Of Course, You Know This Means WAR

Yeah, I’m back. Don’t get all excited or anything.

The hot stat in baseball is replacement value. It’s expressed in different ways, including WAR, or “wins above replacement,” but its basic premise is this: if you replaced player X on your team with a statistically average player, would he perform better or worse than the player he replaced – and by extension, would the team be better or worse?

Of course, this being a baseball statistic it has all kinds of tendrils – would the team be better offensively? Defensively? Would he hit in the clutch? Would he get on base? Would he throw out base-stealers? Would he give up the gopher ball in late-and-close situations? – but the idea of replacement value really boils down to how close a given player comes to the norm.

Replacement value is semi-self-fulfilling. Successful teams have more above-the-norm players, but it’s not clear whether those teams are successful because they have more above-the-norm players, or more of those teams’ players are above the norm because they’re on successful teams. Success begets performance and vice versa, and don’t forget: “Mother and Child Reunion” was first a chicken-and-egg dish served in a Chinese restaurant.

Football being less stat-driven than baseball (though not for lack of want-to), replacement value is not the hot topic it is on the diamond. Replacement value is less valuable in football because three-quarters of an NFL roster is on the field for one-third of a game or more. Many of those players are going to be at or below replacement value. It’s unavoidable. It’s the definition of the mean in a  world where all the children are above average.

(With all the situational offenses and defenses sometimes you’re better-served looking at the replacement value within a position on a given team – moving from the designated run-stuffer to the designated pass-rusher on defense or looking at the first-down back versus the third-down back. One of the reasons the Giants are so good is that Brandon Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw are both above replacement. Ditto for Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul.)

In football, replacement value is good for answering tough questions at the top of the pyramid. Who’s better – Peyton Manning or Tom Brady? How can you tell?

The baseball answer to that, delivered from the pulpit of replacement value, is to take Manning and Brady away from their teams, replace them with a player whose replacement value is at the norm, and see what happens.

That’s a loaded question. Take Albert Pujols out of the St. Louis lineup and there’s an Albert Pujols-shaped hole that can't be filled by Matt Holliday or Lance Berkman. The Cardinals still have to bat nine; they can slip in a Skip Schumaker and go into run-manufacturing mode, but it’s a partial transformation at best. They’re not going to go all bunt-y and start running Berkman like he was Michael Bourn.

Contrast that with football. The most crushing blow to an offense in 2011 outside of Peyton Manning occurred when the Vikings lost Adrian Peterson. How did the ‘Queens react? By not running the same offense at all. Joe Webb got the keys, the passing attack flipped around, the running attack was stood on its head, and while it wasn’t more successful it wasn’t markedly less successful. The point is that given resources and resourcefulness it can be done.

Indianapolis, of course, did none of those things, because it wasn’t built to do them. Joseph Addai and Donald Brown are running backs whose chief asset is not running the ball 30 times a game. They’re the Trevor Hoffman fastball, effective not because it’s used but because it might be used the next pitch … or maybe the pitch after that. The offense built around Peyton Manning could not be rebuilt around anyone else, certainly not Curtis Painter, Dan Orlovsky, or Kerry Collins, and the defense wasn’t good enough to deliver a win when the offense couldn’t outscore the opposition. So on the surface you’d guess that Peyton Manning had the greatest replacement value of any player in recent times.

Not so fast; we still have the Brady-Manning question to answer. Why did the Patriots not disintegrate when they lost Tom Brady in 2008, while the Colts went kablooey when they lost Manning in 2011? Defense is a big part of the answer, and having a defensive coach as head coach. The Indianapolis defense was shredded by injuries in 2011; New England in 2008 had a great defense, with Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, Jerrod Mayo, and Adalius Thomas all playing at a high level. They weren’t the 16-0 defense of the year before, but they were a top-10 defense, and the best defense the Pats have had since.

