LiveBall Sports

There’s really not much to look forward to in tonight’s San Diego-Jacksonville Monday night thriller, but allow me to give you at least one interesting storyline: the quarterbacks.

I really liked Blaine Gabbert coming out of Missouri.  I thought that a number of teams that really could have used a pocket passer, and passed on Gabbert when maybe they would have been wiser to have taken him.  Teams, in their infinite wisdom, passed on Gabbert.

Thing is, Blaine Gabbert hasn’t been good at all this year.  This has prompted “respected” observers to make sweeping value statements, which is irresponsible at best.  Gabbert’s got one fundamental issue, which he shares with fellow recent draft picks Colt McCoy, Sam Bradford, Tim Tebow, and Joe Flacco all struggle to use the NFL pocket.  Flacco’s maturity suggests that pocket awareness can obviously be learned over time, just repeating movements in the pocket.  The idea that a player’s flaws as a rookie will manifest into larger problems later in his career are most obviously asinine.

Still, we can look at Gabbert statistically and compare him to other rookie passers who have struggled recently.  If there’s any takeaway from a list of similar rookie passers, it’s that Gabbert may have been overdrafted by Jacksonville.  David Carr is the only similar recent passer who was a first round draft pick, and he played for an expansion team.  Typically though, here’s the thing to keep in mind: Gabbert plays for maybe the only team in the league for whom he would have passed more than 250 times this year.  Switch Jake Locker and Gabbert and you may be looking at an even worse quarterback situation in Jacksonville, while Gabbert is still sitting behind Matt Hasselbeck.  Same thing if you switch Blaine Gabbert and Colin Kaepernick.

Gabbert played the worst game of his pro career last week against Houston, and he’s made some really dreadful decisions to be sure over the course of this year, but I didn’t see a whole lot of evidence on tape to suggest he cannot play at this level.  Gabbert isn’t making the Jacksonville Jaguars any better right now, but the elite defense to get Jacksonville to the playoffs next season appears to be in place, and with Maurice Jones-Drew still in his prime, the Jaguars simply need to put the offense they want around Gabbert, water, and reap the growth desired next year.  I think Jacksonville is in a much more desirable situation than the Tennessee Titans are, personally.  The Colts might have the best (young) quarterback in the division as soon as next year, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see Blaine Gabbert enjoy more early career success than Andrew Luck because the Colts might require a total rebuild on both sides of the ball.  The dreadful nature of the Jaguars offense and the upheaval of the coaching staff is giving the illusion that the Jags are further from contention than they really are.

The biggest thing for Gabbert is that he will entire 2012 with a full season of playing experience and will need to rework his pocket mechanics over the offseason.  I did not have high hopes for Gabbert as a player this year, but presuming a full offseason next year and shrewd offensive acquisitions by the Jacksonville Jaguars with an eye on rebuilding their passing game, the transition from bad rookie to competent NFL quarterback should go fairly smoothly.  And I think that people doubting the difficulty of a transition by commenting on the sustainability of such struggles will look typically foolish a year from now.

I thought it was pretty clear cut that the two best teams in college football this year were LSU and Oklahoma State.  That was really the case all year.  Oklahoma State consistently played top competition in the Big XII.  They beat all comers  Alabama played two of the top teams in college football in their own division.  They split.

Now, the important thing is we have a system that officially recognizes SEC champion LSU as the best team in the nation this season.  If we had stayed up all night arguing the injustice that is Alabama being ranked second overall in the nation, even though they are a clearly more qualified pick than Stanford, or Boise State, or Houston, or Oregon, we would have missed the fact that the BCS typically gets it right.  LSU is the best.  There’s no real competitor.  Having a championship game because of indecision is not necessary.  Everyone knows who no. 1 is.  They just happen to be contractually obligated to play it.

The game they got though is a particularly boring one.  LSU and Alabama play stylistically similar.  Both defenses are amongst the very best in the nation.  Alabama has one NFL starter among their skill positions, who is a true difference maker when he is in: Trent Richardson.  When he comes to the sideline, Alabama cannot move the ball.  They cannot kick the ball.  Their quarterback cannot run or throw the ball.  Alabama is a brutally efficient college team, they are not an interesting college team.  If LSU is any better, it’s because their dominance is almost artful in nature.  LSU has more talent at the receivers than in the backfield, and their offensive line is not great by SEC standards, but they choose to run it because it defines who they are as a team.  It doesn’t make LSU particularly interesting to watch, but they are an easy team to appreciate.

LSU-Oklahoma State might have been the best of all the BCS bowls.  As it is, LSU-Alabama will be the third best game of the series.  LSU should be expected to win comfortably.  They are the better team.  Furthermore, I don’t know how much Alabama can actually do to close the gap from last time, other than to run Trent Richardson on some type of Olympic distance running program so he never comes off the field.  Absent that, I think LSU wins very comfortably.

I feel like LSU would have won easily against Oklahoma State as well.  And no, I don’t think the score would have been 39-36.  I think LSU could have easily exposed Brandon Weeden in the first half, and in the second half would have dominated Oklahoma State with their depth.  I think OSU would have put up many touchdowns, but would have been chasing the whole game.  Alabama at least is unlikely to be put out to pasture int he second half.  Still, will the game be in doubt at any point?

