I admit I had to replace a couple of consonants in the title to get across what I really wanted to say.

I am seeing a lot of people extolling the supposed virtues of tanking the year in order to draft Andrew Luck, who by all accounts is that kind of once-in-a-generation quarterback you sink your future into. The question is, is going 2-14 or worse and drafting a quarterback in the first round really a path to long-term success? I have an inkling "not" but this is not about inklings, dammit!

I'll take a look at all teams who with one of the first 3 picks in the draft and drafted a QB. We'll see how they fared over the next 5 years - in today's NFL, you're only going to keep your 1st round franchise QB if you resign him in free agency past that point anyway. Or, if he is a bust, you've figured it out by then and you're able to move on to the Next Big Thing the way the Colts moved on from Jeff George (oops! spoiler alert!).

This is also a pretty long list, so I'm going to break it up a bit. The first part will include everyone up to 1997, the year where the standings turned into the Peyton Manning (and the Ryan Leaf) draft.

ON THE MORROW WE SHALL DIE ALSO TO THE BREAK

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So, how good should we have expected Aaron Curry to be? Just for the heck of it, I took a look at all linebackers picked between the #2 and #6 picks in the NFL draft from 1991 to 2004. 2004 was so that I could get a good sense of how well a guy's career has gone and 1991 was, well, arbitrary. I had to start somewhere. I decided to look at this range of picks instead of, say, all linebackers drafted because a. I am lazy and that would take too long, and b. I don't think it gives an accurate assessment on how guys who are drafted relatively early in the 1st round as LBs end up working out in the NFL.

For the lack of a better metric to use, I'm going to look at these guys by Approximate Value, which is one of those pro-football-reference stats which is a kind of analog to Bill James' AV score he came up with back in the 80s. It's a quick and dirty way to determine how good a player is. I'll look at players' first couple years and their overall value. Curry, for references' sake, has an AV of 12 so far (5 his rookie year, 7 last year).

What does his cohort say? Well, I see a lot of decent but not super-spectacular guys in here. There is Boulware and Lavar Arrington to compare Curry to (and Curry doesn't come out well) but over the 2nd half of the little mini-study in particular it seems that teams really weren't getting in the habit of drafting LBs that early, period.

A second way of looking at this - the AVs of all guys picked 4th - also follows. Between these two things,  I think we can make a couple of assumptions about Curry, linebackers, and what Seattle should expect from him:

• Players do make splashes at the 4th pick, obviously. There are several future Hall of Famers drafted during this 14 year period who went around the time that Curry did.
• For the most part, those players started out much, much better. It's unfair to compare Curry with an Edgerrin James, but #4s also included Jonathan Ogden, who is grossly underrated by AV, and Peter Boulware, who combined with Ray Lewis to form a virtually unstoppable linebacking corps in Baltimore in the early 2000s.
• For guys who started out with an AV in the 12-14 range as Curry has, the 50th percentile looks a lot more like "steady, if unspectacular performer".
• There are a couple of busts as well at this point. Aaron Curry has already more or less outperformed all of the busts.

In conclusion, I think that if Curry doesn't turn into a world-beater, and it's looking to me like he's not going to be that guy, but he does wind up being an NFL quality starter (which he was last year and which he looks to me like he will be this year as well) I don't think Seahawks fans ought to be declaring him a bust. It could have been a lot worse, and I think giving a guy a hard time because he didn't end up going on that 90th percentile success track will only lead to more broken expectations in the future.

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I'm seeing a LOT of citations of QB rating lately. Guys, look. I get that it's one number you can look at to get an idea of a player's passing ability. I like that aspect of it, don't get me wrong. The problem with it is that it sucks. It WAY overrates TD rating, which is more of a function of how bad a team's red zone offense is (in that if it sucks, the QB is forced to throw more TD passes) and how good their overall offense is (which a QB certainly contributes to, but in ways mostly covered in gaining yards). It also basically double-counts completion percentage in that a guy who completes a lot of passes will also have good yards-per-pass numbers (whereas a 1970s Kenny Stabler type could complete 50% of his passes and still be effective if all the completions are for 20 yards) (what made the Snake subpar in modern terms was his MASSIVELY high pick percentage).

On top of that - and this has been mentioned - it doesn't include sacks at all. Contrary to popular belief, sacks don't just happen to a QB. A guy like Matt Hasselbeck will often eat the ball instead of forcing it into traffic. Going back a few years, a guy like Brad Johnson got sacked a ton because he didn't check down terribly well. Dan Marino OTOH had some *very* iffy lines but still managed to post INSANELY low sack totals because he had a superhero level quick release. If Captain America had a release that quick, comic book fans would have complained he was unrealistic.

That's why I prefer Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, which is listed in profootballref and is, well, pretty awesome. It's yards per catch, with picks counting -45 yards (the seminal football stats book The Hidden Game of Football figured out this was how much a turnover costs), TDs counting an extra 20 yards (which IMO is probably overrating them but hey, it is harder to complete a 2 yard TD pass to your 3rd string TE than it is to complete a 3rd and long pass to your FB for 2 yards, so they should be worth something), *and* bring sacks into the equation as well. Sacks are actually in there in two ways (not double-counted) - they're there both as failed pass attempts (which they are) and for the negative yards (which they are). It's everything QB Rating wishes it was and more.

