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Because of the way that the Yankees and Red Sox dominante all coverage of baseball, and because of the perception of the “East Coast” bias in sports, particularly in baseball, the idea of divisional dominance tends to be limited to two specific discussions.

1. The American League over the National League
2. The AL East above all

The last two years, those have been particularly relevant to reality.  The National League has really struggled to produce any sort of conference dominance, despite winning the 2008 World Series, and since the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to join the elite teams in baseball from the same division as the Yanks and Sauxs, the AL East has been the primarily dominant division in baseball.

This year, another competitive division rises to meet the challenge posed by the AL East.  It’s not going to spell the end of the American League’s dominance over the National League, but this division should help to take some of the attention off the AL East and work to dispel the East Coast Bias.

I’m talking about the AL West.  You knew that because you read the title.

When talking about the strength of the AL East, oftentimes the weakness of teams at the bottom of that division can get lost in the discussion of powerhouses at the top of that division.  The biggest difference there would have to be the potential, predictable decline of the Toronto Blue Jays.  They’re without Roy Halladay, without Alexis Rios, and without Marco Scutaro this year.  With only minor improvement expected from the Orioles, and the reasonable prediction of decline for the Rays after two years, I suspect that the weakness at the bottom of this division will get lost in the shuffle of another Yankees-Red Sox pennant race.

Team-for-team, there’s no weakness in the AL West.  They’re strong at the top, where the Angels remain the favorite despite numerous losses, but only a hair ahead of the hard-charging Mariners, who had one of the more interesting offseasons in recent memory, adding a whole slew of talented baseball players including Cliff Lee, Milton Bradley, Chone Figgins, and re-signed star pitcher Felix Hernandez to a long term deal, and also extended defensive minded 2009 acquisitions Jack Wilson and Franklin Gutierrez.  It’s a division that could easily go to either of those two teams, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to see the A’s at the top of the division either.

The A’s could be right there behind the strength of an outfield that’s strong and deep, as long as their infielders can stay healthy.  The A’s are less reliant on the street free agent type veterans that they have been in past years, such as Jason Giambi, Adam Kennedy, and Nomar Garciaparra.  They’re still reliant on a very young pitching staff, but between a cavernous home ballpark and the aforementioned athletes in that spacey outfield, the A’s are well hedged against this inexperience thanks to the $10 million they gave Ben Sheets.  Really, the key for this team is getting more productivity out of Mark Ellis than they did last year when he was injured and ineffective.

Then there’s the Rangers, who are coming off their best season since the A-Rod days.  A team that had won half their games or more only once since 1999 managed to hold onto second place in this division, and they’ve made a committment to improve their pitching, which was reinforced by the $7.5 million contract they gave to Rich Harden, which appears to be a steal when you consider that Sheets got $10 million from the A’s.  The kicker is that both are major injury concerns, and if one can pitch much more than the other, than the extra money the A’s spent might be worth it.

Texas could always slug the crap out of the baseball though, which makes them an average team even if their hopes for their rotation do not materialize.  This is essentially the difference between the AL West and the other strong divisions.  If we accept that the Rangers are the 4th place team in this division, there’s no real weakness here from top to bottom.

The biggest question I have is how we can adjust for the fact that the AL West has only four teams.  On some level, it feels fundamentally incorrect to just declare this the strongest divison, team to team, and then not mention that each team in this division has to play more inter-divisional games than every other team in baseball.  It’s true.  Each team plays 18 games against every other team in it’s division.  For AL West teams, that’s (18 x 3 = 54).  For, say NL central teams, that’s (18 x 5 = 90).  For every other division, it’s in the middle of that at 72.

Still, there’s been a huge influx of talent into this division, and with the exception of John Lackey who is now with Boston, talent that left teams here never left the division.  Chone Figgins is now with Seattle, for example.  Cliff Lee is stronger than Lackey.  And the Angels are so strong in the farm system that they can replace what they are losing with Figgins and Lackey, which is more talent at the big league level in this division.  Given these observations, the safe if controversial conclusion is that the AL West is baseball’s strongest division going into the 2010 MLB season.

At this point, it seems safe to define that the first two quarterback selected in the NFL Draft–the only two that will be selected in the top half of the first round–will be Notre Dame’s Jimmy Clausen, and Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford.  The natural question: who is better?

The natural answer: it depends.

Here’s what you need to know.  In a true vacuum, the best quarterback in this draft class is Jimmy Clausen.  That’s true if I know absolutely nothing about the team I am supposed to be advising.  Clausen would have been the best prospect in the 2009 draft as well, and is worthy of the first overall pick in most years.  One could say that Clausen is destined to be successful at the next level–but that’s really missing the point.

Clausen, who left Notre Dame after a wildly successful junior year, is not destined for anything.  Look no further than his career at Notre Dame: as a freshman, he was greatly overwhelmed and out talented and got absoultely creamed behind a sieve of an offensive line.  The team greatly improved the following season, but Clausen really didn’t.  He got his first taste of college success in the first half of the 2008 season, but the team collapsed down the stretch and Clausen struggled against top competition, even while having the best offensive line he would have at ND.

In 2009, Clausen finally enjoyed a breakout year, leading the nation in passing efficiency at the mid-way point of the season before being part of another late ND collapse.  Jimmy Clausen wasn’t really a major reason for the decline, but he does seem to have a few major flaws as a passer, namely if you take away the deep ball, he hardly has shown any ability to move the chains and sustain longer drives.  He is not, contrary to the belief of some, a one year wonder because even though he only has one strong year, the year itself was quite predictable based on his statistics from prior seasons.

Clausen is the type of quarterback who can ride on the coattails of other elite offensive performers, while using his experience at the position, he’s good enough to salvage a mediocre performance from offensive scraps, as he did with his personal statistics on a terrible team in 07, winning all three of NDs victories that season.  That’s the salvaging part.  2009 was Clausen with a superior offense, his true value to a team with some elite talent around him.  2008, on the other hand, represents Clausen’s downside to potential NFL employers.  With a running game, and with a strong OL, and top receivers, and the best defense of the Charlie Weis tenure, Notre Dame went…6-6, and Clausen threw 25 TD and 17 INTs, completing only about 60% of his passes.  It seems safe to suggest that Clausen is a guy who lives off the talent around him, with the rare exception of a situation where all the talent on a team is on defense, and then he won’t be bamboozeled quite as badly as Mark Sanchez was for the Jets this year.

The bottom line with Clausen is that 80% of potential NFL employers will be a lot like that 2008 Notre Dame team relative to it’s competition.  With some extreme exceptions at either end of the spectrum, Clausen projects as an average to slightly above average player.  That’s valuable enough to justify a top five pick…but teams with the ambition necessary to turn teams that are picking in the top five into championship contenders, those are the teams that will pass on Clausen and look for someone better.  Clausen is safe, proven, comes with a (relative) pedigree, and his strengths and weaknesses are well understood coming out.  No analyst is going to project him below the second round.

