So now I would like to present my predictions for the NFC West.
Be prepared: you may go insane from reading this.
1. Arizona
I think the most underrated QB of last year was Matt Moore, and this year it's going to be Helter Skelton. I'm not saying he is going to be great—I just think he will be good enough to win games with a good defense, good special teams with Patrick Peterson returning punts, and possibly a good to great running game with the emergence of Ryan Williams.
As for the elephant in the room, AKA the o-line... while it is bad, and it is an issue, I think it is largely correctable in that you can disguise many of those problems with proper scheming. Some things are not correctable, such as the actual talent of the o-line, but the scheme of the o-line very much is correctable. Also I don't think it would have looked as bad if Kolb did not play in the preseason, as it is easier for the line to block for Skelton because he moves around in the pocket much more conventionally and the linemen know where he's going to be, so that they can block defenders away from the QB instead of into the QB like what happened when Kolb was in there.
Overall this team is built to win close games, and it is also built to participate in close games, and in this (sorry, but it's true) weak division, that could be enough.
2. San Francisco
The success of the 2011 team is not sustainable. They will not be +28 in turnovers again, the defense will not be as good as they were last year, and the injury fairy will not forget to pay them a visit as it seemed to last year. Also, Alex Smith, while having a contract that is somewhat voidable after one year, is not in a contract year this time around. And aside from that, I just don't believe he's going to be a turd for his whole career and then all of a sudden polish himself into titanium. No, he had a career-year (it is basically statistically impossible to not have one) that, yes, coincidentally, aligned with other borderline miracle circumstances that helped this 49er team tremendously.
I do need to say that, as much as I can't stand the cut of Smith's jib, he does have the intangibles that a QB needs: he's got toughness, and he's clutch. Problem is, he lacks this thing called talent. So for him, all he has to do is barely be average in certain spots and he deserves the clutch label. But in the end, his ineptitude came home to roost in the conference championship against the Giants. The Kyle Williams fumbles were a mere footnote to the true reason the 49ers lost that game... it was more the fact that Smith could not complete a single ball to a WR until the final 2:00 of the game, and that he couldn't convert a single 3rd down until the final 2:00 of the game, and that he was throwing at below 50%. And it didn't help matters that on the other side you had a real NFL QB converting 3rd down after 3rd down. Between that, and the fact that the 49ers defense didn't serve him up some convenient turnovers, Smith's talent level was simply overwhelmed by Eli's.
I'm not going to predict a specific record, but this team will be below .500 and sitting at home in January.
3. St. Louis
Ugh, somehow I will have to find a way to cough up a couple paragraphs here without using the banned "rebuild" word. Oh crap, I just did. Well, let me rebuild this starting now. OK here we go.
Now I am going to try to use my words carefully here, seeing as how I am in your forums, but I have to say that there are some numbers on Bradford which would terrify me if I was a Rams fan. Before I even get into this, I know that I'm going to be coming at you with a stat that I've made up myself, and then saying that Bradford is poor in this stat, so you can be mad at me if you want, but honestly I believe there is a big problem here. The stat is what I call Productivity, it is the ratio Yards:TDs. This stat should be around 150:1 for a franchise QB, and it should be low, not high. To give you a barometer, Aaron Rodgers was 103:1 last year. So how did Sam Bradford score last year? If I recall correctly, he sprained his ankle with around 2:00 to go in the 4th quarter of the @GB game. I will therefore ignore the games that followed, and extrapolate a 16-game season based on the first 5 games. In this respect he threw for the equivalent of 3766 yards, 10 TD, 6 INT. The TD:INT ratio is good, but here I don't particularly care about the INTs as my metric is attempting to measure QB productivity and I ignore mistakes (I would use another system of analysis to measure the mistake volume). Bradford's Productivity is at 376:1, which is pretty bad. I haven't yet created a system to attempt to account for a TD that is "sniped" by the RB, i.e. the QB drives the team down inside the 5 and then the RB finishes the drive. However, even if I award all Rams rushing TDs to Bradford, regardless of if they were long TDs like your first play of the year or even if they occurred when Bradford was not in the game, he is still sitting at an adjusted Productivity of 221:1, which is simply too high (adjusted simply meaning the prorated stats, as I already mentioned, together with all Rams rushing TDs). The Rams' offense was not extremely skewed towards rushing, so I would put the Productivity above 221:1. And the problem with a high Productivity ratio is that it means, by definition, you're not scoring. It means you are bending a defense but not breaking it.
