Being down here is the South I get to see a lot of Atlanta Falcons games, and they have a pretty good team, but if they want to have a championship team they need to make a big move.
Trade Michael Vick.
Michael Vick is the World B Free of the NFL – he is exciting, even amazing, and sells a lot of tickets. What he is not, imho, is a championship caliber NFL quarterback.
Okay, maybe the World B Free reference was a low blow, and he seems like a good guy so I don’t want to be attacking him personally – but his trade value is not going to be any higher then it is right now. The falcons could get some defensive help up the middle for this year as well as a couple good future draft picks for him, and give themselves a chance to become a contender.
Matt Schaub is a good quarterback and I think he gives the Falcons at least as good an opportunity to win now as Vick does. Is Schaub as exciting as Vick? Not even close. Will he complete more third down passes then Vick on average? Yes. Schaub will be a starting quarterback in the NFL in the near future if the Falcons let him go and he is a better fit for the Falcons offense. If Schaub was given the offense and got all of the reps, I think that he would be a more efficient quarterback then Vick in short order.
Vick was the 25th rated quarterback in the league last year, that is 25th out of 34 – that is there were only 9 quarterbacks that qualified that were rated lower then he was.
By and large if you look at the list, the teams with the higher rated QB’s went to the playoff’s – only one quarterback in the lower half directed his team to the post season and that was Chris Simms who was in his first year at the helm and got significantly better as the year went on.
Vick starts the bottom quarter of this list.
Look at the division that the Falcons play in, the 2 top teams, the Bucs and the Carolina Panthers have both figured out how to stop Vick. Not even his dazzling running is effective against those teams. With Vick at the helm you can just about pencil in 4 conference losses for the Falcons.
Vick completed just 55.3 percent of his passes last year. The conventional wisdom is that a NFL quarterback needs to complete over 60% of his passes to be effective. His yards per attempt rank him 26th in the league and his 13 interceptions rank him 25th.
Vicks quarterback rating: 73.1
Schaub’s quarterback rating of 98.1
Not to mention that I am surprised every time Vick gets up from a hit and is not holding his knee or ankle. He has yet to prove that he can survive the rigors of the NFL season playing the game the way that he does.
Now, lets look at Vick’s perceived value – do you think that one of the other quarterback challenged clubs would not part with some really good players and or picks to secure Vick? Of course, because the egos of coaches are such that they think that the only thing Vick is missing is THEIR scheme or THEIR coaching.
And if you need proof of what a team can do by trading one superstar for draft picks, just look back at what Dallas did when they built their championship juggernauts by trading Herschell Walker to Minnesota for all those draft picks.
So the value proposition for fielding a winning football team is clear to me. Now Mr. Blank may be more interested in selling tickets then winning championships – and if so he should keep Vick. He is exciting as hell. But, if Blank, McCay, and Mora want to put together a championship team the solution is clear.
Trade Michael Vick
