We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Pt. 2: Growing Pains

Part two of the Trent Green story sees him finally traded, but to a Chiefs team that does not suit him at all.

The story of the beginning of Trent Green’s career in Washington and St Louis has been told (you can find it at the button below if you missed it), but in order to fully explore the details of his stint in Kansas City, we must go back one last time to that dang carpet.

In part one I told you that Trent had a horrible knee injury and missed the entirety of the 1999 season, but I largely glossed over the extent of his injuries, and I did so because they don’t become terribly important until now.

You see, everybody knows about the injury and that Trent missed the season, but what nobody remembers is that his knee was completely destroyed, destroyed to such an extent that if he played any position other than QB, he likely would’ve never seen an NFL field again. Trent lost his ACL, MCL, and lateral meniscus all on that one play. All of these injuries are why his knee took four separate surgeries to entirely repair. We are now in the 2001 offseason (roughly 18 months after the Rodney Harrison leg dive), and the rehab is still not over.

The rehab will never be over for Trent. He will spend the rest of his football career rehabbing his knee every off day. Don’t get me wrong. This is not all that uncommon of a story for the NFL, but it is uncommon for a man who has started just 19 NFL games. His career has barely gotten started, and he is already working with a permanent handicap.

Needless to say, Trent’s mobility will never be the same, and though I won’t mention the knee very much after this point, because it doesn’t come up very often, just keep at the top of your mind that regardless of how well Trent does in Kansas City, imagine what he could’ve done on two good legs.

Back to the timeline.

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If you recall, there were two teams in the Trent Green sweepstakes. Miami and Kansas City were the only two teams in the NFL in position to be able to trade a first round pick for a QB. It is not a coincidence that Trent has landed in Kansas City.

Dick Vermeil is not a name that’s come up very often in this story so far. Again, he was in St Louis, but I was saving his name because it becomes much more important once Trent moves to Kansas City. Vermeil was the head coach of the St Louis Rams, who hired him out of a 15 year retirement to turn their sunk ship around.

It hadn’t worked, as in 1997 and 1998 the Rams had remained awful, and Vermeil’s old school coaching style was not getting him on the good side of his players. In the 1999 offseason, he (in consultation with Mike Martz, who had worked with Trent in Washington) brought in Trent Green to try to save his coaching career.

This was clearly going to work, which (in conjunction with how much everybody liked Trent) is what brought Dick to tears when announcing that Trent was gone for an indeterminate amount of time. We all know what went down in St Louis. The team won the 1999 Super Bowl, and Dick decided it was over for him in coaching. He retired during that offseason.

As soon as he did so, he seemed to discover that he was not as mentally burned out as he thought, and immediately went back on this choice (and has since cited it as his biggest professional regret). However, the Rams had already moved on without him, and without any good jobs available for 2000, he was forced to sit out that entire season, which in our timeline saw Trent playing well and proving he was worth a first round pick.

In the 2001 offseason, the Chiefs fired Head Coach Gunther Cunningham, and replaced him with Dick. All of this was apparently done without management bothering to inform Cunningham, who was notified upon showing up to the facility that he was no longer employed by the Chiefs.

Fans were not happy about this (as Cunningham had brought a lot of success to KC), but to get a head coach that’d so recently led the dramatic turnaround that occurred in St Louis, along with a few of his assistants, had to be at least a little bit exciting, but this excitement was again dampened when Elvis Grbac, who also was not happy with all of this cajoling, left Kansas City following his career year in 2000 to jump on the Ravens’ bandwagon.

This left the Chiefs with an empty QB room. With both starter and backup from 2000 being gone, this left them with Todd Collins as their only rostered QB. I have respect for Todd Collins. He stuck in the league for a long time as a backup, but he’s not what you’re looking for in your first season as a new administration.

Dick knew who he wanted. He’d brought in Trent Green to save his career once, and he’s going to do it again. The first round pick it costs to bring him in is costly, but with this offensive coaching squad, and the heavy St Louis feel they come with, they know it’s going to work.

Trent has just gone through yet another knee surgery in the 2001 offseason. It’s so extensive that he walks into the press conference called to announce him as the new starting QB with a very significant limp. Nevertheless, everybody is all smiles, and it truly is a very happy moment for Trent.

Surely he would’ve preferred to start at home in St Louis, but since it was clear (or so we thought at the time) that it wasn’t going to happen, Trent is quite happy to get out of that situation and into a place that truly wanted him, and a place where he is going to be able to play.

Here’s the problem.

Trent is not going to be able to practice until training camp. That doesn’t seem that bad, but with a new coach who’s trying to install a new system (virtually the same as the Rams’) with a new QB who he’s brought in to be a big help in the teaching of that system, it’s just late to get going once training camp has already started.

