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Many believe the Redskins "Achilles' heal" in 2011 was poor quarterback play. It's obviously sparked many discussion on the 2012 starting quarterback will be. Will he come from free agency? college? arena league? These questions can't be answered right now, but what if we reflect on what would have happened if the Redskins would have found another option beyond Rex Gross and John Beck in 2011. Earlier this week SB Nation contributor John Bois did a piece on Brett Favre, Warren Moon, Dan Marino, and John Elway in the twilight of their careers. Bois focused on Brett Favre and came up with a projected 2011 QB Rating of 82.8 for the "Mississippi Wrangler", and used his statistics to see how quarterback needy teams could have potentially benefited from Favre's services in 2011.
Points scored: 288
Passer rating, across all quarterbacks used: 73.3
Points-to-passer-rating ratio: 3.92
Projected points scored with Favre as quarterback, using above ratio: 325I should probably note that neither John Beck nor Rex Grossman were complete disasters at quarterback. They were just "kind of bad," and statistically, neither was more or less "kind of bad" than the other.
Our projected 2011 Brett Favre gives the Redskins 37 more points to spread out over the course of the season.
Bois goes on to predict that a quarterback of Favre's caliber wouldn't have been enough to win the division, but it would have certainly been enough to compete in the NFC East. His predicted finish with Favre was 7-9 for the Skins. With Favre's projected stats, he would have finished the season in the dead middle of pack, in terms of quarterbacks, with a QB rating number comparable to Matt Hasslebeck, Cam Newton, Kevin Kolb, and Joe Flacco. So what can we take from this going into 2012? It seems as if in a year with a weak schedule and weak division that the Skins would have still finished with a losing record. Next year the opponents will certainly be tougher, so does this type of data point to the Redskins needing a truly elite quarterback to even dream of reaching the playoffs?