Rick Reilly, Open Your Eyes: Luck-RG3 Not Just About The Numbers

Late last week, ESPN’s Rick Reilly wrote an “interesting” column where he argued that despite RG3’s early season hype Andrew Luck was actually the rookie quarterback who had played better up to this point in the season. As the 1st and 2nd picks in last spring’s NFL draft, the Luck-Griffin comparisons are going to go on for the entirety of their careers, and a pro-Luck piece is totally acceptable given all the praise heaped upon Griffin so far this year. But a tagline like “Andrew Luck is a better QB than RG3” is enough to rile me up.

Luck better than Griffin? Not as simple as QBR, Rick.

That’s cut-and-dry enough of a statement that you better be clearly correct, and I don’t think Reilly or anybody else can definitively say that at this point. Is Luck actually better? He very well might be, but Reilly’s tone makes him look foolish to put it nicely. Is Luck playing on a terrible team? Yes. As a rookie signal-caller, is he already the face of his franchise? Check. If you look at new-fangled stats like QBR and the average distance each pass traveled in the air, Luck betters Griffin up to this point. That’s all fine and good, but to say Griffin has had it easier because he has a better team around him (as Reilly also suggests) is ridiculous.

Reilly seems to love stats (like QBR), but it seems he has spent too much time reading them instead of actually watching games. He points out that Griffin has a head coach with nearly 300 NFL games under his belt and a supporting cast that knocked off the Super Bowl champion Giants just last season. That’s true, but it’s also an incredibly lazy point to make. The 2011 Washington Redskins finished just 6-10, and those 2 wins against the G-Men were 1 of the anomalies of the season. Mike Shanahan has a wealth of experience, but his record in his 2+ seasons in the nation’s capital is a less than stellar 14-26.

If Reilly would care to turn on the DirecTV package he boasts about rather than simply rattling off numbers, he could have seen more evidence to contradict his point yesterday, where Luck continues to throw to future Hall of Fame receiver Reggie Wayne and gets superhuman efforts from guys like Vick Ballard (what a play, by the way). Griffin has Alfred Morris to hand the ball off to and…not much else.

Pierre Garcon had 1 great quarter before basically being shut down up to this point in the year. RG3’s next favorite target, Fred Davis, went down last week with a torn achilles. Now what? The helmet-throwing Josh Morgan, the fumbling Santana Moss, and who else? The cut and recently resigned Chris Cooley? Leonard Hankerson? Dezmon Briscoe? Aldrick Robinson? How’s that for a better supporting cast? No future HoF-ers on that list. Did I mention that the Redskins dropped 10 passes yesterday in their loss to the Steelers? Yes, it was wet, rainy, and miserable in Pittsburgh, but the Steelers’ receivers didn’t seem to have the same problems holding on to the ball.

C'mon, man.

It’s more than likely that I am more protective of Griffin than most other players when I read something negative about him, but that’s no excuse for lazy writing. And this isn’t to say that Luck isn’t great, because I think he may have an equally if not more electric career than Griffin's. But RG3 is playing in a tougher division where he basically has to keep the Skins in games all by himself, which simply isn’t the case for Luck. I don’t need stats for that. It’s called the “eye test.” Maybe if Reilly turned on an actual game instead of reading off a list of numbers he would see that.