never registered in the "this guy does cool graceful athletic movements" side of sports fandom and so entirely exists within the framework of championship-seeking that a Josh Allen or Joe Burrow does. Plus, as you say, the Cowboys of it all.
yeah I mean Dak makes excellent quarterback play as boring as it possibly can be
Imagine how much everyone would have hated Tim Duncan if he had the exact same regular season career but lost in the 2nd round with the Knicks every year.
Whereas we all want to overrate how good Derrick Rose actually was because of what watching him made us feel.
Yeah, as a Ravens fan it just seems like such a waste to spend his whole career fretting over the playoff thing. Like, in the back of my mind do I doubt he’ll ever lead a game-winning drive in the AFC title game? Sure, probably. But after decades of pretty grimy football even when the team was good, I’d rather just enjoy the show and hope it works out. (And they win plenty of games with him, it’s not as if they’re going 8-8 and you could rationalize blowing it up and starting over — if your guy’s going 12-4 every year all you can really do is hope he gets better in the playoffs one day.)
I'm just here to annoyingly point out that Jalen Hurts has in fact made a Super Bowl.
Yeah I was very annoyed when I saw that made it into the initial email, no idea why that happened, I've fixed it
I'm going to he blunt. There is no racial element to it. None, never has been. This is completely, 100% made up by pundits for an excuse to say pundit-y things. It is totally false and the concerns about him in draft were completely merited.
Anyway I'm a Redskins/WFT/Commies fan. Jayden Daniels plays a similar style. Hopefully he turns the corner and keeps developing. But if he plays for several years, has a lot of good seasons, but can't get it done in the playoffs? Well the narrative that arises from that will be deserved. Ravens fans, as I know from personal experience, are missing a lot of brain cells, but I don't think the chip is due to anything other than it being their nature. They had the same defensiveness over Flacco who, ironically, was up and down during the regular season but clutch in the playoffs. The joke about calling him 'elite' lives on.
So the answer for Lamar is to prove it. Go on a post season run. Shut everyone up. Or don't, and be one of those players that was awesome and fun to watch but never quite got to that truly elite tier.
The concern coming out of Louisville was that he wouldn't be accurate, but in all manner of accuracy metrics he's been among the handful of best QBs since he got to the NFL. He's also remarkably good at avoiding interceptions. It's true that his deep-ball accuracy lags behind his other stats, which is part of what I was saying when I said that he is a B-plus passer.
He has absolutely overcome the concern as an NFL player. But I believe his completion percentage in college was good, but not great, and coming out of the ACC with a lesser level of competition, as a 'running qb' well... the concern didn't come out of nowhere. I think it's no coincidence his success has been at a top 5 or 6 organization and under the tutelage of Greg Roman. I don't want to take anything away from the guy as a player but I also think there are a lot of places Jackson could have landed where it wouldn't have gone as well.
"....I also think there are a lot of places Jackson could have landed where it wouldn't have gone as well."
That's kind of how I feel about what happened when Vince Young ended up with Jeff Fisher.
Just re-looking at that draft it's notable Baltimore didn't even use their highest 1st round pick on him. And looking at some of the other teams that took qbs in the 1st round... oof. What if Jackson went to the Jets? Or Cleveland? Or AZ? It's entirely possible he is so special that he overcomes those places. Rosen turned out to be such a head case it's hard to imagine that workong out anywhere but it took going somewhere else for Mayfield and Darnold to suddenly look like they maybe weren't so bad after all.
I also think that Lamar would have much more playoff success if he landed in SF or Buffalo, the Bills inability to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs notwithstanding. It's hard to see Jackson being anything remotely like a falloff from Brock Purdy, who's a pretty good game manager and makes good decisions, but has pro-bowlers all around him. Lamar just doesn't have the supporting cast on offense that other teams who consistently do OK in the playoffs do.
I think the awkward answer is that Lamar often presents as slow-witted and confused. That's not to say that he is -- his stellar performance over the years in one of the most demanding and cerebral positions in sports demonstrates quite the opposite. But you often see him with furrowed brow, looking down or staring blankly into mid-space in the pose of someone uncomfortably searching for a clue. He doesn't express himself artfully or with a quick wit in interviews, as Mahomes does. So he comes off as someone with more brawns than brains.
That is, of course, uncomfortably close to the old trope that Freddie mentions of the gifted but not intelligent black athlete that, frankly, at least 90% of us have gotten beyond long ago. Even though we are past it, we all remain uncomfortably aware of it, so anything that remotely, remotely smells of it, such as justifiable criticism of Lamar's playoff record, makes us uneasy. For me, Lamar's presentation is actually refreshing -- I'm pretty sick of the opposite -- the countless media-trained talking heads who present as smart, witty and glib as they sound bite the day's conventional wisdom and prove to have little ability for self-reflection and analysis.
I know this is a minor nitpick, but calling Mariota a longtime backup is wrong. This is only his second season in that role, though probably should have gotten to the bench faster.
hmmm fair
I think a lot of this is one's media diet. The Athletic is one of the more left-leaning major sports publications, yet when I google "The Athletic Lamar Jackson playoffs," the first line of the first result is "Lamar Jackson’s numbers in four career playoff starts (three losses) aren’t great." The comments on pretty much every Ravens story there are "Jackson can't win in the playoffs." If I remember correctly, when the hosts of Good Morning Football did their fantasy draft of quarterbacks before last season, their top three selections were Mahomes, Burrow, and Allen.
