Mark Brunell booed

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by jsarno

#1, I watched the game (my wife is a Broncos fan) and I do not recall "thunderous applause".
#2, It's amazing how fast we forget just how bad Brunell played. If I had to take a guess, I'd guess that out of his 260 attempts, 240 of them (maybe more) were attempts of 10 yards or less. Honestly, he should have had over 70% completion when he was too much of a pussy to throw it downfield. We all remember the 22 straight completions, and 20 of them were 10 yards or less...well laaa-dee-daa. He got booed for his blatent disregard for the offensive system. He flat out refused to leave his confort zone, and utilyze his weapons. I wouldn't have booed him, but I don't blame a single soul for the dismal play of Brunell.
I am Mr. Stathead and use stats to prove points constantly, but you can't prove a thing with Brunell stats. You had to watch, and I didn't miss a single play.

Plummer was applauded while Cutler was still down on the field. What's interesting is that when Cutler came back, he got equal applause from the crowd. Supporting your own QB...what a novel concept.

I can't prove the generalization that Brunell dumped every play either right or wrong, but my only defense for that is this: his 6.88 yards/attempt. You'd think if defenses didn't respect his ability to go anywhere else but the flats, they could have creeped on him, but apparently none did.

I believe Brunell was attacking a phallicy in NFL defenses. With all the speed in NFL back 7's today, few teams can tackle that flat dumpoff efficiently enough to stop the offense. Thus Brunell took the easy pass every time it was given to him. That probably caused a few failed conversions on 3rd downs, yes, and thats certainly on him. But considering he completed more than a yard per pass more than Campbell did, I'm very surprised they (Al after Campbell became the QB) went away from it. Theres no reason to suspect that Campbell wouldn't have been able to improve his yards/attempt if he attacked D's the same way Brunell did, and he probably would have scored more points for us doing it.

The consecutive completions record is nice and all, but meaningless by itself. However Brunell also threw for 261 that game (9.67 yard/att) and still a solid 7.1 yards per attempt even if that Portis 74 yd shovel is to be counted as a run, which it wasn't on the stat sheet. So although a good % of his passes went underneath, he completed stuff in that game no matter where he threw it, and THAT is what the completion record represents. Campbell couldn't have done that because he's going to miss more than 1 out of every 20 underneath throws.

If the Texans (or teams in general) aren't going to prevent the short stuff, why would you risk a longer throw? I don't know, but for JC's first 5 starts, thats what happened.