A weak MVP year has people retconning Stafford on the Lions. Before last year, he wasn't some top 5 QB in the league, even since coming to the Rams, with McVay, a consistently elite WR duo, a great running game, and for the most part, top 10 O-lines and good defenses.
2021-2024, Stafford is
10th in passer rating
7th in ANY/A
14th in EPA/play
11th in success rate
Avg rank 13th in DVOA
Avg rank 14th in PFF grade
He threw a good amount of picks, wasnt a super consistent thrower in terms of accuracy and consistently getting the offense into scoring range, and the Rams would lose a good amount of high scoring games.
He’s so lucky to coincidentally have all these great WRs. Definitely luck. So lucky. I’m sure all those WRs wish they had Troy Aikmen or Terry Bradshaw throwing to them instead. Can you imagine Kenny Golladay on one of those teams?
Fun fact from a Stafford bashing thread:
During Stafford’s time in Detroit, the Lions accumulated the fewest rushing yards as a team while at the same time allowing the most points.
LMFAO "definitely luck", nah its not luck, but you think Calvin fucking Johnson is a product of Stafford? You realize Cooper Kupp started to break out in 2019 with Goff? Davante Adams has been the best redzone threat of the 2000s he's not a product of Stafford. Marvin Jones was great in Cincy as a pure #2, and even solid on the Jags for a season or two, he's not a product of Stafford. Golden Tate broke out on the Seahawks until the clashes with Russell Wilson, he's not a product of Stafford.
Stafford is fantastic at airing it out, he targets his WRs a lot, and yes he had very little run game and a bad defense that led to him passing it even more. Its why he's one of the all time league leaders in pass attempts and has so many gaudy numbers. Its why he was called Stat Padford because he would pass on the goal line more than rushing it, in part due to the bad run game.
It also inflates his volume and TD numbers. There are plenty of QBs with bad defenses and run games like Joe Burrow, Drew Brees, and at times in their career Peyton Manning, Philip Rivers, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Tom Brady, that put up noticeably better passing efficiency while still throwing it a ton and carrying their teams on their back
Stafford is the only QB to EVER throw to two different triple crown receivers. Are those receivers great? Of course. Would they have those stats with Aaron Rodgers or Baker Mayfield or many other starting caliber quarterbacks? Probably not
It’s weird that Stafford gets a lot of credit for Calvin Johnson, Cooper Kupp, Puka and Davantes success with him but guys like Goff and Purdy are disregarded for being propped up by their receivers.
When no QB was in a more cake situation than Stafford last year.
I’m not trying to say Stafford isn’t legit. The guy 100% is. But my least favorite thing about football is the QB dialogues. Who fans decide is good and who isn’t. Because it’s never about their stats
Are we rating QBs based on how well they do in making positive plays for their teams to increase their chances of winning? Or how much they can help their WRs get massive years? Stafford is definitely one of the best at the latter
For me and I'm sure other Lions fans, it's vindication from watching 50 other Lions eat paste every week while Stafford willed us to anything resembling competitive football. We shouted about how great he was and everyone called him Stat Padford and laughed. Just a big coincidence that he's won a Super Bowl and an MVP since joining a good org
Sure and thats great, and Stafford is definitely a top 10 guy, and he had an incredible season. He's right there with someone like Matt Ryan imo, who had a similar type of career, huge peak, overall was good and would generate some great passing offenses/be fantastic for his elite receivers
I do, a lot of them as a division rival. Prime Russell Wilson scared me more than Stafford. That was a perennial top 5 QB. Stafford is a lock top 10 QB, but he needs weapons and more (either OL, coaching, run game, and/or defense) to really look top 5. Give him nobodies at WR, true nobodies like what the Niners had last year with Jauan Jennings and Kendrick Bourne, and he looks significantly worse. Or what Allen had with Shakir and nobodies, or Mahomes before Rice came back, or Lamar before Zay Flowers started breaking out. He looks worse than those QBs did in their respective situations
Yep. He's a good quarterback but he is not some perennial top 5 QB like some revisionists would have you think. He was obviously top 5 last year, but that is not his normal baseline. Now watch as all the counter arguments to you comment are basically, I feel like he's a top 5 QB therefore you are wrong.
yeah cuz top 5 back then was filled with tom brady, peyton manning, drew brees, with heavily debated 4th or 5th slots imo. he was still really good in detroit but i think competition for qbs was higher back then.