Sam Bradford, on the other hand, represents very much of what Jimmy Clausen does not.  Here’s a man who was wildly successful at the college level in consecutive years.  Every statistic for Bradford jumps right off the page.  Touchdowns.  He threw a college TD more frequently than once every 11 attempts.  In this class, only Tim Tebow and Tony Pike are remotely close to that figure.  Interceptions.  Bradford was intercepted less frequently than once every 50 attempts.  Only Tebow is anywhere near that number.  Sacks.  Bradford was sacked less frequently than once every 35 attempts.  Only cross-state rival Zac Robinson is anywhere near that figure in this class.  Bradford’s numbers are just so excellent in every way.

But the catch is huge.  Bradford got injured so early and so badly in 2009 that, combined with the decision to leave Oklahoma with a year of eligibility remaining, Bradford accrued less than 5% of his total value after the midpoint of his college eligibility.  The only other first round pick in history to accomplish the same amazing feat is Rex Grossman.  Grossman ends up being one of Bradford’s nearest comparables in any analysis.  To be fair to Bradford, Grossman failed in the NFL in part because of an inability to complete his passes, and Bradford completed 67% of his passes at Oklahoma.  There’s no way to project Bradford as a low efficiency passer in the NFL given those college statistics, so there’s little worry about him becoming an epic bust.

But NFL teams don’t want to spend top draft picks on questionable decision makers, either, and there’s not a whole lot of film of Sam Bradford under duress.  And what film does exist on Bradford under duress is of him as a freshman, and won’t be all that relevant to the grand scheme of things.  Combined with his injury concerns, and inability to throw for scouts coming off offseason surgery, the team that takes Bradford is going to be very much in the dark regarding his true potential.

The good news with Sam Bradford is that the only real path down the road to Bustsville is through a right shoulder that never really heals.  If teams are prudent in listening to the advice of their medical staffs, there’s hardly a ton of downside here.  A team may very well find out that Bradford is a terrible decision maker off of play action when he gets to the league, but then instead of having a franchise quarterback, you’re left with a quick decision maker who you might have to throttle back at the end of games with leads if he develops a Favarian turnover propensity (a la Grossman).  The “floor” on Bradford looks something like Jon Kitna, so if the arm is okay, you’ll get something average looking out of him at worst, and a franchise signal caller at best.

Bradford simply didn’t turn the ball over much in college though, and unlike Clausen, he never had to grow into his role as OU quarterback.  It always seemed to come naturally to him.  But that apparance may have just been being in the right place, in the right time, with the right team, and his season-long arm injury as a 4th year junior opens up all sorts of questions that neither I nor Sam Bradford can really adequately answer until after the draft.

Either would have been the best QB in last year’s draft (not if they had come out then, but if we compare them now to Sanchez and Stafford at this time last year), but neither would have been a top ten pick in either 2006 or 2008.  It’s an average looking class at the top, but a stronger quarterback class in the middle.  Earlier, I said, in a true vacuum, you would take Clausen.  This is because of his college career path “ending” with his best year (though my formula marks a “zero” for quarterbacks who leave their Senior seasons on the table; technically, that is their true ending value, per my formula).  Bradford gets a really low grade for his injury plagued senior year.  In finance terms, Bradford would be considered the higher risk-higher return investment (you wouldn’t invest in him at the price if you didn’t have a much higher return on him than Clausen).  In scouting terms, it’s known as “boom or bust” potential.  I don’t like to think about it in scouting terms, because if you take a QB at fourth overall and you get a league average player, have you really taken a bust?  I don’t think Bradford will bust, rather, I think any weighted average probability matrix suggests that his return will be neck and neck with Clausen, and that Clausen is the sounder investment.

But what if you are a team like Washington or Buffalo or Seattle who can’t really protect the passer, and already have a competent incumbent?  Exactly why would a team like that be after Jimmy Clausen?  They can’t protect him will enough right now to get a good return on his play as a rookie, and his peak value may not be all that much higher than either Jason Campbell or Trent Edwards (with Hasselbeck, his peak value is in the past, obviously).  Adding Sam Bradford makes a lot more sense for those teams because if you consider it reasonable to project his college performance to carry over through this lost year and into the NFL, you’re getting a high-efficiency, high-return type that offers you something you aren’t getting in Clausen.  Sure, if everything goes right developmentally with Clausen, you’ll get a franchise player out of him, but you’ll need to strive to be the type of dominant offense that say the 2000 Vikings, 2006-9 Saints, or 2005 Bengals were to make him that franchise player.  The Bradford formula for success is a lot simpler: draft him if you believe that his 2009 injury season was a complete fluke, and that he would have light up the scoreboard if he was healthy.  That’s way simpler than building around Clausen, the better prospect, isn’t it?  All you have to do is…be right.

Once a player is drafted, he ceases to be a prospect anymore.  Clausen has more draft value, but Bradford is the more accomplished college player.  Knowing the difference is critical for an NFL GM, and since theres no such thing as an NFL vacuum, knowing where your team stands is critical for making the right choice.

Ultimately, Bradford vs. Clausen is a particularly interesting draft debate between two solid-looking prospects, but it’s hard to see either being the most successful quarterback from a very deep class.  Historically speaking, the best quarterback in a draft class comes from the top (two-three) quarterback debate less than half the time.  This seems like one of those years.  I wouldn’t bet against Dan Lefevour, Colt McCoy, or John Skelton this year, but the class is SO deep, that the eventual best quarterback might end up being left off my top ten list.  Right now, Bradford, Clausen, and McCoy sure seem like the three best quarterbacks in the class (you can take them in any order, even McCoy first), but it’s not heavy at the top.  McCoy will be heavily reliant on a strong system and the coach/playcaller/quarterback relationship, Clausen will be reliant on the entire talent around him, and Bradford needs good health and to not take a pounding into the turf to make the adjustment to the next level.

McCoy tops Bradford and Clausen in this class, in my mind, only because there is no scouting error with him.  If a team exists that can give him exactly what he needs to be successful, systematically, he’s the surest thing in the NFL draft since 2004.  If that team doesn’t exist, then he’s going to flounder around as a backup in this league.  But he’s no worse of a prospect just because the team that can win with a winner doesn’t exist.  He’s the best prospect because of his college success, and the more talented types will find homes either with a team that will make them successful, or with a joke of an organization that offers nothing but struggles.

McCoy hardly has to worry about what Bradford and Clausen do from a team-building standpoint, which makes him the top dog from a projection sense.

Given that it now appears* that the Raiders will bring back head coach Tom Cable and quarterback JaMarcus Russell for the 2010 season, one of the biggest offseason storylines in the west will be how JaMarcus Russell will respond to having the pressure of a make or break 2010 season, and if Cable is the right man to get the best out of him.

