RDS11
On the Game Day Roster
- Joined
- May 11, 2008
- Messages
- 428
- Reaction score
- 248
On Pro-Football Reference, there's a nice table called ' Advanced Passing' that gives a base comparison, season by season, of the player versus his peers. A truly dominant player, a HOF, should have most of these above 100 (100 being the league average). Unfortunately for Bledsoe, stats do not show he was dominant. Yes, his passing volume stats are quite impressive, but throwing often doesn't mean he is an HOFer.
When comparing Bledsoe to Moon and Fouts, its easy to see that Fouts and Moon were among the best of their era, Bledsoe not so much.
To Bledsoe's credit, he took 3 teams that were bad and made them much better in a very short time period. Pats went from 2-14 before he was drafted to 10-6 in his 2nd year. Bills went from 3-13 to 8-8 in his first year, Cowboys from 6-10 to 9-7. But he wasn't good enough to make his teams legitimate playoff material each year. The fact that he never took a team to the playoffs after the 1998 season has to be accounted for.
Btw, Bledsoe was already eligible for HOF this past year (so he won't be a first ballot for sure) and was eliminated from the list of candidates pretty soon in the process. Unless there is a very weak class coming in the nest few years, I think his chances of reaching the finalist stage are pretty dim.
I'm a big Bledsoe fan, and recognize he was a big factor why the Pats started becoming relevant. People in this thread have downplayed his impact in the 2001 AFC Championship game, as if throwing a TD while starting at the 40 was no big deal (not mentioning that Brady threw for just 1 TD for the whole postseason that year, so it's not like it was a gimme scoring from the 40). He didn't play perfect (far from it, with the hook throwaway and all), but he also had an incredible long pass to Patten, throwing from near the end zone, that was dropped by Patten on what could have been a 95-tard TD. But the bottom line is that while it was good enough to get the team to the Super Bowl, its Brady who started SB36 and won it. And that's what we all remember.
While Bledsoe is a well deserving Pats HOFer, he just never was a dominant player, and doesn't deserve to go to Canton.
When comparing Bledsoe to Moon and Fouts, its easy to see that Fouts and Moon were among the best of their era, Bledsoe not so much.
To Bledsoe's credit, he took 3 teams that were bad and made them much better in a very short time period. Pats went from 2-14 before he was drafted to 10-6 in his 2nd year. Bills went from 3-13 to 8-8 in his first year, Cowboys from 6-10 to 9-7. But he wasn't good enough to make his teams legitimate playoff material each year. The fact that he never took a team to the playoffs after the 1998 season has to be accounted for.
Btw, Bledsoe was already eligible for HOF this past year (so he won't be a first ballot for sure) and was eliminated from the list of candidates pretty soon in the process. Unless there is a very weak class coming in the nest few years, I think his chances of reaching the finalist stage are pretty dim.
I'm a big Bledsoe fan, and recognize he was a big factor why the Pats started becoming relevant. People in this thread have downplayed his impact in the 2001 AFC Championship game, as if throwing a TD while starting at the 40 was no big deal (not mentioning that Brady threw for just 1 TD for the whole postseason that year, so it's not like it was a gimme scoring from the 40). He didn't play perfect (far from it, with the hook throwaway and all), but he also had an incredible long pass to Patten, throwing from near the end zone, that was dropped by Patten on what could have been a 95-tard TD. But the bottom line is that while it was good enough to get the team to the Super Bowl, its Brady who started SB36 and won it. And that's what we all remember.
While Bledsoe is a well deserving Pats HOFer, he just never was a dominant player, and doesn't deserve to go to Canton.
