I find it very remarkable that some people seem to think that this is anything other than a close call. Despite their great differences in styles, the parallels between the career paths of each are very strong, which to me has always been clear.
Between Hackett's play calling and Herm's clock management, Chad blew a lot of games in the 4th quarter.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I did not record every Jets game that O'Brien played. It was my opinion at the time that O'Brien was at fault for a higher percentage of his sacks than was the average for other NFL quarterbacks. What more can I tell you then that? Now, since you got on me about not be able to produce a number, I'll safely assume you have done all the legwork. So, tell me- how many times was O'Brien sacked due to inept line play? Receivers not getting open? O'Brien messin' up? Pat Ryan was sacked 43 times from 1984-89. He threw 545 passes in that time period. O'Brien was sacked 261 times from 1984-89. He threw 2467 passes in that time period. Therefore, O'Brien was sacked once per every 10.45 pass plays. Ryan, behind the same offensive line, was sacked once per every 13.67 pass plays. O'Brien started all 16 games in both 1990 and 1991, so I won't bother with those seasons. In 1992, O'Brien was sacked once per every 10.8 pass plays. Browning Nagle was sacked once per every 15.3 pass plays. Why was O'Brien sacked more frequently than those other quarterbacks? O'Brien stayed upright, on average, less often than "QB greats" Pat Ryan and Browning Nagle. Again, I felt that O'Brien was the cause of too high a percentage of the sacks. He was a statue and the way he played seemed to indicate he was scared to throw the ball out of bounds because it would hurt his passer rating. He also seemed to be much too scared to throw interceptions. It seems that mindset creeped in before the 1987 season. He finished 1986 with a 2 touchdown, 12 interception string over the final five games. I believe that O'Brien and Joe Walton had major discussions about this topic after that season. To put it bluntly, I think O'Brien was all fucked in the head after that 1986 season which saw him get benched for the Wild Card game. If you watched the Jets in those years, then you would have noticed that after 1986 O'Brien did not throw the ball deep anywhere near as often as he had in 1985 and 1986. Heck, look at that YouTube video. Many of those plays were pre-1987. If I get bored in the coming days, I'll go through the video again and document the exact number of plays that occurred before 1987. Look at the touchdown numbers. 477 passes thrown in 1989 and only 12 touchdowns. True, that was a horrible team. So let's look at 1991, then. The Jets made the playoffs that year. O'Brien threw 489 passes but only 10 touchdowns! Look at Al Toon. The guy was an all-around weapon at WR his first couple years in the league. He could beat you deep and in the short passing game. If he didn't quite turn into the quintessential possession wide receiver in 1987, then he certainly did in 1988. After 1986, O'Brien was like a starting pitcher who had lost 5 mph off his fastball. He was either unable or unwilling to stretch the field as often as he once did, he was a major reason for Toon becoming an unexciting possession receiver, and he also got Toon concussed numerous times for leading him into vicious hits with poor throws. Pennington is not head and shoulders better than O'Brien, but he did help take the Jets to the playoffs the same number of times and unlike O'Brien, Pennington actually won a couple playoff games. We understand he got injured and the 2003 and 2005 season were ruined as a result. Well, O'Brien had to miss most of the 1984 season because he was in legal trouble. Finally, arm strength is overrated. For all this rocket arm/gun/cannon talk, Pennington averaged more yards per pass attempt than O'Brien. Studies have been done by league historians and/or statisticians that support the theory that YPA is the best stat to judge QBs, that is if you could only use one stat to compare guys. If you look at individual game stats, you will find that the team with the higher YPA will win much more often than the team with the lower YPA. Passer rating, yardage, and completion percentage do not work as well.
What legal trouble was O'Brien in in 84? I never heard of that before. I take exception to the idea that Kenny O was afraid for his passer rating. That guy was fearless to the point of lunacy if you ask me. I'm not saying I liked him taking all the sacks, but I respect the fact that he was willing to stand in and get his head pounded to keep the play alive. He wasn't a selfish player. It really is amazing that Pennington has a higher average YPA, though. Do passing downs that end in sacks count as attempts? That's the only way I can see that being accurate. I loved Kenny, but except for a few epic wins against the Dolphins, he did have a knack for coming up small in big games. That playoff loss to Houston was an abomination.
It is the reason why Pat Ryan was the starting QB for the Jets for most of the 1984 season. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1122634/index.htm Being afraid of losing points off a rating and being afraid of getting hit are very different things. I heard this theory a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s. Maybe I read it in numerous magazines and newspaper articles. There were a bunch of football people who felt that O'Brien would rather take a sack than throw the ball out of bounds. I would read something like that and then would see it happen in the next game. Definitely in many instances, O'Brien simply could not throw the ball away. But it did seem to me that many times he could have, but for whatever reason he did not. They do not. YPA is only determined via actual passes and passing yardage.
