I absolutely posted in haste. I always do. But your so far off base with your comments that i'm somewhat shocked at your arrogance. I didn't realize that my post would be non-legible by the way it was written. Is this better? I sure hope so. I'll try to do better from now on. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I used to do it this way but when i started chatting years ago (which i do not do anymore) everybody else got me into this bad habit so now i'm just doing it without thinking about it. Your attempt to chastise me (did i spell that right?) like some teacher and pupil really makes you look foolish. Something makes me believe you don't care about how others perceive you or on the other hand maybe your desire to try to impress others in a public forum is your cup of tea. Either way i would love to participate in any class you teach with a open mind with the sincere intention of improving my writing skills. However, before we can do this i have one condition. I happen to be a teacher too! Can you believe that? I know, you don't believe it, but it's true. I teach the martial arts here in Indianapolis. If you'll take my class then i'll take yours. Then we can post on here (not that anybody would be interested) what we learned! Everybody will see by my posting in the future that you made a difference in my writing skills and you can tell everyone how you learned the true meaning of "humility" Per Webster's dictionary: hu-mil-ity: the state or quality of being humble; absence of pride or self assertion. PS: I apologize for the run on sentences. I'll try to do better.
please, enough with the lesson's. school is out for another month. aliothefool, you are a genuine sunshiner and i applaud your stand on pennington (i don't agree,but you are persisstant). i think your way off on penny for many reason. 1st one being, although he had that one great season, he has never repeated it since. i think b/c teams had a year to study him and game plan his weaknesses.. i also think most would agree, penny is not a guy that can bring a team from behind in the 3rd or 4th quarter because he lacks the ability to make the kind of throws to come back quickly against the better teams in the league. his lack of zip does indeed contribute to getting his reciever's hammered or his passes picked off. all in all, penny can win us some games against the lower level teams, but his career record against the upper echelon teams speaks for itself. look at the combined record of the teams we beat last year and that speaks volumes about why the jet's had a winning record last season. even with penny's 17 td's and 16 interceptions. last sentence say's a lot also. he's an average qb that needs a raven's type defense for him to win a championship (with the defense doing most of the scoring).. penny is what his stats and record say he is. AVERAGE at best!!!
joesmoe, I can see by your join date that you've been around here for a while. You should probably know then, that I am not exactly a sunshiner. While I'm not exactly a darksider either, I am pretty far from a sunshiner. Anyway, our record last year was what it was. A winning one. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who it was against. Any given Sunday. And we did beat the Patriots. Any excuse people can come up with for it, the fact remains, we beat the Patriots. We almost beat the eventual Super Bowl champs too. And if you believe, as I do, that we should have been awarded a TD against the Browns, we can assume 11 wins for last year. All of this WITHOUT a running game. This is the key. We had absolutely zero rushing attack. It wasn't even decent. Leon was the only bright spot on the ground, and that was late in the year. I don't give a damn how many fanboys Cedric Houston had, he was not that good. Barlow was crap. So how'd we manage to drive downfield often enough to win games? Pennington is a leader. No, he doesn't have Culpepper's arm, but then, I'll take Chad over Daunte ANY day. I guess it comes down to wait-and-see. Yes, I'd appreciate Penny not hanging his receivers out to dry. Yes, I'd like to see him hit Coles or Cotch 30 yards out. More than that though, I want to see the Jets win. If it's Chad that does it, great. If it's Clemens, that's great too. If it's Brad Smith, cool. I don't care if it's Nick Mangold throwing passes, as long as we win. Oh, and by the way, as far as Chad being "at best" average: That's not exactly the definition of average.
Did you know we had the 25 over all ranked O in yards and we ranked 20th in rushing yards last year? The Chargers in 79 had the 5th overall O in yards and were 27th in rushing, in 80 they were 1st overall and 17th in rushing and in 81 they were 1st overall and 16th in rushing. The 49ers 89 SB team was 1st overall in O and 13th in rushing averaging under 4 yards per. The Jets had a short passing game O last year and used it like a running game. We had a lot of WR talent and a running back who ran well in space. Having no running game is not an excuse to have a week passing game. If anything teams with weak running games tend to have bigger passing numbers. We ranked below average in passing yards at 18 even though we were below average in rushing yards at 20. That's the sign of a bad Offense period.