I am putting all of my focus on Sam Bradford here when talking about the Rams because, essentially, R word or not, the team is punting this year away. The success of this season for the Rams will barely even be defined by wins and losses, or by the development of team chemistry, or by the emergence of young talent. It will be solely Sam Bradford flipping over his card, showing us if he's got BlackJack... or bust. The best thing that can happen for this team is for Sam to have a Cam Newton-type year... it won't even matter if the Rams have a Panthers-type year along with that, there will simply be the hope of having a franchise QB. Sam has not yet hit that 30-game mark where you know what you have in your QB. I'd put him at just 16+5=21 games, ignoring the ankle games and giving him a pass. He obviously has talent, as he is a 1, and it is well documented that there are offensive struggles around him. But every 1 is drafted to a bad team... Cam turned around one of the worst offenses in the NFL by himself, so Sam, if he's holding BlackJack, can make this offense better quite literally by himself.
I'm pointing out a red flag here in my analysis, not to try to insult you guys or make fun of your team, but simply for the sake of pointing it out... as this is a football forum where we talk about obscure football stuff. And I think it is an important issue, but it is not something that cannot be fixed (hence the phrase "breakthrough year"). But I think overall that this year should be extremely exciting for Rams fans, because... well let's put it this way, Andrew Luck can stink it up this year and nothing will be done about it, nothing will be learned, nothing will change, but what you Rams fans have is a #1 pick in his 3rd year, you have a #1 pick who's going to make it or break it, a #1 pick who's going to flip over that card. This is the year.
4. Seattle
This team puts the "mental" in "experimental." What else can I say? The experimental neon-glow-in-the-dark-toothpaste-Tron:Legacy uniforms... the experimental WRs (hey, General Bentnose, er, I mean Pete Carroll, I hear Ochocinco is available, er I mean Johnson... whatever). And to top off the experimentation, you've got a QB under 6 feet and CBs over 6 feet? Maybe Carroll is hard of hearing and he can't tell the difference when someone says quarterback and cornerback. Look, I mean, I know it's frustrating that you've got 5'10" DBs trying to cover 6'4" WRs, but there's a reason NFL teams do it this way: if your DB is too tall, his center of gravity is too high, and he is in danger of slipping and falling. And what is the #1 rule in football? Stay on your feet! You're not making a play on your @$$. I know these DBs made it to the Pro Bowl last year, but it is literally one play in a game—let me repeat that, one play in a game—that can make a difference between a CB having a good day and having a catastrophically bad day.
Then we have Russell Wilson. Now let me go off on a tangent before I touch on this. There are people out there who are not currently listing my beloved Matthew Stafford as a top-10 QB. Now, either this is because they are completely unaware of what occurred on or around September of 2011 to January 2012, in which case their opinion is worthless, or they are simply listing QB resumés, in which case, well, I have Google for that and, once again, their opinion is worthless. There is no metric by which Stafford is not a top-10 QB. All of this is to say that while Seahawks fans can be excited over what they've seen out of Wilson, and rightfully so, and I acknowledge that people are generally too slow to allow change at the top of the QB rankings, we have to keep in mind that this kid hasn't yet played a down in the NFL. He's got great legs, but that won't do him any good if he doesn't make it as a QB. We haven't seen what a scheming defense will do to him. We haven't seen a defense capitalize on the fact that his passes are often very high because he has to throw an exaggerated arc to get the ball over the linemen.
So Wilson, while clearly being talented, is as of yet untested, and he is the wildcard... he is the secret ingredient, the X-factor, the control factor, if you will, in this experiment up in Seattle.
