EXACTLY, and I am saying you are splitting hairs with his logic. You both use completely different criteria to come to the same result, his 2009 performance. I quoted you stating: You did not mention regular season play as criteria. That is where the hair splitting began. Now that you have clarified your statement, I am confident your intentions are different than your statement. I am with Clair's logic that his off-season performance decides his position on the field and let the game play prove his abilities. Off-season practice showing a great improvement adds more credible criteria than simply using criteria based purely on last season’s performance.
You haven't improved anything unless you've been put to a test and the results have changed. Right now his "improvement" is just untested theory.
I will say this. I hope that Lee has made tremendous improvements this offseason. But I hope more that I never get to find out if he has or not.
All this Lee bashing is ridiculous. None of you have a sense of history or the perspective required to judge Lee. He was put in a bad position and had limited success.
Yeah, we really screwed that guy. We put him on a team with good backs, good receivers, and a good line. Torture. Funny how guys like Sam Bradford or Colt McCoy get thrown into similar situations and end up Freshman All-Americans. Why do people act as if Lee was a true freshman that was moved from WR to QB and thrown to the wolves? He is a QB, he had an entire year plus another offseason to learn the offense and he did not put up a SEC caliber performance at QB. His flashes of good play were outweighed tenfold by his mistakes. Part of the problem with Lee was that most of his mistakes are not the kind that are typical of a young QB... they are the kind that are typical of a bad QB. He didn't make "immature" decisions most of the time... he just made bad decisions. He was also streaky with his accuracy. There were times during stretches of several games where he just could not hit anyone. These are signs of a bad QB. He did have a few times when he tried to "force" the ball or threw into double coverage, those are the ones that are signs of a young QB. The Alabama game is one in particular where he was trying too hard to fit the ball in where it did not go (but it was also one where he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn half of the time, too.) No matter what you do as a QB, you have to keep the football. There is one thing that has always been consistent throughout the decades of football - teams with positive turnover ratios tend to be the ones who come out on top, year in and year out. You don't have to be able to make every throw, you just have to lead your team and not make mistakes. Lee did not have the confidence of the team, he did not show any kind of security with the ball, and most of all he did not show enough confidence in himself most of the time. I hope the kid has a great life and I don't wish anything bad to him, but I simply do not trust him to quarterback this team. We have too much going for us to put the ball in his hands. Who cares about his experience? Personally I'd rather start a guy with no experience over a guy who had the kind of experience Lee had.
I will leave it at this and this will be the end of this thread for me, because this thread has become something that you'd see on the Rant and that's sad, but look at Matt Stafford's freshman numbers, then look at his junior numbers. Look at Peyton Manning's rookie season numbers, then look at his numbers any season after that. At a position like QB, there's a huge curve. Some get it quicker than others, but just because a kid gets buried into the ground and takes lumps does not mean that he's done forever. Troy Aikman went from 1-15 to the Superbowl in 2 years. It just takes a little time -- especially for a guy who began the season expecting to be third on the depth chart last season. His biggest mistakes were small ones -- eyeballing receivers, etc... Just in the SEC, small mistakes become big problems in a hurry. If the LSU coaching staff did not think he had what it took, they would have politely told him to transfer, but that he's still here says that they have faith in his ability. I trust Les Miles more than anyone on this board and definitely more than anyone who calls themselves "Awesome" in their message board name.
