Four rookies started Sunday. One played well. Three stunk up the house. So what the hell does comparing RGIII to Christian Ponder serve?

And while RGIII played well, it wasn't like he just went wild.


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King's comments are right on the money. Nobody's arguing that RGIII was anything less than excellent Sunday. He didn't come out throwing downfield bombs, but he was great. However, RGIII's performance has nothing to do with Christian Ponder's performance. Absolutely nothing. It's more than a logically faulty argument. It's an idiotic comparison.

By the way, anybody who thinks Christian Ponder had happy feet after the last two minutes of the first half needs a new TV cuz yours ain't workin'. Ponder was 3-for-7 for 32 yards up until that point ... 17-for-20 for 238 yards thereafter. I watched the game, too, and I didn't see any happy feet. I only saw accurate throws made on time. Is that an improvement from last year? Damn right it was.

god i love your posts kapp!

No, my DVR records entire games. It doesn't edit out the happy feet for all of the first half but two minutes so all I see is duckies and bunnies. A game is 60 minutes. He was terrible for almost half of it. Against a terrible team. Without their starting middle linebacker, and a starting cornerback.

He looked much better the second half. Which also included some pretty amazing play by AD and Harvin. Especially on those 1 yard passes that go for 10+.

He's showed flashes in the past. Let's see if he can keep it up...against another bad team. On the road, which should give us a better idea where he's at. And week three he'll get a real test. If he can look halfway decent against the 49ers then maybe we can tap the purple keg. Even if we don't win the game, it'll be a great gauge especially coming off of these two games when his confidence should be sky high, and a game at home.

Lets wait til he faces the best defense in football which, mind you, just made the reigning MVP look ordinary before we make our judgements..... right

I guess playing a good defense at home is asking too much, let's just look at these first two games against bottom 5 teams and that'll give us a great indication of where he's at.

all this rg3 crap is comical. he's played 1 game, and mind you, is on a total loser franchise with no real team around him. so what, he looked good in his first game, is he the only one to ever do that? nobody wants to talk about how bad the saint's secondary is as a contributing factor. cam newton, vick, rg3, randall cunningham (one of my favorites) warren moon, were all from the same mold, and yet doug williams was the only one to win a championship. chew on that immutable fact.

They may be a bottom 5 TEAM, but by all accounts they (the Jaguars), were a good defense (or at the very least: "average"), so the way you portrayed it was a bit disingenuous.

Yes it was but the goal posts seem to keep moving, don't they? IF Ponder actually has a good game against the 49ers I have no doubt there will be someone who decides to diminish that by write it off as a fluke, focusing on any mistakes made, etc.

Frankly, while performances against one team or another can be encouraging or discouraging, when developing a young QB I think what matters most is his body of work. That's how the Vikes will have to evaluate Ponder. If he takes a step back against San Francisco and then takes a step forward a week later (or vice versa) those individual performances will be less important than his performance over the course of the entire season and how that compares to last season. Put simply: the Vikes are trying to develop Ponder into a long term starter so ultimately, what they need to see is development... enough of it to encourage them to stick with Ponder as their starter next year.

you mean like the 6th best defense in the league from last year? Or the 8th ranked pass defense from last year (despite only have one of it's starting CBs for 6 games, and the other for 9)? Oh right, that just happened this weekend.

There's a difference between a good defense and the best. It's comical that you discredit last weeks performance, and are preemptively discrediting this coming week's performance against "bottom feeders", and instead set the bar for Ponder's progression for the game against the best defense in football. You're bias in the matter is very clear.

Now this is funny. Ponder had a halfway decent game, and 1 excellent drive, and now people like Saint want to place a crown on his head. 1 game. And we just barely won, and wouldnt have if we didnt actually go out and get a real kicker.

Lets wait til he plays a road game and division rival before ya get too excited.

Where did Saint post anything remotely close to that kind of statement after the Vikes/Jaguars game?

Everyone's opinion is just going to continue to change game to game. Ponder did well after a poor first quarter. He ended up with a real nice game, 20-27 for 270 is solid. Sure he didnt have the tds, but thats because we gave it to ap in the red zone. Ponder is showing promise, especially when the pressure is on, which i like. But I would like to see our offense get into a rhythm early to prevent those scenarios.

i remain optimistic he can continue to develop into our qb for quite some time. i think when simpson is back and the OC realizes that when we give the ball to our best players, the offense opens up and the momentum shifts to our favor, both on offense and defense.

I put a crown on his head?