More concerning to me is the fact that four of the top nine teams in the BCS standings will not play in BCS bowls.  What is the point of this charade?  One vs. Two?  I guess.  After doing an awful job of sorting out the top five teams, I’m not sure the BCS standings have a purpose.  Arkansas and South Carolina can’t make it by rule, which I suppose makes sense since if you are going to have automatic qualifiers, there has to be some system of making deep conferences ineligible past a point.  But the bigger issue is Boise State and Kansas State both didn’t make it.  Uh, what?  The B1G Ten and ACC both received at large berths?  REALLY?  A team that failed win the ACC is in the BCS?  I’ll go say the obvious: Virginia Tech is less qualified than Houston is to be in a BCS game this year.

The BCS failed to provide compelling or even fair match-ups in multiple games this year.  Is this specifically the fault of the BCS?  Perhaps not.  College football may be in danger of over-saturating the demand for its product in certain geographic regions of the United States.  They consistently must pander to the masses in order to defend the Bowl system.  Does that hurt the sport?  Probably.  Is that wrong? Unfortunately so.  Will any of this matter when LSU is holding the crystal ball?  The BCS executive committee is gambling that no, none of this will matter to anyone in a month.  Life will go on.  And history suggests: they are probably right.

If I’m a Florida Miami Marlins fan, I’m pretty excited this morning: my team just made it’s biggest free agent signing in at least a decade, plucking SS Jose Reyes from the division rival New York Mets.  It remains the front runner to sign Chicago White Sox LHP Mark Buehrle.  The Marlins are still apparently in on the biggest fish in the pond, Cardinals 1st baseman Albert Pujols.  All of a sudden, wait…wha?  The Marlins are throwing their weight around.

You may notice that even though I typically use this blog as a medium for analyzing pro sports transactions, I try not to keep a running ledger of every move made by a baseball team.  But for the Marlins, this is a significant shift away from rhetoric about spending more to develop a ball club and a fanbase, and towards the actual action of building a larger market club.  When a team like the Yankees is involved in a three way trade, sure, that’s worth discussing.  When they sign Bartolo Colon or Freddy Garcia, or the Red Sox sign Marco Scutaro, it doesn’t and shouldn’t register on the public consciousness.  Despite my best efforts, LiveBall Sports has never been a baseball heavy blog.

Reyes to the Marlins is different.  We’re talking about a team that doesn’t draw well moving out on a financial limb with no guarantee of return on investment.  In fact, I will argue that this move will not generate even $50 million in additional ticket and jersey revenue for the Marlins, though I think they will not feel the financial impact of the trade right away.  The more interesting angle, to me, has to do with the Marlins and winning.  Manager Ozzie Guillen was the first big fish to fall.  Now: Reyes, and probably Buerhle could be additions to the club.  Hanley Ramirez is still a Marlin.  This move happens to solve the most gaping hole on the baseball diamond for the last two years: third base.

Or does is?  Well, yes it does, because the remarkably healthy and consistent Hanley Ramirez will slide over that way.  Sure, his long term contract with the Marlins doesn’t look like quite as much of a bargain at the hot corner, but there are maybe two third baseman in the National League who offer more value with the bat than Ramirez: Washington’s Ryan Zimmerman, and New York’s David Wright.  Pablo Sandoval is still very young, and Placido Polanco is still very productive, but neither is (or ever was) Hanley Ramirez.

But the bigger issue here is Reyes, who wasn’t healthy at all in 2009 or 2010.  He was then sensational in 2011, but to me, I’m just not sure how much more Reyes has to offer.  I am guilty of thinking Reyes may have been done as an everyday player prior to last season.  While that was proven obviously incorrect, $106 million is a lot to give to a guy who likely could never justify that.  It’s even more to give when you consider: these are the Marlins.

While there is clearly something brewing in Miami with Reyes joining Ramirez, Mike Stanton, and Gaby Sanchez in the same lineup, and it is easy to see how a team like the Marlins (or Braves, or Nationals) might start looking at the rusting on the armor of the Philadelphia Phillies and think that now is the time to build a perennial contender, I am highly skeptical that Reyes does anything to make the Marlins a contender of the highest order.  I think it just makes them a spender of the highest order.  Reyes heads into 2012 as the premier shortstop in the National League, but I don’t see too many ways he emerges as such in October.

I just don’t see any reason to believe the Marlins are going to allocate enough cash efficiently enough to overtake the Phillies this year, and you may have realized that the Braves have totally rebuilt their farm system and that the Nationals are also flexing their financial muscle, except with a team that now includes a healthy Steven Strasburg and Bryce Harper now in the high minors.  Reyes is a much better bang for buck signing than Jayson Werth was, but that’s not the real competition now for a Marlins team that has struggled to draw even better than three other MLB teams over the last four years.

The Marlins are pretty much just competing against themselves here, because moves like this are unsustainable on their current budget.  And sure, they were just pocketing a pretty hefty revenue sharing check instead of spending it on winning, and yes, I think Ozzie Guillen might have won tougher divisions with less talent than he is going to have in Miami this year.  But while year one jersey sales should support this deal, you know that it is also coming in tandem with other big free agent contracts.  And yet we have every reason to be skeptical that a winning Marlins team will follow.

Guillen is among the best at his job, as is Reyes and as is Pujols and Buerhle.  You can see clearly what the Marlins are trying to accomplish here.  But I can also say that I don’t think it will succeed, because like so many teams before them, the Marlins are trying to leap a lofty development curve by throwing cash around.  And since the MLB free agent market is typically a costly version of players in their prime vs. former superstars: take your pick, the effort to target select talents is admirable.  It may work out on the financial side after all.  I can offer a cost-benefit analysis, but I don’t have all the relevant information.

In terms of winning baseball games: Reyes is a costly investment, and I don’t know how confident I’d be that the wins the Marlins are chasing are going to come soon, if ever.