ALIOTHEFOOL, i can see the points you make and good arguement on your points. it's just i see it different. i see it half empty, you half full!!! the thing i look at this year with the running game is, i don't see it being all that much better with the oline we have and the mere fact that teams don't respect penny's arm and are still going to crowd the box and make penny prove he can beat them. against the better teams, he will continue his losing ways, in my opinion. penny throws are limited to dink and dunk and that doesn't scare anyone.... Among NFL quarterbacks with at least 1,500 pass attempts, Chad Pennington's 65.1 career completion percentage ranks second-highest all-time to Kurt Warner's 65.6. those stats really mean nothing. warner got his, throwing down the field (much harder to do) then penny, who dinked and dunked. to compare penny to warner is almost comic. penny couldn't carry warner's jock strap on warner's worst day in his prime. maybe you should throw average yardage of each qb's pass attempt's, and that would tell a completely different story. anyway, as i said before, we'll have to agree to disagree for now. here's hoping your right, b/c i do wish it so. almost 40 years is too long for this kind of a hang over!!!!
Guys, I don't deny that Penny has a noodle arm. (Though I know for sure that if he threw like a man, rather than like a duck, he'd have more zip and more distance. He evidenced just this last year, until he got his first big hit, and went back to his half motion.) I'm still not worried. Yes, his arm strength is an issue. If he had a strong arm, he'd be better than Manning or Brady. He's a better cerebral QB than either of them, but they have the physical tools to overcome any difference in ability to think in the pocket. I'm fine with the wait-and-see approach. The running game is a completely different element in our attack this year. Jones/Washington is going to make defenses respect our ability to run. We had none of that last year. A combination of Penny's short play abilities, and no ground attack made it easy for teams to have no respect for our offense. We're not going to see 40 yard passing plays, we have to live with that. What we will (hopefully) see is 6 yards on first down on the ground. 12 yards in the air on second. 4 on first on the ground, 8 on second in the air. 15 in the air on first, 5 on first, so on and so forth. This has two benefits. 1) TOP gives the D time to rest. How many times over the past few years have we thrown things at the tv because the D is "on the field AGAIN?" 2) It's "safe." With more attention paid to our backfield by opposing Ds, Chad will have the opportunity to scan the field, and find open men, rather that chucking a floater for Coles to catch 2 feet off the ground. We're going to see more play fakes (which Chad is an absolute master of,) and less in-air hits on our WRs. I was fully anti-Chad at the end of last season. 3rdand15Draw can confirm that. The last few games, both he and I were constantly calling for Clemens. This year is different though. We have a replacement for Martin now, a legit one. That's going to change things.
Alio, there was an interesting interview with Sam Wyche yesterday afternoon on The Fan. They were, of course, talking about the passing of Bill Walsh and the whole 49ers Era. But then the subject of Joe Montana came up and how they scouted him, eventually picking him in the 3rd Round. And with that discussion, the whole thing with the West Coast offense was discussed too. And Wyche was describing Montana's passing attributes and commenting on how he was perfect for the West Coast and how he passed "softly" enough for the catches to be made and the accuracy of the passes, that made the WCO work so well for them. He was also saying what we've been discussing within this thread too, about many QBs putting too much on their passes sometimes and making the catch harder. I couldn't help but think about Penny and our (hopefully) improved running game and how just maybe... MAYBE... this might be the answer to a much improved total offense this year. I like your above scenario and think this is what we'll be seeing a lot of this year.
