Can a Case be made for Keenum...?

[Dolmonite26]

1 hour ago, vike daddy said:

as much as i'd like to real time game data on teddy to help see what he has in his tank, everything this year has to be about advancing in the playoffs. can't risk anything, or any game wins, for the sake of the QB Quandry.

To me that option (game film on Teddy WK 15-17) is still about advancing and making sure the best players are on field come playoff time.  Both options are risky given that the bottom could give out with Case.  He could play like he did weeks 2-8 which was replaceable and the team is bounced in one game.

Its not a decision I would want to have to make, but there should be some consideration I guess.  Still very dependant on how Keenum keeps playing.

[JDBrocks]

Disagree about Bradford not being willing to take the hits. There were games last year where he was throwing darts and getting smacked. Also scheme and personnel change will also have an effect on offensive efficiency/bulk stats. Let's not pretend that a healthy Bradford isn't a better option than Keenum. He sliced up an apparently Super Bowl caliber defense week 1 this year in this brand new offense.

[CriminalMind]

54 minutes ago, boombap said:

What about something like this

Teddy and Case each get $8 mil guaranteed and each has $500,000 per game bonus for starts. If one wins the job outright in camp and stays healthy he would earn $16 mil while the other would still be among the highest paid back ups at $8 mil. If they both play due to injury they could both make in the 10-14 mil range. 

Gives one more year to determine who the QBOTF is and would be fair to both players.

 

Let the best man win.

Case has more leverage & bargaining power then this, he won't sign this kind of contract, if his strong play continues as we hope.

[CriminalMind]

26 minutes ago, JDBrocks said:

Disagree about Bradford not being willing to take the hits. There were games last year where he was throwing darts and getting smacked. Also scheme and personnel change will also have an effect on offensive efficiency/bulk stats. Let's not pretend that a healthy Bradford isn't a better option than Keenum. He sliced up an apparently Super Bowl caliber defense week 1 this year in this brand new offense.

Healthy Bradford completely, is the best of all 3 QBs. So I'm hoping he gets back to healthy still.

[boombap]

2 minutes ago, CriminalMind said:

Case has more leverage & bargaining power then this, he won't sign this kind of contract, if his strong play continues as we hope.

If he continuestoplay at his 3 game pace I agree. Im sceptical about that though. I expect regression at some point unfortunately.

[CriminalMind]

Just another krinkle of interesting information, SF management stated they have no problem franchising Jimmy G, cuz that's the price to keep QBs. 

[vike daddy]

i ain't no doctor or physical therapist, but i can't see how Bradford will ever play again for the Vikings, if anyone.

[Worm Guts]

3 minutes ago, vike daddy said:

i ain't no doctor or physical therapist, but i can't see how Bradford will ever play again for the Vikings, if anyone.

You could be right but it sounds like a complete guess to me.

[vike daddy]

oh it is, i was trying to qualify that right away.

[Krauser]

3 hours ago, Purplexing said:

1. There isn't enough evidence to think CK will cool off from a hot streak of mid 90's QBR/ Passer rating.  A hot streak, to me, is 110+ QB ratings.  Ups & downs yield a mid 90s rating for 2017, which is warm or very warm, not hot.  The high variance of his week to week ratings means the data is insufficient to conclude he'll drop from a mid 90s rating.  IOW, you can throw out outliers to stabilize projections, but many of CKs games are outliers, high and low.  Censoring the data in that manner leaves too little to draw reliable conclusions.

2. I'm not sure any of us know how mobile TB will be, which is different from 'healthy' .  He relied on mobility in the past, and we can't assume the same until we see it in the near future.

3. Trivial point; if top QB is injured or foul's up consistently, the backup QB must play.

1. The evidence that Keenum will eventually turn back into a pumpkin is his entire career to date, which is a bigger, and therefore statistically stronger, sample than the last 3 or 4 games. The best way of predicting future performance is to consider past performance as a whole. That won't give absolute certainty ("enough evidence to think") of what will happen next, but it's a more accurate indicator than extrapolating from the last month alone.

Players do improve, and can regress, so recent trends do have some relevance. But the history of the NFL doesn't show a single other example of such a dramatic, late improvement. Keenum came into this year 29 year-old with 24 NFL starts under his belt, and had lost his starting job in every previous situation. There was no market for his services. The Vikings signed him 3 weeks into free agency, and there was no bidding war. So he comes into this year with that kind of baseline. 

Here's a link to Keenum's game-by-game career stats: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/K/KeenCa00/gamelog/

Passer rating is a bad stat, but even by that measure, this season has been Keenum's best ever, especially the last month. He now has 10 career games with a PR >100; 5 of them were this year, 3 of them since the bye week. He's never had 3 games in a row with a PR >90 until this month.  

