Quote:
Originally Posted by HemiEd
That is a well thought out post, and you make me re-think some of my position. It is just hard for me to get it out my mind seeing him overthrow balls into the ground when under pressure.
That offense was very complicated, and that is a great point. But Trent had the luxury of the best running attack this team has ever had, and among the very ever.
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Well it's important to separate TrINT from Trent. He got himself so far behind the 8-ball with the fanbase here after that first season that yeah, it's easy to remember those balls got on top of and hammered into the turf.
But when he was at his apex, those 4 years from 2002-2005, man he was precise. In those 4 years he averaged damn near 8 yds/attempt. And that was when only guys like Manning and Brady were putting up numbers like that. To put it into perspective, even with weapons like Boldin and Torrey Smith, Flacco's never averaged better than 7.4 YPA and on his career is averaging 7.1. That's even with the fact that he's a very good downfield passer.
Yeah, the system helped, but even the YAC yards were a result of the fact that he was so good at hitting guys in stride and frankly he just didn't miss very often.
For a guy with a sub-standard arm to be able to hit at 8 yds/attempt means that he was firing a hell of a grouping. He was putting it in the right spot almost every time.
History, if anything, has been extremely unkind to Trent Green. We don't realize how good we had it with that guy over those 4 seasons and I think that is almost exclusively because of how quickly people soured on him in 2001.