Even so, the offense was the league’s sixth-best unit, with the same crappy running game that New England has always had. Good receivers to be sure – Wes Welker and Randy Moss – but not really better than Wayne and Garcon and Dallas Clark in Indy. So you think maybe Matt Cassel was better than Curtis Painter?

Maybe a little, but maybe not that much. If Tom Brady’s replacement value is significantly lower than Peyton Manning’s, replacing Brady with Cassel doesn’t hurt nearly as much as replacing Manning with Painter-slash- Collins-slash- Orlovsky. So we come back to the original conclusion: Manning is better than Brady.

Yes, to the extent that his replacement value is higher. You may want Brady over Manning in a big game, and that’s your right. Replacement value doesn’t go there.

All of which is the long way ‘round to the big question: What player is/was the most indispensable to his team?

The simplest way to look at this is to examine the change in record from the year before the player left to the year he left, and then if he went to a new team the difference between the year before the player came and the year he came. A couple of simple change equations, acknowledging that the loss of one player does not define any team’s season.

Let’s work with the top 50 players of all time according to Pro Football Reference, and let’s look at changes that occurred in the meat of that player’s career, if that’s possible.

It gets dicey. Carl Eller and Johnny Unitas changed teams at the tail-end of their careers, when they were close to being replacement-level players. That’s not the same as Marshall Faulk changing teams after three years or T.O. being dealt to the Eagles in the prime of his career.

This little work is split in two, with a list of players who went from one team to a different team this time, and a list of players who didn’t go anywhere saved for the next episode, along with a big wrapup.

Now, the list of players who switched teams.

Lest you think the transition from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers was smooth and productive, guess again. The Packers got more than 50 percent worse; the Jets got 125 percent better. And the QB aside, the Favre-led team was nearly indistinguishable from the Rodgers-led team; it wasn’t like the defense collapsed or the offense was gutted by injuries. Favre at that stage of his career was that much better than Rodgers at that stage of his career. It was a big difference.

The difference between Warren Moon and Billy Joe Tolliver was likewise huge. Unlike the calculated move Green Bay made from the old pro (Favre) to his successor (Rodgers), Houston went from a productive star, to a 28-year-old journeyman who could serve as the poster boy for sub-replacement-level quarterbacks. If Curtis Painter were older, less intelligent, and longer off the tee he would be Billy Joe Tolliver. Given that, a precipitous decline was inevitable.

Interesting stuff abounds in these numbers. Love him or hate him, T.O. made the Eagles better and the ‘Niners worse – though he had the opposite effect when he went from Philly to Dallas three years later. Randy Moss, meanwhile, has had the opposite effect everywhere he's gone. Randy Moss is a player whose teams get worse when he arrives. That doesn't mean teams aren't good when Moss arrives, or that they don't prosper at some point during his tenure. They just don't get better when he arrives – and they get better when he leaves.

You can see how two safeties, Paul Krause and Emlen Tunnell, stabilized young defenses, and how three great defensive backs – Rod Woodson, Ronnie Lott, and Herb Adderley – were unable to do much for established defenses.

You can also see that L.T. is a good player. The Chargers may have underestimated how good – or perhaps they simply forgot that addition by subtraction is still subtraction. How could the Chargers without Tomlinson possibly be a better team than the Chargers with him?

And then there's Marshall Faulk. When he went from the Colts to the Rams he pulled off the amazing combination of making his new team nine games better, while the team he left got 10 games better. There has never been an NFL trade that made each team that much better.

This is good, but there's still the Peyton Manning situation to consider. And we will ... next time. 

And I promise there will be a next time.

