Football is over and Peyton Manning is the story: Does Eli pass the Matt Ryan test →
The idea that the NFL is a passing league isn’t a new one, but the inequity between the two conferences has never been clearer. The three best passers in the NFL are all playing in the NFC, and the relative dearth of talent at the position in the AFC is the reason that Vegas has the conference as a 3-point underdog in next year’s Super Bowl already.
Here’s a way to determine whether a team has a decent quarterback in place or not — let’s call it The Matt Ryan Test. Matt Ryan, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, is an above-average player whose best years are still ahead of him, but he’s unlikely to ever be confused with Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas — the very definition of “decent.” The Matt Ryan Test is this: If you’d trade your team’s quarterback for Matt Ryan in an even exchange, then your team doesn’t have a decent quarterback in place.
In the AFC, only a handful of team’s pass the Ryan Test — the Patriots, the Chargers, the Steelers, and the Texans are the only teams with a starter in place who’s at least as good as Matt Ryan. There’d be serious conversations in Oakland and Cincinnati about it, and regardless of what Broncos fans think, John Elway would have Tim Tebow stuffed in a suitcase before the Falcons hung up the phone.
As football season comes to a close, so too does my Culturemap football column, Down And Distance enter its offseason. Thanks to everybody who read it and wrote in, except for those who threatened me for pointing out that Ben Roethlisberger has been credibly accused of rape more than once (fuck y’all!) and give this last column a read!
We introduce the concept of The Matt Ryan Test, speculate about what the speculation surrounding Peyton Manning will be like (boners swordfights around the ESPN offices!), and lament the fact that during the rest of the primary season, there will be no easy football metaphors to reach for, leaving us woefully restricted to comparing the candidates to baseball and basketball players until things heat up as the 2012 NFL season kicks off…
Seriously, though, getting to write a weekly column where I wrote about football as a social, political, and cultural force through which we view ourselves as Americans has been a dream project of mine for a very long time, and I had so much fun doing it that I am apparently right now typing a weird acceptance speech on Tumblr. But thanks, sincerely, to the people who read it and wanted to talk about it with me, and especially to Culturemap for saying yes to a kind of weird idea (when they were just launching, no less) that they knew would take half a year to complete. This was so much fun for me, seriously.
