The cliche that any respectable NFL contender requires, at minimum, a “good” quarterback is such a truism that merely stating it seems to be nearly unnecessary. In my life, I chose my favorite team in large part because the Denver Broncos, with John Elway at the helm, happened to be champions right around the time I became interested in the game (being from Canada I have no local team). I suspect that such a story lies at the heart of fandom everywhere, especially in the case of those football unfortunates that have no local or ancestral team to cheer for. But, maybe, it is fair to ask exactly what qualifies as a good quarterback at this point in NFL history. Consider these three points.
1) Dan Marino’s yardage record fell this year to Drew Brees and Tom Brady. Further, the record didn’t so much “fall” as it was utterly annihilated. Although anyone would consider those two amongst the sport’s best, Matthew Stafford (with 5038 yards) came awfully close to bumping Marino all the way to fourth on the all time list.
2) Neither Brees nor Brady is widely considered to be the “best” QB in the game right now: a title held by the Green Bay Packers Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers was over 800 yards behind Brees and threw one less touchdown pass, although he played one less game. However, what set Rodgers apart was his ability to almost never get intercepted: throwing six all year. Brees, on the other hand, threw fourteen at a rate double Rodgers. Granted, difference is somewhat mitigated when we consider how many passes each threw. Rodgers was picked off on 0.01% of his passes while Brees settled at a 0.02% rate. The title belongs to Rodgers largely based on his teams record and first place standing in the NFC and league wide: title he nor his Packers would not have had Brees’s New Orleans Saints won the closely contested week one game between the two.
3) None of the above qualify as the most discussed quarterback of the past year. For that distinction we turn to Tim Tebow: the current quarterback of the aforementioned Denver Broncos. At this point it is clear that Tebow makes relatively little sense as a QB because he is the rarest of combinations: a passer that both is not good at throwing a football and is yet also a “winner.” We will come back to Tebow.
So, having thus muddied the waters, let’s look at the quarterbacks who have ostensibly been the most successful this year, having taken their teams to the postseason.
SECTION ONE: ROOKIES
The Cincinnati Bengals’ Andy Dalton and the Houston Texans’ T.J. Yates conveniently not only share a similar amount of professional experience, they are also playing one another, guaranteeing we will see one rookie in the next round. While Dalton is a sixteen game starter, who briefly challenged Carolina’s Cam Newton for rookie of the year honors among media gossipers, Yates is the ultimate placeholder: a third string backup behind the eminently competent Matt Shaub and the eminent draft bust Matt Leinhart. To be honest, this game is about neither of these players. The Texans are favorites because they are both a home team and they feature a run game with both a dominant back (Arian Foster) and dominant scheme (Gary Kubiak’s zone run scheme). Dalton is likely the objectively “better” player despite his late season downturn; however, Yates has been far from the disaster he was suspected of being. Suffice to say, neither Dalton nor Yates ranks very high on the list of reasons to like either of these teams but, surprisingly, neither inspires the doubt and vitriol that many other rookies have inspired in past postseaons.
SECTION TWO: THE PRETTY GOOD PLAYERS
Atlanta’s Matt Ryan, Detroit’s Matt Stafford, the New York Giants’ Eli Manning, and Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger all qualify under a similar heading. All have some credentials that would suggest they might be elite, especially when compared statistically against any other era in football, any yet they are clearly below the Rodgers, Brees, and Brady tier.
While Stafford crossed the 5000 yard threshold, Eli Manning missed by merely 67 yards, although throwing twelve less touchdowns. Both are capable of dominant statical performances and are also widely regarded as being capable of melting down at inopportune moments (generally, Stafford with injuries and Manning with ineffectiveness). Perhaps what is most noticeable about both quarterback’s offences is the quality of their receivers. New York’s Victor Cruz, Hakeem Nicks, and, to a lesser extent, Mario Manningham are among the deepest and most talented groups in the NFL (comparable to other talented bunches such as those in Green Bay, New Orleans and Atlanta). Detroit, lacking the depth of New York, features Calvin Johnson: a player widely regarded as the most uncoverable weapon in the NFL and one who radically alters not only game plans but defensive possibilities, opening up space for secondary options such as tight end Brendan Pettigrew. The Lions and the Giants both feature excellent offences bolstered by arms capable of delivering the ball to talented playmakes.