Packers-Colts: Longing and Belonging and a Fistful of Prop Snow in the Face

If you've been following our all-time playdowns as closely as I am, you're a liar. I'm the freaking author. On the other hand, if you've been following the playdowns semi-closely, you know the Colts' advancing to the semifinals is a point of some contention. People say they shouldn't have beaten the Vikings in the round of 16, the Cowboys in the quarters, or even the Eagles in the first round. Well, they did. They did because while the defense is little more than average the offense is consistently far above average. Put another way, they have not one but several of the most dynamic offensive players in professional football history at a rate of at least one to every position. Tight end, John Mackey and Dallas Clark. Wide receiver, Ray Berry, Marvin Harrison, and Reggie Wayne. Running back, Eric Dickerson, Marshall Faulk, Edgerrin James, and Lenny Moore. Oh, and quarterback, Peyton Manning and Johnny Unitas.

If you're still unconvinced, here's the convincer. According to pro-football-reference.com, the Colts have 13 offensive players among the top 250 players of all time – two in the top 11 (including player No. 1), three in the top 20, four in the top 30. Just doing the math, if there are 32 teams, there should be eight players per team, four on offense and four on defense. Thirteen offensive players from a team means there are more than 200  percent more offensive players from the Colts than from an average team. Throw in five defensive players, and the Colts have 18 of the top 250 players of all time, where the average team has eight – and all that with no Art Donovan, no Bubba Smith, no John Mackey, or no Dallas Clark. That's why the Colts are here.

And if you're unconvinced about the value of Peyton Manning versus his Colts counterpart, Johnny Unitas, consider this: The Colts lost Unitas and nearly won to the Super Bowl with Earl Morrall. The Colts replaced Manning with the closest thing to Morrall the waiver wire had to offer, Kerry Collins, and have nearly won Andrew Luck. Oh, and despite playing most of his career behind Jeff Saturday and an assortment of grain-storage buildings, Peyton Manning is almost never sacked.

The all-time Colts have more than enough line to block for Manning and all that firepower, and just enough defense. So enough about whether they belong. They're there.

Let's compare the Colts to the Packers. The Packers have 14 players in the top 250, eight on defense. (Twelve if you stretch and include Ted Hendricks, Emlen Tunnell, Steve McMichael, and Hardy Nickerson, all of whom spent portions of the back ends of their careers in Green Bay.) So the modern Packers are at a decided disadvantage – and they'd stay at a disadvantage, if we pulled a National Football League and started football time with the merger of the All-American Football Conference.

Unfortunately for the Colts, their time starts with NFL Football Standard Time. The Packers start their football epoch B.C. (Before Cleveland), and by doing that, they up the skill level tremendously. The Packers add the greatest receiver of the prewar era (Don Hutson), three of the best backs (Tony Canadeo, Clarke Hinkle and Blood McNally), and two great linemen (Cal Hubbard and Mike Michalske). Throw those six players in the mix and the Packers have the edge, 19 to 18.

Close game, in other words. Both teams belong, and the game shapes up as an offensive powerhouse versus a strong, well-balanced defense.

Let's play this out.

The Colts get the opening kickoff and go three-and-out. The Packers get the punt and do the same. The Colts take over at their 37 after a decent Lydell Mitchell punt return and Manning goes to work. He hits Wayne, Moore, Berry, Faulk, and Mackey in succession, broken up by a couple of handoffs to Eric Dickerson. The drive takes the Colts to the Packers' 17, where it's third and five.

You know what Peyton Manning throws in these situations like you know your own name. Fade route to Reggie Wayne, touchdown, Colts up seven-zip.

Now it's the Pack's turn. With wide receivers like James Lofton, Sterling Sharpe and Don Hutson working against Bob Boyd and some sugar cookies, Bart Starr doesn't need to be Brett Favre; being Starr is plenty. Starr largely eschews the run in favor of out-routes and screens to Tony Canadeo. The Packers stretch and wedge and ply the ball down to the Colts' eight-yard line. A Gino Marchetti sack pushes the back to the 13. Starr figures if it worked for Manning, why not? He throws his own fade route to Hutson and the game is tied.