*The Raiders continue to deny everything, as expected.  There’s no such thing as news for the Raiders, there are only obscure fluctuations of a single mind.

With all due respect to all the parties involved, Russell’s questionable work ethic is absolutely not an excuse for a guy who can’t play quarterback at this level.  This is not to deny that the guy has been lazy and that his laziness hasn’t been a potential explanation for why Russell is still so unrefined at this point in his career.  That’s probably quite true, and while it’s not something the Raiders could have necessarily predicted before the draft, Russell’s perceived laziness definitely distracts from the fact that he simply wasn’t a good pick.

Observers of the NFL, and the draft in particular, have been very slow to admit an evaluation flaw on Russell, but there is really little doubt at this point that Russell never should have been a first round pick, much less a first overall pick.  If he had been drafted in the 6th round, much more in-line with his talent, then his questionable work ethic might have been the difference between him hanging around the league for a while and getting bounced from the NFL after a season or two.

Before I just go off and crush Russell, the 2007 NFL Draft has yet to produce a resounding success.  Kevin Kolb and Brady Quinn have yet to receive legitimate shots as a starter on a competitive team (Kolb is still behind McNabb going into the final year of his rookie deal, Quinn will probably open somewhere as a starter next year, but could be traded by Cleveland).  Trent Edwards probably has accrued more total value than any QB in the class to date, but he lost his job in Buffalo to Ryan Fitzpatrick of all people, and could begin the backup portion of his career in 2010.  Tyler Thigpen and Matt Moore are hardly established NFL quarterbacks, but they’ve been at least as successful as anyone in this incredibly disappointing class, while John Beck and Drew Stantion are second rounders who have watched their NFL stock steadily decline since draft day.  Bad class, probably the worst since 2002 (if not before), and Russell is merely the headliner of the class.

But he was also supposed to be the “sure thing” of the group.  And there were some pretty strong indications before the draft that the team that drafted Russell wasn’t getting a very polished player with much except his big arm.  But for some teams, that was plenty.

I have a…I won’t even call it a theory, it’s merely something that I’m investigating…an idea that draft evaluations, particularly media evaluations, are heavily slanted in the direction of the scouting evaluations made by the team that picks first overall in any given year.  In 2007, I believe a lot of the positive vibes that were generated by the Russell camp before the draft came because is was widely accepted about a month before the draft that the Raiders had locked in on Russell at first overall, and so the pick needed to be justified by the media.  In the last five years, the Raiders have also locked in on Michael Huff, Darren McFadden, and Darrius Heyward-Bey near the top of the draft, which is a place the Raiders consistently pick because these draft choices never seem to work out.  Picks the Raiders have made have come under major criticism from media types, with the lone exception of the Russell pick, which was probably the worst of the four.

Russell benefited from the same standard that Reggie Bush and Matt Stafford have as offensive skill position players who have rose above the pile to be determined the most elite of offensive players in a draft class.  Stafford and Bush both largely avoided the criticism throughout the process that others in the same classes have been subjected to.  I believe this has to do with first overall pick status.  Once a single player grabs a chokehold on that pick, as Russell was able to do late in February, it does seem like the player’s camp gets a whole lot more control of the information that circulates regarding their client.  But when it’s the Raiders doing the evaluation, exactly how relevant has this proven to be?  What evidence was there that any competent organization was considering Russell in the top fifteen picks of the 2007 NFL drafts.  If the Raiders had taken Calvin Johnson instead, does Detroit take Russell?

Perhaps the Redskins take Russell at No. 6, but probably not.  Then who?  Buffalo, maybe?  Then KC or Jacksonville right around where the Browns traded up to get Quinn?  Perhaps the price for Quinn gets driven down by the falling Russell.  Now the Eagles don’t have to take Kevin Kolb with the first pick in the second round.  They can select Quinn there or wait on Kolb to the middle of the second.

Suddenly, if the Raiders don’t take Russell, the results of the 2007 draft start to fall in line with the common wisdom we’ve come to accept about the draft.  Russell has the potential to end up the most epic NFL bust ever, bigger than Ryan Leaf, but he was simply never a first overall type.  He was probably overrated by conventional wisdom in general, but the only reason that Russell was even considered a top ten pick was because the Raiders had the platform to convince people that this guy was the next big thing in the NFL.

Luckily for the principle of a rational universe, the Raiders have not had to pick at No. 1 in and NFL draft since 2007, which has greatly improved the quality of draft analysis, not coincidentally.

Then there’s the situational issues that have really screwed Russell since he was overdrafted.  He held out of his first training camp.  The Raiders changed coaches only four games into his first season as starter, and the offense that Lane Kiffin had built to protect Russell ended up being turned to expose him.  Then, this year, Tom Cable’s playcalling also reflected Kiffins desire to protect Russell, and because of the strides Russell was not able to make in the past, have resulted in a man that simply cannot process information at an NFL level.  The holdout is at least partially Russell’s fault, the Raiders’ mismanagement is anything but.  Both have killed Russell’s development, and when you take a marginal prospect with a single elite skill, and just refuse to commit to either surrounding him with talent or developing his as a player, or developing an offense that accentuates what he can do well, it’s hardly Russell’s fault that he’s going to bust out of this league badly.  In fact, the only thing Russell could (should?) have done differently is 1) not commit to the NFL draft as a raw junior, and 2) not hold out for a record contract.

Of course, if he doesn’t commit in a weak 2007 draft class, he doesn’t get all that money to play for the Raiders.  That would have been the best career move, but then again, some others might have a different idea of what defines a career.  Specifically: money.  Because by that measure, both Leaf and Russell have been wildly successful football players.

Instead, Russell’s character–his work ethic–is taking a major beating from pundits who want to put their collective finger on why a No. 1 overall pick has failed at the pro level so spectacularly.  But it’s not just one thing, and the intangibles Russell may or may not have are hardly relevant at all.  This was not a fourth round pick at quarterback who was considered to be on the margin as an NFL quarterback from day one.  This was a player who was always marginally skilled, but there was thought to be so much more.  When the Raiders, the McShay’s/Kiper’s/Mayock’s, and all of the relevant committees miss as spectacularly on a prospect as they did with this man, to internalize his failures into a single reason of the player’s own contol seems rather irresponsible.  There are a bunch of people to blame for this screw up, and most of them are still employed by the Raiders.

Tim Tebow is likely to be a very minor player in the 2010 NFL Draft, but should remain the biggest slam-dunk storyline of the entire process.  That process begins today in Mobile, AL, site of the Senior Bowl, where NFL coaching staffs have the honor of coaching rosters comprised of college seniors who will make their professional football debuts this fall.  Tebow accounts for roughly 50% of all media coverage of this event this year.

Despite this, we will not learn anything about Tebow this week.  ESPN’s Todd McShay has aleady begun the overanalysis of Tebow-minutae with this breakdown of his footwoork.  It’s Tebow-mania, and if you don’t catch it this week, you will eventually.

