A quarterback who won a Super Bowl by encouraging Ed Reed to score a lot of pick-sixes knows a thing or two about luck. That's what makes Trent Dilfer's assessment of the Falcons' "lucky" winning record so worthwhile.
↵Last year, ESPN haircut Dilfer listed his top five NFL quarterbacks. Kyle Orton (KYLE ORTON) made the cut, but Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, Donovan McNabb, Matt Schaub, Joe Flacco, and Matt Ryan did not. His reasoning? Orton's team was winning a lot of games at the time (though it stopped doing so shortly after). And that's all that matters:
↵↵↵"This is a bottom-line business," Dilfer said in an appearance on SportsCenter. "And if we're going to judge coaches harshly and we're going to knee-jerk react early in the season when people win and lose, then I'm going to evaluate the quarterback position on one thing and one thing only: Do you win football games?"
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Got it. We judge football by wins and wins alone. He's framing this as if he's making some kind of smartass point about media perception, but come on. Like Dilfer, one of the least impactful Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks ever, wouldn't settle on wins as the metric anyway.
↵So since the Falcons have as many wins as any other NFL team and are the only team to have beaten the defending champions, that means the Falcons are pretty much the league's best team, right? No context, nuance, or discussion necessary, right?
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↵Trent Dilfer names the Falcons as his most overrated team in the NFL. Coming from a Super Bowl winning quarterback, how could I argue?
Steven Godfrey
IACGodfrey
Audio of Dilfer on Colin Cowherd's show, where he abandons wins for the eyeball test and says the Steelers are great (nevermind the Falcons took the Steelers to overtime, unless I missed him noting that).
↵He also takes back his preseason prediction that the 49ers would be good this year, which is interesting because (a) Trent Dilfer admits Trent Dilfer is wrong sometimes, (b) they must be awful if even the Falcons can beat them!, (c) they're really not all that bad -- they just match up poorly against the Seahawks and Chiefs, (d) if the Falcons got lucky to beat the Saints and 49ers this year, then the Saints got lucky to beat the Redskins, Falcons, and Vikings last year, and (e) if the Falcons got lucky to beat the Saints this year, then the Saints got lucky to beat the 49ers this year, and the 49ers are terrible, and now we've entered the darkest corners of Trent Dilfer's mind:
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