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The NFL's Most Underrated And Overrated Players — These gridiron stars may defy expectations, good and bad.
By Zack O'Malley Greenburg
August 30, 2009
Brett Favre made headlines this month by un-retiring--again--and signing with the Minnesota Vikings. Judging by the number of fans rushing to buy purple No. 4 jerseys, one might think the Vikings had already won the Super Bowl.
Unfortunately for residents of the Twin Cities, it's not a great move. That's because Favre is the most overrated quarterback in the NFL, according to our panel of experts. Favre piloted the Jets to a 1-4 record last December, a month that saw him throw nine of his league-leading 22 interceptions. Nevertheless, Favre garnered his 10th Pro Bowl selection--and raked in $12 million, more than twice as much as any other Jet--making him an easy choice for our overrated list.
"Brett Favre is the career leader in touchdowns, but he is also the league leader in interceptions," says Jeff Ma, co-founder of Citizensports.com, an outfit that designs sports-related applications for Facebook and other sites. "That number may grow faster than the former and be more damaging than the former is helpful. In my mind, this was a terrible move for the Vikings."
On the other hand, the Atlanta Falcons' selection of Matt Ryan with the third pick of the 2008 draft is a move that few would second guess. The young star gets the nod as the NFL's most underrated quarterback--he didn't make last year's Pro Bowl despite posting a lofty 87.7 passer rating, easily better than Favre's 81.0 mark. Better yet, the rookie made $6.6 million, about half of what Favre made.
The List
In order to determine these players, we polled experts including Scott Swanay, founder of the advice Web site FantasyFootballSherpa.com; staff members from research site DraftDude.com and Ma. We asked them to choose the most underrated and overrated players at each position, with an eye toward real football talent and fantasy football value alike. We used Pro Bowl appearances to break ties at each position: Nominees for the all-underrated team were bumped off if they'd been recognized for their achievements last year, while overrated nominees like Favre were highlighted because they were selected to football's all-star game over more deserving players like Ryan.
A Team Effort
Along with Ryan, T.J. Houshmandzadeh of the Bengals and the Packers' Ryan Grant landed on the underrated list at wide receiver and running back, respectively. Grant looks healthy after an injury-plagued 2008 and could get additional carries when the windy weather sets in at chilly Lambeau Field. Houshmandzadeh, a relative bargain last year at $2.85 million, should benefit from a change of scenery after bolting the underachieving Bengals for the Seahawks.
Joining Favre on our overrated squad are running back Chris Johnson and wideout Terrell Owens. Swanay thinks Johnson, a Tennessee Titan, may lose carries to a slimmed-down LenDale White. The aging Owens, who made $13 million last year, is often among the league leaders in dropped passes, but gets more attention for his off-field antics. Both could signal a dip in production.
"Owens is almost 37 years old, plays in a very tough conference and in cold weather, and has a bad QB throwing to him," says Lee Caleshu of DraftDude. "He will become extremely disruptive at some point in the season when he becomes aggravated that he is not as productive as he has been in the past, causing a downward spiral in his stats."
The most overrated defensive player? The Bears' Brian Urlacher, whose tackle total dropped to 93 last year, down from 123 in 2007 and 141 in 2006. Worse yet, the former NFL defensive player of the year didn't record a single sack. The Bears paid him $4.2 million dollars for his efforts.
"It's unfair to judge defensive players in terms of raw numbers--as fans, we don't know what scheme they are playing and what roles they have been placed in," says Ma. "That being said, Urlacher's numbers from last year were among the worst of his career ... He has clearly become overrated."
On the bright side, Urlacher may have better luck this season. The Bears will play the Vikings twice, giving the beefy linebacker plenty of opportunities to sack his lumbering colleague on the all-overrated squad--quarterback Brett Favre.
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Fatherhood is first for James
By Michael Silver
August 30, 2009
The offer Edgerrin James had been waiting for finally came over the weekend, and given that it might have been his last best chance to land with an NFL team this season and continue a drive toward Canton, logic suggested he’d jump at the opportunity.
