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3 Narratives around the NFL that need to end IMMEDIATELY

Antonio Brown
Who wants Antonio Brown? That is the biggest question, because he feels he deserves to be signed and wants the NFL to hurry up.

By: Josh Shippen

    Whenever one football fan hears one rumor made by one unreliable source mumbling to himself in his sleep, it can blossom into a nationwide (ie. Twitterwide) narrative that none of us want to shut up about. Usually these do not bother me, but there are a few that are so absurd that they need to be brought to life and killed. My influence will not deal the final blow, but as long as I do my part to kill them I have done my job. So without further adieu, let’s get started with this absurd accusation.

Ryan Tannehill is not good, he is just a system quarterback

OK, my first quarrel with this is the term “system quarterback”, because I feel like we overuse the meaning. Let’s take a look at a quarterback like Matt Ryan, Matthew Stafford, or even the worshiped Patrick Mahomes. If any of them ever got shipped to a team like the Jets or the Giants, they would not perform nearly as well, and don’t flap your mouth telling me Mahomes would still blow up the league on the Jets there is no way that would have happened. Does that make them system quarterbacks? Absolutely not! That means their play would recede on a God awful team. Not surprising.

Now with all this being said, let’s take a look at Tannehill’s past. Tannehill was drafted by the Dolphins who by the laws of the universe are forced to be mediocre or worse every year. With this being said, you’re trying to tell me Joe Philbin is going to be the coach to turn around Tannehill? Yeah I don’t think so. Even with all of the garbage he was forced to work with in Miami, it wasn’t like he was ever terrible. In his time there, he was always the number one if he was healthy.

Cut to Tennessee where after the Dolphins decide to move on from Tannehill he signs a baby contract to back up Marcus Mariota, and then proceeds to have a season that parallels Matt Ryan’s 2016 MVP year in many ways. Again, that does not imply that he is a system quarterback, it just implies he had astronomically better coaching, better surrounding talent, and yes maybe the system DID fit a little better, but that still does not make him a system quarterback.

If the Titans were the team to draft him in 2012 and he started playing amazing, nobody would be honking about him being a system quarterback because all we know is that he plays well in Tennessee. So by this logic the choices are admitting that Tannehill isn’t a system quarterback, or that literally 90% of all starting quarterbacks are system quarterbacks that probably would have been terrible on any other NFL roster.

Playing in the NFL is so specific that you can’t just assume you can plop NFL players on whatever NFL roster you want and they’ll do the exact same thing they did on their original team. You could have the play you got when Brett Favre Was on a different team, or the play of Brady on a different team, it depends so much on dozens of variables within different teams.

Well that was fun, let’s move on to our second brainless narrative

Antonio Brown is not the Long Term Option for any Team

    Much like was discussed in the earlier portion, there are dozens of variables involved in being a successful NFL player, and Antonio Brown fails to grasp one of the most important variables in the whole NFL. Football is a team sport. Brown is the embodiment of not caring how much of a pain in the gluteus maximus he is being to his teams, he’ll just torpedo them.

    Some players can get away with that. Le’Veon Bell has barely got away with it because he was technically sitting out “for the running backs”, and other players get chances if they have had off the field issues (Aldon Smith), but it is different with Brown.

    What’s the point of paying 15 million dollars for the best position player in the league if he’s going to sit out the most important game of the season, or demand a trade that he’ll cry and whine about so much that there are barely any teams that want him. So after he is done slandering the front office of the team he just screwed over, he goes right on over to Oakland and basically goes out of his way to make the team about “ME, ME, ME” so much that he has to get cut before he even plays!

    We don’t have to read the whole storybook, but what it boils down to is that if you can’t rely on your players to show up for big games and be team players, you’re better off paying a discount to pay for a player that while he might be worse, he will be better for your franchise and give you consistent play.

That one was too easy, but this narrative is the most brain dead argument of them all.

Matt Ryan is not going to get traded!

    One word sums up this narrative. Lazy. One of the givens for all NFL teams is that you don’t trade away your franchise quarterback. This would be a different story if Matt Ryan’s play was in a Brees or Rivers like recession, but Matt Ryan is still one of the best quarterbacks in the entire league!

    Just because the coach and GM got poached doesn’t mean the quarterback is doing anything wrong at all. As soon as Quinn was out of the building, Ryan became a way better second half quarterback and will probably have great games to come this year. Trading away Ryan makes no logical sense. Even if you got a first for him, who knows what will come from it, and with trading away the best player your organization has ever had that is a huge consideration. 

    So fear not for the future, for Matt Ryan to be traded Arthur Blank would have to be abducted by aliens and the new owner would have to be a ten year old playing owner mode on Madden. 

Damond Talbot

NFL Draft Diamonds was created to assist the underdogs playing the sport. We call them diamonds in the rough. My name is Damond Talbot, I have worked extremely hard to help hundreds of small school players over the past several years, and will continue my mission. We have several contributors on this site, and if they contribute their name and contact will be in the piece above. You can email me at nfldraftdiamonds@gmail.com

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