Is Charlie The Answer?
By Keith Myers
No, no he’s not.
I don’t think I can make it any clearer. I know yesterday I said that I believe that the Seahawks should make a QB change, and I stand by that. It just so happens that I also don’t think that Charlie Whitehurst will do much better. So for everyone who chanting for Charlie to be inserted into the lineup, I need to ask:
Why?
I spent the morning looking over the stats of the two players, and they’re really quite similar. Take a look:
| Comp | Att | Yds | Ave | TD | Int | Rat | |
| Week 9 vs NYG | 12 | 23 | 113 | 4.9 | 1 | 2 | 44.3 |
| Week 17 vs StL | 22 | 36 | 192 | 5.3 | 1 | 0 | 84.5 |
| 2010 Season | 57 | 99 | 507 | 5.1 | 2 | 3 | 65.5 |
| Jackson in 2011 | 59 | 97 | 527 | 5.3 | 2 | 2 | 73.7 |
Every time someone starts telling me about the exploits of Whitehurst, it always one of two things. Either it’s the week 17 victory against the Rams, or its the 2011 pre-season. Let me just stop right there. You’ll notice I didn’t even include the pre-season stats in my table. You want to know why? Because, Pre-Season stats don’t mean ANYTHING!
Teams don’t game-plan against you, they also don’t do much beyond straight vanilla defenses, since they don’t want to provide tape for their week 1 opponents. Charlie also never faced a first string defense. He put up the vast majority of his numbers against 3rd stringers and guys who aren’t even on active rosters right now. I don’t care how well he did, those stats are meaningless.
As for his week 17 win over the Rams last season, I can’t and wont dismiss that performance. It was a solid, though unspectacular performance. It also provides hope that he might be an upgrade over Jackson. Unfortunately, I have a difficult time separating the week 17 win from the week 9 loss where he looked really poor. I’ll give him a pass on the games when I had to come in and take over when Matt got hurt.
It’s hard when you weren’t even a part of the walkthroughs with the first team to execute the game-plan. But that wasn’t the case in week 9. That was just ugly.
So where are we now? Well, It looks like we’re right back where we started. I’m done waiting for Jackson to get his act together. If he couldn’t get the job done against a really bad Cardinal defense, then he’s simply not going to. Whitehurst is the only other option right now, and he’s not much better (if he’s better at all).
All we have is that straw to grasp onto that Whitehurst, whose has all of 2 starts in the NFL, might improve while Jackson seem very unlikely to. Doesn’t give much hope, does it?