Dave Berri over at the Wages of Wins blog has posted his final ratings for NFL quarterbacks for the 2006 season (related blog post here). The final rating is further confirmation that the David Carr saga is over in Houston.
As noted earlier here, here and here, Berri’s QB rating is a much more accurate measure of a QB’s true value than the misleading QB rating that the NFL uses (incredibly, the formula for the NFL rating system not only is complicated and unclear, it also ignores sacks, yards lost from sacks, rushing yards, rushing attempts, and fumbles!). Carr finished the season ranked 28th among the 32 starting NFL QB’s (he ranked 15th in the NFL’s official rating), higher only than such luminaries as Joey Harrington, Charlie Frye, Bruce Gradkowski and Andrew Walter. Suffice it to say that Texans coach Gary Kubiak — who had nothing to do with the decision to use the Texans’ first draft choice in history to acquire Carr — will not likely elect to continue hitching his coaching legacy to the wagon of such high-priced mediocrity at the QB position.
Carr is a nice fellow, so it’s too bad that it didn’t work out for him in Houston. The team certainly didn’t do him any favors, what with a chronically make-shift offensive line and several failed forays at acquiring a true left tackle to protect Carr’s backside. And it’s important to remember that player statistics tracked in football are not the same as statistics tracked in baseball. In baseball, many of the hitting statistics that are tracked reflect the ability of the individual. In football, however, this is not precisely the case. The stats that a quarterback accumulates are a reflection of not only his ability, but also the ability of his teammates, his coaches and the defensive players that the quarterback faces. Consequently, it’s not always the case that even Berri’s QB rating shows that one player is “better” than another player.
But after five seasons, Carr’s numerous technical deficiencies — poor reading skills, a low release point that causes many tipped balls at the line of scrimmage, poor pocket presence, mediocre leadership skills, inability to handle the shotgun formation, etc. — are simply too numerous to overlook. His abysmal QB rating simply confirms that he is unlikely to improve to even an average level of NFL quarterback. At this point, backup Sage Rosenfels is a far better bet than Carr to achieve a better-than-average QB rating in the 2007 season.
By the way, for the fourth consecutive year the top quarterback in the NFL is Peyton Manning, who achieved a QB score over 2,000 under Berri’s rating system, only the fourth time that a QB has attained that level since 1995. In watching Manning in his prime, we are witnessing one of the truly great NFL QB’s in history.