This is compounded by the fact that the Chiefs just don’t have the players to play this system. These Chiefs are set up to be the West Coast offence they’ve been since they traded for Joe Montana in 1993. There just are no big play threats, because a West Coast offence doesn’t really need any, but Vermeil and OC Al Saunders and Trent Green himself are all looking to go vertical and stretch the field. It’s just a mismatch.

As a result of all this turnover, the best years of Tony Gonzalez’s NFL career are over. He’s going to be stuck for years on this Chiefs offence that is not designed to suit him. He’ll remain great, but his very best is already behind him. Derrick Alexander’s (a 1300 yard receiver in 2000) tenure as an elite receiver is over for injury reasons.

Beyond those two, there is running back Priest Holmes, who did good things for Baltimore in 1998, but for the past two seasons has been buried on their depth chart. Generally, when a team uses a first round pick for the privilege of replacing you, there’s a reason they do so, so who knows if we should put much faith into him, and those are the only offensive players on the KC Chiefs worth naming as we go into 2001.

And you thought Patrick Mahomes had a weak supporting cast.

In addition to fan discontent over how the offseason was handled, not having all that many offensive players worth mentioning, a new offensive system altogether which the roster is not suited for, a quarterback with a bum knee, and no first round pick to try to alleviate any of these problems, there’s one more thing the Chiefs must consider.

The Trent Green rule.

If you’ve forgotten, the Trent Green rule states that wherever Trent goes, great offence and horrible defence will follow. As of 2001, the Kansas City Chiefs have not ranked worse than 20th in yards allowed since 1987. Guess where they’re going to rank in 2001.

If you guessed well worse than 20th, you’re correct.

Because Trent Green can’t have nice things, the perpetually good defence of the Kansas City Chiefs is going to tank the second he gets there, and it’s going to hamper his ability to win for his entire Chiefs tenure.

All of these forces combine to make 2001 a miserable experience for both Trent and his Chiefs. There are (predictably) serious growing pains trying to install the new system. There are only three receivers (Priest Holmes, Tony Gonzalez, and Mikhael Ricks) on the entire team with positive per play value, and it’s a struggle for everybody.

Trent does go to Washington in week three for the first time since leaving there three years ago, and has probably the best game of his career so far, generating 0.735 EPA/Play and winning a 45-13 blowout, but this turns out to be the only win in the Chiefs’ first seven games.

I don’t know if Trent himself was not ready to play, or the entire Chiefs’ offence was not ready to play, but either way they were awful in the early stages of 2001. In the first seven games of the season, they generate positive EPA/Play just twice. Once was against Washington, and one other time that I’m going to get to.

They were held to three points by a New York Giant defence that’s going to end the season ranked just 13th, six points by a Bronco defence that’s going to rank just 17th, and negative EPA/Play by the quite bad (23rd) Arizona Cardinals. There were also games against good opponents mixed in, but I want to demonstrate that these Chiefs were not being held down by a strong schedule.

They were just bad.

This is demonstrated in week seven, in a very rare Thursday night game (back then, Thursday nights were used only for panicked rescheduling) against one of the worst defences of the entire play tracking era, the 2001 Indianapolis Colts. This is a team that had prime Peyton Manning, and managed to miss the playoffs. That’s how bad this defence was, and the Chiefs still can’t do anything with it to begin this game. They do not score until the final play of the first half.

Their first half drives go as follows: three plays, seven plays, one play (interception), three plays, five plays, three plays, three plays, and then finally the field goal to end the half.

What in the world is going on? Six first downs in an entire half against one of the worst defences I’ve ever seen? Didn’t you tell me this series was here for the purpose of hyping up Trent Green? You’re doing a pretty bad job.

I understand that. This first half is even more horrendous if you watch it with your own eyes, but I’m stopping at this game for a reason. If you know what’s coming in the future between these two teams then you know what that reason is. If you don’t then you’re in for a real treat once we get there. Stay tuned, but the gist of why I’m stopping is this:

The Chiefs will not punt again in this game, and they will not punt again against the Indianapolis Colts for three full years.

That’s right. The second half of this game in 2001 played between two teams which will not make the playoffs is the start of perhaps the most legendary succession of shootouts between two teams the NFL will ever see, and the kickstart to perhaps the most underrated rivalry (in terms of entertainment value) this sport will ever see.

The Chiefs march straight down the field to open up the second half, getting to the goal line but stalling there and settling for three. The Colts respond with a kick return touchdown, but like a flash Trent has thrown a touchdown pass to Tony Gonzalez. An interception deep in Colt territory allows Indy to pull out to a 14 point lead, but before you can blink it’s back to seven again.

