Gronk to retire

I know the source but if he signed with a movie company before the Superbowl he more than likely had his mind made up.

REPORT: Gronk Has Already Signed With Movie and TV Production Company

Gone too soon:

QuantumMechanic said:

In his prime, Gronk was absolutely better than any TE (and perhaps better than any non-QB offensive player) ever. However, he only played 115 regular season games (and 131 games overall).

By contrast, Gonzales played 270 regular season games (and 277 games overall) and Gates played 236 games (and 248 games overall).

Measured by games, Gates and Gonzales played about twice as long as Gronk did. A player, no matter how great he is, can't help the team if he's not on the field.

So I don't think it's an easy call to say Gronk is the GOAT. Prime vs. prime, absolutely, without question he is. But the shortness of his career relative to the other great TEs makes the GOAT title a much closer thing.

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Gronk has more rings than Gonzales and Gates combined.

Post season stats
Gates 51-540 10.6/rec 2 TDs in 12 games
Gonzaleze 30-286 9.5/rec 4 TDs in 7 games
Gronk 81-1163 14.4.rec 12TDs in 16 games

Deus Irae said:

Cold Hard Football Facts used to have one available, and it broke things down very nicely, but that site's gone both downhill and behind a paywall, so that article isn't accessible anymore. The top 8 were (no particular order)

1. Bart Starr
   
2. Joe Montana
   
3. Sammy Baugh
   
4. Otto Graham
   
5. Tom Brady
   
6. Johnny Unitas
   
7. Roger Staubach
   
8. Steve Young

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That’s interesting. I’ve been spending some hours researching the greatest QBs out of curiosity. I came in pretty biased without a great understanding of the history of the position and going by a lot of pop culture lists. My assumption was that Unitas was top 5 and Starr was somewhere from 10-15, as many lists have it.

I also keep coming to the conclusion that Bart Starr is above Johnny Unitas and is Top 4 (Brady, Starr, Graham, and Montana in some order after Brady).

I specifically wanted to compare the careers of Starr and Unitas, since they overlapped quite a bit, and thought it seemed a lot like Brady-Manning, with Starr often winning head to head over Unitas, being the ultimate clutch performer, and essentially ending all questions about the greatest QB of that era. His stats for those days weren’t prolific but efficiency stats excellent, especially in the biggest games. Five championships, the first being SB1 and SB2, and the only QB to win 3 straight.

Overall that list is quite similar, in terms of the players listed, to what I’ve come up with as well. I was going to mention in my previous post that one way to determine the modern bias of the list is to see where Staubach ranks. If it’s top 1o, the author probably knows history well; top 15, there’s a chance the list doesn’t suck; not top 15 means this is probably a lazy effort to fill out a list.

Is there anyone on this forum who can tell you if Bart Starr was better than Johnny Unitas, or if Otto Graham compared favorably to Sammy Baugh.... let alone comparing any of them to Montana, Marino, Manning, Brady, Brees?

primetime said:

How do you even judge a Brady or Brees against a guy like Graham who was playing 70 years ago? I mean, this is why these rankings are totally absurd. If you transported Otto Graham to 2019 amd threw him into a football game, he'd probably look like Christian Hackenberg under center. That doesn't mean he wasn't great, even an all-time great, but it's just not comparable. There were teams who wouldn't employ black players when he played!

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That’s part of what makes it so interesting. Deductively, you rank them by going backwards process of elimination, ranking by ease of which has the easiest argument that they AREN’T the GOAT first. So here’s how I would, in my opinion, compare them: Otto Graham absolutely dominated professional football for roughly ten years and was without question the greatest of his era by all noteworthy opinions, awards, and accolades. Drew Brees has never been seriously considered to be the greatest of his era, and even adjusting for the post-expansion number of teams and more competitive league, he’s a guy likely to drop about 10 spots on rankings list the second his cumulative stat records are broken. He can’t be in th conversation for greatest ever when he isn’t really in the conversation for greatest of his own peers.

I’m also having trouble weighing the greatest of their own eras against each other, Brady, Montana, Starr, and Graham, which is kind of what Montana is referring to when discussing the GOAT argument. But Montana’s league was not all that different from Brady’s league in the sense of the number of teams, importance of the QB, and difficulty of winning a championship, so Brady > Montana seems to be the easiest one for me.

How about this: Gronk played 131 games (including playoffs).

His 131 games were better than any other 131 game stretch of any TE, ever. Easily.

If you want to say that someone else was a better TE overall because they played 75 more games while performing at 75% of Gronk capacity, fine. You're basically making up your own rules as to how you define "better," and if your set of rules includes longevity, then the argument changes into one about how much longevity matters in discussing legacy, not how good Gronk was.

But if you take that way, and just put up Gronk's career against anyone else's, scaled for games played, then it's a no-brainer.

There's obviously been a lot of talk about the length of his career. And I would suggest he has had a normal sized career for a TE. I would also suggest some of the more pass heavy TEs like Gonzalez or Sharpe are more the outlier for length probably due to less wear and tear.
Not having done any research to support my theory and going strictly out of memory guys like Coates, Winslow Sr, and Bavaro had similar 10 year careers.

Reiss said the retirement was a shock to the Patriots. Been a rough off season, loads of talent are no longer with the team.

primetime said:

Is there anyone on this forum who can tell you if Bart Starr was better than Johnny Unitas, or if Otto Graham compared favorably to Sammy Baugh.... let alone comparing any of them to Montana, Marino, Manning, Brady, Brees?

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Sure, but the question is the sufficiency of the comparative data. That's a problem in every long lasting sports league, and the question as to whether the data is sufficient to be reasonably conclusive will be answered by the individual.