Fair enough. The Colts come right back. This time Manning, starting to feel the heat from Reggie White et al., makes better use of draws and screens with Faulk and Mitchell. He wriggles the ball down to the nine and lets Eric Dickerson take over from there. Three straight-and-I-mean-straight runs make it 14-7.

The Packers can't get into a shootout with the Colts, but they're willing to try. Starr continues to exploit the Colts' suspect secondary, in particular on a  57-yard Max McGee route with Hutson playing the part of ol' Max. Jim Taylor bashes it in from the five and we're tied.

Games sometimes veer from flurries of scoring to flurries of ... well, flurries, in the sense of tiny snowflakes being all the announcers have to talk about (except for Kevin Harlan, who never seems to talk about anything). In the case of this game and the Packers, it's Willie Wood, Charles Woodson, and Herb Adderley asserting themselves on the back end of the D and Willie Davis, Henry Jordan and Reggie White asserting themselves on the front. For the Colts, it's using Ted Hendricks as he was meant to be used – as a rogue force playing the whole field.

All of which is a long way of saying that Hendricks blocks a field goal as time expires in the first half, and the Packers and Colts go into halftime tied.

The teams come out in the second half to heavier snow – and if snow isn't Manning's kryptonite it's his triple-decker sauerkraut-and-toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce. After the Packers go nowhere after the second-half kickoff, Manning makes his first mistake. A pass steered in the direction of Ray Berry ends up in Adderley's hands instead. He returns the interception to the Colts' 39 and the Packers are in business.

It's not much of a business, as it turns out. A pass to Sharpe and a couple of Jim Taylor runs move the ball to the 30, where Chester Marcol is called on to not run with a blocked field goal, and he performs his task admirably, putting the Packers ahead 17-14.

At this point the snow takes over, and Eric Dickerson tries to. He bulls the ball downfield into field-goal range, leaving the kicking duties in the hands of long-time bad-weather kicker Adam Viniatieri.

Now is the time when poetic justice should assume power, and the Green Bay Ted Hendricks should block the kick of his former team, forcing the Baltimapolis Ted Hendricks back out on the field to stop the Packers, but that doesn't happen. Fred Carr doesn't even get an island-sized paw on it. Instead, Viniatieri simply pulls it left.

There's not much after that, fans of offense, lovers of the Washington-Baylor Alamo Bowl. Everyone sort of slips and mucks around for 10 minutes, Manning throws a pick to Dave Robinson, and Reggie White supplies the exclamation point with an exuberant belly-whopper of a sack. The gun fires and the Packers escape with a 17-14 win.

What a gyp! What a dirty, rotten gyp of a game! To have a absolute upset-in-the-making, one of the greatest pretend games in the entire history of made-up football games, ruined by the oldest trick in the book – a blast of stage snow in the face.

Okay, but think about it. The game is played in Green Bay in winter. It snows in Green Bay in winter. One of the greatest real games in history, the Ice Bowl, was played in Green Bay and was made great in part by the temperature. See, it gets cold in Green Bay in the winter. The game itself minus the temperature was no greater than a score of other games. Add the temperature and – voila! – instant classic. And a cup of instant coffee to go with it.

Besides, there's nothing that says the Packers wouldn't have won the game on a dry Green Bay field on a placid Green Bay winter's day. The superior Packers lines and a better Green Bay secondary were starting to assert themselves before the snow. Bart Starr didn't have a multitude of weapons to attack the colts with; he just had the right weapons. You don't need four great running backs and seven great wide receivers; two of the former and three of the latter work fine.

Of all the great players in this game, Sterling Sharpe really stands out. The receiver was on his way to a Hall of Fame career before the neck injury. As it stands, his seven-year numbers compare very favorably to Lofton, Steve Largent, Berry, and Bob Hayes. Sharpe pulls down 11 balls in this game for 117 yards. Hutson is fine – five catches for 87 yards and a TD – but no one matches up with Sharpe.