With Dak, it's not just the fact that he plays for the Cowboys, but that Jerry Jones has turned into even more of a punching bag over the past couple of years. With Dan Snyder out of the league, Jones is back to being the most hated owner of a major franchise. (The Panthers owner is up there, but he's less famous and no one takes the Panthers seriously.) Jones saying that the Cowboys were "all in" this year didn't help things.
Football is a team sport. And there are other contextual variables which are almost impossible to capture. Not being a Ravens (or really NFL team) fan, I don't remember exactly each and every situational report or 3-deep game roster for each (or really any) of their playoff games. But I do know that they haven't exactly been a Pro Bowl factory for WRs. They seem to rely on RB by committee as well, maybe because they have injuries late in the season. Mark Andrews is the only consistent offensive performer *when he's not injured!* I can think of on any recent Ravens playoff teams besides Jackson. I do recall that last season, in addition to Lamar's injury and playing at not quite 100% for much of the year, they also had issues with OL health and depth. Then there's the offensive scheme, play calling, etc. Long story short, I think you put Jackson on the 49ers or Eagles and his playoff EPA is in the middle of the 1st quadrant of the graph.
So I did look and see what the Ravens recent historical Pro Bowl situation's been. From an offensive perspective, it's been slim. And I was shocked to see Devin Duvernay (WR) making it twice (possibly one for ST/returns?). Other than DD, they haven't had a WR in the Pro Bowl in the past 24 seasons. An occasional RB, most recent being Mark Ingram II and Patrick Ricard (FB) seems to get selected often. Not even very many offensive linemen (other than Andrews) have made it since Lamar has been in Baltimore. Yanda (G) made it almost every season from 2014 to 2019, but then no OL until last season w/ Linderbaum (C). The Ravens Pro Bowl selections have been almost entirely the defense with Jackson and Andrews on O and Justin Tucker (K) on ST.
Pretty sure the Cowboys do way better than that on offense since Dak's been in Big D, including the line.
Yeah, quarterbacks. Once they get a rep, whatever it is, that's it. Too good, too bad, not enough pub, way too much; I could give you examples of all of them.
Lamar is a good passer, but his form is not classic, his throws tend to be low-arc, and he's poor on deep balls. Those things have an effect on his rep. It's not just what you do as a QB,it's also how you look. And again, it's not always fair, but once you get a rep for something it tends to stick, so for instance it's cool that Aaron Rodgers throws off a ridiculous base a lot, because he was already a great QB.
Also, bottom line: no matter how many yards you run for, you gotta hit your receiver 90+% of the time, preferably in the chest, and that tends to come up in the playoffs when defenses key on keeping the QB behind the line and in the pocket.
"preferably in the chest" is not really true tho. Watch this Sunday with an eye towards where the windows the QBs are throwing to are. It hit me when I was throwing around with a D1 quarterback one summer and every ball was above my head. You gotta go get it.
No way do QBs have more influence on winning and losing than any other position in sports. They're not even on the field more than half the game and when they are, they're one of 11 players. Compare to the stroke in double scull rowing.
In sports that people care about (which is obviously what we're discussing):
1. The best player on an NBA team, regardless of position (Jokic, for example, would immediately make any team a top 3 - 5 favorite)
2. NFL QB.
Might not even be the right order but it's definitely those two.
The stroke in double scull? C'mon.
What a crazy take.
I think Dak has 2 years longer in the league. He also plays in Dalllas which gets constant national coverage.
No racism in Lamar draft grades. Countless black qbs do not get those comments. He presents that way, and the stats show he arguably plays in a way that lends itself more to raw athleticism than picking apart defenses from the pocket.
As an old fart, high school backup, and 55-year Packer fan, it’s interesting but weird to infuse QB discussions with such an abundance of crunched #s. Football is better in the mind’s eye as something that transcends the delusional hyper-specificity of a surfeit of data-driven conclusions. At least it seems that way over the long haul that I’m working on. Hey, have any of you young whippersnappers ever checked out Sonny Jurgensen? Give him a play on YouTube sometime. He was probably never in any better shape than the bartender at your favorite watering hole but had a tremendous arm, with great touch and long-ball accuracy. Lombardi had won 5 championships with my idol, Bart Starr, but called Jurgensen the best passer he’d ever seen. He coached him for a year before dying of cancer. Sonny could kind of throw his belly into his motion and deliver strikes downfield but also whip an outlet pass behind his back. Played with single bar face mask and no chin strap. Was on the 1960 Eagles team that Norm Van Brocklin QBd to a championship and sat on the bench watching Bill Kilmer, a guy who struggled to throw a spiral, start ahead of him in the ‘72/‘73 Super Bowl. Sonny is one of many such greats who never won it all. As far as black QBs go, Doug Williams put the old prejudices to rest years ago. He may have had the strongest arm ever, and it was on great display when he and his Redskins teammates squashed the Broncos in the SB in 1988. Of course, old, bad habits die hard, but it is one of the great gratifying ironies of the game that he did it with a franchise that had been the last to sign black players. Is there a quantifiable formula to measure that? Didn’t think so.
“ People forget that John Elway’s reputation was as a phenomenal athlete who couldn’t put it together and win the big game, a choker”
Uh, no. His legacy would have been willing mediocre teams to the big game where they were generally obliterated by whatever juggernaut emerged from the harsh fires of the NFC to accept its AFC sacrifice.
QB’s get more credit than they probably deserve, generally, when they win. And they take more of the blame than they deserve, when they lose. As you say, it’s part of the territory.
And agreed, you can “advanced stats” all day long, but unless and until you get a ring, you’re not reaching the very highest heights in the pantheon. Just ask folks like Marino, or Moon.