Tanier:The QB Nonsense Index

[JD_KaPow]

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/...-index-a-banner-year-for-absurd-qb-storylines

Another fun piece by Mike Tanier. It's a slideshow, ranking QBs by how much media and fan nonsense swirls around them. All the NFCE QBs are in the top 12.
#12 Eli:

A study in the anatomy of 98-octane quarterback nonsense:

• A quarterback due to make $17 million in 2016 (via Spotrac) begins contract extension negotiations with his mega-media-market team.

• Due to the automatic escalators built into the salary cap and franchise-tag rules, any reasonable extension would make that quarterback the highest-paid player in the NFL in 2016.

• A media insider duly reports the facts. Because "highest-paid player" is both A) an accurate detail and B) a juicy tidbit integral to the "media" element of being a media insider, the "highest-paid player" element of the story is highlighted.

• The "highest-played player" demand is ripped from its context and exposed to gamma radiation until it sprouts green muscles and starts threatening to smash puny humans.

• A full news cycle is spent debating whether the quarterback is greedy, arrogant or delusional for banging his shoe on the table and demanding to be paid more than, say, the Yankees' fourth starter.

• The quarterback and his agent eventually take to the airwaves to deny making any unreasonable demands.

• A full news cycle is spent accusing the quarterback of backpedaling and spin-doctoring.

Eli Manning's August contract kerfuffle was such vintage nonsense that it should be bottled and blasted on a deep space probe to the far reaches of the cosmos to warn advanced cultures what they are in for when they reach Earth. It was an otherwise quiet year for Eli, but just being the one starting quarterback in New York who won't get socked in the jaw by a teammate exposes him to some high-level baseline nonsense contaminants.

#10 Eagles QBs:

Still doubt that Chip Kelly is a genius? Kelly:

• Traded for a former Heisman-winning quarterback with a history of knee injuries and a 2015 salary that would make an oil baron blush.

• Re-signed a former Jets quarterback so universally maligned and lampooned that he nearly invented the Internet meme industry.

• Signed another Heisman-winning quarterback famous for being Tim Tebow.

• Yet, through it all, made himself the center of attention.

That's like standing among Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift yet having everyone pay attention to you. That's genius. Maybe he should change his name to Chip Kanye.

Tebow brings baseline nonsense wherever he goes, and there have been many efforts to stoke Sam Bradford's injury, contract status or some potential controversy with Mark Sanchez over the starting job into something juicy. But making sense of Kelly's Eagles is like trying to navigate a cornfield maze while blindfolded, so any attempt to manufacture nonsense collapses into a mixture of disorientation and amazement. Look for the successes or failures of the Eagles quarterbacks to be laid at Kelly's feet.

#8 Romo

Tony Romo spent years in the Nonsense Index Top Five. Now he's an aging veteran who will always be reviled in the I-95 corridor but has outlasted the jokes about what his last name rhymes with (har, har, wasn't that a fun couple of years?), his romantic life, his vacation habits and the late-season and playoff failures that had a lot more to do with the organization around him than with him, give or take a fumbled extra-point hold. (And what starting quarterback other than Romo still held for extra points in 2006?)

To put a decade of Romo nonsense in perspective, here is an except from this year's Football Outsiders Almanac.

Romo has given up golf in the offseason in an effort to keep his back healthy. What a depressing thought: a wealthy, successful, athletic 35 year old giving up even the occasional round of golf to save himself for his grueling profession. If a corporate manager gave up moderate-intensity outdoor recreation because it was eating into his effectiveness in the boardroom, you would stage an intervention. But we expect our quarterbacks to give up everything in the name of entertaining us.

There's a deep, disturbing metaphor for approaching middle age in the first world coded within the saga of offseason Romo:

Age 27: Trip to Cabo at the height of "busy season!" Why not?

Age 28: Watching American Idol contestants and thinking: Got her, got her, need her, got her…

Age 30: Carrie Underwood is writing whole albums about you. Time to settle down.

Age 31: Marry Candice Crawford. We said "settle down," not "settle."

Age 32: High-altitude jogging: a healthier way to get a head rush than jetting off to Cabo.

Age 34: No carousing, less mountain jogging, more getting your butt kicked around a golf course by a kid 12-years younger than you. Granted, he's Jordan Spieth, but still…

Age 35: No more golf. Time to start trolling the early-bird dinner specials for mashed potatoes and applesauce.

Thanks for the nonsensical memories, Tony.

#1 RGIII

The Commanders quarterback saga is the closest thing science will ever create to a perpetual motion machine. It just keeps spinning faster and faster, despite not having any new input.

Robert Griffin III has given the world three-plus seasons and offseasons of the most concentrated idiocy we have ever encountered. It would not have been possible without help, though. Griffin has shared the stage with a meddlesome owner, a pair of coaches better at mind games than game plans, a backup selected in the same draft (Kirk Cousins arrived with a blinking yellow sign that read, "This is the guy everyone will fall in love with at the first sign of trouble") and a fanbase addicted to a binge-purge cycle of anointing and executing would-be saviors.

Before you assign all of the blame to Griffin for his failure, which is the fashionable opinion at presstime, ask why he is playing an almost note-for-note cover of the Donovan McNabb swan song. Mike Shanahan gave Cousins a ringing endorsement during this week's Griffin dirt-piling seminar, when all of us pretended we never liked Griffin anyway (after following him with hearts floating around our head for the entire 2012 calendar year); Shanahan has developed dozens of media confidantes over the years, but we are still waiting for him to develop his first quarterback.

Griffin's time near the top of the Quarterback Nonsense Index is nearly through. He will slide to the bottom of the ratings during his second career as a damaged-goods quarterback bouncing around the NFL in search of a second chance that has about a 6 percent chance of ever arriving. So let's take this moment to remember it all: the predraft tizzy, the Herschel Walker-style trade everybody thought was a great idea for some reason, the theme socks, the Hope posters, the time when fans sent him wedding gifts, the weird little medical shed at FedEx Field that was used as Griffin's playoff examination room but never existed before or since (Dr. James Andrews' TARDIS, maybe?), daily updates of Griffin's "superhuman" recovery, the hoopla over his return and the long, slow, tortuous unraveling of his career, which the Commanders were helpless to stop but many other organizations could probably have solved with a few candid conversations.

Griffin may be gone when we do this next year, but the Commanders will be here. Good luck, Cardale Jones.

 

[Beats_By_Zeke]

I like #1 lol.