Andy Reid: QB Genius?

The pending QB controversy (Kolb vs. Vick) got me to thinking. Is Andy Reid a QB genius? I mean how the heck did we end up with 2 quality QB starters in a league where barely half the teams can trot out a viable QB on a week to week basis.

At first blush, it's valid to say Reid lucked into this position. Vick was a quality QB for a number of years in this league so there's no reason to think he wouldn't be. Well, if that was the case then why were the Eagles only team to take a flier on him? You can't tell me it was all a character issue as there's a number of teams out there who collect problem children (ahem, OAK). And there are a number of teams who desperately needed QB help last year. So were 31 head coaches wrong or has Reid improved Vick?

Take a look back over the past 10 years and there always seems to be a competent #2. Is this luck or something more? I decided to look at the stats of all the QBs that have played for Reid and broke them down into Reid Career and Non-Reid Career numbers. For the sake of comparison, I've excluded all non-QBs from this analysis and any QBs who only played for Reid. I've also excluded McNabb as 6 games in WAS is too small of a sample size. I'll fully admit that the sample sizes for all these other guys are also quite limited, but hey. At least we've got some different numbers to debate.

	Player	Att	Comp	Yds	Comp %	Yds/Att	TD	TD %	INT	INT %
Non-Reid Career	Koy Detmer	181	97	1011	53.6%	5.59	5	2.8%	5	2.8%
Non-Reid Career	Doug Pederson	295	167	1486	56.6%	5.04	5	1.7%	10	3.4%
Non-Reid Career	A.J. Feeley	346	191	1893	55.2%	5.47	11	3.2%	20	5.8%
Non-Reid Career	Jeff Blake	3204	1809	21585	56.5%	6.74	133	4.2%	98	3.1%
Non-Reid Career	Mike McMahon	308	135	1709	43.8%	5.55	10	3.2%	13	4.2%
Non-Reid Career	Jeff Garcia	3488	2148	24228	61.6%	6.95	151	4.3%	81	2.3%
Non-Reid Career	Michael Vick	1730	930	11505	53.8%	6.65	71	4.1%	52	3.0%
Reid Career	Koy Detmer	173	87	933	50.3%	5.39	5	2.9%	9	5.2%
Reid Career	Doug Pederson	227	119	1276	52.4%	5.62	7	3.1%	9	4.0%
Reid Career	A.J. Feeley	309	181	2177	58.6%	7.05	16	5.2%	14	4.5%
Reid Career	Jeff Blake	37	18	126	48.6%	3.41	1	2.7%	1	2.7%
Reid Career	Mike McMahon	207	94	1158	45.4%	5.59	5	2.4%	8	3.9%
Reid Career	Jeff Garcia	188	116	1309	61.7%	6.96	10	5.3%	2	1.1%
Reid Career	Michael Vick	109	65	885	59.6%	8.12	7	6.4%	0	0.0%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Koy Detmer				-3.30%	-0.19		0.13%		2.44%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Doug Pederson				-4.19%	0.58		1.39%		0.57%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	A.J. Feeley				3.37%	1.57		2.00%		-1.25%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Jeff Blake				-7.81%	-3.33		-1.45%		-0.36%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Mike McMahon				1.58%	0.05		-0.83%		-0.36%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Jeff Garcia				0.12%	0.02		0.99%		-1.26%
Reid – Non-Reid Career	Michael Vick				5.88%	1.47		2.32%		-3.01%

Of the 7 QBs above, it looks like 3 were clearly better (Feeley, McMahon, Vick), 3 clearly worse (Pederson, Blake, Detmer), and Garcia virtually unchanged. Blake only had 30 more attempts after leaving PHI so you could argue that there wasn't much Reid could teach him at that point. Ditto Garcia. Pederson did better after leaving PHI, so that kinda blows that theory. Feeley and McMahon were playing for really bad teams outside of their PHI career (MIA, DET) so their numbers can be spun the other way. Detmer only hung around as long as he did because he could hold for Akers not so much for his passing acumen.

So the numbers don't seem to point one way or another. My gut tells me though that he does more with less than about anyone else out there. Or maybe it's a system thing.