02-28-2021, 10:16 AM
(02-28-2021, 12:11 AM)Nately120 Wrote: It's all conjecture for sure, but Palmer being drafted by the Bears who made it to the SB with Rex Grossman, or the Steelers/Ravens who had top tier defenses, or ended up with Andy Reid or something could have led to him having more marquee wins than he got here.
I do think Palmer being drafted by the Bears and playing for those teams that had Devin Hester and an amazing defense could have helped....well, lots of QBs could have done stuff in Chicago in that time period I guess.
As for Florio, he may be a Bengal hating d-bag who needs to go to hell, but meh...we haven't had a winning season since 2015 and our last two seasons have been total arse. I'd complain about him talking ill about us but thems the breaks. Reminds me of Sports Illustrated for Kids having that "don't say bad stuff about anyone" slant to it. I think it was going into the 1993 football season and for teams that were good they talked about the marquee players but for the lousy teams it was all about them being "a young, talented team."
Anywho, is Florio any harder on the Bengals than we were on the Browns when they stunk? Is it easy to be positive about bad teams you aren't a fan of? Could I write a non-hater paragraph about the godawful Pittsburgh Pirates or the Ottawa Senators?
I get it, but there are still way too many unknowns when it comes to being able to say what CP's career would have been like anywhere else. He had 8 years, 1 of which he never set foot on the field. Another (08) he was either playing hurt or flat out not playing at all. So in reality, it's 6 seasons with him on the field. One was developmental (04). The next was one of the best seasons the team had with a loaded offense. Same loaded offense in 06. 07 and 08 were disappointments by any reasonable measure. 09 was an overachievement, and I'd argue that the team's success was more due to Benson and the running game than anything CP was doing. 2010 was the T-Ocho dumpster fire, but CP9 explicitly asked for that to happen.
When guessing what his career would have been like elsewhere, people are really making leaps. Just look at the Colts. As an organization, they assembled a generationally great offense around an all-time great quarterback in Manning. Good line, embarrassment of weapons everywhere, and mountains of wins including a Super Bowl. Peyton sustains his neck injury, the Colts flop to get yet another generational QB in Luck, then run 18 out of town, supposedly leaving him for dead.
Now, in hindsight, Luck had a nice but massively disappointing career cumulatively in Indy. He was one of the most highly touted QB prospects ever to be drafted. It was damn near impossible to find weaknesses in his game. He had size, arm strength, accuracy, intelligence off the charts, and he was competitive as hell. He even looked the part for awhile before injures began accumulating. At the time, other than New England, what team would you want to draft that kind of player other than Indy? They just developed and won with a can't miss quarterback. Manning thrived there and became an all-time great not only at the position but in the totality of the game. Surely to god Luck would be a HOF mega star there, right?
Except, as we all know it didn't go down that way. They failed miserably to build a line to protect him, go his brains beat out, and effectively ran him out of the league long before he should have been. He didn't quit his team like CP, he quit the entree game of football forever, largely because of inept management of the team around him. This wasn't crappy old Mike Brown. It was an ownership group that had a title, a HOF QB, and a very recent history of winning a lot, and they absolutely botched a generational, maybe THE generational QB prospect in epic fashion.
As for the Bears, they have their own set of issues. They'd probably have given a lot for a QB the caliber of Andy Dalton, much less Palmer. They are the all time can't find a QB team of the league.
To say this or that would have happened here or there is kind of a pointless exercise. Too many variables and too many instances of conventional wisdom being proven wrong.