This continues until the game ends. It ends as a 35-28 win for the Colts. Considering the score at half was 7-3, then you can understand how the second half is a preview of events to come between these two teams. Watch out Indianapolis. We’ll be back.

However much week seven might have been a preview of the Chiefs’ future with the Colts, it was not a preview of their future in 2001, as following a win to end the skid against a fairly good opponent in the San Diego Chargers it was right back into the malaise, scoring only seven points against the 16th ranked defence of the New York Jets.

At last in week ten comes the respite of a bye week, and week 11 finally sees an all around well played offensive game (the first since Washington) against Seattle to move us to 3-8. I truly believe this is where things begin to change a little bit, because week 14 in Oakland against the 8-3 Raiders is the game where this Chiefs team moves from the past to the future.

This is a good game for Trent, but good is all, as 0.089 EPA/Play against the league’s 20th ranked defence is not turning any heads. This is the Priest Holmes show. He runs for 168 yards, and catches five balls for 109 more, and gives the Raiders fits all day long. Unfortunately, KC stacks all of their production into the first three touches of the game.

After these three touches we are leading 17-7, but with Rich Gannon going against our porous defence that’s anything but safe. Immediately it’s only a 17-14 lead, but what happens next galls me. I’ve never seen it before.

We get across the 50 and into Oakland territory every time we touch the ball for the rest of the first half, but do not manage to score on any of these tries. A punt from the 50, a punt from the 49, a punt from the 47, and a missed field goal means that we have to go into the locker room down 21-17, despite clearly having been the better team in the first half, and to start the second half it gets even worse.

After nearly getting over the 50 again (we stall at our own 45 this time), Tim Brown returns the resulting punt for an 88 yard touchdown and I am gobsmacked that we are losing 28-17. It’s almost unbelievable the way that this game has turned out. Get ready to hear more stories like this. They’re actually fairly typical for this Chiefs era.

A great kickoff return of our own from Dante Hall nets a field goal to close the gap to 28-20, but all of a sudden we cannot go anywhere. After having no trouble moving the ball in the first half, it takes us all the way into the fourth quarter to get the ball over the 50 again, and even that drive ends in a punt. It takes us all the way until the eight minute mark to truly get anything going.

We ride Priest all the way to the Oakland four yard line, but this is not the best touchdown scorer in NFL history quite yet, and we can’t quite pound it in from there, turning the ball over on downs. Oakland however fumbles the ball trying to run the clock out, which gives us the ball back and we do score a touchdown, but a failed two point conversion means we go home with an unbelievable 28-26 loss.

For a team that came into this game as nine point road underdogs, this performance is nothing to be ashamed of, but do you know how hard it is to generate 0.103 EPA/Play, hold your opponents to negative EPA/Play and lose? I’ll give you the answer:

It’s almost impossible.

Yet here we are.

Trent seems to find himself in a lot of these spots doesn’t he?

You wouldn’t believe it, but the same thing almost happens again the very next week. The Chiefs generate 0.110 EPA/Play (this time with a lot more Trent and a lot less Priest). The Broncos can generate just 0.017, and yet it still takes overtime to get this win. How is this possible?

Two missed field goals, one fumbled kick return, and -14.83 total EPA out of the special teams. That’s how. In fact, it was the same issue last week, with special teams costing the Chiefs 9.03 points in a two point loss. In fact, it’s the same issue every week.

How a team with Dante Hall on it can get so much negative value in total from their special teams is beyond me. On the whole season, special teams manages to generate positive EPA/Play for the Chiefs just six times in sixteen games, and in five of those games the defence is so bad it wipes out their entire contribution.

I’m going to give you a chance to guess. I know this offence has been struggling this season and I understand that, but how many times this season do their defence and special teams combine to help them in any significant way? This is easy to look up, but then you’ll know you’re a cheater, so take your guess. Put it in the comments if you want or just hold it inside.

The answer is three. Weeks three and four in Washington and Denver, where the defence covers up for how little the special team units are helping, and week 16 in Jacksonville, where the special teams return the favour and cover up for the defence a little bit. Just for fun, let’s find a QB roughly comparable to 2001 Trent Green.

I’ll use Tom Brady as my comparison, because their numbers are roughly comparable (both are quite bad), yet their results (in terms of wins) were wildly different. Of course, this is because Tom’s defence and special teams combined to generate greater than 0.05 EPA/Play (my definition of ‘significant’ help) in seven of Tom’s games (half of his 14 starts), in addition to all three playoff games en route to the Patriots winning the 2001 Super Bowl.

Keep in mind I’m excluding the games where the defence and special teams simply fail to make things worse (which would bring the total up to 11 out of 14 for Tom and just nine out of 16 for Trent) in favour of only including ones where the offence got significant help.