Roethlisberger has an established history of being a “winner” for the Steelers although he is hobbled this year by a lingering high ankle sprain. Unlike Stafford and Manning, players whose physical talent resides almost entirely in their arms, Roethlisberger is as physically imposing as most tight ends and is famous for being to withstand pass rushes despite the failures of his blocking. Pittsburgh’s passing offence relies of Roethlisberger’s ability to avoid sacks almost single handily because the team features one of the league’s worst offensive lines. The recent announcement that Maurkice Pouncey will sit out only further deteriorates the quality of the line. Although Roethlisberger threw for the second most yards of his career, Pittsburgh's offence has suffered from the collapse of its once dominant run game: a fact only exacerbated by the recent injury to Rashard Mendenhall (who, although not dominant, leaves behind only Isaac Redman in his wake). The question is whether or not being a “winner” has any real effect on whether Roethlisberger and the Steelers can in fact win.
Ryan is somewhat of an outlier in this group: possessing neither dominant statistics nor past track record. Further, he suffers from rather extreme splits in which he is almost a completely different player when put indoors on turf (an all star) rather than outdoor grass surfaces (rather mundane). Outdoors in New York it is more likely that we will see the version of Ryan that falls somewhat the quality expected from and elite quarterback. Like Stafford and Manning, Ryan benefits from a dominant receiving corps (Roddy White and Julio Jones) and is fortunate to also have a quality running back (Michael Turner). Realistically, the Falcons’ offence is built more on overall quality rather than extreme talent at the quarterback position which, if Ryan does in fact struggle somewhat outdoors, may actually benefit them.
SECTION THREE: THE CONUNDRUM
As noted above, Tim Tebow is the exception to all these rules. Here are the facts:
- He cannot consistently throw a football at a level we would usually attribute to a professional thrower of footballs.
- He reads defences slowly and is incapable of making many throws that are integral to many of the best NFL offences.
- Every so often he is capable of astounding feats of physical performance: both throwing and running.
- He has been remarkably good at winning football games.
Unlike the above group, Tebow has almost no support from his receivers and the Broncos did him no favours trading away Brandan Lloyd, his best receiver, midseason. While Roethlisberger is often given credit for “winning” in a way I question, Tebow is an even more extreme example of giving credit where is it only possible due. It is almost indisputable that the Broncos win streak this year was due to a dominant run by their defence, an incredible amount of luck, and poor decisions by opposing teams. However, it is indisputable that despite his sometimes terrible play, Tebow did have a few magical (a carefully chosen word in this case) moments that helped his team win games. I suspect that Tebow will not have a long career as a starting quarterback; however, my being wrong would really only fit within the narrative that has dominated Tebow’s professional career thus far. At this point, Tebow has proven almost nothing and, if the Broncos are blown out by Pittsburgh as many suspect they will, he may fade away. If the Broncos win, and Tebow has anything other than a terrible game, his place in the quarterback hierarchy will, perhaps, become clearer.
SECTION FOUR: SUPERSTARS
Brees, Brady, and Rodgers, both in the playoffs and generally, are in a class to themselves. The fact that all three play for teams with horrible defences, and that they also play for the three teams with the best championship odds, only underlines their cumulative dominance. Despite the work of other players at the position and the changing definition of “great,’ and despite the possibility that none of them will actually win a championship this year, Brees, Brady, and Rodgers seem to point to the continuing role of great quarterbacks at the heart of great teams.
Friday, 6 January 2012
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Video Games and the Possibility of Emergent Art
It is not uncommon for the guardians of so called "high culture" to dismiss forms of new culture, forms that currently most often appear in the digital medium, as so low that they do not qualify for the requisite level of art or culture to which they might ascribe. Recently, the United States Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, a ruling that is particularly notable for the sentiment expressed by Justice Scalia in the majority opinion: that the court must not fear technology simply for the fact of its being new. In fact, he went so far as to draw an analogy between classic forms of children's entertainment and the violence therein, such as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the violence of video games.
The academic roots of Justice Scalia's opinion are felt in the burgeoning field of criticism that takes up video games as a new pillar in the artistic production of contemporary culture. It is not at all uncommon, in the new horizons of both academia and more broadly in culture as a whole, for video games to take up alongside older disciplines (such as print, music, film and the plastic arts) as a legitimate subject of study. However, the same problems that have assailed those other disciplines in the past strike at video games now. Charges of indecency and corrupted morality are often levelled against the producers of video games in much the same way that the arts in the past have been represented as the domain of loose morals.
