Err Apparent

So Sports Illustrated has a story this week about the challenges facing Aaron Rodgers, successor to Brett Favre as the Packers' quarterback (pictured at right, scalping Phish tickets, with Favre indicating the size of the doobie they are going to smoke during YEM). The article dwells on the difficulties faced by players who replace hall-of-fame, Superbowl-winning, living-legend quarterbacks. Shockingly, it turns out that they are usually not as good as their predecessors.

SI goes for the too-much-pressure, fans-expecting-the-world-of-you explanation for these follow-up quarterbacks' collective failure, pointing to the miserable results of those who followed Unitas, Namath, Staubach, Bradshaw, and Marino (with the notable exception of Steve Young, who won a Superbowl as Joe Montana's successor in San Francisco).

But allow me to suggest another explanation: quarterbacks who follow living-legend types tend not to be as good as the actual living-legend types because EXTREMELY FEW HUMAN BEINGS ARE LIVING-LEGEND-CALIBER QUARTERBACKS. This includes almost everyone who is actually good enough to play quarterback in the NFL. True, the schlubs who followed the greats listed above were pretty sucky. But if you put a picture of every NFL quarterback from the past 40 years on a wall and threw six darts against the wall, chances are you would hit at least five equally sucky quarterbacks. Maybe, if you were lucky, you would hit a Steve Young one time. But probably you wouldn't.

So, I can understand that running an article whose central thesis is "it's extremely unlikely that any quarterback picked at random (say, Aaron Rodgers) will be anywhere near as good as Brett Favre" won't sell a lot of copies of Sports Illustrated. And I wish Rodgers the best (go Bears!). But it doesn't change the fact that, like so many stories in the sports media, this one is peddling a bullshit psychological explanation for what is simply a statistical near-certainty.