Yet when the Seattle Seahawks suggested to James’ agent Drew Rosenhaus that the 31-year-old running back fly diagonally across the country from south Florida last Sunday, EJ said, “No way.”
As James explained Thursday night, “Monday was the first day of school. Trust me, I wasn’t going to miss that for anything.”
That accompanying his children to their respective public schools in Naples, Fla., was a deal-breaker makes sense when placed in the context of James’ heartrending offseason. On April 14 James’ four kids, all under the age of 12, sat with him in a Tampa hospital room watching their mother, Andia Wilson, die after a spirited battle with leukemia.
Wilson, his longtime girlfriend, had always been the one to handle the first-day-of-school frenzy while James plied his trade in Indianapolis or Arizona. This time, he was determined to be present – for his kids, for himself and for her.
“I had to be there,” he said. “There was no leaving.”
The Seahawks understood, and James delayed his departure until Monday evening, sticking around long enough to pick up his kids and get the lowdown on the big day’s events.
Now the NFL’s active rushing leader with 12,121 yards, a total that places him 11th on the league’s all-time list, is soldiering on with his family’s blessing while keeping his vocation in its proper perspective.
Even as he copes with tragedy, James hasn’t lost his sense of humor. Ask about the speculation that he’ll ultimately challenge incumbent Seahawks halfback Julius Jones(notes) for a starting job, and James replies, “Nah, it’s cool. The way I look at it is I’ve played 10 good years, and I’ve done everything a running back can do. I want to help. I think I want to be like Ginobili now – I want to come off the bench. I’m the new Manu Ginobili! How about that?”
Though he reached his first Super Bowl last February, completing a late-season revival that coincided with the Cardinals’ unlikely drive to the brink of a championship, James does not look back fondly on his final year in the desert. Stung by a midseason benching, James likened the experience last January to a “bad (expletive) dream” and couldn’t wait to relocate. Privately, he was dealing with the stress of Wilson’s illness, flying home at every opportunity and spending many nights on the phone assessing her condition.
After the Super Bowl, as things worsened, James tried vainly to help Wilson continue her fight. “I never believe in giving up in anything,” he said. “I’d sit there with her phone in the hospital and call her friends and get them to talk to her. I had Coach [Tony] Dungy say some [inspirational] words. Anything we could do to bring her through we were going to try.”
The end, James says, “just came out of nowhere. It was like a straight fall – in the morning she was fine, and she didn’t make it through the day. She had everything she could possibly have – the will to fight, great doctors, financial support, a [bone-marrow] donor lined up – but she was too weak to go on. The hospital room was packed with people. My kids watched her take her last breath. That’s some crazy stuff.”
Amid the painful circumstances James’ and Wilson’s families rallied, forging a plan to ensure that the kids would enjoy the most stable reality possible under the circumstances. At first James, released by the Cardinals after they drafted Beanie Wells in late April, figured that meant his career was over, and he was at peace with it.
Determined to live in the moment and of the moment, James remembered that before the 2008 Presidential election, he and Wilson had talked about taking a family trip to Washington, D.C., to commemorate a potentially historic triumph. “If Obama won,” James said, “we said we’d go big.”
So, in June, James went really big, chartering a coach bus and driver and inviting about 60 friends and family members on a week-long trip from Florida to the nation’s capital. They stopped in Charlotte, N.C., to visit former University of Miami teammate Damione Lewis, now a Panthers defensive tackle. Another ex-Hurricanes star, Redskins halfback Clinton Portis(notes), hosted a barbecue in the D.C. area.
Other than that, the James Gang was a typical bunch of tourists. “We went to the White House, all the monuments and a bunch of other attractions,” James said. “We had an itinerary all mapped out. It was low-key, and everyone had a lot of fun.”
The following weekend was Father’s Day, and James took his kids to Atlanta. He’d avoided discussing a potential return to football, but when the subject came up, his children didn’t hold back.
“They actually wanted me to play,” he says. “My oldest [daughter Edquisha], she knows where I rank on the rushing list, and she’s big on that. She said, ‘Daddy, you could be in the Hall of Fame! You’ve gotta go try and pass some more of ‘em up.’ ”
Given that James is 22 yards shy of Marcus Allen, he’ll surely be a top-10 rusher before the leaves turn, with Marshall Faulk(notes) (58) and Jim Brown (191) also in his immediate sights. If James runs for 619 yards in ’09 he’ll pass Tony Dorsett and could rank as high as seventh, though he could be overtaken by the Chargers’ LaDainian Tomlinson in the process.
In a development he never saw coming, James is now playing for his second Jim Mora. The first, who coached him in Indy, was a taskmaster whose departure – in favor of the gentler Dungy – did not cause James a whole lot of regret at the time.
Now he says, “I had my best seasons, statistically, under Jim Mora, so it’s tough not to see that as a positive. I played for the father; now I’m playing for the son. It’s cool.”
He’s also playing for an offensive coordinator, Greg Knapp, who favors the zone-blocking scheme in which James thrived in Indy. “I told Coach Mora the other day, ‘Damn, why couldn’t I have been in this system three years ago?’ ” James said.
More significant to James is the system that’s in place to take care of the kids in his absence. Three family members, including his mother, are devoting themselves to the effort, and though James jokes that there are limits to his contributions – “I’m not saying I’m gonna be a soccer dad, driving around in a minivan” – he’s clearly in a different space than he was during the first decade of his career.
“As football players, we’re so programmed to do well in our job that sometimes we forget about our house,” James says. “I look at my mom, who’s helping with my kids, and then I look at them. My kids don’t have that mom. When you really think of it like that – damn, it’s heavy.
“If my daughter would’ve said, ‘Daddy, I don’t want you to go play,’ then 100 percent guaranteed I wouldn’t be playing. I’ve gotten to enjoy so many things, but right now it’s time to be a parent first, and I don’t want to blow it.”
On Monday, James made sure he didn’t, shuttling Edquisha (seventh grade), Eyanha (third grade) and Edgerrin Jr. (pre-kindergarten) to each of their schools, while his youngest, Euro, stayed home with grandma. It was an eventful morning but not a particularly stressful one: While this might have been James’ initial foray into first-day-of-school madness, he was painstakingly prepared for the moment.
As he explained Thursday from his hotel room in Bellevue, Wash., “We did everything the night before. It was super-organized. All the clothes were laid out, all the lunches were made, and all they had to do was wake up, eat breakfast and go.”
His voice trailed off as he finished the recollection.
“The kids were excited,” he said quietly. “It was sweet.”
And, of course, it was bittersweet.
TAKE IT TO THE ATM
After being offered some insignificant but face-saving contract upgrades by the San Francisco 49ers, rookie wide receiver Michael Crabtree will realize he’s tripping and join the team a week before the regular season opener. … The Cincinnati Bengals, conversely, will stubbornly lowball Andre Smith until after the season is under way. … The Delaware County Daily Times staffer who wrote this headline is either unintentionally funny or desires a ton of grief from PETA.
LIES, LIES, LIES
1. Chad Ochocinco’s plans to circumvent the NFL’s no-tweeting policy will be foiled when a New England Patriots video assistant is caught filming his hand signals.
2. No one is cheering more for Mark Sanchez than Pete Carroll.
3. Thanks to Stanford sports sugar daddy John Arrillaga, when Cardinal coach Jim Harbaugh takes care of business in his office bathroom, harp-playing angels sing Free’s “All Right Now” in mellifluous tenors.
MY BUDDY’S ANNOYING FANTASY ADVENTURE
When we last left my buddy Malibu, he was eking out a third consecutive third-place finish in his Sex, Drugs and Fantasy Football League with his beloved No. 1 overall pick, LaDainian Tomlinson, on the bench as per my advice. Naturally, Malibu responded by conducting this year’s draft without my consultation – and by taking LT No. 2 overall, a move that would have occurred over my staunch objections, and letting his free-flowing love for the Chargers contribute to his delinquency. But don’t just take it from me; take it from one of Y! Sports’ esteemed fantasy experts. Brad Evans will be breaking down my tips this season to Malibu and UCSB women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb (who’s back for a second year and promises to include me in this weekend’s draft deliberations).
Before I get to Evans’ critique, here are Malibu’s selections in his 12-team league for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with overall pick number in parenthesis: LT (2), Marion Barber (23), Kurt Warner (26), Donovan McNabb (47), Hines Ward(notes) (50), Reggie Bush (71), Bernard Berria (74), Steve Breasto (95), Joe Flacco (98), Zach Miller (119), Darren Sproles (122), Michael Crabtree (143), LeRon McClain (146), Nate Kaeding (167), Malcom Floyd (170) and Michael Vick (191). Evans’ analysis: “Unless starting two quarterbacks is a requirement, your boy is packing-heat-in-the-waistline-of-loose-fitting-jeans kind of stupid. Warner, McNabb and Flacco were all tendon-snapping reaches. According to average draft position values, each is going roughly 20 picks later than where he selected them. As a result, his receiving corps suffered massively. The Chicago Bears have more talent at wideout. A WR thrice of Ward, Berrian and Breaston won’t win you any championships. … Suppressing team loyalties can be difficult, but in virtual pigskin it’s a necessity. Assuming Peterson went first, bypassing MJD, Forte, Turner and DeAngelo for a geriatric back with thin tread is a grave risk. Thankfully, he was wise enough to handcuff Sproles – for an excellent value, mind you – later in the draft. … To further prove his misguided lunacy, he also drafted a kicker well ahead of the Mr. Irrelevant round. … For your buddy’s sake, hopefully he relishes dark, dank and musty conditions, because his primary residence will likely be in the fantasy dungeon.”
OXYGEN-DEPRIVED THOUGHT FROM ABOVE
Despite winning the NFC North last season, fourth-year Vikings coach Brad Childress is believed to be in danger of losing his job if he doesn’t take his team further into the playoffs in ’09. The recent signing of Brett Favre shows that Childress is aware of the urgency of the situation. Yet what if Favre resembles the quarterback who struggled mightily in his last five games with the Jets, rather than the future Hall of Famer who performed at a high level in his first 11? If desperation sets in, would Childress have the guts to bench a legend and end his precious consecutive-games streak? Would Childress consider giving Favre the first series of each game and then yank him? Would Favre then stop publicly referring to his coach as “Chilly”? I’m not rooting for this to happen – I hope each of the NFC North quarterbacks lights it up this season – but it would be compelling theater.
LET’S DO SOME DON JULIO SILVER SHOTS FOR …
Former NFL official extraordinaire Burl Toler, who died earlier this month at the age of 81. Toler, the first African-American official in a major American sport, was the beloved patriarch of a tremendous family, and I know his son, Burl Jr., will help carry on a tremendous Bay Area legacy. Speaking of admirable Californians, let’s raise our glasses for former Washington Redskins and San Diego Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard for proving you can still shred at 72.
THIS WEEK’S PROOF THAT CAL IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Natalie Coughlin is one of the most decorated Olympians in U.S. history, not to mention a Golden Girl who ranks with the greatest of all Golden Bears. Now Coughlin is getting ready to represent on a reality-TV juggernaut – and best of all, she’ll be doing it with a fellow Cal alum. Like Coughlin, Alec Mazo, her partner on Season 9 of “Dancing with the Stars,” studied psychology at the world’s greatest university. Mazo, who captured the Season 1 championship with Kelly Monaco, has already tasted glory; Coughlin will be out to prove that the stereotype she once related to me about swimmers – that they’re sort of, uh, spazzy on land – isn’t absolute. “It’s completely true – with me the exception,” Coughlin said jokingly. I’ll be tuning in beginning Monday, Sept. 21, to watch her prove it against some of my favorite interview subjects, including Chuck Liddell, Michael Irvin and Joanna Krupa. I adore them all, but Coughlin will eat them for lunch.
