...I only saw about 10 minutes of yesterday's game. Enough to see Cam Newton get his ass handed to him...Cam Newton is a spoiled, selfish puss...bench his entitled, untalented, useless ass...I don't like the Broncos, but I'm glad they beat the Panthers.
I agree with everything except saying Newton is untalented. He is very talented, but he did appear to have that superman mentality thinking, because he had such a great season he was entitled to the championship...
Football is a team sport, no one player on either side of the ball can do it all by themselves. Some people mistake past success as meaning they are omnipotent. When a team depends on one player to carry the team and that one player gets shut down it leads to things like, well, the Panthers/Broncos game. I have to agree, I don't like the Broncos, but I'm glad they beat the Panthers
On another paragraph so as not to poison the previous statements. The Patriots don't really have any top tier players except for maybe Gronk and Gostkowski yet their play as a
team makes them greater than the parts, which makes them harder to beat. Check the weekly top 5 players at all positions and you will almost never see a Patriots' player listed, yet as a team and with good coaching they win more than lose. The Broncos had a great game plan and a better team and stifled the Patriots team. There was no Manning Magic but it wasn't needed because the team carried the game.
This is why football stats are so much harder to untangle than baseball or even basketball stats, because they are totally interdependent. Take a GREAT QB and give him a shitty O-line and he'll look like shit. Take a GREAT O-line and give them a no-more-than competent QB and everyone will talk about how he's the next Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. Look what Ryan Fitzpatrick did for my team, the Jets. He's a good journeyman quarterback, and the Jets offensive line was pretty good this year and was tailored around Ryan's strengths and weaknesses, and so they did well.
A measure of a defense's effectiveness is how little time they spend on the field. Part of that's how many 3&outs they get, But time on defense is also connected to how well the offense holds the ball. It's all connected.
If you've got a great stable of running backs who consistently get 4 yards or more, and get lots of 2nd-and-short downs, your QB won't be passing that much and his stats may not look so good because they don't need to.
A QB's rated on completions but how many passes did the Panthers drop Sunday that they should have caught? Usually steady Jerome Cotchery seemed to have nothing but butter on his fingers. Did he make even one completion? Yet that counts against Newton.
If you pass the ball for 2 yards and the receiver runs 48 yards, or if you pass 48 yards and the receiver runs for 2, they both count as 50 yard completions, but are utterly different animals.
Then, to top it off, the NFL changes the rules every year so 2015's stats and 2014's stats cannot generally be compared (think: PATs missed). Baseball rule changes are rare and very conservative, so a .300 hitter today isn't much different than a .300 after 1902 (when fouls began to be counted as strikes). There are SOME differences--pitchers are more restricted on their motions, spit balls are outlawed and the mound is lower, which helps the batter, but fielder's gloves are far bigger and better, as well as eye shades which offsets that. But, in general, a .300 hitter is a .300 hitter.
Football. Definitely a team sport.
