The bad, the bad, and the ugly

I'm out of town until Saturday. With the Vikings having a bye and sitting pretty at 7-1, I thought I'd have some fun at the expense of the bad -- really, really bad -- teams in the NFL.

* The Browns fired their GM, who was apparently picked by their coach (shouldn't that be the other way around?) and won't start Brady Quinn because they don't want him earning an $11 million bonus if he takes 70% of his team's snaps. Derek Anderson, meanwhile, is historically bad.

* When the Chiefs wanted to get younger two years ago, they traded 26-year-old Jared Allen to the Vikings. That was confusing. Trading 33-year-old Tony Gonzalez made more sense, though I couldn't figure out why you'd want to trade possibly the best tight end ever and a pillar of your community. Gonzalez, for the record, trails only Roddy White in receptions and receiving yards for the Falcons. But at least the Chiefs got younger, right?

Well...as if gobbling up 29-year-old Bobby Wade after the Vikings waived him, the Chiefs have claimed 31-year-old Chris Chambers. If their plan is to trade away great receivers and acquire mediocre ones, then they're right on target...

* It was about what you'd expect in a Rams vs. Lions matchup: With Detroit trailing 3-0, Matthew Stafford threw an interception into the end zone. Defensive back James Butler took the ball out of the end zone, ran back in to avoid a tackler, where he was then tackled by Kevin Smith. 3-2. It's the second time I can recall an offensive player scoring a safety. Philadelphia wide receiver Charles Johnson did it in this game, 10 years ago.

* If he had enough attempts to qualify, Vince Young would be the lowest-rated passer among active quarterbacks (69.0). He's also 18-11 as a starter. I know passer rating doesn't include rushing yards, but that's still messed up...

* The Redskins made it through the "easy" part of their schedule -- Giants, Rams, Lions, Bucs, Panthers, Chiefs -- with a 2-4 record. Those teams have a combined 11-34 record. Counting their game against Philadelphia last week, their next six opponents -- Eagles, Falcons, Broncos, Cowboys, Eagles, Saints -- have a combined 32-10 record. Can you say "2-10 record"?

* And oh, those Buccaneers. They rank 28th in the league in scoring, but that should be nothing new to Tampa Bay fans. Amazingly, in 34 years, the Bucs have only ranked in the top 10 in scoring once, in 2000.

But hey, at least their coach doesn't assault women.

Watch out for the Lions in 2009

What would you say if I told you the Detroit Lions have a 21% chance of making the playoffs this year?

Considering that only 37.5% of all teams in the NFL make the playoffs in any given season, you'd probably think odds a little over half as good as that would be too high. To be sure, strange things can happen: Jay Cutler could bomb in Chicago, Green Bay might not fix its defense with the 3-4, Adrian Peterson could get hurt (gulp!), and Matthew Stafford could be the best rookie quarterback in league history. And BAM! The Lions take the NFC North, or at least get enough in-division victories to secure a Wild Card berth.

Some people get their ideas through meditation, others get them in the shower...this unlikely scenario came to me, as many great ideas likely do, by watching Alge Crumpler in last night's Hall of Fame Game between the Titans and the Bills.

Say what?

Apart from noticing Crumpler's girth (was he always that big?), my first thoughts upon seeing him was why the Falcons let him go to the Titans in the first place. He was a reliable receiver for the team for seven years, averaging 45 catches and just over 600 yards per season, numbers most tight ends would be more than happy with. The natural reason, of course, was that the Falcons were rebuilding after a 4-12 year and thought they could afford to let their high-priced veteran player go.

So what happened? Matt Ryan is what happened. The Falcons went 11-5, made the playoffs, and, in the offseason, traded for future Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez to play tight end for them in 2009. Now, Gonzalez is a better receiver than Crumpler, to be sure. But why didn't the Falcons just hang on to Crumpler and accept that it might just take a couple years to be competitive? And what if Matt Cassel leads the Chiefs to a good record and playoff berth this year? Will the Chiefs regret giving up Gonzalez (not to mention Jared Allen last year)?

The trade deadline in baseball recently passed, and you see similar things in MLB: high-priced veterans being traded to contending teams in exchange for cheaper prospects. In MLB, with no salary cap, legions of minor leaguers, and a powerful players' union able to negotiate huge guaranteed contracts for its constituents, it probably makes more sense, even if your team thinks it can contend in a couple years. That kid from AAA might not be as good as your All-Star, but he's reasonably decent and makes about 1/50th the money. And if the situation is reversed in a year or two, you can make a deadline deal of your own and trade him for a pricy veteran.