Dickerson has a nice game for the Colts – 97 yards rushing, mostly in the second half – but Manning's numbers fall off a ledge once the snow starts. He finishes 21 of 38 for 225 yards and two scores, but also an interception and three sacks. Manning's had better games, and that's part of the point. Most of Manning's better games have not occurred in big games in bad weather. This game is completely in character for Peyton Manning and the Colts – even if it took a silly vaudeville prop to do it.

So the stage is set for the last game in our all-time playdowns. Sorry, all you non-traditionalists and disavowers of the NFL's prewar past: It's Packers-Bears.

Let the railleries begin.

Colts-Cowboys: Battle of the (Cartoon) Network Stars

Maybe the greatest appeal of football to men is this: It’s so linear.

You either have talent or you don’t. Either the talent performs or it doesn’t. If the talent doesn’t perform the team loses. If the team loses the coach gets fired. The switch is on or it’s off. It’s broken or it’s fixed. It’s brats or burgers.

What’s more, the product is standardized. There’s a recipe for throwing and general agreement on how to catch, how to run, and how to tackle. You don’t find a lot of knuckleballers in football. The Greenwich Mean Time of football is the 40-yard dash. You run against the clock, and the clock doesn’t keep a supply of graphite oil inside its belt.

Compare this to baseball, which is a women’s sport if ever there was one. Ichiro is arguably the greatest baseball talent of the modern age – Americans only saw the down side of his career, remember – but he is more idiosyncratic than a stop-motion David Byrne, he makes positive contact with the ball one-eighth of the time, and even if he makes positive contact there’s no guarantee of a positive outcome. And it’s all discussed incessantly by everyone involved. I was watching the season finales on Wednesday, and for all the inherent drama I mostly felt like I had just wandered into the narthex of the local Lutheran church after a Sunday-school teacher’s meeting.

Really, baseball couldn’t be more feminine if it were lavender-scented.

The ultimate lesson here is that in football talent wins more often than not, even in these fanciful made-up games I’ve been documenting over the last several months. Cachet, that certain something behind a good 70 percent of the Yankees’ world championships, doesn’t really come to play in this sandbox.

All of which is a preface to saying this: the Cowboys lose.

Now, the Cowboys have nothing if not cachet. Of all the cartoon characters football fans have created to personify their team, the Cowboys’ character is the most pervasive: The 100 percent Amurrican as wild-west cowboy, rootin’ and tootin’ and shootin’ up the town, daring the law-abiding citizens to make him stop.

Oh, and he’s short. Like five-foot-two short. And his cowboy hat falls down over his ears to such an extent that all you see of him besides his hat is a pair of cowboy boots. It’s Jerry Jones in caricature as L’il Jerry, Amurrican hero, and one way or another L’il Jerry always wins. The Cowboys oeuvre is a topsy-turvy everything’s-bigger-in-Texas act for the new Texas, where they sell more Hyundais than F-150s, and it’s custom-made for all the brawn-over-brain galoots who have secretly rooted for Yosemite Sam to blow up Bugs Bunny just once.

If the Cowboys were a baseball team they’d be the Yankees; it’s been said more than once because it’s true. The Cowboys would hit you over the head with their stadium and pitch Herschel Walker in game one, Peyton Manning would lose a fly ball in the sun, the ‘Boys would bring in Deion Sanders to close, and it’d be all over before Pat Summerall realized they were playing baseball.

However, the Cowboys’ inherent Yankeeness returns to bite them in this stadium of the mind, where the numbers throw fastballs and reality runs the 40. Dallas’ success has been self-perpetuating, often in excess of the talent producing the results. The Cowboys have won 57.6 percent of their games, just a tick behind the Bears, yet their best quarterbacks have been Troy Aikman and Roger Staubach – Hall of Famers more renowned for managing talent than displaying outlandish skills. The ‘Boys running backs are unimpeachable – you gonna argue with TD and Emmitt, despite their iffy skills as pass-catchers? – but the wide receivers aren’t difference-makers and their offensive line toils in well-deserved obscurity. The D-line is stout and the linebackers are solid, but like a lot of good teams there’s work to be done in the defensive backfield. They’re just a team, in other words, like a lot of other teams. They don’t run out Hall of famers two-deep like the Bears or have a HOF-caliber QB as the fourth-stringer, like the 49ers and Rams. They put their pants on one leg at a time, and they set no records doing it.

