Week 1 QB Round-up

I'm going to try to start doing a weekly QB round-up.  I'll pick 3-5 performances (that I at least saw some of) and discuss them.  I have a part-time job on Sunday and Monday nights, so I might not see every performance, so I won't discuss those games a lot of the time unless I DVR them and watch them later.  Here goes:

1)  Matt Ryan - Matt Ryan is still Matty Checkdown... Bear with me on this one.  Matt Ryan had a great game on Sunday.  He played like a QB who can win it all, although I have strong doubts that the Saints' defense is anywhere near as good as people think they are.  The thing that struck me is that he had yet another couple of plays where a screen led to a gigantic gain.  He always seems to get some great YAC from his RB or WR on those plays.  I want somebody to track YPCD (yards per checkdown) to see just how far ahead of everybody else this number is for Ryan.  Again, he played a great game, I just found it chuckly-worthy that it of course included a couple of big-gain checkdowns.

2)  Eli Manning - Terrible.  The worst multi-Super Bowl-winning QB in history... and only better than Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson on the list of QBs who have even won 1.  He has been inaccurate and turned the ball over his whole career.  Now that he doesn't have a defense to bail him out, he looks a lot more like the mediocre QB that he has always been.

3)  Andy Dalton - Andy Dalton struggled on third down.  He also struggled on all downs in the second half.  However, he did something he's never done against Baltimore: he didn't kill his team with bad throws.  This was a change.  Dalton is flawed.  He doesn't have a big enough arm to dominate a game.  However, give him guys like Gio Bernard and AJ Green, and he has plenty of arm to win.  I think this is the year that Dalton finally wins a playoff game and people stop riding him so hard.

4)  Joe Flacco - This dude is owner of the dumbest contract in sports history.  In fact, the stupidity of his contract rivals the stupidity of the Herschel Walker trade.  I understand he was historically great in their playoff run and that he has a great playoff record.  Just keep in mind that his playoff wins include at least one stat line (too lazy to search it) with double-digit passing yards.  Playoff wins are overrated in determining how good a QB is.  While Flacco deserves all the credit in the world for that amazing playoff run (11 TD, 0 INT), I think it's pretty obvious that those numbers are the only thing keeping him from trumping Dilfer and Johnson for worst SB winning QBs ever.  Ok, enough of my soapbox... I'm supposed to talk about this past week.  Flacco looked lost.  He turned in his typical 60+ attempts, <400 yards performance, most of which was accumulated playing catch up because he had played so poorly early.  Yes, I know Steve Smith dropped 4 balls early, but Flacco wouldn't have looked much better had Smith caught those balls.

5)  Aaron Rodgers - Oh boy, hate to do this one.  Aaron Rodgers looked timid last week.  In the first half, when the line was doing an ok job of protecting, Rodgers refused to push the ball downfield. It was really disappointing.  Even more disappointing is that he didn't challenge Richard Sherman at all. Sherman is good, but he's not freaking Deion Sanders.  At least throw toward the guy ONCE!  In the second half, Rodgers was under pressure more, but he still didn't look comfortable.  He wasn't accurate, he wasn't decisive, and he wasn't himself.  I've heard analysts blame his collarbone.  Huh? Dumb analysis.  He didn't look this bad last year after he returned from the injury.  This is probably just a one game thing and it wouldn't be the first time that Rodgers has played fairly poorly in the first game of the year (in fact, the only game where he truly played great was the opener against the Saints right after the lockout).  One thing that I found really interesting was looks of disgust and the head-shaking by Rodgers on the sideline every time the defense did something stupid.  I don't think I've ever seen him so demonstrative.  I think there might be trouble on the way for this team this year.