Re: Mangini asks Favre to come to Browns training camp ... To help QBs? (Yeah,right)
Any quarterback on a bad day can absolutely murder your team. This is true of Brady, Manning. Roethlisberger and every other QB in the game.
As for the rest, don't kid yourself. Hell, it's joked about on this board because players like Samuel are suddenly less talented in the eyes of a lot of the posters here after they leave.
Not really: any quarterback on an awful day can murder you, but good QBs can manage their mistakes enough that they don't regularly compound them into multiple-interception suckfests. Brett Favre can kill you on even a bad day: he may snatch victory from the jaws of defeat a couple of times per year, but he snatches defeat from the jaws of victory just as often. Even in playoff games, he throws 2+ interceptions a third of the time. In today's NFL, you can't win like that. We had this same debate before this past season, and I feel pretty confident that the way that 2008 played out validated what I was saying.
Case in point: how many truly awful games has Brady had in his last 3 seasons starting (2005-2007? Games with 2 INTS: 5. Games with more than 2: 2 (4 INTs against Indy in 2006, 4 against KC in 2005)
Favre from 2006-2008? 16 games with 2 INTs, 4 games with more than 2. Favre throws 2+ INTs with almost 3 times the frequency that Brady does. And that's even though they have similar attempts per season (556 vs. 541) and with Brady averaging more TDs per season (33.33 vs. 22.66-- even if you take out the 50 TD season, he averaged 25 over the other 2).
Of course Brady is better than Favre- I don't expect anyone to dispute that. But it goes far, far beyond simply being better. Elite QBs, like Brady, offer the same upside that Favre does, without being prone to having nightmare games on a
regular basis.
As for other players, I do agree with you to some extent in that respect. That claim isn't without merit, but personally my thoughts on Samuel are exactly what they were when he played for the Pats: good instincts, creates turnovers, and can be very effective as long as you don't ask him to play man-to-man. That's what he was with the Pats, and that's what he is with the Eagles. He's a good CB who wasn't worth the money that the Eagles paid him. IMO, a lot more people look at him that way than think that he suddenly got worse because he stopped wearing a Pats' uniform.