Such is the story of the 2001 season for the Chiefs. In terms of offence, they were good, 6th in the NFL in EPA/Play. In terms of everything else, their 6-10 record indicates that they needed work.

This is the Trent Green story, so I feel the need to make note that this is the worst season of Trent Green’s career. His -0.019 EPA/Play (20th) and 5.06 ANY/A (19th) are both the lowest Trent will put up at any point during his prime, and make clear that something was not right here.

Whether it was the knee surgery and the resulting lack of practice time, or the trouble of his teammates of getting to grips with the new system, or the general lack of quality of those teammates, or some combination of the above, something got to Trent this season.

Even with this, there are positives.

The first and foremost is that Priest Holmes is here, and he’s here to stay, and he’s here for cheap due to his obscurity in the years before coming to Kansas City. This leaves a lot of room for the Chiefs to improve the squad, but there is one more thing about this that’s already beginning to cast shadows over Trent.

Of all the things Priest Holmes does, he is most outstanding at scoring touchdowns. In total in 2001, the Chiefs scored 16 rushing touchdowns. This left only 17 touchdowns for Trent to throw for.

What’s the problem with this?

Most teams score a great deal more than half of their touchdowns through the air. For example, let’s look at the 2001 New England Patriots again. They scored 36 total offensive touchdowns, and 21 of them came through the air. That’s 58%. Another team that had a QB roughly the quality of Trent is the New Orleans Saints, who in 2001 had 35 offensive touchdowns, 27 of them coming via the pass. That’s 77%. 2001 Jacksonville Jaguars? 31 touchdowns, 20 passing touchdowns. 64%.

What am I driving at here?

What I’m saying is that generally a QB the quality of Trent Green gets to account for 65% or better of his team’s touchdowns. If Trent Green got to account for 65% of his teams’ touchdowns for his entire career, he would’ve ended up with two more touchdowns in 1998 in Washington (25 instead of 23), and four more touchdowns (21 instead of 17) this season, and he’ll lose more than that as the years go on.

This may not seem like a big deal, but continuously compound this over an entire career, and Trent is going to end up with a fairly large number fewer touchdown passes than he deserves. I bring this up in 2001, because I think it’s the most consequential here. The reason this is the case is that in 2001 Trent led the league with 24 interceptions.

Compared to Trent’s 17 total touchdowns, 24 interceptions look quite ugly. However, compared to a more reasonable 21 touchdowns that a QB would’ve gotten without Priest Holmes on his team, this begins to look a bit better, and if we could be slightly optimistic and say that Trent could do what Aaron Brooks (a QB of similar quality to Trent in 2001) did and account for 77 percent of his team’s touchdowns, then Trent would’ve ended up with 25 touchdowns and a positive TD to INT ratio.

Those of us who read these articles are smart. We don’t care who scores the touchdowns. It doesn’t matter, as long as somebody on the team does it. Therefore, specifically because of examples like Trent Green’s, where a great QB is going to spend an entire career getting fewer TD passes than he should (and easily could) have, touchdown passes are a stat that’s entirely meaningless to me.

However, people care about touchdown passes. By people I mean casuals. Another thing casuals care about is TD-INT ratio, and by that metric Trent Green is perhaps the NFL’s worst QB in 2001. Luckily for us, we don’t care about turnovers either (this article explains why), so we don’t have to worry about this statistic either when analysing Trent.

The gist of what I’m driving at is that Trent is going to spend a whole career getting shortchanged out of passing touchdowns on his stat line, simply because he doesn’t care to do so and allows Priest to do the scoring without fussing about it. This means that his TD-INT ratio is going to persistently look rather ugly for a QB of his stature. Casual fans care about stats like this, and as a result will spend a lifetime underrating Trent Green.

We do not care about stats like this. Not even a little bit. Touchdown passes do not matter. Turnovers do not matter. What matters is being good at playing QB and moving the ball down the field and consistently putting your team in positions to score, which does not require scoring yourself, and does not require absolute ball security. I’ve termed this the Josh Allen Theorem, but it could just as easily be called the Trent Green theorem.

Now that I’ve told you all of this, go look at Trent Green’s basic career stats. You’ll see that he never has a TD-INT ratio better than 2-1 in any of his best years, and you’ll now know that it does not matter.

So, you can choose to be among those who in 2001 gave Trent the nickname TrINT, or you can join us in the enlightened age, working to hype up Trent Green.

The next part of this series will oversee both Trent and the Chiefs overcome these growing pains and ascend to their true form, the NFL’s best offence. However, the Trent Green rule is still in effect. This defence is going to get worse, and can you win playoff games without any contribution at all from them?

Click back and find out.

Thanks so much for reading.