When you assemble a team with consistent winning as a goal, this is what you get. When you assemble a team with less coherent goals, the best-case scenario is the Colts.

Make no mistake: the Colts have won 53 percent of their games over the last 59 years – nice, but hardly exemplary. However, the Colts have only been good half that time. The other half of the time they have been so bad that it’s a surprise they’ve only moved twice in their existence. The Frank Kush years were so execrable that the Colts could have been forgiven for pulling up stakes in week 12 and resettling in Shreveport or Toledo.

To be intensely bad half of your life and still be on the plus side of the glass must mean periods of sustained brilliance, and the Colts have delivered. The Johnny Unitas and Peyton Manning teams have been among the greatest teams in football history, and if the all-time Colts steal heavily from them, what of it? Do you really want to trot out Steve Emtman in the interest of equal representation?

The bottom line for the Colts is that their quarterbacks are two of the best ever, they have four HOFers at running back – a scary combination of thunder (Eric Dickerson) and lightning (Lenny Moore and Marshall Faulk) and out-of-the-backfield pass-catching ability -- and three at wide receiver, they have one HOF tight end and maybe two, their O-line sports a current HOFer and a couple of gonna-bes, and their defense is predictably strong in the front line and less strong at linebacker and D-back. Plus, they have two HOF coaches already, with perhaps the best coach (Tony Dungy) in the wings.

That’s not much more than the Cowboys, but it is more. And in the inexorable, ultimately linear game of numbers that’s being played here, slightly more wins.

Here’s how. The Cowboys take the opening kickoff and pound the ball down the field, alternating Smith and Dorsett and setting up a 38-yard Rafael Septien field goal. The Colts go three-and-out, with a Peyton Manning sack, but then the Cowboys are bottled up and the Colts get untracked. Three straight Manning completions move the ball into field-goal territory, but three straight incompletions result in an Adam Viniateri miss from 46.

No matter. A Gino Marchetti strip results in a Dorsett fumble, Dwight Freeney recovers and the Colts get a short field to work with -- bad news for the ‘Boys, as Manning finds Mackey down the middle to give the Colts a 7-3 lead.

The ‘Boys keep pounding the ball, and use a rare bomb to Bob Hayes to set up an Emmitt Smith TD as the first quarter ends. The TD hardly dings the Colts’ momentum, though. Manning deftly works the short passing game to set up a patented fade pattern to Reggie Wayne, and the Colts regain the lead 14-10.

The rest of the first half follows a similar pattern. Dallas uses the running game to lengthen its possessions; the Colts use the passing game and a no-huddle offense to speed down the field. Both teams wring a field goal out of their possessions, giving the Colts a 17-13 lead at halftime.

After the Kilgore College Rangerettes high-step at halftime and L’il Jerry dances on the star at midfield comes the game’s biggest break: The Colts get the second-half kickoff.

Bang! Sixteen yards to Ray Berry. Bang! Eleven to Marvin Harrison. Bang! A nine-yard draw play to Edgerrin James. Bang! A 23-yard screen pass to Marshall Faulk. Before the ‘Boys can react, a no-huddle onslaught rocks Dallas onto its heels, and by the time their heads clear Dickerson has galloped into the end zone and the Colts have extended their lead to 24-13.

