by Gus Griffin
Brock Osweiler is introduced in Houston
(Image via WashingtonPost.com)
Does Brock Osweiler, on the basis of 7 starts, deserve the $72 million ($37 million guaranteed) that he has coming to him?
Of course he does, if some idiot is willing to pay him. That is what the market is willing to bare. What a team is willing to pay and what can be justified by on the field performance have never been completely in line.
Keep in mind that we are not talking about some billionaire owner being subsidized by taxpayer dollars to build a stadium, largely with seasonal workers and jobs with no benefits. We are talking about a guy playing a game, largely financed by our voluntary viewership and patronage for a league that has made it blatantly clear that it could not care less about the health of its players after they are done.
He would be the idiot not to get every dime he could get and only those with a poor understanding of the economics of playing NFL QB are unclear about this.
What are those economics? Think of it this way: there are 32 NFL teams. If we evaluated the performance at starting QB with a letter grade, I can only come up with 17 that could clearly be graded as at least a “B.” I am excluding rookies and first year starters in Tennessee, Tampa, and Washington, even if they are trending upward, due to the cautionary tale of RG3. Simply put, their sample is too small to make a final assessment. But even if they pan out, that still leaves 12 teams with a significant need of an upgrade at QB. The irony of it all is that 3 of those 12 (Vikings, Texans, and Broncos) made the playoffs last year, to include the eventual champs.
Bottom line is that there are more NFL Teams than there are high quality QBs. This produces an odd economic reality which allows the unproven and proven pedestrians, in terms of performance, to make out like bandits……..and we should not blame them for exploiting a situation reinforced by the false narrative that a team must have an upper-echelon QB to win the Super Bowl.
History shows that a dominant defense is a better predictor of winning the Super Bowl than an upper-echelon QB. Consider this, of the 50 Super Bowls, the losing QB in nearly half of them (23) are either hall of famers or league MVPs. Eighteen of them split between Elway, Tarkenton, Kelly, Staubach, Warner, Manning, and Brady lost more than one. Compare that to this list of single SB starters to include Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson, Mark Rypien, Jeff Hostetler, Phil Simms, and Jim McMahon. Their Super Bowl record was 6-0. The common denominator was dominant defense.
I submit that as long as the false narrative of needing elite QB play is more prevalent than the reality, which is that there simply are not 32 dudes on this planet that can play NFL QB at an elite level, about a 3rd of the league will continue to chase that which simply does not exist in a quantity large enough to meet the demand.
Smart economics would stop going for the home run at QB and instead load up on defensive talent.
Gus Griffin, for War Room Sports
