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| Christopher Reina. 25th April, 2010 - 10:05 pm
 In a move that said 'We finally surrender on propping up JaMarcus,' the Raiders acquired Jason Campbell on Saturday in exchange for a fourth rounder in 2012.
I have been very high on Campbell for a few seasons, feeling he was treated unfairly by Washington. He almost aways felt like a placeholder quarterback for the Redskins and dealt with multiple play-callers.
Campbell has a career 82.3 passer rating, which ranks him 21st amongst active QBs, ahead of Eli Manning, Matt Cassel and Kyle Orton. He had a passer rating of 86.4 during a tumultuous 2009 season, which was 15th in the NFL. I think that's about where he is as a quarterback, dead center average.
But Campbell didn't have an exemplary collection of receivers, nor did he have a very good offensive line, which undoubtedly nicked down his numbers. The Raiders don't have the same kind of offensive line as the Jets, or the wide receivers as the Saints or Colts, but both will be better than the Redskins.
Campbell also had to play six games per season against the NFC East, a brutal division that he had a 79.4 passer rating against in 18 games. Against the AFC West, Campbell has a 94.5 passer rating but that is of course a smaller sample size that also includes one game against the Raiders in which he had a 106.5 rating.
He is a fairly accurate passer with a career completion percentage of 61.2%, but it has nudged up in each of the past three years and was at 64.5% in 2009. He also doesn't turn the ball over very often, with a very good interception percentage of 2.3%, ahead of the Mannings, Philip Rivers and Tom Brady.
Campbell is a good runner even though he certainly isn't a running quarterback. He has averaged 5.1 yards per carry and will scramble for first downs when his receivers are tightly covered downfield. That type of asset is frequently overlooked by certain segments of the NFL community when evaluating quarterbacks and the value of keeping drives alive in that way cannot be overstated.
There had to be a reason, however, why the Redskins were so eager to yield a high second rounder for a quarterback in his 30s and subsequently give up Campbell for only a fourth rounder that they will receive two seasons from now. Working against Campbell is his career record of 20-32, but I would prefer to dismiss that as symptomatic of his Redskins team as a whole and also throw in the same caveat where we throw it out the window when judging baseball pitchers. He isn't going to win games singlehandedly and isn't in the same class as Rivers, Peyton, Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers.
Undoubtedly, the Raiders now have their best quarterback since Rich Gannon was under center. Gannon came over to the Raiders at an even older age than Campbell and the Raiders are hoping that their new QB has a similarly successful second act of his career.
The Raiders have averaged just over four wins per season since 2003, never winning more than five in what has been an unprecedented display of losing for a franchise that formerly would proudly declare that they had the best winning percentage in football. The Raiders went through a similar drought between their 1993 playoff appearance and when they finally returned in 2000, but they were at least competitive during that stretch, playing .500 football in three seasons and then posting a 9-7 record.
Russell will now presumably take his first overall pick money, shop and eat himself into oblivion. It wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility for a team to take a flier on his cannon arm with the hope that he might have been a product of the Raiders' dysfunctionality, but it isn't a scenario I would bet on. And that is coming from someone who was a JaMarcus apologist up until the beginning of the 2009 season.
One of the reasons why Al Davis has struggled to find productive players is he sometimes doesn't grasp why others don't have the same level of desire to win as he does. He'll see players blessed with a wealth of natural talent and expect them to crave achieving their best the way his teams in the 1970s always did.
Beyond the pricetag of his contract and the invested time in the 2007-2009 seasons, the Raiders must also look at the kind of impact players Calvin Johnson, Joe Thomas, Adrian Peterson, Patrick Willis and Darrelle Revis have become, who were drafted behind Russell in 2007.
Grade for Raiders: A
Campbell clearly wasn't going to be the Washington quarterback from the moment they surprisingly traded for Donovan McNabb and now he comes into a low pressure situation with the Raiders where they appear to legitimately transforming the culture of the franchise.
The situation isn't as favorable for Campbell as going to a playoff-ready team like the Vikings had Brett Favre decided to retire, or even the 49ers who are a playoff team one quarterback away from being a contender, but he at least knows he will be given the opportunity to start.
Grade for Campbell: A-
Donovan probably gives the Redskins a better chance of making the playoffs in 2010, but he is only marginally better than Campbell in my opinion. I have that opinion despite believing McNabb is chronically underrated despite being ubiquitously absent in several big games. I suppose Mike Shanahan had to start fresh and move on from Campbell, but I would imagine the Redskins could have held onto him until the deadline and received much more back in return should someone like Alex Smith fail on the 49ers, if Favre retired on Minnesota, or if there was a major injury. Given the injury history of McNabb and the uncapped season, it would be a bet that didn't carry much risk for Daniel Snyder.
Grade for Redskins: C
Chris Reina is the executive editor of RealGM. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cr_reina. |
