i like richard rodgers but if anybody wants to compare him to jimmy graham at this point of his young career is nuts !!
not even in the same league yet !!
Originally Posted by: nyrpack
Sure at first glance this might seem the case; but the Queen of the Imperial Court looks hot, ‘til you delve a litter deeper and find it’s a guy in drag...This is a mind opening exercise and something to keep in mind when opining on any player’s value.
Baseball players are principally paid and evaluated by WAR; and so are most football players though no such official stats exists; but every now and then a GM goofs.
Z2C is wrong: Graham is only the chassis of a Ferrari, look under the hood🤣. The question of how good a player is based on one thing: how many can do what he does. If Graham gets 2000 yards on 150 targets from Brees, but everyone else gets 2001 or more; then he’s actually the worst there is; if everyone else gets 300 yards or less, then he’s a superstar. This is the foundation of WAR. Think about this: if Abby, Janis, Pinkard, etc could all do what Cobb did, Cobb would not even have been offered a min. contract.
W/ a broken down Shockey the 2 years before Graham became a supposed stud, NO’s offense was [very slightly] statistically better than they were the last 4 years w/ Graham. Using WAR, this indicates Graham is no better than a broken down Shockey and R.Rodgers is better than a broken down Shockey. [ya, that’s a slippery slope😝; but not all logically invalid arguments are wrong]
This seems outrageous to you because you are allowing one tiny stat to bias/corrupt 100% of your thinking. CM3 may end up with 15 sacks-Who cares?! That’s 15 good plays out of 1000. I and GB will be judging Clay on how he did on 1000 plays, not 15. In 2014, Graham had 124 Targets, 86 catches for 889 yards in 775 snaps. How many catches and yards would Rodgers get w/ 124 Brees targets? I’ll bet its close. Your opinion of Graham was clearly 100% formed by his play during those 86 catches. But on 2 of those 86 he fumbled and LOST the ball. For 38 other plays the ball was thrown to him and he didn’t catch it, so that’s 38 more failures that need to be balanced against the 84 positive plays. An what did he do the other 651 snaps? Did he block? Did he run his routes w/ the same gusto knowing he wasn’t getting the ball? Did he have zero, 100, 200 or 650 more bad plays to weigh against those 84 successful ones? Saints ran 1100 plays, what was he doing the other 325 snaps when he wasn’t on the field: did he call over young TE Hill and counsel him and explain defenses and reads? He had 2 penalties that didn’t count in the 775; that’s 2 more bad plays to balance against the 84 good ones.
Here’s something else: the games last 3 hrs x 16 weeks or 48 hours. But, throughout the year maybe 1200 hours are spent preparing for those 48 hours. Of those other 1152 hours, is he doing things to make the team better, the same or worse? Is he doing things to make other players better the same or worse?
Now we don’t have solid info on 99% of this. Heck, even good catches might have been bad plays if the wrong route was run sabotaging a better play that otherwise would have occurred. We don’t know nor will we know anything concrete, for example, about Sean Richardson’s neck injury. But if GB releases him with an injury settlement, we should kinda assume the neck injury is really bad. New Orleans was due to pay Graham 8M this year and took a 9M cap hit to trade him; that should give you an idea of what the Saints thought about Graham: this indicates they don’t think he’s all that special, that his WAR is not that high, that on 124 Brees targets most can get 86 catches and 889 yards. It also provides insight into how the Saints feel of Graham’s other 1152 hours and his performance during the 1016 snaps that were not catches.