With the pressure on Dallas to quickly move the ball, the team folds up like a Quizno’s franchise. Ted Hendricks picks off Aikman and returns it to the Dallas 19. A nine-yard pass to Berry makes it 31-13. Roger Staubach relieves Aikman and delivers a 37-yard scoring strike to Michael Irvin, but the Cowboys are unable to turn a Bob Lilly strip of Peyton Manning into points, and Manning makes them pay by firing a 43-yard bullet to John Mackey.

With the outcome in hand, the Colts put the offense on Eric Dickerson’s shoulders, and he burns more than enough clock. A late Dorsett score can’t change the ultimate reality (in a made-up sort of way): 41-27 Colts.

Peyton Manning is masterful, completing 27 of 42 passes for 342 yards and four scores. Aikman and Staubach combine to go 16 for 29 for 274 yards and two scores. Smith and Dorsett combine for 143 rushing yards, but the Colts’ four backs lay down 132 – not exactly what Dallas had in mind.

So while the cartoon embodiment of the Cowboys sheds big pooling tears on his artificial turf, the cartoon embodiment of the Colts moves on to the next challenge.

And that cartoon embodiment of the Colts is … haven’t you heard? It’s Captain America.

Faulk + Manning < James + Manning

You look at the one-year teamup of the dynamic talents Marshall Faulk and Peyton Manning and wonder: So how much better would the Colts have been if they had hung on to No. 6 all-time in all-purpose yards instead of dealing him to the Rams for the Draft Picks Known As Mike Peterson and Brad Scioli and parlaying their 3-13 record into Edgerrin James, a/k/a No. 19 all-time in all-purpose yards? Uh, how about not any better?

When Faulk was dealt, he was done with the Colts and vice versa. The team was evolving from Marshall Faulk's Team With Jim Harbaugh, a play-the-plan, improvise-in-open-space, run-first kind of team, to Peyton Manning's Team, a change-it-at-the-line, throw-it-around kind of team, and that just wasn't Faulk's deal. It wasn't that he went all Oprah; his just weren't the right set of talents, so there was nothing to be gained on either side by Faulk sticking it out in Indy.

James came in and caught swing passes and ran one-cut stuff, and that was what Manning needed to complement the slants and quick outs that are the meat of his game. Look at the backs who have filled the halfback chair since Faulk left: James, Dominic Rhodes, Joseph Addai, Donald Brown. It's not like they're Faulk-esque at all. The best you can say about their speed and elusiveness is they have a little wiggle. Otherwise they run like a diesel locomotive: plenty of torque, but if the tracks don't go there they ain't going there. No. 19 was simply a better fit than No. 6 for P-Man's Colts -- and it turned out okay for Faulk, too.

Debunk The One You're With

It's with great pleasure that fantasy-football expert Brad Rutta and I announce the birth of our second fantasy-football podcast, available here: http://www.ourmedia.org/ia/details/KitKieferandBradRuttaTheDebunkers_2__DebunkTheOneYou_reWith_/. You want to know what's so bad about good NFL offenses? You'll find out here. Check it out.

Hunter Smith: The Lonliest Guy In Football?

Smith was a great punter who rarely punted for the Colts. One imagines him sitting on the sidelines through another excruciatingly long Colts drive punctuated with 15 performances of The Iceman Cometh at the line of scrimmage that finally seems to be winding down with a third-and-17 at the opponent's 44. Smith grabs his helmet, straps it on, kicks his leg over his head a time or two, practices his drop -- and in that time Manning has thrown 23 yards to Reggie Wayne through an opening the size of a Chiclet, and Smith sits down again. in 2006 Smith played in 16 games and punted 47 times, which we all know is less than three times a game. Brian Moorman punts that much before Kevin Harlan has his throat completely cleared. Another way to look at it is this: In 10 years of punting for the Colts Smith was in the top 10 in yards per punt six times; he was never in the top 10 in punting yards. When the Colts let go of Smith in 2009 it wasn't because he couldn't do the job any more; it was because the Colts forgot what job he was supposed to do. The football equivalent of the Maytag repairman.