My advice: don’t rush into it.  Tebow is neither pre-destined to fail nor succeed in the NFL.  Because he is such a polarizing draft prospect, Tebow often doesn’t receive credit for being similar to all of the other quarterbacks in many ways, which he is.  Certain analyses I’ve read on Tebow often make this critical error of making observations about what Tebow does not do, and generalizing that he cannot do these things.  It’s true that a read progression is not part of Urban Meyer’s offense.  It’s true that Tebow drops the ball below his waist to throw.  It’s also true that a majority of his success at Florida was based in the option offense which does not (directly) translate to the NFL, and that he didn’t do much work from under center throughout his time as a Gator.

It’s also true that Tebow is an accurate passer with a pretty refined sense of the pocket for a college quarterback with mobility, a good arm, and has all the requisite college experience that can result in a player being undervalued in the draft process.  Tebow is actually very toolzy as a prospect, and could best be described as unrefined as a professional quarterback.  Many quarterbacks in that mold have failed, but the ones that have succeeded have done so with rare talent around them, with their superior motor skills being used to simply pull the trigger in a powerful offense.

If you want a strong comparable of a quarterback who can be successful in the Tebow mold, I wouldn’t look any further than former Central Florida quarterback Daunte Culpepper who came into a situation where he merely needed to distribute the ball to great receivers Randy Moss and Cris Carter for the Vikings.  Taking over in 2000, Culpepper was a major questi0n mark as to whether or not he could start as a second year player and offer the production that veterans Randall Cunningham and Jeff George had.

Culpepper was spectacular early on in his career.  The relevant portion of his career lasted for five years from 2000-2004, where Culpepper made three pro-bowls, throwing for 20 TDs (a rough measure of high offensive efficiency) in those three years.  Culpepper didn’t really get any better from 2000 to 2002 (surviving the “Randy ratio” in the process), then broke out in 2003, and had a record setting year in 2004.  His career effectively ended at that point.  After a 110.9 QB rating in 2004, Culpepper hasn’t made it to the realm of the average since then.  He was always bad about getting rid of the football, but whatever timing within the offense Culpepper had left him after his 2005 injury.  Anecdotally, I’ll say he played well in the Lane Kiffin west coast offense in 2007, but his stats don’t look any better that year than at any point from 2005-2009.  Culpepper has not been an NFL type quarterback at any point in the last five years, but is still in the league because of some great passing seasons from 2000 to 2004.

For Tebow, this would be a pretty easy model of “success” to follow in the NFL.  Culpepper sat for a year, then tore up the league as a sophomore before eating his lumps and developing into one of the league’s top QBs.  But when he lost his elite target on the outside, he was never again a valuable quarterback.  Culpepper’s style was hardly refined, and spoke to a college career where he was able to get by on immense talent and inferior competiton rather than by attention to detail and cognitive ability.  For Tebow’s college success to be written off as unsustainable in the NFL would ignore the fact that anyone who wants to try to put a Florida type offense in the NFL could easily sustain Tebow’s dominance.

Some quarterbacks will always look more comfortable in the shotgun than under the center.  This is true of both JaMarcus Russell and Alex Smith, and both were FIRST OVERALL picks in the draft.  Tebow isn’t going first overall, but he’ll enter the NFL already more adept at passing than Russell, and pretty close to what Smith has matured into.  Taking a flyer on Tebow near the end of the first round or the second will require a team to committ to what he does well, and build up the offense around him rather than to rely on his leadership to squeeze blood from a stone.

Nothing at the senior bowl is going to project that Tebow will succeed or fail in the NFL.  That doesn’t mean the game is useless: for about 85% of the players there, working with NFL coaches is going to give invaluable experience to kick off the draft season.  It’s fine if a team takes a look at Tebow’s delivery of the football and decides that they don’t want to be the ones to take him to the next level.  No team has ever made a mistake by NOT drafting someone, rather, critical mistakes are made when teams draft the wrong player.  Some teams have been slower than others to embrace college spread principles in their offensive scheme, and I do believe that for Tebow to be successful, he’ll have to be in an offense that embraces a few spread principles, as well as it’s pro-offense staples.

He’ll impress some people, disappoint some others, but ultimately, the team that decides to take him on draft day decided a long time ago that they should try to take their offense in a new direction.  It is January 25th.  The teams in the NFL that are hell-bent on making the status quo work in the NFL should not be considering Tim Tebow to solve their problem with smoke and leadership.  Their presence at the Sr. Bowl is not Tebow-related, and the teams that are considering him aren’t going to make any noise this early.  In short, nothing Tebow can do this week can erase 4 years of draft concerns from the Florida days, and if the reports are to be believed, Tebow has little to prove to non-believers to begin with.

NOT NEW YORK CITY, NY — Even with the flare of all the highly touted quarterbacks who have reached the NFL’s version of the final four with their teams (all in blowout fashion, mind you), it certainly seems like none of them have received quite the credit for there as Jets CB Darrelle Revis has.

It’s not like Revis isn’t deserving of the praise.  The Pitt product is a true shutdown player at a position where failure is widely accepted as a bump in the road, at a position where a pass interference flag, in context, is a method of defense against a worse result.  Revis can excel in technique and physicality at a position where a few bad beats means that you’re freely available talent.

Especially in a year where Packers counterpart Charles Woodson was awarded defensive player of the year, it’s hard to complain about Revis getting all this hubbub, especially when then known alternative is all-Favre, all the time.

Here’s the big issue: a lot of the credit is disingenuous.  Revis is this year’s darling of the playoff ball only because he plays his home games in the New York media market.  Can we seriously not have a player from that market who is quietly underrated for a change?

Why does Mark Teixiera have to be baseballs best switch hitter since Bernie Williams?  Why is it so hard to find any information about the first ten years of Wayne Gretsky’s career?  And can someone please tell me why Spike Lee is a larger part of the culture of NBA Basketball than, say, Flip Saunders has ever been?

Darelle Revis has a really good shot at the pro football hall of fame, if for no other reason than the fact that he’s been accepted as one of the league’s most elite players–at any position–at the age of 24.  Other shut-down type corners have had to wait, sometimes until after their best years, to get this type of recognition.  It hasn’t helped that Nnamdi Asomugha has never played on a winning team, but he wasn’t universally accepted as elite until age 27.  League types knew that Champ Bailey was a great talent as early as 2000, but he didn’t make his first all-pro team until he left a historically underachieving Washington team for Denver, who would only begin to underachieve after Bailey (age 26) arrived.  Asante Samuel was age-26 before he was elected to his first pro-bowl.  Al Harris was 33 when he was first elected to the pro bowl.