There's also the issue of transferability. Could Brady?Manning/etc... handle the roughness of earlier football? Could they have thrived without video, modern training and the like? Those questions are just as legitimate as whether or not a smaller player from the, say, 50's, could have handled having to bulk up for the modern game, would have been found to have had some inherent fatal flaws on video, and questions like that.

slash83 said:

Reiss said the retirement was a shock to the Patriots. Been a rough off season, loads of talent are no longer with the team.

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Wow paging Jared Cook

MrBigglesWorth said:

If he came back mid-season would they have to keep 9 million open in cap space? That might tell something

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No. He'd have to play for an amount they could fit under the cap, whatever that might be at that time. Usually they keep 5-7MM in space for just those circumstances. They have around $18MM now (rough guess), but knows what will be left come September.

Ice_Ice_Brady said:

I’m also having trouble weighing the greatest of their own eras against each other, Brady, Montana, Starr, and Graham, which is kind of what Montana is referring to when discussing the GOAT argument. But Montana’s league was not all that different from Brady’s league in the sense of the number of teams, importance of the QB, and difficulty of winning a championship, so Brady > Montana seems to be the easiest one for me.

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Is it Starr or Unitas?

And Starr and Unitas were close enough to Graham (Unitas' career overlapped with Graham, while Starr's started one year later) that it seems reasonable to judge them against one another. The former two had the AFL as well but it's not wildly different. Would you consider Peyton Manning and Pat Mahomes to be of different eras even though they didn't overlap?

The post-1978 interference change seems like the biggest marker of eras for quarterbacks. There were obvious differences between 1950 or 1960 and 1975, same as there were differences between 2018 and 2003 or 1993, but I don't think anything's ever been as big as that. Though 1950-1975 is probably a bigger difference than 1993-2018 because of historical stuff (desegregation, notably, and TV causing football to begin to deplace other sports as a national pastime and therefore attracting more and better athletes) as well as I suspect a general tendency towards pushing the upper limit of human athleticis as there's only so far you can take exercise and nutrition and medicine (even with HGH and the like).

The 2004 "emphasis" did change things, though. There's probably a reasonable multiplier you could apply for pre-1978 and pre-2004 stats to normalize them with the modern era.

I mean it wasn't unexpected but at this point you have to draft one of Hockenson/Fant/Irv Smith right? We cannot go into the season with Matt LaCosse as our TE1. Maybe after drafting one of the top TEs we could have Gronk workout with him during training camp.

God speed, Gronk. Hopefully you find something you enjoy to do after retirement. All Patriots fans will miss your bubbly personality and your dominant performances.

And speaking of which, while deciding the GOAT at any position is difficult (only clear GOATs are Tom Brady and Jerry Rice), Gronk was clearly the best TE to ever play the game. I don't know about beating out Gonzalez as the GOAT since Gonzalez has volume stats but peak Gronk was simply a dimension above any other TE.

TB_Helmet said:

How about this: Gronk played 131 games (including playoffs).

His 131 games were better than any other 131 game stretch of any TE, ever. Easily.

If you want to say that someone else was a better TE overall because they played 75 more games while performing at 75% of Gronk capacity, fine. You're basically making up your own rules as to how you define "better," and if your set of rules includes longevity, then the argument changes into one about how much longevity matters in discussing legacy, not how good Gronk was.

But if you take that way, and just put up Gronk's career against anyone else's, scaled for games played, then it's a no-brainer.

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Everyone makes up there own rules about the definition of better.

Thanks Gronk we'll miss you!

primetime said:

Is it Starr or Unitas?

And Starr and Unitas were close enough to Graham (Unitas' career overlapped with Graham, while Starr's started one year later) that it seems reasonable to judge them against one another. The former two had the AFL as well but it's not wildly different. Would you consider Peyton Manning and Pat Mahomes to be of different eras even though they didn't overlap?

The post-1978 interference change seems like the biggest marker of eras for quarterbacks. There were obvious differences between 1950 or 1960 and 1975, same as there were differences between 2018 and 2003 or 1993, but I don't think anything's ever been as big as that. Though 1950-1975 is probably a bigger difference than 1993-2018 because of historical stuff (desegregation, notably) as well as I suspect a general tendency towards pushing the upper limit of human athleticis as there's only so far you can take exercise and nutrition and medicine (even with HGH and the like).

The 2004 "emphasis" did change things, though. There's probably a reasonable multiplier you could apply for pre-1978 and pre-2004 stats to normalize them with the modern era.

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Good stuff here in your post about the rule changes and different eras.

Starr is my choice. In terms of the overlap, I can’t find the article right now but I believe Starr and Unitas went head to head something like 18 times with both having superpower teams, and Starr won the h2h by a good margin. Graham retired right before those guys emerged, so no, overlap can be a messy term but not really in this case.

I do put a fairly heavy emphasis on championships, though that isn’t everything. The argument against Starr being greatest of his era is pretty limited. Was anyone better? Unitas won championships in 1958 and 1959. He didn’t win another one until SB5, but there’s a pretty big asterisk: he was injured early in the game.

But Starr had the greater team right? Well, Unitas’s teams weren’t exactly chopped liver. Earl Morrall came in for him in 68 and win MVP with that supporting cast. Greater coach? Unitas failed to win a single title under Shula and they flamed out with some amazingly talented teams.

Overall, the Colts were really darn good. Unitas really won 2 titles, and they spanned 2 total years. Starr’s career as filled with game winning heroics and big plays.

Gronk was great, that is all

Great TE, great Patriot, no lack of respect whatsoever for wanting to do something else (ideally a few weeks ago), he will be missed, it is what it is, time to move on, it's not the end of the world, BB & staff will come up with a plan that has a reasonable chance to produce satisfactory TE production, we're on to the draft->training camp->season->#7.