Matt Ryan: Hall of Famer?

I think a lot of people think he should get in, though not necessarily Giants fans

I'm on the fence and -- though I think he will get inducted -- I definitely think he should wait a few years.

Plunkett has two rings, yes, but his career passer rating is 67.5. That's pretty poor.

 

Plunkett is a difficult case because he began his career on a team that nearly got him killed and whose career was rescued by becoming a Raider, a team with an actual offensive line. If I were a Hall voter I would not necessarily vote for Eli. It'd have to be in a weak year, and there are fewer and fewer such years.

 

Maybe time to update our milestones.

 

^^^ bitter Pats fan whose team got punked by Eli twice in the Super Bowl.

jk

 

Those are the milestones because:

Only 11 QBs have thrown 300 TD passes and in 2000 only three guys had thrown that many
Only 9 QBs have thrown for 50,000 yards and in 2000 only two guys had thrown that many

 

Unless he gets a Super Bowl ring, he won't be first ballot but he will get inducted at some point. He will have numbers, he got to a SuperBowl. He was an MVP and another season where he was the Offensive Player of the Year.

The measure of Ryan will come against the generation behind him. There might be a point where you look and go, that 60,000 yards is still more than X-amount of guys, those nearly 400 TDs are still X-all-time.

 

Unless I'm mistaken, he was MVP the same year he was Offensive Player of the Year, not two different years.

I'm surprised you think he will be inducted. Stabler had to wait till he was dead, and the pool of good QBs back then was a lot shallower than it is now.

 

Warren Zevon.

 

That's going to be an interesting trend to track over the next decade or so. Are all of these guys with huge passing numbers the new normal, or are we in a golden age of great quarterbacks and didn't realize and appreciate it.
Right now, there are four no-doubt, first-ballot HOFers still active and as many as a half-dozen others (including Ryan) who have been really damn good for a really long time. You've also had a couple of others retire in the past few years (Peyton and Romo). I'm not sure there's ever been an era with that kind of depth at the position. A lot of them have also been remarkably durable. You can literally count on one hand the number of games Rivers, Eli and Ryan have missed -- combined -- in the past 10 years, and still have a couple of fingers left over. That counts for a lot more in football HOF discussions than in baseball, where guys sometimes stick around too long and wind up hurting their case by getting tagged as compilers.

So the question with all of them is going to be were they great in a historical sense, or just at the leading edge of a trend? And if the latter, how harshly can you judge the more "mediocre" among them when they were still as good or better than 98 percent of the QBs to have ever played to this point?

 

He was. I looked at the wrong column.

I think he will be inducted in a down the ballot, depends on the finalist, maybe a Senior guy kind of way. I don't think anyone right now would put him as a first-ballot guy. But it's going to be a Frank Gore kinda thing to an extent -- he'll be top 7ish in a bunch of passing categories so he belongs as an outer circle guy if he can't win a ring but had 15-plus really good seasons and that counts for something.

 

There are six no-doubt, first-ballot HOF QBs right now -- Brady, Brees, Big Ben, Eli, Rivers, Rodgers. I know people don't want to believe that about Rivers and Eli.

It is hard to get to where Ryan is career-wise. Guys like Luck and Wilson are half-way to those totals. I think guys like Ryan are going to be rewarded. Now in 20 years if 12 guys pass him, then that's an issue but you won't know until that point if he is just one of a dozen