The only real comparable type of career path to Revis is, ironically, Woodson, who went to the pro bowl as a rookie and also all of his first four seasons in Oakland, a media sinkhole.  But Woodson had a New York-media tie that even Revis didn’t have in college, when he played at the nationally-syndicated University of Michigan and won the Heisman trophy as a defensive player.  Green Bay is not exactly Los Angeles or San Francisco, but with Woodson’s late career “revival” (assuming the talent ever really went anywhere), he figures to be Canton-bound, much like Revis.

It was hard to ever expect a pro football player to rise to prominence in the national spotlight faster than Eli Manning did during his career 180 in some city over 6 months starting in September of 2007.  But Revis’ ascension has happened perhaps quicker.  Revis didn’t get good overnight: he played in the pro bowl last season, he was a mid first round pick who might have taken the league by storm as a rookie in 2007 if not for a lengthy holdout and the aforementioned Manning saga.  There’s no room to dispute Revis’ greatness, just as no one would ever suggest that Favre or Peyton Manning already has their Canton-check written, and just waiting to be cashed (whether there will ever be a 5-year period in American history where Favre doesn’t play NFL football is anyone’s guess).

Seriously though, it might be time to give it a rest.  He plays in New York, the cliche-capital of Greatest City in the World.  Look at him and their foul-mouthed, well-fed, character of a coach!  Isn’t it great that this team–and city–just never goes away!  It’s the City that NEVER SLEEPS!!!1!

But for the rest of us who don’t feel any particular nationalistic pride with the people and writers of New York, Revis is just another really, really good pro football player, like a Josh Cribbs or a Jared Allen, that we’d really only like to hear about in the context of a great individual effort or next contract, and certainly nothing more.

I figure I should start with the argument AGAINST Chris Johnson for offensive MVP, at the very least to prevent this from becoming a Johnson puff piece.

Johnson may have been the best RB in the league this year, and he might have set the all time yards from scrimmage record, and he might have become only the 6th player in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards, but this may not have been the historic season it looks to be on the surface.

In 2007, Brian Westbrook rushed for 1,300+ yards and 7 TDs.  That doesn’t exactly jump off the page at you as a great season, but when you factor in receiving statistics, it’s clear that Westbrook absolutely lapped the field.  His 750+ receiving yards were nearly twice as many as any other back in the NFL, he scored 5 additional receiving TD’s and the combined result was one of the great seasons by a running back in NFL history.

Like Johnson, Westbrook’s team failed to make the postseason that year.  He received zero MVP votes.

In 2006, when LaDainian Tomlinson won the NFL MVP, the award could have just as easily gone to Larry Johnson or Steven Jackson for their historic seasons.  The year before that, there were about six running backs who were every bit as dominant as Chris Johnson was this season, but even though only one (Shaun Alexander) took home the league MVP, it wasn’t but three or four years ago where dominant seasons by an NFL running back were quite common.

It’s due to this context that Johnson (and to some extent, Steven Jackson) stand alone as dual threat players at the running back position in the NFL.  All the rest of the dominant backs from this era have been hampered by injury or have otherwise lost their dominance due to age.

Actually, the record that Johnson broke for yards from scrimmage was set in 1999 by Marshall Faulk…the year that Kurt Warner won the MVP.  Faulk would actually take the MVP the next season when Warner missed five games with injury.

The case against Johnson is essentially not that he hasn’t lapped the field as an NFL running back this year, but that lapping the field isn’t all that special.  It also needs to be noted that Johnson was not able to set the yards from scrimmage mark prior to his team being eliminated from playoff contention, meaning that at the point he set it, the team did not have to make concessions with Johnson in order to win a must win game.

Anyway, the whole idea is not that Johnson is not MVP worthy, but that some players with this type of season have won those post-season honors, and others have not.  And this year, a bunch of quarterbacks just happened to have excellent years.  I personally would have voted for four quarterbacks this year ahead of Chris Johnson, plus potentially a few defensive players who had standout years.

The primary point of this post was to point out that it was defensible to not give a single vote to Johnson for MVP, and it was just as defensible to give Johnson the offensive player of the year award by a healthy margin.  It, however, defies logic to make such a distinction between the awards so that a player like Johnson can get 80% of the vote for one award, and not a single vote for the other.

At the heart of the voting, selectors are still assessing value to make their determinations.  There are two different schools of thought to determine this value, in one way, Johnson comes out well ahead because of the field of competition he was up against, in the other, he kind of falls behind the quarterbacks who offer more total value with regard to the outcome of the game.  The idea with the voting is that you get a nice mix of these two schools of thought in the results: Johnson gets some votes, others vote for Manning, Brees or Rivers and you total the votes and make determinations.

I can perfectly understand the position that quarterbacks should win the MVP award most of the time because they perform on the largest stage of all football players and certainly this year, there were some exceptional performances from some exceptional players, every bit as strong as Johnson’s performance.

But EIGHTY PERCENT of the voting electorate for the NFL Offensive Player of the Year award decided that Johnson was the best offensive player in the NFL this season.  EIGHTY FREAKIN PERCENT.  I may disagree with the assessment to an extent, but when it’s apparently that clear to the people making the voting decisions that Johnson is the best offensive player in pro football, how can we explain four quarterbacks getting a vote for MVP, and Johnson getting none?

I have three operative theories, with the first one being obvious and the second two being mutually exclusive:

1) Johnson’s team only won 8 games. Sure, after starting 0-6, they managed to complete a .500 season, but people haven’t forgotten about that start.  If the Titans had gone 12-4, Johnson probably wins the MVP award near unanimously.  With that said, the difference between the MVP award and the OPOY award was…Jim Schwartz and Albert Haynesworth going elsewhere?  Um?  Okay.

2) The results of the MVP award might have been out prior to the collection of the OPOY voting. If this is the case, a bunch of individual voters would have known that, despite setting the all time record for yards from scrimmage fall, the man who broke the record got no votes for MVP.  These are both honors bestowed by the Associated Press, so I can’t even tell you if this is an accurate assumption.  The votes could have gone in at the same time for all I know.  Which leads me to my other possible reason:

3) Voting collusion. There’s no reasonable way that in the realm of probability that a bunch of voters could have acted individually and produced the logical disconnect observed between the two votes for awards.  Either Johnson was the best offensive player in football or he wasn’t.  In some years, most years actually, the variance in who is doing the voting could explain the gap between the vote totals in the two awards.  This year, that’s not a reasonable explanation.  Johnson received just under 80% of the votes for OPOY.  Perhaps the “real” percentage of AP football writers that believe that Johnson had a better year than all other offensive players is acutally 75%.  Or 60%.  Or 40%.  The further you get away from the actual vote, the less likely it can be explained by pure chance.  At some point, it becomes ridiculous.

