JKool

Ok, that sounded like progress. However, now I\'m confused.

If Joe Horn is better than either of the Eagles WRs (pre-TO), then why not just stop talking about making the playoffs and records? Obviously talent is evaluated quite well independently of records and/or making the playoffs (and I agree).

My point about a player on a team with a better record being judged a better player is an \'other things being equal\' (at least I think I said that) judgement. Thus, if we have a lot of information, we would not use that argument. Say all you knew about a player was the record of the team he played on - you would count that as some evidence of his ability, wouldn\'t you? This is why people get all upity about \"playoff experience\" and the like, I believe.

Either way, I don\'t think this matters very much, but I was wondering if you did - since you seem to be saying you don\'t care about the record of the team but you do care about whether they made the playoffs (which clearly has to do with a team\'s record). I was just trying to determine what \"not making the playoffs\" had to do with evaluating Joe Horn\'s ability to help us make the playoffs. Certainly his abilities are the kind of things that would help, right? If you say no, then I\'m confused - since if Joe were to have gone to the Eagles (instead of TO) he would have helped them make the playoffs, since he would have been better than either of their other two, right?

Notice that both my arguments were intended to be general arguments. I acknowledge your counter-examples (just as I did before), but we\'d need to show that my arguments (actually, I\'m really only interested in the second one) don\'t hold in most cases (in general) to show that they are wrong.

Your second argument seems to me to be this: a team that has a worse record has better means of getting at least one player they need (as they have a higher draft pick).

I agree with that. Of course, a team with a bad record is more likely to need far more than just one player (unlike a team with a higher record - e.g. a 10-6 team that didn\'t make the playoffs because of the wild card system, that may very well not need any new players to make the playoffs). That is the sense in which, in general, a team with a better record is in better shape than a team with a worse record - even if they don\'t make the playoffs.

Why is this last point relevant? Well, if Joe is part of what is helping us be 8-8, then he is a good part of the team. (That is, if without him we would be 6-10, then we are better off with him than without, even if we don\'t make the playoffs.) Of course, it is possible that he is holding us back from making the playoffs, but I don\'t see an argument for that. More or less, we don\'t need a #1 WR while we have Joe, we have one.

I\'m not suggesting that someone else might not help us more than Joe, but I\'m just having trouble understanding why I should think that he is expendable on the grounds that we haven\'t made the playoffs while he\'s been a Saint.

Also, if you think, in general (rather than in rare cases), that it is possible for teams to suddenly make the playoffs with almost no personel changes, why are you interested in changing our personel? Surely, we could be like Dallas? I\'m sure you didn\'t mean the point this way, so I was hoping you could tell me what you meant here.

Further, I agree with you that our not improving from 8-8 is odd (and altogether frustrating). My explanation is that we haven\'t found the missing pieces in any given year (one year we need a CB badly, another a DT, another a LB). But, I don\'t think that being 8-8 is some sort of curse - in fact, I believe it shows that we are only a player or two (or a good coach or two) away from making the playoffs. I don\'t see how if we\'d been 1-15 every year I could believe the that we only a few moves away.

Maybe we\'re just talking about different things? Interesting still, no?

"... I was beating them with my eyes the whole game..." - Aaron Brooks