Quote:
Originally Posted by Solecismic
We've known for a long time that it's a quarterback's league. Even Vince Lombardi knew it. You either have a quarterback or you compensate for not having a quarterback.
With an increasing salary cap, a good strategy is to allow your starting quarterback to claim a good percentage of that increase.
What I got wrong is just how few real quarterbacks there are in the league and that coaches know it, and try and plan around it, but there's only so much they can do.
The Stafford/Goff trade (and the resulting immediate success) has changed the league.
If you're designing a football sim and what makes football particularly challenging is the variety of plays you can call... how do you simulate the have/have not nature of the quarterbacking position?
I recently read (as I've mentioned before) Collision Low Crossers, which is a detailed account of the 2011 New York Jets season.
The prevailing narrative is that the Jets had a Super Bowl caliber team, probably the best defense in the game, and a likeable, talented quarterback who simply could not process the game quickly enough to make good decisions on the field. Turnovers resulted and turnovers in the NFL are often the difference between wins and losses when the talent level is pretty close between teams.
There's a lot about whether the Jets could have won if Rex Ryan had insisted on making those game plan adjustments instead of trusting his offensive coordinator that Sanchez would get it eventually. That, too, would be difficult to simulate.
Now you have Rodgers, clearly at the tail end of his Hall of Fame career, knowing he can command the money that others have refused to command because they wanted good players around them.
It's an interesting strategy (if it indeed even is a strategy). Rodgers is notoriously silent about his internal motivations, even willing to wall himself away from family and not talk about it. I wonder what he's thinking right now and whether he will still be able to command the respect of a locker room if he takes that much money.
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One unfortunate thing about the Calvin Ridley stupidity news breaking when it did is that we almost missed Jim musing about developing football sims in the contemporary era.
It is a good point for discussion. How do you model something like the Buffalo/KC playoff game?
If you tried to accurately model what the NFL is like right now, I can already hear the complaints: "The only thing that matters is getting a QB rated above [X]. It does not matter how well you gameplan; or how good your other players are; or your coach ratings. The, like, 5 teams with top QBs are the only ones who really have a chance. And all you can do is luck into those guys. This game sucks!"
So how do you deal with modeling reality when reality isn't as diverse as it used to be?