I suspect collusion because it would be so easy to look at the Titans’ 8-8 finish, and decide that he should be taken out of the MVP race,  But for Johnson to receive no votes, it would be reasonable to suspect that prior to the voting, it was decided that the voters would not be using similar criteria to decide the offensive player of the year award vs. the MVP.  It’s not that the AP was unwilling to support Johnson’s excellence.  Not at all.  Rather, it’s much easier to reflect his dominance when his name is effectively removed from the award he was unlikely to win in the first place.

That much reflects the stigma of “winning” in individual awards.  Now, no player in a team sport have ever won a contest by themselves.  Some have come close, but it’s never been accomplished, and no contest between two teams will ever be won by a single person.  But that’s the flaw of the MVP award.  People knew as recently as Week 16 that Johnson could not win the MVP award, that he could not beat out other offensive players that many believe were less impressive than he was this season.  And so, rather than offering him 13 votes (or whatever) and a distant second place finish to Peyton Manning, I believe that there was a strong suggestion to not consider the running back from the 8-8 team in the MVP race.

I believe that to be wrong, but it hardly takes away from Johnson’s dominance.  I don’t think he’s the best player in pro football, but this season, Chris Johnson has been a player for the ages.  At least one of our post-season AP awards speaks to that.

There’s a lot of players whom I feel should be in the hall of fame who will never get the chance.

Let me qualify: I’m not talking about Russ Grimm or Ray Guy or other semi-finalists who get close to the hall of fame every season.  I’m talking about the Shawn Springs’ and Rich Gannon’s of the world: guys who have done remarkable things for the game of football over very short lengths of time, but ultimately don’t have the standard-level “hall-of-fame resume” and never really will.  I, obviously, favor a much more inclusive hall 0f fame as a solution to making the questionable decisions for selection.

In many ways, the Hall of Fame case for Kurt Warner falls into the same category of a career where his aggregate statistics don’t jump off the page.  Warner has thrown for fewer career yards than non-HOF bound active players such as Kerry Collins and Donovan McNabb, and he has thrown for fewer touchdowns than McNabb and Tom Brady, who despite being Hall of Fame bound, still has a good six or seven years left on his NFL career as a starter.

As recently as 2006, Warner would have been the perfect example of a player that, I felt, should have absolutely gone to the Hall of Fame, but had no chance.  In a five year period from 2002-2006, Warner played in zero playoff games, had only three fourth quarter/OT game winning drives, and watched his sack rate push above 9.0% for a five year period.  At age 35, there was every reason in the world to believe that Warner was done.  I would have pushed for hall of fame inclusion based only on his 1999-2001 seasons, but historically, three excellent seasons has never been quite enough to get anyone into Canton.

Nevermind that these seasons were beyond excellent: they were historic.  Warner led the league in yards per attempt each of those three seasons, in net yards per attempt, and in adjusted net yards per attempt each of those years.  Warner led the league in passing yards/game twice, and has never posted high interception totals, despite playing in a Dick Vermeil/Mike Martz offense.  Three Vermeil/Martz quarterbacks have led the league in INTs in the last ten years (Trent Green, Marc Bulger, Jon Kitna), but not Warner.

Yet, despite that awesomeness, history was on the verge of forgetting Kurt Warner, much like it will eventually forget Mark Brunell, who from 1996-1999 was as good as anyone in football, even Brett Favre.  Brunell had the same mid-career lull as Warner, where he really didn’t play all that well, before going to revive his career in Washington.  This is where their career paths diverge.

Despite periodic effectiveness in Washington, that trip has sufficiently derailed any shot that Brunell had at the Hall.  He actually threw for a career high of touchdowns when in Washington in 2005, and got off to one of his best career starts the next year, but ended up benched for good at mid-season because the team was uncompetitive, and the team had spent a first round draft pick on Jason Campbell prior to the 2005 season.  Brunell is remembered in Washington more for the failure of the 2004 season than the success of the 2005 one, and seems to still take an unfair share of the blame for a 2006 season that was de-railed by a league-worst defense.

For Warner, his decision to sign with Denny Green’s Cardinals certainly appeared to be the kiss of death for his career, but when Green was fired at the conclusion of the 2006 season it was the new hire, Ken Whisenhunt who went where no one expected: the graveyard of lost careers.

Over the last three years, Warner has arguably done the best work of his illustrious career.  Sure, he hasn’t quite won a Super Bowl for the Cardinals, and his numbers have lacked the MVP punch of his numbers from St. Louis, but he’s doing it this time around without multiple Hall of Famers on his offense.

The “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams featured at least five potential hall of famers: Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Marshall Faulk, Orlando Pace, and Warner.  The 2008 Cardinals, who very nearly won the Super Bowl, have Warner, Larry Fitzgerald, and Edgerrin James, depending on how loose you want to get here.  James was hardly more than a replacement level player in the 2008 season anyway, while all of those potential hall of fame Rams were in their prime when Warner played for them.

Despite the obvious decline in quality of cast, Warner’s numbers from the last three years remain near the top of the league.  In fact, up until the last two seasons, the knock on Warner his whole career was that if you hit him hard enough, frequently enough, he could be pressured into coughing up the football.  Since 2008: Warner has been intercepted less frequently than 1 in 40 passes, and has been sacked on fewer than 1 in 20 dropbacks.

At age 38, Warner has no weaknesses.  According to the Football Outsiders DYAR statistic, Warner had the best game ever in the Brett Favre era with his unbelievable playoff performance against the Packers.  He became one of only two playoff quarterbacks in the last 15 years to throw for more touchdowns than incompletions in a given game.  And with retirement breathing down his neck, we could be seeing the final chapter of a guy who is perhaps one of the best ten quarterbacks ever to play the game, and a guy who still appears to be one of the five best quarterbacks in the game of football.  All this despite watching the amount of quarterback talent in the league triple over the time he has been a starting quarterback in the NFL.

At this point, the argument for Warner is simple.  Don’t worry about the counting stats.  He didn’t get his career started until 1998, and had a five year lull right in the dead middle of his career.  Doesn’t matter.  Warner threw for 20 or more touchdowns in six different seasons.  In 1982 and 1972, no quarterback in the NFL threw for 20 touchdowns.  In NFL history, only two quarterbacks have thrown for more yards per game than Dan Marino:  Peyton Manning, and Kurt Warner.  Warner’s career QB Rating of 93.7 is third all-time among quarterbacks drafted (or signed) prior to 2003, behind only Peyton Manning, and Steve Young.

More succinctly, here’s how you can sum up the case for Warner:  the two quarterbacks of the era most synonymous with hall of fame futures are Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.  That’s perfectly fair, but just remember that the two best quarterbacks of the era are Peyton Manning…and Kurt Warner.

Best game: Eagles and Cowboys.  Worst game: Whatever Jim Nantz and Phil Simms are calling.  Lets get right to the picks.

NY Jets at Cincinnati

After a Week 15 loss to the Falcons, the Jets needed a minor miracle to make the postseason.  After *finding a way* to beat the 14-0 Colts the next week , they not only were likely to make postseason, but needed only to win their final game to get the 5th seed.  The Jets nearly lost everything by virtue of being swept by Miami: any scenario in which Miami had even tied the Jets in record would have eliminated New York from postseason contention.