Not only did you do it, you did it Dennis Green style!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWmQbk5h86w

ponder had more yards than sanchez, shaub, roethisberger, manning, brady, rivers, eli, and about 15 other starters.

he had a higher completion % than every qb in the league not names romo, brady, ryan, or alex smith.

he didn't have any td's but he didn't turn the ball over which is more than newton(2), brees(2), stafford(3) and vick(4) can say.

and his team won the game which at the present time, roethisberger, cassell, eli, rodgers, newton, brees, etc. can't say the same.

i missed the post where anyone was crowning ponder. i just fail to see how this was a poor performance and doesn't show signs of improvement.

methinks you are not the one who is failing here......

A couple of interesting nuggets here.

Christian Ponder must "play almost mad" for Vikings to get off to a fast start

http://www.1500espn.com/sportswire/Chri ... tart091212

simple solution....

tell him to read this board all week.

if that doesn't work, let him read the in-game thread while our defense is on the field. that should do it.

He turned it over on a fumble but not an INT, although he came close to doing the latter early in the game. Nevertheless, your overall point is valid. Once Ponder settled in, he played very well. I hope he can build on it.

Thanks for the link. Ponder sounds very determined.

I loved this part:

great tidbits there.

i really believe this offense will thrive on pace and cadence. they need to be aggressive early to get defenses back on their heels and guessing. they have the athletes to do this with AP, Harvin and Rudolph...even Ponder can eat up big chunks of yards with his legs. it's good to see him thinking this way. if the o-line keeps arcing upward, we will have a really good idea of what Ponder can do before very long. personally i think he has all the tools and talent. this is actually an exciting season from my POV.

It all comes down to what you choose to concentrate on, I guess. And this is where, admittedly, I fall flat on my face.

You concentrate on happy feet. And y'know, I gotta hand it to you. That kind of ability -- to exhibit laser focus on the negative aspects of Ponder's first seven passes -- well, it's a gift.

My perspective, flawed and positive as it may be, is that Ponder hit 74 percent of his passes and won the game.

(WTF? Did he just say "won the game"?)

I just can't help myself. I mean, I give young Mr. Walsh all kinds of credit -- it was a great, clutch kick. I'm glad we have him. But I just keep thinking -- without those 3 happy-foot completions in 14 seconds to get in field goal range, the Vikings prolly lose.

Pure Kool-Aid, I know. Please bear with me. I'm working on being more negative.

Which gave up the 4th highest completion percentage. Because the team overall is complete trash. And they only had one of their starting cornerbacks for THIS game? Missing their starting middle linebacker as well. So probably two of their best what, 3 players? Were inactive? But I'M the disingenuous one?



I don't think ANYONE is saying it was a poor performance. The difference in opinion appears to be whether or not one good half makes up for the other. And if one good half against a terrible team is an indication of a quarterbacks growth. And if a single game against a bad team at home should be used as a sign of ANYTHING. The same nonsense was used to defense TJoke after any competent performance of his.



Funny, just like IF Ponder has a bad game against the 49ers I have no doubt there will be five times as many "someones" who decide to write it off as a fluke, focus on anything positive he does, point out how good the opposing team is etc. And look back at the previous two games as proof positive he's not the QB they saw in the 49ers game. But the one he saw in the game against the two bottom 5 teams. Despite using said defense to savage a cross town rivals performance three weeks earlier.

Why do we have to concentrate on anything? Take the game as a whole. He had a little over a good half, against a bad team. Made a few very good throws. And made a few very bad reads and decisions. Overall he had a good game, showed some flashes, but was still inconsistent over the course of a game. And I wasn't hand picking the "best" defense to use as an indication, I was using the first team we play that was any good. But since using that as an indication is asking too much, unlike using this Jaguars game, let's give him *another* week against what should be a solid team in the Lions, a quarter of the way into the season enough? Or are they too good too?

Why target one particular game as a measurement at all, whether it's against the Lions, 49ers, Jaguars or Colts? There's no need to rush to judgment when we're talking about a player playing the most difficult position in the game with less than even one full season's worth of starts. Is it so hard to just take the good with the bad and evaluate Ponder's overall performance and progress at the end of the season? If we can take the game as a whole, why not take the season as a whole too?

Regarding this last game: inconsistency over the course of a game is common at the NFL level and it's not unusual for even the most accomplished of QBs. QBs strive for perfection and many fans demand it but it's rare. As you said, overall Ponder had a good game so why repeatedly diminish his performance? Maybe Jacksonville will be a bad team again this year but Jacksonville was the only team Ponder could play against last weekend and he played well. After one week, he has a top 10 in QBR and he was instrumental in leading the Vikes to come-from-behind victory. That's good news so again, why diminish the performance?

