Re: La Canfora: Pats making late push for Bodden - Texans and Steelers in it
If you ignore the age drop off by pretending that injury improvement overcomes that, and you then assume that no player will get injured this season, you can assert that "clearly" statement.
Not at all, I assume that players will get injured. Notice that I didn't say anything about Brady, Wilfork, Mayo, Vollmer, Springs, Neal, Tate, McKenzie, or Green, all of whom had injuries that significantly affected their play last year and caused them to miss games in all but Brady's case. If I was 'assuming that no player will get injured this season', I would have mentioned them.
Instead, I pointed out two specific guys who historically aren't injury prone, yet suffered an injury early in the year last year that significantly impacted their play throughout the season, but should heal just fine given some offseason rest. They may both get injured again, but it's unlikely that either would suffer that same type of injury.
Given that older players tend to be more injury prone, and take longer to heal, it makes no sense to assume that you can ignore the drop off.
Classic straw man: I didn't ignore the dropoff, see above.
Also, given that we've seen the impact that Neal missing games has on the team's offensive line, I just don't find your "clearly" statement credible.
He already missed four games last year, and wasn't even close to 100% in many of the others. I wanted the Pats to move on because he's so injury prone, but this injury proneness is already built-in to the team's performance. He'd have to be more injured in 2010 than 2009 for it to have a net effect relative to last year.
Could happen, but, as usual, you're just taking the worst-case scenario and using that as the baseline to build your case that the Pats will be worse off. It's the same mistake that homers make when they project forward by assuming that every young player will get better, every injured player will heal, and every veteran will stay the same. It's not realism: it's just flawed, deeply biased, faulty logic.
And Butler was not better than Springs, which is why he was benched for Springs at the end of the year. Now, if the age drop off happens to Springs and the second year leap happens for Butler, that'll make for an interesting comparison of last year vs. this year.
With Springs, you're getting a guy who can give you a few good games, but can't give you many games at all. It is what he is, and it's what he's been for the better part of a decade. That's not just who he was last year; it's who he's always been, and it's who he'll be again this year. There are guys who got hurt last year and you can reasonably figure that odds are against a re-occurrence because they don't get hurt frequently (Light, for example), and then there are guys who got hurt last year just like they get hurt every year, and at this point they are what they are (Neal, Springs). Simply by staying on the field, Butler is a better player than Springs.
That said, I'm not sure why you'd use the Texans game as an example of Springs being superior to Butler. Both started, both played plenty of snaps, and Butler had an interception. By any measure, he had a better game than Springs did. And Butler wasn't benched for the Jaguars game: he was inactive. Unless Butler somehow managed to fall behind Wilhite on the DC for all of one week, there it was not a simple benching.
Side note: I *do* think that it's highly probable that we'll be less impacted by injuries than we were last year, where we had Brady in his first year back from a two-year injury (and improving greatly as the year went on), as well as Wilfork, Mayo, and Moss all hobbled. That's four of the top five players on the team, and, even starting with Welker's injury, it's unlikely that that will happen again. That's a completely different debate, though, so if you want to have that one let's start another thread and go at it.