The Bengals have been in for awhile now.  The story of this season was that, in perhaps the NFL’s toughest division, the Bengals beat everyone to go 6-0.  Of course, they benefitted from playing every division opponent on their schedule prior to December, at which point, they have gone back to playing Bengals football.

One of the reasons that this match-up is interesting is that both teams approach the game uniquely, but largely the same.  Both teams use a lot of 6 OL sets, and have strong offensive lines.  Cincinnati’s Kyle Cook and New York’s Nick Mangold might be the two best centers in the game today.  The Bengals are finding out about Lavarneus Coles what the Jets knew last season.  It’s hard to quantify what they are missing with T.J. Houshmandzadeh in Seattle, but I’d imagine it’s quite a bit.  The Bengals passing game is hardly the terror it once was, in fact, it’s probably one of the ten weakest passing games in the league.

It’s got nothing on the Jets non-existant passing game, though.  The Jets are the kind of team that if they throw 20 times in a game, they’re in trouble.

For Cincinnati, they really couldn’t ask for a better match-up to win their first playoff game since 1990.  The Jets are the NFL’s best defense, but they are a team that can be beaten through methodical football focused on a rushing attack.  It’s easy to predict how this game will be won, since both teams play the same game, but it’s hard to predict who will win it.  I’m flipping my pick from most of this week and taking the Bengals.  I think the Jets are the better team, but the Bengals got a big advantage by getting to see all of Rex Ryan’s exotic blitzes last week.  At home, I think they’ll play well enough to make Mark Sanchez a factor, in which case, it may not be all that close.

Philadelphia at Dallas

If history was to dictate this game, the Cowboys don’t have a fighting chance.  Donovan McNabb and Andy Reid have never failed to win at least one postseason game in any year they have made it to the playoffs.  Neither Wade Phillips nor Tony Romo have ever won a playoff game.  Cowboys…drought…1996…etc.

More recent history suggests the Cowboys do have a chance, because they swept the Eagles to win the division this year.  Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this game is the fact that both of these teams are talented enough to go all the way and win the super bowl THIS season, but obviously, the loser of this game will be done before they can get started.  The Eagles are in a bit of a bind, because even if they can draw up a plan to defeat the Cowboys, they just have the Saints next week in the Superdome, a bad match-up for the pass-happy Eagles.  First things first though, they need to find a way to beat Dallas.

The key to the whole game is the Dallas defense.  If it shows up at it’s strongest, like it has played most of the second half of the season, the Cowboys are a very legit threat to beat the Eagles and go all the way to New Orleans for a rematch.  The problem comes if they fail to get pressure on McNabb in the first half of the game, and he starts to hit those long plays downfield, the Cowboys simply won’t be able to sustain against the Philadelphia defense.  This should be a better game than either of the two regular season match-ups, but I’d be foolish to put any faith in the Cowboys here.  The Eagles will win.

Baltimore at New England

I don’t think Wes Welker’s injury is going to limit the Pats very much.  For one thing, he had become a limiting factor of sorts on the Pats offense: so good at what he does that the team loses balance and just becomes a series of Welker option routes.  Even when Brady successfully got the ball to Moss this year, it seemed forced.  In fact, some of Brady’s best throws to Moss were not even dictated by the coverage at all.  With Welker out, and Julian Edelman playing his role in the offense, it would be easy to think of the Patriots as a one dimensional team, but this gives them an opportunity to re-commit the running game and let Brady get back to doing what he does well.

I think if the Pats can overcome the Ravens in this one, they would have to be considered one of the most dangerous teams in the field.  The problem, particularly with the Welker injury, is that the Ravens are a very underrated football team that has a great chance to strike while the Patriots are trying to identify a go-to play or two that they can win with in the playoffs.  When the Patriots were winning all their titles back at the beginning of this decade, they were doing so with barely functional receivers, sort of like the group that the Ravens have now.  Derrick Mason is your Troy Brown equivalent.  Mark Clayton is David Givens.  Kelly Washington is, Deion Branch?  Anyway, the Ravens have a passing game again now that Todd Heap has resurfaced as a receiver after 4 years of blocking hibernation.  Having two NFL quality offensive tackles will do that for you.

Ray Rice is the reason that the Patriots will not overcome the Ravens, dangerous as they are can be.  The explosive second year back is a primetime performer.  Though this game will be played in the middle of the day, Rice and backfield mate Willis McGahee are playing as well as any tandem of backs in the NFL right now, and not just on running plays.  The duo is great on passing plays as well.  The Patriots defense figures to be helpless to slow down these two plus Heap, and while I can’t tell you what to expect from the Pats offense, I’m probably more confident that the Ravens will win this one than with any other pick this week.

Green Bay at Arizona

For the year, Green Bay has long been the best of these two teams, and there’s really no doubt that they should have a slight edge going into this match-up.  But the Cardinals have been here before.  And while there’s no Jake Delhomme in the second round to help propel this team towards the super bowl, Green Bay is an opponent that definately favors the Cardinals.

For one thing, Arizona is an even better coached team than they were a year ago.  Ken Whisenhunt is a constant, one of the best coaches in the NFL, but both of his coordinators are better preparers than Clancy Pendergast and Todd Haley were a year ago.  Adrian Wilson is a superstar once again in this defense.  Darnell Dockett is probably the best, or second best, 5-technique in the NFL now that Richard Seymour plays in a 4-3 front.  And this season could be the final opportunity for Kurt Warner to present to the world his case for being a hall-of-famer.

The Packers are excellent at designing pressures to get hits on Warner, but this is a Cardinals team that can choose to punish them with the run, or beat them with the passing game.  It looks like Anquan Boldin will miss this one, but Steve Breaston is more of a mismatch for the Packers to deal with anyway.

I expect Aaron Rodgers to be marginalized in this game by a strong Arizona pass rush, and soft, yet complex zone coverage schemes that take away the Packers’ ability to use their speed to strike quickly.  Ryan Grant has a good chance to be successful on the ground, but I don’t believe Green Bay will stick with the run long enough for it to matter.  For the Packers to win, they’ll have to find a way to generate points with their defense.  It can happen, but until it does, I like the Cardinals.

Mark Sanchez, in his embryonic form, is hoping to become the next Rex Grossman.  Believe it or not, he’s hoping for more than that.

Sanchez would love to be the next quarterback with a season QB rating under 77.0 to lead his team to the Super Bowl, if not to win it.  The issue with that is that Sanchez has struggled so much as a rookie that even the formula to reach the super bowl paved by contemporaries such as Grossman and Trent Dilfer doesn’t hold up for Mark Sanchez.  It’s true that no rookie quarterback has ever reached the super bowl, but more and more that fact seems to become irrelevant.  With Joe Flacco reaching the AFC Championship game last year, it’s believable that a rookie QB can reach the super bowl, if his team can hide him.