Because it wasn't just "good news". It was a come from behind victory in part because of Ponder himself. Four drives without a score. Four drives where he looked completely lost and made a number of bonehead decisions. If you're going to discuss the performance can we at least be honest about it? There were good parts, and bad parts. I'm acknowledging both...that is "diminishing the performance"?

Because there seems to be no end to this with you and just for my own information could you put into column A pluses (if any) about Ponder and column B negatives ie. noodle arm, too short, not strong enough etc etc. I just can't comprehend why you dislike this kid so much. And I can do without any more of your comments directed at me about how I love him and want to have his children.
Let's be serious and truly get to the bottum of this.

I'll agree with you that Ponder played poorly (and well) depending on what part of the game you looked at. If this topic was overloaded with posts about ho Ponder was the answer, and we've finally found our franchise QB, I'd be posting alot more on the other side of this debate. To wit: It was ONE GAME. Let's not crown him just yet as there is still alot of football to be played this season. I get that. I really do.

The problem is: I don't see anyone saying that. What I see (admittedly through my perspective of the world, so its entirely possible that my interpretation is flawed) are people who are seemingly reluctant to acknowledge that Ponder just might be (not saying he is, or for sure will be - just entertaining the thought that he is showing improvement and if that trend continues he might be) our answer at quarterback. Some of us are willing to accept the fact that he had a sub-par first half and then went on not only to redeem himself in the second half, but to do so convincingly enough to have the game (when taken in it's entirety) be a pretty good performance.

Keep in mind we are not arguing that his (hypthetical) 40.2 Passer Rating in the first half lowered his overall rating to 78.2 for the game. Why if we (hypothetical again) take the 2nd half alone (without consideration of the first half, he was a 102.2. We'll just ignore the first half because it doesn't fit with what we want to see. No one is doing that. His PR for the GAME was 105 and change. That means that if I evaluate his performance in its entirety, he had a decent game. We aren't ignoring the first half of the game (Heck that is why his PR probably wasn't upwards of 120, right?) but neither are we saying one half "trumps" the other.

Yes, I freely acknowledge Ponder was not facing the 85 Bears defense, but this wasn't the 81 Colts either. Frankly, since all NFL teams move a little bit (or alot) from year-to-year, it could be either the best (or the worst) defense we will face this year. The jury is still out.

Lastly, I disagree that the come-from-behind victory was because of Ponder himself (unless he put on #20 during a time-out and was playing CB with about 20 seconds left in the game. The Vikings were ahead up to that point, and only a touchdown was going to save the Jaguars from defeat...)

Because I want to see the Vikings win a super bowl. And I don't believe he has the skill set to accomplish that regardless of what is around him. On the field, the sideline, or the front office. Game managing west coast offense quarterbacks are a thing of the past. Even guys like Rodgers have a very good to great down field passing ability. And run when there aren't any other options, not as soon as it's an option. Elite quarterbacks that can make plays win games in todays NFL. And to me Ponder's ceiling isn't an elite quarterback. At the very best we're getting Tony Romo. At the worst, Tarvaris Jackson. Again that's my opinion. And I think the team is hurting itself spending the time it's going to take to develop him regardless of whether or not he never reaches the highest level he's physically capable of.



And I can do without any more of your comments directed atme about how I hate him and want to see him fail.



Right now? A His mobility. His accuracy under about 15 yards, velocity on shorter passes.
B Runs too soon. Plays scared a lot of the time. Stares down receivers. Accuracy past 15 yards. Arm strength past 25~ yards. Ability to throw the ball into a small window. Struggles through his reads. Takes too many hits. Size. Needs help from receivers, can't really make plays on his own.

See, this is where your obvious bias against this kid destroys what little credibility you may have had in talking about him.

As it pertains to Sunday's game, every single issue you list here is patently false. Especially the "stares down receivers," "accuracy past 15 yards," and "struggling through reads" baloney. Every throw after his first seven was a good throw. He looked off defenders. He threw accurately on the 29-yard pass to Rudolph after looking off the safety, and the 26-yard completion to Aromashodu in the game-tying drive (and that throw had plenty of velocity). Hell, even the "takes too many hits" criticism doesn't apply to Sunday's game. Not in the least.

At best, you're living in last season. At worst, you're presenting a thoughtless litany of issues that apply to any generic bad quarterback.