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I'll take an average team with Rivers versus a great defense with Wilson, as is. I would agree with the axiom in a vacuum but with the NFL everything orbits around how much talent do you have at the QB position.
Team Stat Visualizations
Advanced NFL Stats captures the Patriots', Hawks' personalities
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=== Team Stat Visualizations ===
Advanced NFL Stats creates a grid for you that captures the 'personality' of every team at a glance. The dynamic link there gives the embedded hyperlinks with info on each team: here's a small capture for yer convenience, brudder.
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Teams stationed along the purple line are .500 teams.* As a team moves top right, moving along the green line up toward the arrow point, it's a better team. The Panthers and Titans are trailing the rest of the league. I'm very happy to see the 49er's where they are, aren't you.
The Saints and Seahawks are teams of even quality - to date - but the Saints rack up, and give up yards while the Seahawks slog out WWI Maginot-style games. It's neat to see the Rams and Arizona right there in the same territory, with the Rams trailing a bit. Which is about what you'd have thought. But it's a disconcerting thought that the Cardinals could have a considerably more ferocious defense than ours.
It's a basic axiom of sports, for Dr. D, that he'd rather have the Saints' or Seahawks' position than the Chargers'. Mediocrity in every area is hard to address. But if you have something you do real good, you only have to bring the weakness up to mediocre and you're set. Which is tougher: to move from "bad" to "mediocre" or to move from "mediocre" to "excellent"? It's much easier for a baseball team to move RF from 0.0 WAR to 2.0 WAR, than it is to move it from 2.0 WAR to 4.0 WAR.
The script of the Seahawks' season has been: can they stay up with the pack while Russell Wilson figures his job out? So far the answer has been yes.
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Comments
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they're looking like a solid .500 club...maybe more. Beat a couple of very good teams but lost to at least one bad team. Interesting...
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Pete Carol was much more exiting as the head coach of USC. In fact I find college football much more exciting. In college the standouts can rip the game wide open at any time. The NFL is composed of nothing but college standouts, and the talent gap is much smaller.
It helps when you are an Oregon native however, and the Ducks and the Beavers are romping the pack 12. Looking forward to the "Oregon Civil War." Spark my interest and talk some college ball every once in awhile. Puleezze.
And hey, it's regionally sound with Colorado now in the mix.