Andrew Luck

[rewing84]

Has Andrew Luck done enough to merit hovg consideration

[JohnTurney]

tough one
http://nflfootballjournal.blogspot.com/ ... m-nfl.html

gotta say no

[ChrisBabcock]

Definitely not hovg level. He's had decent team success, but the honors have been thin. And first glance at his stats what pops out is he had only one season of single digits interceptions. That doesn't seem very good in this day and age.

[74_75_78_79_]

There seems to be a bit of parallels between he and Bert Jones' careers. Short yet impressive careers with even more promise left on the table. Each retiring due to averting further injury. I guess I'll have to agree that he'll come up just short of HOVG.

[JohnTurney]

I misread---I was in a hurry---I thought it was a HOF question

HOVG? I can see that---

[rewing84]

Definitely not hovg level. He's had decent team success, but the honors have been thin. And first glance at his stats what pops out is he had only one season of single digits interceptions. That doesn't seem very good in this day and age.

thats a good point chris on the ints part

[bachslunch]

Good points all around. Andrew Luck might maybe be HoVG depending on how deep a pool you want. It would take some selling to convince me, but maybe it can be done. I’m leaning no on HoVG and definite no on HoF.

[Rupert Patrick]

There seems to be a bit of parallels between he and Bert Jones' careers. Short yet impressive careers with even more promise left on the table. Each retiring due to averting further injury. I guess I'll have to agree that he'll come up just short of HOVG.

Both also had fathers who played in the NFL, and although Dub Jones had the better career than Oliver Luck, it could be said that Oliver Luck probably had the more impressive career wthin the NFL as he worked in the upper hierarchy of the league for many years. I think it's close, but I think Bert Jones had a slightly more impressive peak than Andrew Luck, if you compare them relative to their eras.

The 1975 Colts were one of the great surprise division winners of football history, and they had a tough road to get past, including the Dolphins and Bills, both of whom were in the playoffs the previous season, along with the Patriots, who went 7-7 in 1974 and were the hot team the first half of the '74 season, and the Jets, who were also 7-7 in Namath's last good year. Nobody saw the Colts (2-12 in 1974) coming; they absolutely shocked the football world by going 10-4 in 1975 and winning the AFC East. The emergence of Bert Jones was a key reason.

In 1976, Bert Jones was the NFL MVP, but as with 1975 he had the bad luck to run into the Steelers. 1977 was perhaps the Colts clearest path to the Super Bowl, and his Colts took the Raiders to double OT where they lost in one of the ten best games of the decade. When Jones tore up his arm in preseason in 1978, it was all over.

Luck was, pardon the pun, lucky, in that he walked into the system that was set up for Peyton Manning, and the team responded to him immediately. The Colts were in the gutter in 2011 without Manning but with Luck running the controls, they were right back where they were before. While Luck did play a sizable role in the Colts success during his run there, I don't know how much was due to the system that was designed for Peyton Manning that he assumed when Manning left. He was the right man in the right place at the right time.

I thought this would be a good chance to break out my QB Time Machine, this is exactly what it was designed for. This is a spreadsheet I designed for converting a quarterbacks statistics from one era to another. To this point, I have been reluctant to let others use it because I know the first thing they will do is to translate Tom Brady's stats to the 1930's and 40's, or Sid Luckman's stats to the 2000's, and they'll complain it just doesn't work. You can't convert pre-WWII quarterbacks to the modern era, and you can't convert modern QB's to the pre WWII era, but other than that, it seems to work pretty accurately.

Anyway, I decided to translate Andrew Luck's career into Bert Jones' era. Luck played from 2012-18 and did not play in 2017, and Jones played from 1973-82. I decided to convert Luck's career to 1974-1980, with him missing the 1979 season. This is Luck's career translation:



As you can see, the final career stats are pretty similar to Jones, 2355 projected passes for Luck for 2551 for Jones, 121 projected TD passes is a little better than Jones 101 actual, the the projected percentages for completion percentage (.565 for Luck) is similar to Jones .561. Jones yards per pass is a little higher than Luck's projection but not much, and as I mentioned, Luck does have an edge in TD percentage while Jones has a slight edge in interception percentage.

I thought I would turn it around, and project Bert Jones into the modern era. I converted Jones career to the 2009-2018 seasons:



This time, Luck has a slight edge in completion percentage and interception percentage.

Here are their actual season-by-season stats:





Is Jones in the HOVG? If not, he should be. I would take him over Luck for the HOVG, but it would be close.

[BD Sullivan]

Jones' 1978 injury effectively ended his HOF chances because he never really got back on track and was pretty much done when the Rams grabbed him.

[Rupert Patrick]

Jones' 1978 injury effectively ended his HOF chances because he never really got back on track and was pretty much done when the Rams grabbed him.

The Rams bringing in Bert Jones in 1982 was similar to their bringing in Joe Namath in 1977; they were trying to milk one last hurrah out of them but mostly I think it was to stimulate ticket sales. Jones and Namath were there to get their one last big paycheck.