Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandy Cheeks
DJ... I don't want to have to search for it, so hopefully you will admit and explain this.
About a week before the PIT game, you made a great post about how Alex Smith is and was Alex Smith. He would be the same guy before and after this one game... and this game would not define him.. whether great or poor performance.
Will you admit to stating this?
Because if so... then you were content.. maybe not thrilled.. but content with Alex as a starter.. and defended him many times before this game.
.. but it sure feels like you stated what you did pre-game.. and now have thoroughly became that which you so frequently fought against... because of that one game.
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I did say exactly that.
But I came to the conclusion that the team around him has to play too well after watching that game and started thinking about combined probabilities.
To get to a SB would require one of 2 things - enough wins to only need 2 playoff Ws or 3 playoff Ws.
Now even assuming that we manage the first thing (which is a hell of a high bar anymore and took some incredibly timely playmaking/turnovers that simply don't show year to year repeatability), that's still 2 wins that you need in January to advance to the SB.
And with Smith's style of game, the Chiefs simply have to play virtually mistake-free football to win both of those games. Now there's a chance; maybe 70% even, that they can do that once. But they'd have to do it
twice and the laws of combined probability say that there's less than a 50% chance of them pulling that trick.
It isn't that I changed my mind on Smith as much as I changed my mind on football in general. Smith is still an adequate QB (and I've said it many times in the Mellinger thread; guy's a credible QB that can help many teams and in fact helped this one get here). But to win with him you need a team that's going to play extremely well around him and the odds of doing that frequently enough to get a top 2 seed or doing so three times in January are just very long. The margins between success and failure in a parity driven league are too tight to expect that your other 52 guys are going to win their battles handily in successive weeks.
Smith leading a conference championship team is simply a bad mathematical bet. And why I've focused on that single play so much is because it's a perfectly distilled image of what makes Smith incapable of pulling his team past those mistakes. All he needed to do was make one play on a night that his team simply didn't have it - he didn't make it and that's a play that shows perfectly why (and could've easily been that one play).
A championship team needs to have a QB that can save them, maybe only once, on a night in January where they're just spinning their wheels a bit. The Chiefs don't have that QB; they have the same credible, middle of the road guy that Smith has always been.
I'm no longer convinced that the odds are good enough with him under center to justify not making a change.