The point is, why do NFL teams let their top talent go when they have a bad year or two (or 10, in the case of the Lions)? With a draft that actually works (more or less) in distributing top talent to the worst teams in the league, more moderate contracts, a salary cap, and a shorter schedule, which leads to greater fluctuations in win-loss record than true talent level would normally account for, why not hang on to your good players? You're not going to save that much money and might pull out of your nose dive quicker than you think.

But how quickly do teams "turn it around" in the NFL and go from awful to playoff hopeful? To answer this, I counted an "awful team" as one that went 4-12 or worse since the 1988 season (with 1987 being the strike year). I then counted how many years it took that team to make the playoffs after its awful season. If a team hasn't yet made the playoffs since its awful season, I didn't count them in the survey. And some teams' playoff-counting team counted against multiple awful teams. For instance, the 1997 and 1998 Bears are counted as taking four and three years, respectively, to make the playoffs, owing to the 2001 Bears' playoff run.

57 teams over 21 seasons meet these criteria. Their average wait to make the playoffs was 3.19 years, distributed below:

1 Year	12 teams
2 Years	16 teams
3 Years	7 teams
4 Years	8 teams
5 Years	6 teams
6 Years	3 teams
7 Years	3 teams
8 Years	2 teams

Of the 57 teams to go 4-12 or worse over this span, nearly half (28) made the playoffs within two years. Suddenly, blowing up the whole team doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Of course, it could be that blowing up the whole team was why those teams made the playoffs. Maybe the players Kansas City received in the trade for Jared Allen will be the reason they make the playoffs in 2009. (The Tony Gonzalez trade won't bear fruit for a while, though; the Chiefs dealt Gonzo for just a 2nd-round pick in 2010.)

And then there's the Lions. 12 of 57 teams -- about 21% -- made the playoffs the year after their "awful" year. And the awful year wasn't just a blip on the radar during an otherwise good run. Interestingly, as I look at those 12 teams, none of them seemed to be "good" for any significant length of time before their awful season, and a few -- like the 03-04 Chargers, 98-99 Rams, 98-99 Colts, and 95-96 Jaguars -- were very good for several years after making the playoffs for the first time following a lengthy period of mediocrity (or nonexistence, in the case of the Jags). The Falcons were the most recent team to accomplish this feat, so maybe Matt Ryan can lead them to a new era of dominance in the NFC. And maybe Matthew Stafford can usher in a new era of prosperity for the Lions, if not in 2009, then at least by 2010.

Or maybe he'll just be Joey Harringon, Part II.

Dry and dry again: Jared Allen

Almost as common as the "Bernard Berrian couldn't catch a cold even if the Vikings played outdoors in December" talk that's gone on since the Vikings signed the receiver has been the dire predictions of what will happen if the team's other major off-season acquisition, Jared Allen, "falls off the wagon." Allen, you'll recall (and how could you forget?) was suspended four games (later reduced to two) in 2007 for violating the NFL's substance-abuse policy after being arrested for a DUI in 2006. If he violates the league policy again, he could be slammed with a full-season suspension, and that likely played some part in the Kansas City Chiefs' willingness to let go of last year's NFL sacks leader.

Truthfully, I didn't know much about Allen prior to his eight-tackle, two-sack game against the Vikings in 2007, his first game back after serving his suspension. Since rumors of a trade surfaced in mid-April, I've dug into his history a little more, to get an idea of his future. Every story I've read paints him as a guy who partied hard right out of college, made some mistakes, and has now cleaned up his act.

Great. That's what Koren Robinson said, too. And we know how that turned out.

But Allen seems different. Yeah, I know, there's some homer-ness to that, since he's one of "our guys" now. And, unless his drinking habits led to a tragedy, stories about him are going to be of an unfailingly positive nature. I really believed Allen had turned the corner, but I always thought there was at least some small, fraction-of-one-percent chance he might surrender once again to his demons and, like too many athletes who had come before him, wreck what should be an outstanding career.

Then I read Jeffri Chadiha's piece about Allen for ESPN The Magazine. And that fraction of a percent has evaporated to zero.

Most encouraging is Allen acknowledging that his going out to bars was due to a belief in the notion that he had to cultivate an image of a wild and crazy "party guy" to fit in with teammates and, he admits, "I was single and wanted to meet chicks." Since his arrest and suspension -- he's been dry since the arrest, 20 months and counting -- he "vanished from the nightlife" and has matured considerably: "Not drinking was part of my growth as a man." In essence, he sounds like someone who drank and partied to appear cool and attract the chicks, so to speak, and no longer needs that sort of stimulus to live a happy life.