I don't know about other people, but for some reason, my limited memory of Montana was that he threw harder than Pennington. However, I've always also believe that my "memories" are a product of 3 things: 1) I was young back then, so my memory is very cloudy, even of the Jets in that timeframe. 2) Montana was "larger than life." It's easy to believe a guy was "better than he was" when you have 20/20 hindsight to help. Not to mention arguably the game's greatest receiver catching passes from him. 3) Every clip you see today is in slow-mo. There's no way to tell anymore what the actual speed of his passes was. I can say with almost certainty that Montana did have an easy touch though. Regardless of the speed with which he delivered the ball, it always dropped into Rice's hands, rather than a John Elway Cross into his chest. Plus, again, Montana had the benefit of a full offensive force around him. Chad has yet to have the full package. We're significantly closer to that now. I really hate to get my hopes up so early with the Jets, but I'm excited so far.
A couple of Joe Montana observations when considering a comparison to Penny: 1) The guy had a terrific O-line that allowed him the luxury of running around and buying time. 2) Yes, Rice and Clark were the perfect WC receivers. Don't remember much about their running game, however. 3) Montana's arm was deceiving, because he could air it out on you amidst all that dink and dunk, albeit it usually had some air under it, but I do think perhaps less than Penny's deep passes. 4) Montana was extremely adept at improvising and shooting from the hip as the play unfolded. He was also very cerebral and cool under fire. Now, I suppose a comparison can be made with Pennington to some degree. Penny's got some (not all) of Montana's attributes. And it remains to be seen just how close the rest of the team can come to duplicating the surroundings in which Montana was able to be so successful, but yeah, he had his faults too. Today, we tend to think of Montana as walking on water. This wasn't always the case and he had considerable criticism from time to time in much the same way Penny has now.
Just some obscure guy by the name of Roger Craig. :wink: Reading up on Montana, Walsh was actually questioned for his choice of Montana due to his lack of arm strength. hmy: Guess arm strength might be overrated and a decent running game not so much after all huh? :up: Man, I really hope we're both right, or we're in for a long miserable season. :beer:
A couple of other very interesting other thoughts discussed yesterday: Wyche was saying that Bill Walsh would go into a game with about 20-25 pre-determined plays to start the game. These plays were designed to set the tone of the way the offense was going to be perceived by the opposition, but didn't necessarily follow that the entire game would be played this way. They were only designed to "throw off" the DEF and make them think this was their overall game plan. And these initial 20 plays were cast in stone, too. Walsh wouldn't care less if it was raining or too windy or some other such distraction that might be cause to abandon this initial 20 plays. He'd run the ball 20 times, for example, even if they were only getting 2 YPC. Then, after the opposing DEFs would "hone in" on stopping the Niners with whatever they were doing, he would then start inserting plays to "burn" them, letting Montana loose with vicious, yard-grabbing short crap. He said that Walsh also had a real knack for taking advantage of the "old NFL mentality" with his new WCO. A lot of teams (the Giants, for instance) were old school and figured the only way to win a game was to run the shit out of the ball or some other such "manly" plays. So he'd have Montana just carving them up with dinks and dunks and short, hurry-up stuff that would just drive DC nuts! It was a hilarious interview, but a lot of this might still be useful today. You'd have to say that Schottenheimer's no slouch in this department... giving opposing DEFs a taste of what they don't expect. And this is what's so great about Penny too, is that he's smart enough and has this Montana-like ability to run with Schotty's hurry-ups and WC stuff. He reads well and improvises after the snap very well, so these are all attributes that Penny has that all get lost in the constant "Noodle Arm" drubbings.
Yes, on a long TD pass to Cotchery, in fact. That was my favorite moment of the entire season. Not just because we beat Miami on Christmas night, but Joe Thiesman and Cornholer, etc spent the whole night trashing Chad's arm and abilities. Right as Motormouth was talking more shit, Chad buzzes one right down the middle of the field--in the rain--to Cotch for the TD. Absolutely beautiful. :up:
Yeah, that would have to have been mine as well. All night they trashed Penny and then BAM! Even the one guy in the booth was like, "he had a little something on that one, didn't he?". Yeah, he did, you morons. :lol:
