Thinking about what I think about Aaron Rodgers

When Chris and I talk Packers–as we did last night–there’s usually a blog post waiting around the corner. Not sure if that means you, dear readers, should be excited or cautious, but here it is anyway. Bear with the stream-of-consciousness flow of this one:

The topic of our conversation the last couple days has been Aaron Rodgers, who’s now 23 starts in to his professional career. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how hard it is to fairly evaluate Rodgers. His statistics are obviously very good; his passer rating of 110.4 leads the league, and it comes on the heels of an impressive 93.8 rating last year.

But then there’s the other side of Rodgers, what you see on Sundays: Too many snaps where he looks 20-25 yards down field, makes a read or two there and never comes back to a checkdown. The times where he seems not to have the “internal clock” to step up and feel a pass rush like the great ones so often do. The red-zone inefficiency. The games where he doesn’t really get the offense clicking until the Packers are throwing every down in the second half.

And then I had a scary thought: What if Aaron Rodgers is Philip Rivers?

You know what I’m talking about – the impressive, statistically appealing young quarterback who puts up good numbers, enters each year at the controls of an offense with a ton of weapons, but who you can never really imagine hosting the Lombardi Trophy.

I thought I was overreacting. Then I went to the numbers — the ones beyond the traditional yards-and-turnovers metrics for quarterbacks that are very easy to manipulate. I swung over to FootballOutsiders.com, an excellent site that’s doing for football analysis what Baseball Prospectus did for seamheads. I checked their advanced QB stats, which adjust performances for game situations and opponents to figure out how much more valuable a player is than the league-average QB or the readily-available replacement. They also have a stat called effective yards, which counts sacks and aborted snaps against a QB’s value.

In all of those metrics, Rivers and Rodgers are having very similar seasons. I looked at last year; Rivers was better than Rodgers in all of those categories.

Check it out for yourself, and let me know what you think.

None of this is to say I don’t like Rodgers. He’s clearly a solid NFL quarterback who still has room to grow. His numbers compare favorably with Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in their second seasons as starters, and he’s miles ahead of where Brett Favre was in 1993 (when Favre led the league with 24 interceptions).

That is, if you just look at the numbers. At this point, I want to see more than that from Rodgers. The intangibles don’t have to be all there yet, but I want to see signs of them. I want to see him get rid of the ball quicker, or make more plays like the long scramble he had in the second half against the Vikings. I want to see him develop the confidence to put the ball in tight spaces, which is the only way the offense will get better in the red zone. I want to start feeling like when the Packers are in a tight game, he’ll be able to  make the adjustments necessary to pull one out every once in a while.

For all his mistakes, that’s what (still) sets Favre apart. He’s mastered all the minute details of the game so well–footwork, pocket presence, spotting blitzes and adjusting protection at the line of scrimmage–that when he’s motivated and he’s on, he’s almost impossible to stop. The interceptions drove us nuts, and I think they’re still coming with the Vikings. But Sunday reminded me of why this guy is so good, and where Rodgers needs to go.

Now, I say all this with a caveat. I think, on both sides of the argument, we evaluate Rodgers unfairly because of who he’s following, and the circumstances by which he got the job. We want to believe he’s a finished product so we can puff up our chests, look at Vikings fans and say, “It’s OK. We like our guy better, anyway.” But as with anybody who’s ever followed a legend, Rodgers suffers because we don’t want to wait through the development period.

So that’s where I’m at with Rodgers at this point. It changes week-to-week, but if by the end of the season, we start to see him develop in the finer points of quarterbacking, I’ll feel a lot better about this season.

Anybody have any other thoughts on Rodgers’ progression? This is a long, confusing process, and the Favre drama only made it worse. Post your thoughts and impressions here, and hang in there. We’ll get through this.

–Gene Bosling