Well since this is about the fifteenth thread we've had on the same topic, I have my reponse almost memorized.
1. Brady's play has been great. He's been a top 3 QB over the last 5. Is there anyone here who can say they've seen any slippage? No, in fact there are some who think he's getting better and even smarter with age..
2. Brady's contract precludes keeping both after the 2017 season. Does it makes sense to let Jimmy go for nothing or at a decreased discounted, fire sale price, at the end of 2017. Or does it make better sense to trade him at the end of 2016 for a premium price?
3. Did Jacoby show you anything in his 6+ quarters to make you believe that with his poise and work ethic that he can't be a decent NFL QB after 2-3 more years of hard work in this offense. Some of these "keep JG" arguments might make a bit more sense if JB wasn't a rookie on the roster.
4. The Pats have a lot of cap space next year and a lot of important FA's to sign this off season. Regardless of how THAT shakes out, it will be likely that when the season starts, the Pats will likely have little cap room to manuever having Brady AND a Franchised back up.
5. The same people who are hyping Jimmy as the next great thing will be the same people who are going turn on him the moment he encounters some adversity. It's just the nature of today's fandom. Just look at Saint fans who want to dump Brees, and Packer fans who are starting to question Rodgers. Or EVEN those fans who are ready to move on from Brady after 5+ quarters from JG. If it can happen to them, just think about what it would be like here if JG had a tough stretch of games.
If the GOAT can go through a four game stretch like Brady did in 2014, JG will certainly go through some tough times.
BOTTOM LINE: I haven't seen anything close to a reasonable argument for keep Jimmy past this season. The ONLY possible reason would be if Brady's play falls off a cliff THIS season, or he has a catastrophic injury during the year.
Agreed on pretty much every count. I think a lot of people don't remember what Garoppolo looked like as a rookie. He always had an extremely quick release, but that was the main asset he had going for him. Even if Garoppolo plays and plays well on Sunday, that will make a grand total of one game where a team had meaningful game tape on him and went into the game knowing he would be the starter. Historically, a lot of young QBs have looked great for up to 2 games simply because there was so little game tape to reveal their flaws. In Marcus Mariota's first two games, he had 6 TDs, 0 turnovers, and passer ratings of 158.3 (perfect) and 96.3. Over his remaining 10 starts, he surpassed an 84 passer rating twice. If Garoppolo started an entire season, he would not consistently look as good as he did week 2. It's not quite a foregone conclusion, but it's close.
Also, not to be alarmist, but the Pats' roster construction is kind of at a crossroads, and while I think Belichick has trended toward sustainability as well as he reasonably can, it's going to be a huge challenge starting next season. Collins, Butler, and Hightower all need to be paid, and what up-and-coming talent to we have moving up to replace them as cheap, high-value production? I'm optimistic about young talent like Flowers, Thuney and Mitchell, but the Patriots have nothing to show for two of the last three first rounds, and that's uncharacteristic of them. All it takes is a couple rough years where you don't get the production you're used to out of the draft. The team can tread along for a couple years, but it eventually comes home to roost and you get a roster like 2009: overly dependent on a few core veterans, and lacking the depth that the team has generally had throughout the Belichick era.
In a lot of ways, I see what the Pats did over the last 5-6 years with their roster as very similar to the roster lifecycle from 2001-2008. From 2001-2005 and 2010-2013, the Pats had unusually productive drafts, selecting multiple future good starters every year. In both cases, they continued to see the benefits of that for the next few years, as they had a surplus of premium young talent playing for cheap. But then, a few years later, all that talent starts getting their second contracts, which means you lose it or you pay it a lot more. You can tread water for a couple years (2006-2008), but if you have drafts like 2006 and 2007, you end up paying the piper with something like 2009.
In this respect, I'm just slightly worried about the team going forward after this season. We need young cheap talent to step up once talent like Butler, Hightower, Collins and Jones are no longer around, young, and cheap. The 2014 draft looked like a great candidate for this at the time, but with Easley and Stork gone that's no longer the case. 2015 is looking an awful lot like it'll be defined by Brown, Flowers, and Mason, so I'm pretty optimistic as I think that's a nice collection of talent. I'm cautiously optimistic about the 2016 class due primarily to Thuney and Mitchell, but at this point in 2006 I felt similarly good about that draft class.
Basically, the Pats need their talent pipeline to stay strong, and having one first round pick to show for the last three years is a pretty major hurdle in that respect. If Garoppolo can fetch a first round pick, especially a pick in the top half of the round, that'll a) represent a chance to fix that, and b) represent an extremely rare chance for the Pats to get access to top-half-of-the-first-round talent on a cheap rookie deal. The Pats have to manufacture these opportunities because they're never bad enough to draft in the top 25 in their own right.
Basically, for the Pats to pass up that kind of opportunity, I think they need to be awfully confident that Garoppolo is a franchise QB. And maybe they are, but if they are it's because of what they've seen in practice more than what they've seen in 1.5 starts. Plenty of mediocre QBs looked awfully good for 2 starts. So in Garoppolo you have a much younger QB than Brady, but his unknown factor is just as high as Brady's (which is age-related going forward), and he's going to be significantly more expensive than Brady after 2017, and there's a good chance that Brissett can develop into just as good a QB as Jimmy, on a timeline that's better suited to replacing Brady.
So I'm not going to claim that there's no risk in trading Jimmy, since there clearly is. Good young QBs are a huge asset. It's why he's worth trading, and it's also why he's potentially worth keeping. But frnakly, I think the risks of keeping him outweigh the risks of trading him. There's the risk that he turns out to be injury-prone, the risk that he isn't actually as good as he's looked, the risk that with more gametape he becomes easier to plan against (it's worth noting that his performance did trend downward over the course of both games he played). There's the risk that he's good but significantly overpaid, and we end up in a Joe Flacco-type situation. There's a risk that Brissett develops into just as good a player, while Jimmy never gets to anything close to Brady-level. End result: we punted on a few years of GOAT QB play to lock in 'pretty good'. There's a risk that the team around Garoppolo decays because our pipeline of first-round talent is looking pretty grim, and not enough of the mid-round guys step up and play like first rounders.
Compared to those risks, I'll gladly take whatever king's ransom a team like the Browns is willing to pay for Jimmy. They've got to be panicking a bit right now: their QB situation is a dumpster fire, they traded away the rights to what looks like the NFL's next franchise QB (Wentz), and they have all these first round picks that we all know they're just going to waste on ****ty players anyway. In any case, whatever picks we can get for Garoppolo, I'll take that and a few more years of Brady over the risks outlined above.