I rag on Kolb below the break.

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First I want to make clear that I think that Nolan Ryan was a good baseball player. I don’t like to pass out terms like “great” or “best” lightly and so won’t use them to describe him, but at the very least he was very good at what he did, far better than I’ve ever been at anything I’ve done, for instance, and there is certainly a longevity-based argument for him to be in the Hall of Fame. I’ll even go so far as to say that his inclusion in the Hall does not cheapen it unless you are a fan of a very, very small Hall, which I am not.

However, there is a massive gulf of difference between “very good for a long time” and “the best ever”. This seems to be a fairly controversial opinion. For instance, in the 1999 All-Century team sponsored by Mastercard and Major League Baseball, Ryan was named by the fans as the top right-handed pitcher of the period (Sandy Koufax was voted best lefty). His career numbers at a glance also hint at greatness: most strikeouts ever, most no-hitters in the history of the game, 8 All-Star appearances, 2nd all-time in career games started, lowest hits/9 innings ratio of all time… it’s quite a pedigree. And by one definition of “great” – the one that means something similar to “large” – there isn’t a lot of question here either: Ryan was the most extreme power pitcher of his or of any era.

Any time a very good or “great” player like Ryan is discussed, there are always arguments as to the proper contextualization of his career accomplishments. One argument against Ryan is that as gaudy as his strikeout total and no-hitters look, his peripheral numbers don’t all appear to add up to a level that a Tom Seaver, for example, achieved.  His career ERA+ is a solidly above average but nothing special 112, and while his FIP, which better takes into account the things that a pitcher can control than ERA does, bumps his career runs-allowed rate from 3.07 per 9 to 2.97, it’s only enough to put him on a similar plane with Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, and Roger Clemens once era (not ERA!) and the ballparks each player played in are taken into account.

Still, there is the knotty question of Ryan’s BABIP, which was only .265 in his career, a number that by itself certainly seems to indicate that he ought to be given even a little more credit than what is due from a glance at his FIP. Is this a big deal? I’ll look at this question in three parts.

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If I ever get the time / find a point in the future where I need to complete a report for class but get a major case of the procrastinations, I'll see if I can do this with all Seahawk quarterbacks or something, but here's my idea: cross-era equivalencies. What would Dave Krieg's stats from 1984 look like in the context of 2010? I know this has been done before, but I don't think it's been done using standard deviations. I'll try and explain my method here and see if people think if it has any legs.

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Feel free to explain your non-MARSHAWN LYNCH favorites below. I'm going to go ahead and say that this was probably my favorite play ever in Seahawks' history. My reasoning:

- It was the greatest play of perhaps the greatest game the Seahawks have ever played. Seattle has been in other barn-burners and other games which meant a lot, but both at once? There was the Green Bay "we're going to take the ball and we're going to score" game but I choose not to count that one because, well, we lost and all.

- On a purely aesthetic level, this was beautiful. It wasn't just a quarterback finding a speedy receiver who got behind a defense, a defensive back making a nice read and just happening to have nothing but space between himself and the end zone, or a botched field goal attempt that very nearly turned into the greatest play in a certain other team's recent history. This play was a team of guys simply overcoming another team time and time again on one single play. There was good blocking at the line (and, because every great play must also remind you of the frailty of humanity, bad blocking by Stacy Andrews) and great blocking down the field.

- This is really point 2A rather than a real 3rd point but to me a broken tackle is the most beautiful moment in football. It is the football equivalent of a counterpunch in boxing that sends the other guy to the canvas (a la Floyd Mayweather's hit on Ricky Hatton wherein Money used Hatton's momentum to send him face-first into the turnbuckle). And on this play there were no less than eight of them. Eight. Any one of those tackles, if made, would have made this a merely good play; a couple of them wouldn't even have given Seattle a first down. There is a great football term, not used anymore except by old-timers, called "broken field running". This play was the epitome of broken field running. At no point was this play ever working 100% correctly but it just kept succeeding yard by yard and tackle by tackle until boom, touchdown.

- In one play, it redeems a man who a lot of us, to be honest, were unsure about. I have always liked *watching* Marshawn Lynch since he joined this team but I admit that after the game is over I can't help but look at the box scores and remember the game as a whole and think, "okay, maybe Marshawn wasn't such a great pickup after all". Well, at this point, whatever the man does or doesn't do from here on out for the Seahawks, we'll always have The Run.

- It resulted in a playoff win, of course. I think that a win vs. the hated Chiefs in Kansas City comes close to a playoff victory but this in and of itself is going to give it an edge to some.

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So I have a fascination with history in general, baseball history in particular, and also a morbid curiousity with strange deaths. In yesterday's postgame page I made a quick note about one of the guys on the list and felt that he shouldn't be alone. If you have your own baseball deaths, please feel free to add them! This is intended to create debate, not end it. Or whatever they say at the beginning of Prime 9. I will point out here that I confined my list to guys who met their ends before the memories of people who might be reading this. So, no Cory Lidles or Lyman Bostocks. Sorry.

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