Quote:
Originally Posted by skinsfan69
As I've mentioned before some QB's you just can't judge them by rating, comp. % and so on. Ben is one of those guys. For the most part he gets the job done when it matters. It may not look pretty but he makes enough plays for Pittsburgh's offense. I don't think he's an upper tier NFL Qb but right now he doesn't have to be. At this point he's a better QB than JC.
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Ben's had a pretty impressive early career. I wasn't really arguing that he's not better than Campbell, because the question wasn't even posed. I suggested that the gap between them is smaller than one would be led to believe by what is read and spoken about the two of them. If the price on Ben is 100 million, and the price on Campbell is 60 million, I'd take JC at the reduced price.
The only thing is, that Ben is coming off the least productive season of his career, statistically. I realize he "got it done" and I also don't really care. I saw him in the playoffs, and he was more like his old self than he looked to be in the regular season. With the Ben who showed up in the playoffs, you can win a whole bunch of games with a mediocre defense. With the Ben who played the 2008 regular season behind an inconsistent OL and WR targets, having the No. 1 (or close to No. 1) defense was a downright necessity to win more games than they lost.
We can wax poetic about the 3-4 games that Ben led drives to win in the final minutes last year, but if he had the 2008 Redskins defense instead of the Steelers defense--and the Redskins weren't a chopped liver defensive team--he's not in any of those games to win it at the end. He's got a 7-9 non playoff team instead of an eventual super bowl champion. And to put that in perspective, that would have been the second time in Big Ben's career that he would have failed to go .500.
The defense makes a huge difference in how he is perceived. And in 2008, second half specifically, our defense was a detriment to how Campbell was perceived. The phrases "Jason Campbell" and "poor second half" have appeared all over the internet, but Campbell was one of two guys on the offense who executed a higher percentage of the time in the second half of the year than in the first half. He just got no help.
I'm unconvinced that Ben will have a stronger career than Campbell, although if JC doesn't start having some 7.5-8.0 YPA seasons, he's never going to catch Big Ben, in my mind.