:rofl:HE blew that game, not the kicker who missed not one but TWO makebale kicks to win the game. It was Chad's fault.
You started it, check post 224. Where did I say anything personal to you before then? Also check 225. It's hard to take you seriously if you can't even get that straight. You are a hypocrite.
I see it quite the opposite. Chad's intelligence on the field masked a lot of Herm's shortcomings with the clock. The most glaring clock management errors Herm made were with Vinny and Quincy Carter in the game because Chad wasn't there to correct it. I don't think he was worried about his passer rating, either. He was the cerebral type, very much like Chad, and also very accurate early in his career. It always seemed to me he studied each play to the very last second to try and make the best throw, willing to take a hit in the process. A lot of times he would have been better off throwing a few away, to not lose yardage and to not get his brains beaten in.
After watching O'Brien, I also felt his passer rating was more important to him than doing what's best to keep the drive alive. We need more 1980s Jet fans in this thread. Was definitely an opinion held by many Jets fans @ the time. It was so rare for O'Brien to throw the ball away. Doesn't matter if the O-Line can provide 7+ seconds of time ... O'Brien would still take the sack before throwing the ball away. Fearless is the one word I would never use to describe O'Brien. Fearless qb don't scramble on 4th down & dive one yard short to avoid taking a hit. He'd throw up lame duck soft passes & just lay out his receivers. Fearless is the word to describe WR that tried to succeed under Kenny O (like Toon).
First of all for such a long winded post you never, here or elsewhere, referred to two other aspects that compare favorably for O'Brien. The first is that Chad had a much more effective running game backing him up, the Qb's best friend. Second you leave out that Chad missed roughly one third as many starts as he could have, while O'Brien did not start roughly one in eight as many games as he could have. Being in there, able to play the game, I think should count for something. Turning to the particulars of your post, I never said that O'Brien had no responsibility for the total amount of sacks he had. THe question is how much responsibility, behind what most here familiar with the subject indicate is an awareness that the OL he played behind was not as good as the ones Chad did. Your analysis comparing Ryan with him at first glance seems compelling, but it really isn't, because your grouping of those years skews the totals. How? Look at the years 84-86, then separately 87-89, and what do they show? In 84, Ryan had 285 attempts and 30 sacks. In 85 he hardly played. In 86 Ryan had 55 attempts and was sacked 5 times. For the totals, that is 345 attempts and 35 sacks, or more than one every 10 attempts. 84-86, O'Brien had 1173 attempts and 124 sacks. Slightly worse than Ryan's percentage, but only slightly. Meanwhile Ryan threw 15 interceptions while O'Brien had 35, but the O'Brien's higher total pass attempts meant his interception rate was lower. O'Brien also had 56 TD's compared to those 35 int's, while Ryan was only one better, having 16 TD's compared to 15 int's. These numbers indicate that concededly O'Brien was slightly more likely to take a sack than Ryan, but at the benefit of a lower interception ratio and a far better ratio of TD's to Int's. And oh yes better YPA. How then to explain the divergence in your grouping of 84-89? Ryan showed stellar improvement in 87, for one. That year he had only one sack in 53 attempts, while O'Brien had 50 in 393. BUT... Ryan's interception ratio also went from 1.8 in 86 to 3.8 in 87, throwing 2 in that measly 53 attempts. The next year the int ratio was nearly as high at 3.5, throwing 4 on 113 attempts. 89 was even more shocking. In Ryan's last year with the Jets he threw three interceptions in only 30 attempts. So it can be seen that the disparity in those numbers you came up with really really pointed to a divergence in the 87-89 period when Ryan in effect traded a reduction in sacks for an increase in interceptions. O'Brien meanwhile kept his interceptions down in 87 and 88, with an increase in 89 on that lousy team, but still nowhere as high as Ryan's rate. I also bolded your statement about interceptions. Because I think it is funny and cannot be supported. O'Brien's interception rate for his career on the Jets was pretty consistent, and was 2.7 compared to Pennington's 2.9. O'Brien's was better, but not that much of a difference with Chad. YPA and arm strength. You certainly would not claim that arm strength is a bad and not a good thing. Even Chad Fans do not go that far. But let's first look at YPA. Chad's for his Jet career was 7.2, while O'Brien's was 7. Again, not a significant difference, but Chad did do better here. How to explain? I think the difference is that O'Brien played longer, quite simply. And on worse teams. Compare his first three years of playing with Chad from 02 through 04. O'Brien 84 - YPA = 6.9 85 - YPA = 8 86 - YPA = 7.7 Chad 02 - YPA = 7.8 03 - YPA = 7.2 04 - YPA = 7.2 O'Brien had the better numbers. In 05 Chad hardly played, with a 6.4 YPA. In 06, his comeback year, his YPA was only 6.9. In 07, his last year with the Jets, it was 6.8. O'Brien meanwhile concededly dropped off in 87, to 6.9 and even worse in 88 to 6.1. But he got the YPA up to 7 in 89. The last three years with the Jets were where his YPA was in the mid 6 range. 