Unfortunately, in its current state, the video game industry has not fully found the means to justify its own existence. Despite the ruling of the Supreme Court, video games have not been seamlessly tied into the history of the development of the culture of art in either a legal or philosophical sense. Justice Scalia's opinion simply ties video games into a preexisting order in which violent texts already exist and therefore applies the protections of the American First Amendment; in its plainest form, the opinion casts video games as more of the same of something we have seen before. Further, Justice Scalia expresses deep misgivings about the ability of video games to work with sexual material - a qualification that would seem to shut off what has always been a primary inspiration for art. Therefore, while video games are subject to the protections the arts have claimed in the past, they are also constrained within the same old bounds that have plagued the reception of artistic work. The ruling does not see any paradigmatic shift in culture so much as the need to uphold those standards derived from the past.
One can imagine the problems that would be associated with the publication of any video game that strove to portray intimacy (putting aside the kind of puerile --and off screen-- sex in game such as God of War). Even more problematic would be the depiction of non-normative sexuality or sexuality that posed a challenge to the standard of the day. For instance, James Joyce's Ulysses, which had its own problems with the English standards of morals upon its publication in the early twentieth century, would not only pose artistic problems in its digital representation but would also be assailed by manifold bureaucratic and economic difficulties. Granted, without the patina of time, and canonization, many texts have fallen from the cultural consciousness because their historically informed challenges have proven to be of not enough substance to stand the test of time. However, equally, figures such as the Marquis de Sade, who offended in his own time, have maintained their relevance and even now inform how we learn to think about ourselves in the broadest sense.
Perhaps the greatest challenge video games face in their validation as art is one that criticism has fought, vigorously, in the past century and is yet a fact that most have not yet learned to live without: authorship. While censorship has a long history, the fight against censors is equally historically informed and, moreover, invokes some of the greatest names in the canon. John Milton, author of what is most often considered the greatest English epic poem in Paradise Lost, wrote Aeropegitica, a persuasive and eloquent defence of the right to publish illicit material, in the belief that a discerning English public would be bettered by the chance to decide what ideas they might be believe. Likewise, many of the other great writers in the canon have served double duty as critics, sometimes within their art itself. While more recent critics, many of whom are lumped into the amorphous and poorly defined category of the "postmodern" although the strain of thought is also expressed further back by those such as T.S. Eliot, have proclaimed "the death of the author," it seems that the we are culturally not yet able to let him or her die. That is to say, somebody remains responsible for art but, in the emerging digital culture, it is not at all clear who that may be.
What video games lack is a clear author figure. In the nineteenth century Percy Shelley defended poets on the grounds of their keen insight into the human condition and thereby elevated them to the post of "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." However, in that vein, whose insight is expressed in a game? First, the actual production of games entails the work of so many individuals, witness the length of the credit sequence at the end of a modern game, that the intellectual work of any one person is indiscernible from the whole. While film may suffer from the same confusion, we are at least prepared to parse a film and recognize its constituent parts (such as direction, scripting and acting) in a manner not yet attained in the consumption of games. Therefore, games are produced by "teams" rather than "authors" and, it seems, we are not yet able to think about this new form of cultural production. This new form of work, a kind of collective effort of thought, does not fit with the personal and subjective origins that most still ascribe to art. Moreover, because a team remains something less than a culture, it also fails to take the form of what some think of as cultural productions. From the spines of books we have be trained to think about art as the work of one, potentially great, mind and video games leave us unfulfilled in that regard.
However, the most pressing and distressing complication in authorship is almost Freudian in it's nature; in video games, we find ourselves as authors and producers of the work. In what is an odd twist, considering how video games have been denigrated for their destruction of the modern attention span, games invoke the gamer in a way unattainable by books, film, music or visual art. In a very real sense, we produce our own experience along with the makers of the game. While the intellectual quality of the experience is a debate for another time, the mode of engagement is truly a new frontier in art. While art has always gone through revolutions, the role of the viewer has never been more active than it is in this new, emergent art form and, therefore, the problems of viewing art and the imperative working through of art's meaning have never been so visceral.
As someone who is fascinated by art and it's reception, but also happens to be a gamer, I struggle with the opinion offered by Justice Scalia. While, on the one hand, I cannot help but be pleased by the extension of the legal rights of art to, what I think of as, an emerging artistic medium, I also struggle to think through how video games do and do not ingratiate themselves within the preexisting canon and its standards.
The academic roots of Justice Scalia's opinion are felt in the burgeoning field of criticism that takes up video games as a new pillar in the artistic production of contemporary culture. It is not at all uncommon, in the new horizons of both academia and more broadly in culture as a whole, for video games to take up alongside older disciplines (such as print, music, film and the plastic arts) as a legitimate subject of study. However, the same problems that have assailed those other disciplines in the past strike at video games now. Charges of indecency and corrupted morality are often levelled against the producers of video games in much the same way that the arts in the past have been represented as the domain of loose morals.
