(Joe Flacco was Exhibit A of this two years ago, and before him, Eli Manning.) We always know less about the NFL than we think we do the best team in the league only wins the Super Bowl 24 percent of the time (perhaps less often in recent years - 2013 notwithstanding), and it’s notoriously difficult to predict which team will claim the title. There’s a tendency for talking heads to proclaim with certainty that a team “ will never win a Super Bowl with so-and-so at quarterback,” only to see the prediction disproven in a flurry of playoff upsets. This is the dilemma for teams like the Bengals: While average quarterbacking is difficult to replace, it’s also not good enough to reliably lead a team to Super Bowl contention, even with strong defensive help. What’s a team to do when its “quarterback of the future” matures into something less than a perennial Pro Bowler but something more than a scrub? For all his achievements, Dalton has been exactly average as a passer in his NFL career, and at age 27 he isn’t likely to get much better before his performance starts to decline. 100 QBs in the league (around three for each of the NFL’s 32 teams) - plus a few recent QBs for each of the 120 FBS college programs - Dalton would currently rank in the 97th percentile of all QBs with any kind of professional aspirations.Īnd yet, Dalton - who signed an instantly scorned six-year, $115 million contract extension with Cincinnati last week - is also a symbol of mediocrity. If you plotted out the entire population of people who play quarterback at any level of football, Dalton would be near the top 1 percent. In the pros, Dalton has won more games in his first three seasons than all but three signal-callers in NFL history. Soon he was drafted into the NFL just three picks shy of the first round. In college, he led Texas Christian to more postseason top-10 finishes (three) than the program had mustered in its previous 69 seasons combined, and graduated as the school’s most decorated passer by just about every metric. For a middling NFL quarterback, Cincinnati Bengals starter Andy Dalton has already accomplished quite a bit in his football career.
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