Countdown

[Hplarrm]

Talk about anomalies!

 

When RoboQB won the SB with Pitts, this marked the NFL finally breaking a string of no (I mean zero, nada, none) teams winning the SB with a QB they had drafted in the first round going back to Dallas picking Aikman at the end of the 80s.

 

Manning winning it all with Indy seemed to start a new streak perhaps of teams winning the SB with men they had drafted, but one time is an event and twice may be a coincidence and you need at least a third time to even hint at a trend and the fact remains that it is still unusual to see a team win the SB with a QB they drafted in the 1st.

 

There simply is no tried and true method which one can say works a lot of the time or even has what can be described as a good chance of working out. If you want to follow the method which has worked the most in the past decade then you are looking at the draft but thanks to Tom Brady getting your QB in the 6th round (without the disastrous investment of JaMarcus Russell, Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith $).

 

I am not sure though why you want to claim it is such an anomaly to find your SB winning QB in FA though because not only is there the most recent example of Drew Brees to show this can work but the last 10 years finds this anomaly joined with cut reject Trent Dilfer leading his team to an SB win and 2 time loser Brad Johnson leading Tampa Bay to a win. So while there is nothing which happens with the frequency to say it is the way, I think that drafting a player in the first round and building a team around him is the anomaly.

 

Particularly in the Bills situation after such a long playoff drought the thought of committing to what in even the best case is a near decade long strategy of building around a new savior seems dismal.

 

Your odds of getting a Pro Bowl level QB from free agency are very slim. Sure there was Drew Brees, but he was an anomaly, made possible by the (unique) Philip Rivers/Drew Brees situation. Stuff like that doesn't happen every year, or even (necessarily) every decade. There have been no Drew Brees-caliber QBs in the primes of their careers to hit free agency since then, and that was several years ago.

 

If the Bills want a real QB, and if they want him to not be an aging veteran in the twilight of his career, their only realistic option is the NFL draft. If you're concerned about the short-term, you could have that QB sit his rookie year. The Bengals went in that direction with Carson Palmer, and it makes sense. No sense in throwing a guy to the wolves before he's learned the offense.

 

If the Bills are serious about winning the Super Bowl, they're going to need a real QB. Not that you absolutely have to have a real QB--the Ravens of 2000 didn't--but it makes your odds a lot better. Getting a real QB through the draft is just the price of doing business. The mentality that this process is too slow, and winning is too urgent a thing, is exactly what got the Bills into their current mess.

 

Since 1980, the Bills have drafted QBs in the first round exactly twice. The first time was Jim Kelly. The second time was Losman. But in Losman's case, TD must have felt at least some reservations about him, or else he wouldn't have tried to trade up for Roethlisberger. Those reservations proved to be abundantly well-founded.

 

If short-sightedness and a lack of commitment to drafting QBs in the first round are what got us into this mess, it's far from clear those are the ingredients necessary to get us out. Many or most teams with real QBs got them in the first round. Peyton Manning. Matt Ryan. Carson Palmer. Philip Rivers. Aaron Rodgers. Eli Manning. Maybe it's time for the Bills to start thinking about doing what those teams did. That strategy seems to have worked for them. The Bills' strategy of immediate gratification, short-term stopgaps, and so forth hasn't exactly worked out well for us.