Unfortunately, in its current state, the video game industry has not fully found the means to justify its own existence. Despite the ruling of the Supreme Court, video games have not been seamlessly tied into the history of the development of the culture of art in either a legal or philosophical sense. Justice Scalia's opinion simply ties video games into a preexisting order in which violent texts already exist and therefore applies the protections of the American First Amendment; in its plainest form, the opinion casts video games as more of the same of something we have seen before. Further, Justice Scalia expresses deep misgivings about the ability of video games to work with sexual material - a qualification that would seem to shut off what has always been a primary inspiration for art. Therefore, while video games are subject to the protections the arts have claimed in the past, they are also constrained within the same old bounds that have plagued the reception of artistic work. The ruling does not see any paradigmatic shift in culture so much as the need to uphold those standards derived from the past.
One can imagine the problems that would be associated with the publication of any video game that strove to portray intimacy (putting aside the kind of puerile --and off screen-- sex in game such as God of War). Even more problematic would be the depiction of non-normative sexuality or sexuality that posed a challenge to the standard of the day. For instance, James Joyce's Ulysses, which had its own problems with the English standards of morals upon its publication in the early twentieth century, would not only pose artistic problems in its digital representation but would also be assailed by manifold bureaucratic and economic difficulties. Granted, without the patina of time, and canonization, many texts have fallen from the cultural consciousness because their historically informed challenges have proven to be of not enough substance to stand the test of time. However, equally, figures such as the Marquis de Sade, who offended in his own time, have maintained their relevance and even now inform how we learn to think about ourselves in the broadest sense.
Perhaps the greatest challenge video games face in their validation as art is one that criticism has fought, vigorously, in the past century and is yet a fact that most have not yet learned to live without: authorship. While censorship has a long history, the fight against censors is equally historically informed and, moreover, invokes some of the greatest names in the canon. John Milton, author of what is most often considered the greatest English epic poem in Paradise Lost, wrote Aeropegitica, a persuasive and eloquent defence of the right to publish illicit material, in the belief that a discerning English public would be bettered by the chance to decide what ideas they might be believe. Likewise, many of the other great writers in the canon have served double duty as critics, sometimes within their art itself. While more recent critics, many of whom are lumped into the amorphous and poorly defined category of the "postmodern" although the strain of thought is also expressed further back by those such as T.S. Eliot, have proclaimed "the death of the author," it seems that the we are culturally not yet able to let him or her die. That is to say, somebody remains responsible for art but, in the emerging digital culture, it is not at all clear who that may be.
What video games lack is a clear author figure. In the nineteenth century Percy Shelley defended poets on the grounds of their keen insight into the human condition and thereby elevated them to the post of "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." However, in that vein, whose insight is expressed in a game? First, the actual production of games entails the work of so many individuals, witness the length of the credit sequence at the end of a modern game, that the intellectual work of any one person is indiscernible from the whole. While film may suffer from the same confusion, we are at least prepared to parse a film and recognize its constituent parts (such as direction, scripting and acting) in a manner not yet attained in the consumption of games. Therefore, games are produced by "teams" rather than "authors" and, it seems, we are not yet able to think about this new form of cultural production. This new form of work, a kind of collective effort of thought, does not fit with the personal and subjective origins that most still ascribe to art. Moreover, because a team remains something less than a culture, it also fails to take the form of what some think of as cultural productions. From the spines of books we have be trained to think about art as the work of one, potentially great, mind and video games leave us unfulfilled in that regard.
However, the most pressing and distressing complication in authorship is almost Freudian in it's nature; in video games, we find ourselves as authors and producers of the work. In what is an odd twist, considering how video games have been denigrated for their destruction of the modern attention span, games invoke the gamer in a way unattainable by books, film, music or visual art. In a very real sense, we produce our own experience along with the makers of the game. While the intellectual quality of the experience is a debate for another time, the mode of engagement is truly a new frontier in art. While art has always gone through revolutions, the role of the viewer has never been more active than it is in this new, emergent art form and, therefore, the problems of viewing art and the imperative working through of art's meaning have never been so visceral.
As someone who is fascinated by art and it's reception, but also happens to be a gamer, I struggle with the opinion offered by Justice Scalia. While, on the one hand, I cannot help but be pleased by the extension of the legal rights of art to, what I think of as, an emerging artistic medium, I also struggle to think through how video games do and do not ingratiate themselves within the preexisting canon and its standards.
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