Meanwhile, it’s time for some current Golden Bears to strut their stuff, beginning with the great Alex Morgan, who had a hat trick in Cal’s season-opening 4-1 win over Nevada in women’s soccer last Friday. The junior forward leads the 16th-ranked Bears into battle against No. 3 Portland in the City of Roses on Friday night. (Cal’s seventh-ranked men’s soccer team kicks off its season the following weekend at Georgetown and Maryland in the D.C. Area Classic.) And the Bears’ sixth-ranked women’s volleyball team gets things going this weekend at the Nevada Marriott Courtyard/Fairfield Invitational, beginning Friday night against UC Irvine. Throw in the blessed reopening of “The Fish” and the impending start of the 2009 football season, and things are looking mighty rosy in the center of the universe
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Bengals Ochocinco Tweeting Displeasure About Latest NFL Fine
By Matt Loede
August 30, 2009
Chad Ochocinco is not happy again. And he’s using his Twitter account to tell people about it. The Bengals wide receiver is saying that he’ll sue the NFL for being fined $5,000 for wearing an orange chinstrap in a preseason game. One tweet pointed out “Im sueing the NFL, I am color blind so this fine is discriminating because I’m disabled in a way, this is a sad day for me:(”
Ochocinco also put a photo of the letter he received from the NFL outlining the uniform rules infraction: “Specifically, you wore an orange chinstrap.” His online rant began about 12:30 p.m. Saturday with: “WTF I got a damn fine already, it’s the damn preseason, this is some bull***!!!!”
He continued later with a post on ESPN reporter Chris Mortenson’s Twitter feed: “mort this is … ridiculous, I am typing a letter back to the league office as we speak, I’m fining they a$$ back!!!! ”
The rule that Chad broke is Rule 5, Section 4, Article 3(a) which specifies that all players must wear, among other things, a “Helmet with chin strap (white only) fastened and face mask attached.”
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Haley, Pioli trying to reprogram Chiefs
By Charles Robinson
August 26, 2009
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Every day he wakes up, Dwayne Bowe(notes) thinks about it. The Kansas City Chiefs wideout drives to the practice facility in anticipation. He parks his SUV and ponders it. And when he finally sees coach Todd Haley, maybe in a corridor or coming around a corner, he knows how every minute of his day will play out.
“[Tuesday] when he saw me, he smiled,” Bowe said. “I knew it was going to be one of those days where he was [encouraging] me and not yelling so much. It was all positive. But if he doesn’t look at you, or he’s not smiling or talking, you know it’s going to be a [tough] day. Each day, you just never know.”
Asked if he ever thought about such a thing a year ago – reading the facial expression of former coach Herm Edwards – Bowe lets out a telling laugh and shakes his head.
“Never,” he said.
All regime changes come with uneasiness. New coaches bring new ideas, develop new favorites, and thrust veterans into situations where they are once again reading the landscape, trying to figure what it all means for them. But maybe no place this offseason has brought a more palpable shift than Kansas City, a franchise that saw a roster go through much of 2008 on autopilot, concluding with a 2-14 crash and a total purge of the team’s leadership structure. Gone are Edwards and former general manager Carl Peterson, a duo whose final days were defined by a roster filled with viral habits and elitism.
Enter Haley and general manager Scott Pioli, two men who have seemingly gone to work on the franchise’s psyche with a blowtorch and a chainsaw. With that in mind, you need only look at the Chiefs for one afternoon to realize that the blood-letting has just begun. And by the time it’s over, there may not be a player on the roster who hasn’t had the buttons inside his head re-programmed – if he can survive long enough.
That latter point is significant. Since the start of training camp on July 31, the Chiefs have made more roster moves than any other team – signing, cutting or trading 14 players. And that’s a tally that doesn’t include the inking of draft picks. While at their training site in River Falls, Wis., the Chiefs released five players. The previous regime had cut three players while in River Falls … in three years.
The message couldn’t be less ambiguous: Just because a player gets on the plane to go to camp doesn’t mean he’s getting on the plane to come back. No matter the price, Pioli and Haley have shown their dedication to churning the roster and creating endless competition.