And that's the difference between Allen and Koren Robinson. Robinson spouted all the usual platitudes about how he'd turned a new leaf and didn't need alcohol anymore, and so on, but I never got a sense of the underlying reason of why he would quit drinking. With Allen, it seems a very logical procession: He wanted to look cool and establish himself as a youngster, so he drank. Now, he is a well-established star, one of the highest-paid players in the NFL, and a focal point for his team's upcoming season. Why would he need alcohol? He's already got everything. I realize I'm no expert on the insidious nature of alcohol addiction, but it seems to me that Allen's achieved everything he wanted -- though it doesn't look like he's found that "chick" yet -- so why would he need alcohol? Yes, there's the case of Koren Robinson again, but he was still a marginal NFL player. Allen's far above "marginal," and looks to be smart enough to realize that alcohol will only bring him down, not prop him up.

There's also a little bit of on-the-field good news tucked away in the article. Take a look at this sentence:

By summer 2007, Allen had dropped 20 pounds, from 280 to 260, and reported to Chiefs camp in the best shape of his life.

Allen averaged about 9.0 sacks per season his first three years in the league before exploding for 15.5 in 2007. If his giving up drinking and re-dedicating himself to football led to that kind of improvement, maybe he can sustain that level of play for 2008 and beyond -- or even improve upon it.

The Jared Allen watch

The Kansas City Chiefs have begun talks to trade their franchise player, defensive end Jared Allen, and the Minnesota Vikings appear to be one of the interested parties. Allen has scheduled visits to both the Vikings and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before the draft, and the Vikings, with more and better draft picks than the Bucs -- the likely compensation for Allen -- appear to be the front-runner.

To which I have to say: Excellent!

Allen is one of the premiere talents at his position, and a rising star in the league. He led the NFL in sacks last year, with 15.5, though playing on a 4-12 team limited his exposure. He's only just turned 26 and has averaged nearly 11 sacks per season in each of his four pro seasons while also averaging about 60 tackles a year each of the last three seasons -- a high number for a defensive end -- and forcing 14 (or 13, depending on what stat page you look at) fumbles. He's missed just three games in those four years, including two this year for...

...uh oh. A substance-abuse suspension. Danger, Will Robinson?

I think not. After his tussle with the law over a DUI, Allen has stated that he's "learned his lesson" and apparently even convinced Commissioner Roger Goodell, who reduced Allen's four-game suspension to start the season by two games. All things considered, Vikings fans probably would have preferred that Allen's suspension remained at four games, as his first game back in 2007 was against the Vikings, where he racked up eight tackles and teed off on the statue-like Kelly Holcomb twice for sacks and was a major factor in the Chiefs' 13-10 victory.

Assuming that Allen's troubles with the law are behind him, and I tend to think they are, he would be a great fit for the Vikings. Only 26 years old, his best years may still be ahead of him, and, after losing out on free agents Justin Smith and Antwan Odom, the Vikings are probably ready to offer the moon to sign Allen. As the Chiefs' franchise player, Allen is due about $9 million this year, but a long-term deal would probably be front-loaded, as they often are, so as to minimize the later cap hit. The Vikings were $32 million under the cap when free agency began, and the Vikings probably still have about $15-20 million left -- more than enough to sign Allen to a long-term deal, especially if they don't have to pay for a first-round pick.

Ah yes, there is that part: The Chiefs will likely want at least a first-round pick for Allen, and probably also another, later pick and/or players as compensation. Seeing as how the Vikings have two third-round picks, a first- and third-rounder would seem like the starting point for a negotiation, and if that's all it takes to land Allen, I'd consider it a fair deal. Assuming the team is targeting a defensive end in the draft -- probably Derrick Harvey or Philip Merling -- landing Allen would preclude any need to draft a defensive end this year. Plus, who would you rather have on your team: a fairly young, proven, possibly elite NFL player or a rookie whose never played a down in the NFL? If that's the choice, I'd up the bidding to three players/picks, if that's what it takes to snare Allen. Hey, maybe the Chiefs will even throw Tyler Thigpen back to us. He has to be a better backup QB than Gus Frerotte.

You don't often get the chance to land a player the caliber of Jared Allen, especially for the potentially low price of two draft picks. If this works out -- and we should know by the time of the draft -- then the failure to acquire another defensive end earlier in free agency might have actually worked to the Vikings' advantage. Let's hope so.