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Just good enough is a dangerous trap in the NFL. For the record I love Tomlin, but you can see why people might be upset when you have teams like the Eagles that do repeated tear down and rebuilds, especially given how hard it is to land a good QB in general but when you are mildly above average in particular.
Many fans (maybe foolishly) would choose ups and downs instead of consistency.
I guess the shame of it is that you don't get to pick which team you root for, for the most part, so you're stuck with the style of whatever team you like.
In the NFL I actually watch a lot of regular season games with my family, and I'd sooner pick a competitive if unspectacular team every year over unwatchable year after year while hoping for the future. MLB I understand tanking because it takes years of playing lots of young players for some of them to hit and start to build a core, there's value in playing the kids live. The star centric nature of basketball makes it, for most teams, an unfortunate necessity in the NBA.
But in the NFL, there's a confluence of short careers, limited and uneven development of players in the league, complicated salary cap rules, and the randomness inherent in player selection. Yes, you need to tank if you want to draft a Joe Burrow. But sometimes you go all in to get #1 overall and you get nothing. The Jets have spent the last six seasons starting a second overall and a third overall pick, they've never had a winning record in that time.
Good teams with good coaches and GMs and systems might have missed picks, down years, and problems, but they're able to reset quickly without years of losing by making good selections in later rounds and developing players well. Glancing over the QB rankings at TheRinger for a quick reference, out of the top 20: Hurts, Purdy, Love, Smith, Prescott could all have been drafted by basically any team in their draft year. I'd sooner bet on a good organization developing a fresh player than I'd bet on a bad organization turning things around. For every CJ Stroud there's a Bryce Young. And sometimes you tank for the top pick and end up with a Baker Mayfield or a Trevor Lawrence, whose best seasons have looked like the ones Tomlin's detractors are complaining about.
I don't disagree, especially given how often we see "what ifs" in the NFL. Andy Reid is probably going to end his career a top 5, maybe even a top 3 coach. Would that have happened if they hadn't gotten lucky with Mahomes? Is it still deserved anyway? What about Baker, what would have happened if he ended up on say, the Patriots during Bill's era?
Football is a weird sport sometimes.
Although taking a serviceable QB with a good team ala Purdy seems like a good idea......but look at how much Kirk is making, I'm not sure how much that works either.
League needs more talent.
It's a bizarre combination of an individual sport for the QB and a sport that requires a very large team. Getting a good QB is probably the hardest job in any sport when it comes to roster construction. Getting access to a top talent QB is going to cost either a lot of draft capital, which you normally acquire by having a bad team, or it costs a lot of cap space which makes it hard to build a good team around the QB. Then in a few years they have to give the rookie QB a massive contract anyway. It's a weird game of windows.
That feels like a market failure. It shouldnt be that hard, in a country of 350 million people, to turn up a few good QBs each year. I suspect the problem is that most non-pro teams are focused on a weird combination of "good sportsmanship" and "we need to win right now, so lets just run it every play." There's no youth development systen like the big pro Soccer clubs have in Europe.
I don't really understand the theory that there isn't enough talent going into the QB position.
QB "busts" are still immensely talented athletes. It just happens that the particular combination of skills and experience required scale at a rate where you can really tell the difference between top 100 (plausible NFL backups), top 30 (plausible NFL starters), top 15, and top 5.
What I was trying to say is that it isn't lack of talent, but lack of training. Playing QB in college is obviously tough, but they're still just amateurs who are have only been playing competively for a few years. It's a totally different job being QB there, versus playing against top-tier adult professional in the big league. In college they can kind of coast on talent and instinct, but playing in the NFL requires specialized training that most people just don't get until they're already in the league, which is why you often see 1-st round draft picks flame out while later round picks require years to develop before eventually becoming ready for prime time.
Ah, absolutely, agree. The problem is the injuries. Not that you don't see injuries in soccer or baseball, but they're not expected in the same way they are in the NFL. Or teams aren't as risk-averse about injuries, which seems odd to say, but consider how many MiLB pitchers who never see the Show retire without their original elbow ligament, and nonetheless MLB teams will keep talented arms in the minors for years risking injury to develop their skills to a Major League level. Plenty of UEFA stars spend time lent out to other teams to build skill in real games, even with the risk of injury. By contrast, NFL QBs often get zero game time if they don't immediately seize a starting job in the NFL. Backup QBs in the NFL are the biggest waste of athleticism imaginable. Tanner McKee on the Eagles was a late round pick, but has shown flashes in the pre-season of ability, but outside of multiple injuries and a lost season for the team he might never see an NFL field.
Even the preseason has degraded to the point where it doesn't tell you much. Preseason games have gone from full contact games that don't count, to half-assed games where there's a lot of subs, to the starters play one or two series, to some starters don't play at all until the regular season. And we've seen the result this week where teams that don't play starters in the pre-season are sloppy and out of sorts to start the season. But coaches are risk averse and prefer to hide their starters, because losing a starter (or god forbid a starting QB) in the pre-season might cost you your season and your job, while teams come back from losing week 1 every year, and you can always blame bad luck for the loss anyway.
There's just no available method to develop a backup QB who doesn't get reps. Trey Lance is the prime example recently, but every year fantastically talented CFB athletes get drafted as backup QBs and fade into obscurity. There are better than a dozen QBs drafted every year, and no more than a few get any significant live reps. It's a conundrum.
A totally sociopathic, risk neutral, philosopher-king of a combined Owner/GM/Coach would be signing QBs every year and loaning them out to CFL teams. Or a risk-neutral league would support a minor league system where QBs could develop skills in real game time. It would be "worth it" for young guys to get the chance to play full speed and full contact and blossom, even if you lose 5 or 10 prospects to injury for every guy who reaches the NFL the value of an NFL QB is so high it would be "worth" it from the team's perspective. McKee might turn into something, but he won't do it in three scrimmage style pre-season games every year. This is one obvious area where the NFL is actually too soft and concerned with player injuries.
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Trevor Lawrence’s best season saw his team making it all the way to the AFC Divisional Round and giving the Chiefs a hard-fought game which the Jags could have won if only a couple of moments (Christian Kirk’s costly drop, a bungled red-zone interception on what should have been an easily scooped tipped pass) had gone differently. I would submit that this is a good bit better than mediocrity.
Trevor Lawrence's best season (SO FAR) saw the team go 9-8 in the regular season. Which is the kind of season that Tomlin gets criticized for, being mediocre-good but not good enough to win a championship and remaining trapped in purgatory because playing like that they will never accumulate the draft capital to go get a really talented QB like Trevor Lawrence.
I like Lawrence and the Jaguars, they were fun to watch when they came to the Linc. (Has to be the only time in history an opposing coach came to a stadium with a statue of him outside, right?) I'd like to see them find their way to a great team. But Lawrence is definitely an example of how tanking for picks is a fraught strategy, already they're through Lawrence's cheap years.
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