First Tragedy, Then Farce

If I were Howie Roseman, I’d be booking a trip to Monte Carlo right now. First, he gets two teams to pay for the privilege of assuming ghastly Chip Kelly contracts. Now, he gets someone to clean up his own mess:

After Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater tore an ACL, an effort immediately emerged to identify all of the team’s options at the position. Few if any lists included Sam Bradford’s name.

But Bradford, whom the Eagles insisted was their guy for 2016, is suddenly Minnesota’s guy for 2016. The Eagles have announced that the Vikings sent a first-round pick in 2017 and a fourth-round pick in 2018 to get Bradford.

You can sympathize with the Vikings overreacting to what is not only a season-ending but career-threatening injury to Bridgewater. But as Chip found out the hard way Bradford isn’t the solution to any problem other than “we need a cheap backup.” His raw stats look vaguely OK, but as the advanced metrics (24th in DVOA, 34th in QBR) have consistently indicated, once you boil off Colonel Checkdown’s 4-yard completions on 3rd-and-7 and 8-yard completions in garbage time, he’s consistently been one of the worst starting quarterbacks in the league. (And this isn’t a prejudice against his conservative style, either — Alex Smith’s numbers hold up fairly well in the advanced metrics because unlike Bradford he consistently moves the chains.) Plus he gets hurt a lot. You would have to be one hell of an optimist to think that he’s suddenly going to turn it around working for Norv Turner as he pushes 30. This will still be a lost season for the Vikings, and now they won’t even get a solid 1st round pick out of it. And while I still think the Eagles were really dumb to trade up for Wentz this obviously mitigates the damage.