From Monday, Brady has improved his average performance from 2.05 stars to 2.58 stars. Manning without 2015 is at 2.5. and Drew Brees is at 2.78.
Personally, how much do you weight postseason performance in evaluating players? I think it is probably most useful to look at how players play against top defenses and other top QBs weather that is during or before the postseason. Currently, I use it more as tie breaker given the small sample size.
Fight the good fight Marc. I'm always on the play index. It's where I get all my 'most impactful play of the 2021 season (by WPA)' type stuff.
I also think you've hit the nail right on the head with postseason performance. As far as determining how good (not great, because great takes into account team accomplishments) players are, about five percent of NFL games (13 out of 285) are played in the postseason. Therefore, the postseason gets five percent of the weight when determining who the best (not greatest) players are.
Greatest is a narrative thing. Best is a factual thing. Why greatest always seems to take precedence over best in the NFL discourse I have no idea.
Five percent weight on postseason is so negligible that it in essence serves as a tiebreaker in the way you were saying. For instance, right now Josh Allen and Tom Brady are pretty much in a dead tie when it comes to regular season performance. However, Josh's meh playoff performance (from best to worst 2, 0, 3, 2, 3) will likely lose him the tiebreak. We can even go further down the list and find Matt Ryan and Lamar Jackson pretty much tied (so far), but Matt Ryan's forever underrated playoff performance (1, 1, 4, 0, 4. Lots of bad but lots of good) takes him ahead.
I'm not sure if you saw my Note, but my whole impetus to do this series was the career of Tomas Vokoun, who was the best goaltender in the NHL over a six year period, but nobody cared because his teams couldn't make the playoffs. This is just not right to me. The best players in the world are the best players in the world, regardless of whether or not they have one bad week at the end of their seasons.
People say it's all about championships, but they're lying to themselves. I explored this in my post about the 2007 Patriots. People remember the 2007 Patriots, but do they remember anything about the 2007 Giants? People care about champions when the most interesting story is the champion (like the Chiefs right now). When the most interesting story is not the champion (like the Patriots in 2018), nobody cares, and if anybody would disagree with that, I would challenge them to tell me one thing they remember about either the 2007 Giants or the 2018 Patriots, exempting any relation to the most interesting story in their league that year (meaning no bringing up the Patriots when talking about the Giants, and no bringing up the Chiefs when talking about the Patriots).
The same goes for every league. I don't understand why people insist on lying to themselves pretending it's all about championships, but it's not. Often times the championship story and the real story will align (2022 and 2023), but often times it won't (2018 and 2021). This weird cognitive bias is in a way the whole purpose of this Substack existing. People look at things differently looking back than they do as it's happening, and articles like this are trying to correct that.
From Monday, Brady has improved his average performance from 2.05 stars to 2.58 stars. Manning without 2015 is at 2.5. and Drew Brees is at 2.78.
Personally, how much do you weight postseason performance in evaluating players? I think it is probably most useful to look at how players play against top defenses and other top QBs weather that is during or before the postseason. Currently, I use it more as tie breaker given the small sample size.
Also, if any wants to see the playoff performance of all these guys at glance, check out (https://nflfastr-app.herokuapp.com/index?), really useful site.
Fight the good fight Marc. I'm always on the play index. It's where I get all my 'most impactful play of the 2021 season (by WPA)' type stuff.
I also think you've hit the nail right on the head with postseason performance. As far as determining how good (not great, because great takes into account team accomplishments) players are, about five percent of NFL games (13 out of 285) are played in the postseason. Therefore, the postseason gets five percent of the weight when determining who the best (not greatest) players are.
Greatest is a narrative thing. Best is a factual thing. Why greatest always seems to take precedence over best in the NFL discourse I have no idea.
Five percent weight on postseason is so negligible that it in essence serves as a tiebreaker in the way you were saying. For instance, right now Josh Allen and Tom Brady are pretty much in a dead tie when it comes to regular season performance. However, Josh's meh playoff performance (from best to worst 2, 0, 3, 2, 3) will likely lose him the tiebreak. We can even go further down the list and find Matt Ryan and Lamar Jackson pretty much tied (so far), but Matt Ryan's forever underrated playoff performance (1, 1, 4, 0, 4. Lots of bad but lots of good) takes him ahead.
I'm not sure if you saw my Note, but my whole impetus to do this series was the career of Tomas Vokoun, who was the best goaltender in the NHL over a six year period, but nobody cared because his teams couldn't make the playoffs. This is just not right to me. The best players in the world are the best players in the world, regardless of whether or not they have one bad week at the end of their seasons.
People say it's all about championships, but they're lying to themselves. I explored this in my post about the 2007 Patriots. People remember the 2007 Patriots, but do they remember anything about the 2007 Giants? People care about champions when the most interesting story is the champion (like the Chiefs right now). When the most interesting story is not the champion (like the Patriots in 2018), nobody cares, and if anybody would disagree with that, I would challenge them to tell me one thing they remember about either the 2007 Giants or the 2018 Patriots, exempting any relation to the most interesting story in their league that year (meaning no bringing up the Patriots when talking about the Giants, and no bringing up the Chiefs when talking about the Patriots).
The same goes for every league. I don't understand why people insist on lying to themselves pretending it's all about championships, but it's not. Often times the championship story and the real story will align (2022 and 2023), but often times it won't (2018 and 2021). This weird cognitive bias is in a way the whole purpose of this Substack existing. People look at things differently looking back than they do as it's happening, and articles like this are trying to correct that.