6.57, I believe. For the comparable six year period Chad played and got 7.2, O'Brien was 2367 attempts for 17,589 yards. 7.43. In short the disparity in your overall career numbers is attributable to O'Brien's fall off in his last three years down to 6.57. For the six year period comparable to Chad's six years with the Jets, O'Brien's YPA was higher at 7.43 compared to Chad's 7.2. I appreciate that Chad went to Miami and had another comeback, but he hardly played in 09 and is not now playing. In other words if he had stayed on the team his last three years would have been even worse than O'Brien's last three for the Jets. This ties back into what I see as O'Brien's comparable advantage of longevity and not missing games. So, we established that for 84-89 Kenny was sacked at roughly the same rate as Ryan behind the same line, but threw a far better TD to Int ratio, and thereafter Ryan's sacks declined as his interceptions went up. On YPA we have clarified that for the same number of years Chad contributed to the Jets, six, O'Brien's YPA was better, and the disparity in your team career numbers was really attributable to Kenny's drop off in his last three years, three years at the end of which Chad was not playing at all.
This is why you cannot take this guy seriously. We are learning that YPA is why O'brien was better and he's giving us #s from pat Ryan in 1987 when all but 4 of his passes came in a replacement game. Why don't you dig up the #s for David Norrie while you are at it?
Are you fuckin' kidding me? The shit started with post #205. You called my position ridiculous. You also made up shit. You responded to stuff that you hoped I wrote. You also had a definite tone throughout and it was not a pleasant one. I called your response "crap." I also agreed with nyjunc that you are misinformed. jonnyd made a comment. I responded by writing specifically about O'Brien. You decided I wrote something other than what I actually wrote and then all hell broke loose.
Okay, you totally missed the point of that statement. I did not think you would have missed the point. My point was that I felt O'Brien turned into a wussified game manager after '86. I was not the only Jets fan at the time to think this way. You can also see that I'm not the only Jets fan in this very thread who thought this way. In my opinion, O'Brien in '87 turned into a Neil O'Donnell, Trent Dilfer type of QB- throw high percentage passes as much as possible, don't stretch the field too much, keep it safe, don't throw picks. In other words, in my opinion, O'Brien was a gunslinger in '85 and '86, but wasn't a gunslinger after '86. In short, I thought he played scared after '86. Keep in mind, though, that it is all relative. I don't believe someone playing QB in the NFL would be a sissy. I'm simply comparing him to the average NFL starting QB. "I want to keep my job, I don't want to throw interceptions, I want to play safe"- that kind of thing.
I think people go too crazy over that one play. I was sitting in the upper tier above that end zone, the field looked wide open. I don't know if he was afraid to get hit or just overestimated how much space he had. To judge from my angle and by the rest of his career, I doubt he was afraid to get hit. If anything he was too willing to get hit. Regarding throwing the ball away, my opinion was always that he waited too long to make plays and didn't give himself the chance to safely get rid of the ball. He would throw it out of play in the red zone but he never ever threw it away recklessly, which was good and bad. He certainly had the arm to get it out of bounds if he wanted to.
He was fearless. By being like that, he held the ball too long often, played behind some dreadful offensive lines and got sacked more then any QB in that period. His toughness ended up hurting him in the end. Absorbed too many hits which resulted him in being a little gun shy toward the end of this career. Guy used to take a beating. Thanks he gets are some Jet fans questioning his toughness. Ridiculous.
You are getting it twisted. Mentally and physically tough- Brett Favre Physically tough but not mentally tough- Ken O'Brien Mentally tough but not physically tough- Chad Pennington I hope that makes a little more sense. Maybe you don't agree with me on that, but hopefully you understand my point a little bit better now.
This may have had a lot more to do with Wesley Walker. Walker was a deep threat. When he was in his prime, O'Brien threw deep to feed him the ball. When Walker can play 12-16 games and is healthy enough to gain 700-1,000+ yards in a season his QBs were great. When he wasn't, his QBs had more problems. Also, Keep in mind that O'Brien took 353 sacks in his career and had 3 seasons with 50 or more sacks. I think if you get hit enough times you start thinking about getting rid of the ball a bit quicker. After the Raider playoff game, I saw a similar change in Pennington. Pressure got to him and he was much quicker to check down after that game. Before that loss he used to hold onto the ball longer.