Sammy Baugh: Thoroughly Modern Quarterback

A couple of years back Sports Illustrated did a great photo spread in its football-kickoff issue where it paired up current stars with former greats. The centerpiece was this wonderful picture of Sammy Baugh chatting up Peyton Manning at Baugh’s ranch in Texas. It was the perfect pairing in so many ways because Baugh was the model for the modern quarterback, and Manning was the model modern quarterback.

The thing people don’t get about Baugh, though, is why he’s the model for the modern quarterback. To do that we have to go to the numbers, and include league averages in addition to Baugh’s numbers.

Year	Cmp	LgAvg	Att	LgAvg	Cmp%	Lg Avg	Yds	LgAvg	TD	LgAvg	Yds/Cmp	LgAvg
1937+	81	69.7	171	181.5	47.4	38.4	1127	1023	8	9	13.9	14.7
1938*	63	82.4	128	203	49.2	40.6	853	1164	5	9.3	13.5	14.1
1939*	53	95.2	96	223.8	55.2	42.5	518	1417	6	9.9	9.8	14.9
1940*+	111	96.8	177	225.4	62.7	42.9	1367	1379	12	10	12.3	14.2
1941*	106	97.8	193	221	54.9	44.3	1236	1340	10	9.9	11.7	13.7
1942*+	132	98.6	225	224.9	58.7	43.8	1524	1361	16	10.8	11.5	13.8
1943+	133	76.9	239	173.2	55.6	44.4	1754	1131	23	11.4	13.2	14.7
1944	82	82.4	146	192.2	56.2	42.9	849	1175	4	10.6	10.4	14.3
1945	128	96.1	182	210.7	70.3	45.6	1669	1438	11	10.9	13.0	15.0
1946	87	104.9	161	234.1	54	44.8	1163	1574	8	12.6	13.4	15.0
1947	210	140.6	354	299.1	59.3	47	2938	2167	25	18.8	14.0	15.4
1948	185	149.8	315	311.6	58.7	48.1	2599	2087	22	19.6	14.0	13.9
1949	145	152.7	255	327.5	56.9	46.6	1903	1932	18	16.8	13.1	12.7
1950	90	154.5	166	331.3	54.2	46.6	1130	1989	10	16.9	12.6	12.9
1951*	67	150.8	154	323.4	43.5	354	1104	1953	7	16.7	16.5	13.0
1952	20	155.3	33	335.3	60.6	54.5	152	1919	2	18.2	7.6	12.4

The numbers show a very good record, but not exactly the record you might have expected for an epochal quarterback: five times leading the league in completions, four times leading in attempts, four times leading in yards, and twice leading in TD passes. Good, but Ken Anderson stuff, really.

Okay, now look at the completion percentage. Baugh led the league in completion percentage nine times. Now look at the yards per completion: Below the league average every year but two.

You get it now? Baugh, western-movie career notwithstanding, was not only not a gunslinger, he was the antithesis of a gunslinger. All the other top quarterbacks in the league through the Baugh years were gunslingers – Luckman, Herber, Waterfield, Van Brocklin – but Baugh was a game manager. Baugh ran an offense that was predicated on completing more shorter passes, going for doubles instead of home runs. It’s not that he was against the long ball or the TD pass; it was simply not the reason why he passed the ball. He passed because it was more effective than running – c.f., Peyton Manning.

This is the sort of stuff that gets buried. More has been made of the fact that Baugh is the only player to win a passing crown, a punting crown, and an interception title, but it’s a crackerjack record. Baugh won his interception title during the war years, when he was a glorified center fielder picking off the likes of Buss Warren, and balls were much easier to punt back then. It’s the passing that’s impressive, and it’s impressive because he was behind the league, not in front. Peyton Manning and every other purveyor of a pass-first ball-control offense ought to tip his hat in the direction of TCU before they take the field.