Are the Patriots too old to win the Super Bowl? If so, the Steelers are going to need canes, walkers and maybe even some of those awesome electric scooters I see advertised on TV if they’re going to make it to Indianapolis. I mean, they’ll need planes and buses, too, of course.
The Patriots are tied for the 9th oldest roster in the NFL, averaging 27.1 years of age. The Steelers have the oldest roster at 27.7 years; the Buccaneers are youngest at 25.5.
What does all this mean? Not so much, really. It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Fun with Integers
The crack statistical team at TSCIF notes that average age is not as interesting as median age but over a 53 person sample where everyone is at least 21 and at most 35 (with rare exceptions) neither one is going to tell you all that much.
In case you were reaching for your calculator, the average of 21 and 35 is 28; pretty much the average age of the Steelers roster.
You did that math in your head, didn’t you?
Anyway, Patriots’ OT Sebastian Vollmer is 27 but he has only 3 years of wear and tear on his immense Teutonic frame. Numbers like the average age of an NFL roster are really quite uninteresting. They lack context, perspective, a back story, an absent father, chronic migraines and a bit of a drinking problem that is losing the war with those headaches. There’s no there there.
Performance is the only thing that matters. Some players are injury-prone. Others not. The player’s battle of attrition with his own body is measured in workouts, practices and games and he is graded on the basis of an intransigent cost/benefit scale. Everyone's eventual. Speaking of...
Jack Del Rio hates David Garrard
Whatever the spin coming out of Jacksonville, the timing of David Garrard’s release is plainly curious.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sure why the Jags were so crazy about Garrard in the first place. I always thought of him as a pudgy running quarterback. But so what, right? Jacksonville is a running team. Garrard’s job was not to fumble the snap and reliably hand the ball off to the likes of Fred Taylor and Maurice Jones-Drew. Maybe he wasn’t pudgy. Maybe he was big-boned.
But seriously, who cuts their starting quarterback the week before the start of the regular season?
Actually, it turns out this is the second time Jack Del Rio has done this, having cut Lord Byron of Leftwich back in the day just before opening day. Ironically, Garrard was the beneficiary of Del Rio’s eccentric decision-making process when Leftwich was cut.
What goes around comes around, I guess.
More importantly, regardless of the result, isn’t cutting your starting quarterback just days before the start of the season borderline psychotic? Del Rio is the same guy who wound up losing his punter because he introduced a sharp ax (and a large piece of wood) into the locker room where grown, naked, emotionally-arrested men will occasionally indulge in a bit of horseplay. The ax in the locker room was a bad, bad decision. The kind of decision that makes you turn to Igor and say, “Now that brain that you gave me. Was it Hans Delbruck's?”
Packers QB Aaron Rodgers went on the radio to talk about how much he loves his anonymity or something. Along the way he described Jets QB Mark Sanchez’s spread in GQ as “embarrassing.”
How delightful!
Unfortunately, this did not start the slap fight I was hoping for but it did make Aaron Rodgers my second favorite quarterback.
I’ll never betray you, Tom.
For Entertainment Purposes Only
New Orleans 41, Green Bay 31.
What We Knew in 1980
And you should really give The Great Curve a listen, too.
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