“A day won’t go by here that Scott Pioli isn’t trying to make this team better through other players,” said Chiefs linebacker Mike Vrabel, whom Pioli acquired from New England in the offseason. “I came to expect that from eight years with the Patriots. Guys are going to come and go, and there are going to be guys constantly brought in to challenge you at your position. That’s just the way it has been. … You’re going to get an opportunity, and if you make the most of it, chances are you’ll get a second opportunity. But if you don’t, you can bet they’ll be looking for somebody else.”
The new regime wasted no time making that apparent. When Pioli took over in January, he inherited a roster that had become utterly complacent in losing. Even more, the group had developed such poor conditioning habits that a trained personnel eye could look at film from last season and see the team gaining weight from Week 1 to Week 16.
Discipline was in shambles, chemistry was largely nonexistent, and a dysfunctional star system had developed. The disjointed elitism was even apparent in the structure of the parking lot, where players were allowed to buy the best spots for their cars, rather than earn them on the field.
And it festered into the offseason, where players arrived to the beginnings of the training program grossly overweight. That included three key players – defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey(notes), offensive tackle Branden Albert(notes), and guard Brian Waters – who were all more than 340 pounds at one point during the offseason.
Those digits made weight and conditioning one of the highest priorities, to the point that Haley and Pioli have fined players for coming in too heavy. Ideally, Haley believes teams should never be so overweight that a roster sheds more than 150 pounds in offseason training. But the Chiefs’ last total was a staggering 767 pounds lost – a digit that screams just how poor discipline had become under Edwards’ watch.
“If that kind of weight loss ever happens again, I won’t be here,” Haley said. “Because that means I let the team get fat on my watch. It’s a shocking number – shocking even to me.”
And yet, it remains only one shocking fact in an ugly reality that has spoken just how far the Chiefs have left to go. While some of the chemistry issues have been removed from the roster (namely Tony Gonzalez, who badly needed a change of scenery), Haley is still wrenching on the remaining talent. None more publicly than Bowe, who had earned a reputation for coasting in practice and lacking intensity.
Haley made it painfully clear he wasn’t going to tolerate it, demoting Bowe to the third-string offense less than two weeks into training camp. Only this week did Bowe start taking reps with the first-team offense again – not before realizing that Haley’s mental and verbal jousting was just beginning.
“If we start off slow in practice, he’ll be like ‘OK, Bowe, I see you guys don’t want to come out here and practice, so we’ll start it all over again,’ ” Bowe said. “A good play is never good enough. … When they put me on third string, I didn’t think ‘OK, I’m going to go into a hole now.’ I just had to make more plays. The plays I was making weren’t good enough for them. I started making plays in the running game, and even in the passing game, I was running hard on dummy routes to get another guy open. I had to become a full team player instead of just worrying about me.”
Added quarterback Matt Cassel, “He doesn’t mess around. He’s to the point. Personally, I like that. I kind of experienced that a little bit with [Bill] Belichick in New England. He tells you how he feels – blunt and to the point. You always know where you stand. There’s no crap in the middle.”
That blunt approach isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Pioli and Haley both admit the roster is far from meeting their expectations. Thanks to dead drafts at the end of the Dick Vermeil era, the Chiefs lack the instrumental homegrown four- and five-year veterans that often comprise the core of a winning team. That means the next few offseasons will be rooted in procuring and developing talent around pieces like Bowe, Albert, Dorsey, and Cassel.
Until then, Haley and his staff will oversee a defense that needs to manufacture a pass rush, an offense that will have to scheme to protect Cassel, and a franchise that will have to toughen up and take lumps before it gets over some significant hurdles.
“We’re going to have to scrap to figure out ways to win games,” Haley said. “We’ve got some work to do. … There’s not a lot of room for sensitivity. That’s what I said at the beginning. I don’t want sensitive guys. I want guys that understand what’s happening – why someone is MF’ing them or why someone is screaming. It’s not about respect. It’s about having high expectations.”
While it could take some time for the Chiefs to build and meet those expectations, just establishing them might be the truest step this franchise has taken in the last two years.
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