The Jets are masters of deception.  They beat the Colts and Bengals to go to the playoffs in consecutive weeks without ever asking Sanchez to do anything.  If they are to continue on through the playoff march, they will have to successfully continue to hide Sanchez every week of the postseason.  This, contrary to most assumptions, requires the offense to be even more complex than if Sanchez were able to carry his weight.  When plans to hide the quarterback fail, it often goes awry because of a desire to simplify the offense so that the young gun can contribute.

That shouldn’t be the Jets’ plan of attack.  A simplification of an NFL offense just makes it easy to defend.  That’s not something the Jets can afford.  When you have a fringe passer in Sanchez combined with a ball dropper like Braylon Edwards, and no real third receiver, the last thing that an offense like the Jets should do is get simplistic.  The Jets need to get creative in how they hide Mark Sanchez.  I think they get major creativity points for trashing the Bengals by using Brad Smith creatively including on straight handoffs, basically telling the Bengals they will run the ball, but keeping misdirection as a viable option to compensate.

However, one of the primary reasons the Jets were able to execute was the presence of a rookie safety named Tom Nelson in the starting lineup, fresh into the starting lineup (bonus points to anyone who can name the only other safety in the AFC North from Arlington Heights, IL), was sorely out of place in his role in run support.  Playing a gap for the first time in his career against the Jets 6-in-the-box schemes, the Jets did not need to pass.  Nelson will move back into a package role next week as Chris Crocker returns to the starting lineup, which means the Jets need to take their offensive gameplan to the next level to protect Sanchez.

The one schematic asset the team has every week is a powerful offensive line, one of the very few remaining the the NFL that can execute a man blocking scheme, and do so with any success.  When the team adds Wayne Hunter, a third offensive tackle to the mix, it becomes the premier power football team in the NFL.  If the Jets’ power game has a weakness, it’s that rookie third round pick Shonn Greene isn’t the complementary back he needs to be at this point in his career.  Thomas Jones is at the very end of a very long, highly successful career that will fall just short of hall of fame consideration.  Jones is third in the NFL in rushing yards this year, but at 31 years of age, this could be his final trip to the postseason.  The Jets will lean on him one last time, but it’s hard not to see Leon Washington as a feature back next year if he can make a successful recovery from injury.

The Jets are one of the few teams in the NFL who can still use pulling lineman to their advantage, and it was a big part of their success this season.  Ultimately though, this is just another rare deceptive tactic the Jets utilize to marginalize the effect of Sanchez on a game.  Next season, the goal of the offense will expand to get Sanchez involved in the productive phases of the game as the Jets move from a rushing team to more of a passing team.  In the immediate, it’s easy to like their odds for short term success because of the ability that they’ve shown in the past to squeeze above average contribution from an offense that can’t throw the football.

Like a video game with a strong linear-progression, every week from here on out will get more and more difficult for the Jets to win without relying on Mark Sanchez.  But if the Jets are the experienced players they appear to be, they’ll stick to the plan down to their last life, and will remain one of the most fascinating tales to watch in the entire playoff field.

I’m not sure that the 2010 National Championship Game was the single finest hour for the Alabama Crimson Tide, but in the context of an exclamation point to a nearly flawless season, it was fitting.  Their opponent game into the game featured the most complete quarterback in college football, a vaunted passing attack, a fast defense, and an undefeated record coming in.  Even when Colt McCoy left after only two plays with a shoulder injury, every other thing that Texas promised to bring was on display in this game.  Alabama’s opponent fought hard, as their opponents had so many times this year.

No one was surprised when it wasn’t enough.  No one was ever able to muster up enough to beat the Tide.  With all due respect to the Texas Longhorns, as good as any team in the rest of the nation this year, Alabama didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination after the SEC Championship game.  Both of Alabama’s most impressive victories this year came in the Georgia Dome: the first against a fast, talented Virginia Tech team, the second obviously against Florida.  It’s not that Texas wasn’t every bit as good as those teams, just that neither of those powerhouses got all that close to taking down the Tide.

In many ways, Texas fought tougher and got closer than any of Alabama’s prior opponents.  Sure, there were some in-season scares.  Auburn led Alabama with two minutes to go in the Iron Bowl.  Sure, in the middle of the season, Tennessee and LSU were both close enough to beating Nick Saban’s squad to which we could see some cracks in the armor.  Perfection is something that isn’t meant to be obtained.  The Alabama Crimson Tide were hardly perfect in 2009, merely the best college football team we have seen in many years.

If Boise State is the reason that College Football should institute a playoff system, Alabama is the counter-argument.  Their last title came 17 years prior to this season, clearly, they did not enter the season with a particular advantage with the polls.  They only entered with a significant scheduling advantage, which is to say, any season in which Alabama had gone undefeated against this schedule in any given year, they’ll play in the national championship.  In the case of Boise State, the institution of a playoff system offers an oppotunity to win a championship through merit, that wouldn’t otherwise be there.  Opportunity, however, is a zero-sum game.  For Boise to receive a percentage of that opportunity, teams who play the toughest schedules have to lose some of that opportunity.  That’s Alabama, Va. Tech, Miami, and Florida, those SEC and ACC powerhouse programs.  In the eyes of many, the same playoff that gives opportunity to teams that make it because of soft schedules just offers up potential pitfalls to teams that would be in the championship game in a bowl system.

In other words, a proponent for playoff system specifically implies that we don’t know who the best team is after a whole regular season.  Is this realistic?  After Alabama had beaten down on Florida in the SEC Championship, were they a true no. 1 team, or a nominal no. 1?  If there had been any doubt, they took care of it on Thursday night.

In historical context, I think we can call this the best Nick Saban college football team, ever.  The 2003 LSU Tigers split the championship with USC.  The next year, USC was even more dominant in 2004.  I’ll submit: that was the greatest college football team of the decade, with 2001 Miami a close second.  Has there been a team more impressive than the 2009 Crimson Tide since then?  2005 Texas went undefeated and upset the heavily-favored Trojans in the National Title game.  The next three National Champs were one or two loss teams, not to take anything away from them.  As for dominant teams that didn’t win the national championship, I’ll submit that only 2006 LSU would be competitive with 2009 Alabama, and they had two losses.  Given all that, I think it can be declared that Alabama is the strongest college football team we have seen in the last five years.

With this victory, Saban has moved much closer to becoming a college football legend, QB Greg McElroy has yet to lose a game as a starter, and RB Mark Ingram bucks a recent (likely meaningless) trend of Heisman winners underperforming on the games’ biggest stage.  And once Colt McCoy was unable to return for the Longhorns, the only thing for an impartial fan to enjoy in this game was a breif fling with destiny encompassed by utter dominance.