Who is the Real Michael Vick?

I have been insisting this for a while now and finally have all the facts before making my full argument:  Michael Vick is not one of the top 10 quarterbacks in the National Football League.  Every time I have posed this idea to one of my friends, acquaintances, or colleagues they have taken my remark as a personal insult and tell me I’m crazy for making such an allegation.  I’ll let the stats back up what I have to say.

I’m addressing this right away: I have no personal vendetta against Vick, but the heinous acts he committed are unfortunately going to follow him for rest of his life.  Vick did the crime and paid the time and I plan only to judge him as a football player.  Continuing, I must admit that Michael Vick came out of prison a more mature and disciplined adult, but how else would Vick improve his public image and be granted permission to rejoin the NFL?  These personality and lifestyle changes rubbed off on Vick in his stellar 12-game regular season posting a sparkling line in 2010: 100.2 QB Rating, 62.6% Completion Percentage, 3,018 Passing Yards, 21 Touchdowns, 6 Interceptions, and 676 Rushing Yards on 100 attempts for 9 Rushing TD’s.  Continuing there is no other player in the NFL quite like Vick and no one else is capable of amassing these stats in a single season; Vick is always a staple on the SportsCenter top-ten plays. 

True to form though, Vick choked in the playoffs to the eventual Super Bowl XXXXV Champions posting a 79.9 QB Rating, 55.6% comp %, 292 passing yds, 1 TD, 1 Int, and 32 rush yds on 8 attempts for 1 rushing TD.  The drop in performance from his regular season is considerable and Eagles fans are certainly going to remember Vick’s botched throw right into the hands of Packers DB Tramon Williams while driving deep into Packer territory with 37 seconds remaining in the 4^th quarter to bring the drive and game to a screeching halt.  Think this performance was an aberration?  Check out Vick’s career line in the NFL Playoffs: 2-4 Record 77.6 QB Rating, 56.0% comp %, 977 passing yds, 5 TD, 4 Int, and 271 rush yds on 37 attempts for 1 rushing TD.  Vick has never had a stellar playoff performance and his playoff win-loss record indicates that.

Let’s look at the last 20 Super Bowl Champion QB’s:

1991 Mark Rypien    2001 Tom Brady

1992 Troy Aikman    2002 Brad Johnson

1993 Troy Aikman    2003 Tom Brady

1994 Steve Young    2004 Tom Brady

1995 Troy Aikman    2005 Ben Roethlisberger

1996 Brett Favre      2006 Peyton Manning

1997 John Elway      2007 Eli Manning

1998 John Elway      2008 Ben Roethlisberger

1999 Kurt Warner    2009 Drew Brees

2000 Trent Dilfer     2010 Aaron Rodgers

Clearly there is a proven formula surrounding winning a Super Bowl and it involves your QB staying in the pocket where he’s best protected.  This serves as a nice segway into my next point: each time Michael Vick scrambles he puts himself and his team in an extremely vulnerable position.  In his six seasons as a Starting QB (2002-2006, 2010), Vick has missed seventeen games due to injury which equates to more than a full season’s worth of games.  Quarterback is widely regarded as the most important position on the field; these signal callers can make or break a season.  As the owner of an NFL franchise do you really want the whole outlook of your season changed because Michael Vick refused to slide while scrambling for a first down?

Let’s dive into Vick’s career numbers: 80.2 QB Rating, 55.3% comp %, 14,609 passing yds, 93 TD, 58 Int, and 4630 rush yds on 653 attempts for 32 rushing TD.  I’ll start with the positives: every time Vick scampers into the open field he averages 7.1 yards per attempt.  This is production you could never expect from a running back and serves as a potential game-changing element.  Now on to the negatives: in the NFL an 80 QB Rating is essentially the make or break line (i.e. Alex Smith at 82.1 and Ryan Fitzpatrick at 81.8), a 90 QB Rating means you could be on the cusp of becoming a star (i.e. Matt Ryan at 91.0 and Matt Schaub at 92.0) , and a QB rating over 100 means you’ve had a stellar season (i.e. Tom Brady 111.0).  Just twice in his career as a starter Vick has had a QB rating over 80 over a full season.  As far as completion percentage goes, 60 percent seems to serve as the make or break line for QB’s, Vick has eclipsed this figure just once in a full season.

By this assessment, the gap between Michael Vick and a young quarterback such as Josh Freeman may not be as far off as you think.  Both players are coming off their first ever quality season statistically, shouldn’t they both be viewed as an unknown for 2011?  There is no real track record of success for either QB and Freeman still has several years of development ahead of him at just 23 years of age.

Obviously 2010 is a complete outlier compared to Vick’s other seasons as a starter, and I must remind baseball fans Brady Anderson once hit 50 home runs in a season, and Derek Anderson was a Pro Bowl QB in 2007.  Has Michael Vick truly turned the corner as a QB or are we going to see more of the same Vick who threw at least one interception over his past six starts (including playoffs) of the 2010 season?  We must forget about all the games we won using Vick in Madden 2004, forget about how much he helped your fantasy team in 2010 and realize Michael Vick has only once been as far as the NFC Championship game.  After assembling and all-star cast, Eagles fans are building themselves up for a Miami Heat esque let down in 2011 at the hands of Michael Vick.