The question is whether Keenum from December 2017 onward will look more like Keenum from 2013-17 (ups and downs and overall mediocre/bad, not a viable long-term starter despite a few good games) or Keenum from November 2017 (one of the best QBs in the league). There isn't absolute certainty about either possibility, but that doesn't make it a 50/50 even chance between them. Maybe he'll do something unprecedented in his career, and in NFL history to date. But if you're setting your expectations as fan, let alone choosing a starting QB for the rest of the year and beyond, it would be foolishly optimistic to expect the hot streak to continue forever.

2. Teddy still looks pretty mobile to me. 

Teddy is younger today than Keenum was for his first start in 2013. He was more effective as a 21-23 year old starter in 2014-15 than Keenum was until last month. It's weird but somehow the same people who want to imagine that the 29 year-old has suddenly turned from a frog into a prince aren't more curious to see what the 25 year-old who was the unquestioned franchise QB until his injury can do, now that he seems to have recovered well from that injury. 

Who knows how it will turn out, but it's hard to imagine the Vikings and Zimmer won't at some point give Bridgewater another chance to start. 

3. No one disputes Keenum had to play, or that he's playing well. 

Starting QBs who go out with injury usually get their jobs back once they've recovered from that injury, or at least fairly soon after. 

From what we know, it seems Teddy's recovered from his injury.

 

 

[Dolmonite26]

33 minutes ago, Krauser said:

It's weird but somehow the same people who want to imagine that the 29 year-old has suddenly turned from a frog into a prince aren't more curious to see what the 25 year-old who was the unquestioned franchise QB until his injury can do, now that he seems to have recovered well from that injury. 

This is what gets me the most.  We're dreaming up the longer odds of Keenum, "just needing a chance." And has now turned the corner.  But the guy who has shown much more in a similar sample size pre 2017 is....a JAG?

[vike daddy]

i like Dr Krauser's use of fairy tale analogies.... pumpkins... frogs turning in to princes...

 

[Krauser]

16 minutes ago, Dolmonite26 said:

This is what gets me the most.  We're dreaming up the longer odds of Keenum, "just needing a chance." And has now turned the corner.  But the guy who has shown much more in a similar sample size pre 2017 is....a JAG?

Bridgewater was pretty good as a young starter, but his boxscore stats weren't great and I think a lot of fans didn't like his playing style. People love gunslinger QBs, and Teddy was basically the opposite. Even then, he was an effective starter, a much better player than the raw stats often used to dismiss his performance ("14 TDs"). More sophisticated analysis of his play was positive, especially film analysis (e.g. by Cian Fahey, Derrik Klassen and PFF). 

PFF had him as a top 15 QB in the league in 2015: https://www.profootballfocus.com/news/pro-daily-focus-teddy-bridgewater-was-a-top-15-qb-last-season

Quote

Teddy Bridgewater was a top-15 quarterback last year: Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spieman has come to the defense of quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, after reports that some people don’t believe that Bridgewater has the potential to develop into a franchise quarterback. Taking a dive into his PFF grades shows that he might not be there yet, but with the 13th-best grade among quarterbacks in the NFL last year, he’s on his way to getting there if he continues to improve.

Bridgewater has thrown just 28 touchdowns over his first two seasons in the league, but at the same time has thrown just 21 interceptions in that span. Our adjusted completion percentage takes into account drops, batted passes, spikes and passes where the quarterback is hit as he throws the ball. Bridgewater had the best mark in the NFL last year at 79.3 percent, after finishing third as a rookie at 77.3 percent.

Pressure didn’t overly affect that, either, with Bridgewater having the fifth-best adjusted completion rate on throws under pressure at 70.7 percent. He did grade negatively under pressure, however, with six of his nine interceptions coming here. It was a similar story in 2014, too, so this is obviously an area where he needs to take a step forward if he is to develop into a top-tier quarterback in the coming years.

Bridgewater was solid in the Vikings’ playoff loss against the Seattle Seahawks, with just one pass where he received a negative grade, and he did complete a pass that set the Vikings up on the 18-yard line with 1:26 left in the game. Four short plays later, kicker Blair Walsh missed a 27-yard field goal that would have won the game, and if it wasn’t for that, the narrative at the end of the game would likely have been about Bridgewater driving the Vikings downfield for the game-winner against one of the NFL’s best defenses.

The Vikings have made an effort to improve the playmakers around Bridgewater, and while Stefon Diggs, who was the highest-graded rookie wide receiver in the NFL last year at 82.0, was last year’s top target, hopes will be high that 2016 first-round draft pick Laquon Treadwell can have an immediate impact...

...