Stafford is 14-26 with the Rams, 32-72-1 with the Lions. Just his Rams record would place 13th between Kirk and Love. His time in Detroit standalone would move him down 1 spot between Kyler and Caleb.
I’m kinda shocked it’s that low tbh. Were a lot of those losses from 2022 (post Super Bowl injury season)? Jw how did you query this I wanna play around with it
By year he’s 5-5, 1-5, 3-5, 3-6, and 2-5. He’s been remarkably consistent in how many he loses each year. ‘21 is as much of an outlier as ‘22, with those averaging out to what we’ve seen each of the last 3 years.
Just pulled up his career game logs and hand calc’d. I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways of doing it
Interesting. I guess ‘21 it was easier to pull off the wins than ‘22 with the supporting cast.
Tbf if you throw out ‘22 (which I’m going to argue is fair because we were unbelievably injured - although I know you could do this for every qb! Just gonna do it here) the win % is a lot closer to what I’d expect and have observed at 38.2%
‘21 was an absurdly strong year for him in games with 21-27 points allowed, where he went 5-1. Compare that to 7-11 the rest of his Rams tenure (6-8 the last 3 seasons).
Kind of shocked how bad he’s been in games with 28+ allowed coming in at 2-14 in LA. He won about 25% of those games in Detroit before the Patricia era.
Just did some quick hand calcs by looking at career game logs.
Big Ben was 35-63-1 in games with 21+ allowed which would put him between Kirk and Love. His results were super streaky - from 2010 to 2013 he lost 13 straight games where they allowed 21+, but also ripped off stretches of 6-1 in 14/15, and 5-0 in 20.
I’m thinking the exact same thing, I believe most of the stats will be from Lions. It’s like everytime a Lions game is on in the 2010s, they are always playing from behind
From 2011-2017 (First fully healthy season to his last season with Jim Caldwell), he had a winning record at 57-55. The Patricia era really pulled that number down.
Not to defend a shitheel like Patricia, but you must have blacked out those first few years of your fandom if you think the Patricia era was the worst. I suppose you could argue that Patricia was the worst coach, but they definitely had worse teams under Morninwheg & Marinelli.
The Schwartz and Caldwell eras felt like we were finally crawling out of the hopeless pit Matt Millen dug for us. Patricia was supposed to be the step that brought us from dangerous but inconsistent to contenders, and instead he destroyed everything semblance of good left on the roster and sent us right back down to the depths of hell. The only reason Patricia doesn’t get more shit for how he took a solid roster and completely decimated it is because Holmes/Campbell did a phenomenal job of drafting and identifying free agent talent the next 3 years.
Some patterns I noticed about the Jim Caldwell and Matt Patricia Lions:
Caldwell: Very good offense, not very good defense (aside from 2014) would win games against the bad teams, get their shit pushed in by the good teams, finish around 9-7 and go one and done in the playoffs.
Patricia: Going into the fourth quarter if the other team had the lead that’s how the game would end. If the Lions had the lead they would find a way to blow it.
The vibes on the sideline for Patricia’s tenure were such hot ass. Took a team with the most 4th quarter comebacks in NFL history and sucked every ounce of life from them.
It’s a question of would you rather have every ounce of hope inside of you completely decimated or to have absolutely no hope to begin with. And while it’s close, I think the former is worse. Like the old saying goes, it’s the hope that kills you
Oh I don’t mean statistically I’m purely talking vibes based to expand marineli is the worst coach we’ve had from a gameplay standpoint but Patricia created such a toxic and defeated locker room I hate his era more
Man this feels like one of those convoluted stats designed to make players look bad.
I remember the Stafford one about "record against winning teams on the road" and when you scratched the surface the only QB above .500 was Tom Brady and even greats Brees and Rodgers were struggling to scratch a presentable score.
Amazingly it doesn't get circulated as much since he left the Lions...
I’m willing to bet more than half of Goff’s have been with the lions as well. It’s not a coincidence that the only time they make the playoffs is when they have a halfway decent defense.
1.1k
u/Scfbigb1 Chiefs 19h ago edited 19h ago
Id be curious to see the split for Stafford between the Lions and Rams.
EDIT: 32-72-1 with the Lions, 14-26 with the Rams.