Refuting the Illogical

Look, I understand that controversy sells. Say something that is blatantly wrong with enough brashness and you know that you will annoy anyone with common sense. There’s really nothing like saying something idiotic (The sun is blue!) and then refusing the listen to any logical arguments to the contrary.

I give you the case of one Gregg Easterbrook. The guys has basically made his living doing this, but last week he went a step further and claimed that Eli Manning was now a better quarterback than Peyton Manning. Seriously?

Here is one example: “Well, ponder this: Eli Manning is now a better quarterback than Peyton Manning. At the current rate, his career achievements will at least match, and perhaps surpass, his big brother's.”

What career achievements? The only comparable career achievement is Super Bowl wins: Both have one. So yes, if you extrapolate that over Eli’s career, statistically Eli might end up with more. But other than that, I don’t see how the two are anywhere close to comparable. And keep in mind that quarterbacks like Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson have also won Super Bowls.

Mr. Easterbrook claims that “[i]n terms of passing stats, the two players are approximately the same”. Really? Let’s take a deeper look into these approximately similar stats. For comparison’s sake, let’s throw out both players’ rookie season (Peyton’s was much better, by the way).

After his rookie season, Peyton rolled off six straight 4000+ yard seasons, with his QB rating never dropping below 84. In Eli’s first three full seasons (including last season’s Super Bowl win) his highest QB rating was 77 and his highest passing total was 3762.

In Peyton’s entire career, he has never averaged less than 7.0 yards per attempt in a season. Eli’s best average was 6.8 yards per attempt. In each of Peyton’s first three non-rookie seasons, he completed 62% of his passes. Since those three seasons, he has not dropped below 65%. Eli has yet to approach 60% in any season.

In Peyton’s entire career (again, excluding rookie season) he has thrown more than 15 interceptions only twice. Eli has already done it three times, in each of his first three full seasons.

These differences might seem insignificant, but when every Peyton Manning pass goes for an average of 1.5 yards further and he completes maybe three or four more passes per game (given the same number of throws) that is a pretty huge advantage. Throw in Peyton’s clear decision-making advantage and the intangible benefits of his vast knowledge of the offensive playbook and audibles, and Peyton is giving his team a significant advantage every time he steps on the field.

While it’s true that Peyton did not win any playoff games until his sixth season, he did lead the Colts into the playoffs in his second and third seasons. Eli achieved the same feat, leading the Giants into the playoffs in his second and third seasons. What people seem to forget is that since Peyton Manning took over as quarterback, the Colts have missed the playoffs only twice, and not since 2001.

What the Giants did last season was amazing, and Eli has played well this season (with the exception of last night’s bed-crapping against the Browns) but can you really argue that Eli is a better quarterback than Peyton? I mean, he didn’t even make the Pro Bowl last year and his team won the Super Bowl! That should say something about how good Eli is.

I’m not saying that Eli Manning won’t turn out to be a good quarterback, but based on what we’ve seen from him so far, I think it’s a little early to declare that he’ll have a better career than a guy who is without question one of the top quarterbacks of the last decade, if not the best.

(Note: In today's article, Mr. Easterbrook made no reference to the fact that his new golden child just threw 3 picks in a terrible loss to the Browns, while Peyton Manning had another stellar, mistake-free game as the Colts trounced Baltimore 31-3)

An Exercise in Olympic Superlativism

Sportwriters should stick to what they know. How many more “Olympic” pieces are going to be written by the likes of Jemele Hill? Sure, we all know Michael Phelps just completed one of the most amazing Olympic performances of all-time, but immediately after Phelps wins his eighth gold medal, Jemele Hill writes an article proclaiming him to be the “greatest athlete of all time”. Maybe it was the greatest feat of all time, but it’s going to take more than a 750 word essay with half-assed comparisons to Wilt Chamberlain and Brett Favre to convince anyone, or at least it should.

For me, this was the absolute worst passage of the article: “Phelps has had to beat Ian Crocker, Ryan Lochte and Laszlo Cseh in Beijing all of whom were world-record holders. Phelps is beating his competition in their individual specialties. Imagine if Kobe Bryant sang a better national anthem than Marvin Gaye, or if Alex Rodriguez dunked better than Dwight Howard.” Never mind the absurdity of comparing the similarity of swim events to that of nailing a three pointer and singing, but Phelps didn’t actually beat Lochte in his world-record event (200 Back) and Laszlo’s "specialty" is the Individual Medley, which is comprised of all four strokes. By no means am I a Phelps-hater (quite the opposite), but I find the immediate need to proclaim him (or anyone) the best athlete of all-time unnecessary at best and, at worst, insulting.

For those of you that occasionally, likely as a result of boredom, read ESPN’s TMQ, you may have noticed his brief commentary on Michael Phelps in today's effort: “In other Olympic news, the timer said Michael Phelps swam the 100-meter butterfly in 50.58 seconds, Milorad Cavic swam it in 50.59 -- can anyone seriously believe either finished one-hundredth of a second different from the other? …Tenths of seconds are absurd enough, as Tuesday Morning Quarterback noted a few months ago. A hundredth of a second is too fleeting to have any common-sense relevance, let alone decide an athletic event; and this is setting aside whether a mechanical device splashed with water (the touch pads) can be accurate to the hundredth of the second. Yet numerous clocks in Beijing show hundredths of seconds, as if these splinters of time can be measured meaningfully. Reader Fred Ruonala notes that as the Phelps result was announced, one of the NBC announcers said viewers could "clearly see Phelps touched first." Now Olympics announcers can perceive hundredths of seconds.”

First of all, it IS clear from replays that Phelps finished first, if ever so slightly. If tenths and hundreds of seconds are too small to decide athletic competitions, how does “TMQ” propose that these events be decided? Any swimmer or track sprinter can tell you that a quarter or tenth of a second can be a huge difference. It is widely acknowledged that Usain Bolt torched the competition in the 100M Dash. However, his margin of victory was only a meager .2 seconds. Under TMQ’s assumptions, that difference is “irrelevant” and “fleeting”. Perhaps all the finalists should have been awarded gold medals, since their times would have all rounded to ten seconds.

Also, his description of touchpads as “mechanical device(s) splashed with water” grossly misrepresents the quality and accuracy of these electronic machines. TMQ is simply making guesses about things he does not understand. In an age where technology improves by leaps and bounds every year, it is harder to believe that we would be unable to create an accurate timing device than it is to believe we could. If races could be timed to hundredths of seconds in Mark Spitz’s era, does TMQ honestly believe we should use a larger unit of time to decide races some 30 years later?

I may not be a qualified journalist, but I’m also not being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write about sports. The least we can expect is some semblance of a coherent argument and a clear indication that these individuals are even watching the events before jumping to their laptops.

Sorry for the lengthy layoff. Expect SEC college football previews within the week.