With Diggs’ success as a rookie, the addition of Treadwell, and a solid tight end in Kyle Rudolph, the onus is firmly on Bridgewater to take that next step forward. He hasn’t quite hit the heights that he needs to yet, and second-year signal-callers Derek Carr (Oakland) and Blake Bortles (Jacksonville) took bigger steps forward in their second seasons in the league, but Bridgewater has shown enough that he is now in position to make that happen heading into his third season in the league.

Bridgewater's fantasy numbers were terrible, but more advanced stats showed him as an effective starter. Scott Kascmar at Football Outsiders, notoriously skeptical of young QBs, had him as the best young QB in the league by the end of 2015. I tabulated some of Kacsmar's numbers comparing Teddy to my old friend Derek Carr: 

By those measures, Teddy was performing as roughly a top 15 QB in 2015 -- in other words, those numbers matched the performance he was putting on film. 

Even so, heading into 2016 I said Bridgewater needed to improve. In particular, he needed to be more willing to throw downfield into tighter windows. That was the major flaw in his game at that point, and it was easy enough to excuse -- he mostly played conservatively because that was the style of the offense and the identity of the team, and the run-first scheme and supporting cast (especially the bad pass protection) tended to limit his production. But improvement was needed. 

I don't think it's at all hard to imagine that Bridgewater would be able to make that change. Shurmur brought some new concepts to the offense in 2016, and Teddy was great that preseason. Here's what I posted in the old forum after the 3rd preseason game:

Quote

Teddy's been much better this preseason than he was last year, or especially his rookie season. 

His deep accuracy has been phenomenal. On targets 16+ yards downfield ("deep" in the box score), he went 6/7 for 159 yards and 2 TDs. The only incompletion was the drop / catch failure by Rudolph today (no idea why he didn't reach both hands out for it). That includes 3/3 on targets 20+ downfield (Thielen for 22 and Johnson's TD vs Bengals, Diggs on the corner route for 22 today) and 1/1 on targets 30+ (Johnson's TD). 100% of those throws were accurate, and on several he targeted smaller windows. Several of those throws came with pressure in his face and/or muddy pockets, and he showed an excellent feel for pressure and a willingness to deliver on target even while taking a hit. 

There haven't been many failed completions. I pointed out the one in the Bengals game. Today, there was the 2nd and 10 checkdown to McKinnon near their own goalline (gained 1), and the screen to McKinnon on 3rd and long. Both are defensible decisions -- checking down on 2nd and long inside your own 10 is reasonable, and a 3rd down screen again with lousy field position is a play that actually has a chance (and McKinnon might've converted if the DL hadn't caught him from behind -- downfield blocking was good there). 

The OL has been better, especially the IOL, but it's still not great. Teddy took a couple of quick sacks, one longer sack that he should've avoided (Bengals game when the checkdown was there), one longer sack on the OL (Smith got pushed into him and disrupted what would've been a deep route to Thielen on a double move -- the play where the illegal contact flag got picked up), and one where he tripped. 

The receivers have been better. Diggs is consistently getting open, including against good CBs (couple of his routes today were against Verrett, who's very good) and showed some nice YAC ability. Thielen and Rudolph have made difficult catches in traffic, though Rudolph missed one he should've caught and had that fumble too. 

Play design seems more similar than different. Teddy's still mostly taking deep drops and reading deep first. The main difference is that the OL is giving him enough time to make his first read, and the ball is coming out on time and being delivered accurately even in that 15-25 yard window. 

Overall, very encouraging if you hope / expect Teddy to take a step forward this year.

That was written the day before the knee injury. 

It seems he's now recovered from that injury. We had every reason to fear he wouldn't, but it looks like he did. 

The OL is better than it was in 2015, better even than it was in preseason 2016 before the injuries piled up. The receivers are better too. The scheme is much friendlier to the QB, working more from shotgun, etc.  

Until this month, Keenum had never done anything comparable to what Bridgewater did as one of the youngest starters on the league in 2014/15. However much of the improvement we've seen from Keenum is real (not just variance/luck or a hot streak), I for one think that Bridgewater can reasonably be expected to make similar strides (if healthy), given the better situation he would find himself in now compared to 2015. And given that he starts from a considerably higher baseline -- Bridgewater was a much better QB than Keenum in 2015/16 -- it's very reasonable to expect that all things being equal (playing on the same team), Teddy will be a better QB going forward than Case.

There's no guarantee that would happen, but IMO it's absolutely crazy not to want to find out. 

[JDBrocks]

Please don't ever leave us again, Krauser!

[gopherwrestler]

6 hours ago, Purplexing said:

Those teams' circumstance are rare, and don't seem to apply to Minnesota.  You're inching out on a limb that doesn't seem to have much support.  Why did those SB winners drop their vet QBs, and why do you think circumstances are the same in MN? (re: the latter; I think not).

Really they dropped them because they knew they could find better.

Can we find better than Case Keenum? Probably.