Task 6:
I honestly didn't think I'd have such an easy time of this, but believe it or not, there is a unanimous first ballot Hall of Famer who I don't think even deserves to be in the Hall. Or at least, I believe he got there on faulty premises due to bad awards votes the years prior.
Matthias Caliban, when he retired, was 2nd in passing touchdowns, 3rd in passing yards, and 10th in passer rating. This seems like it should be an easy slam dunk hall award, especially considering his 3 QBotY awards and his MVP award. But that's the thing, at least from my point of view. Most of his awards are wrongly earned; at most I feel he should have 1 QBotY and 1 MVP award.
But to fully tear this down, I'm going to start with Passer Rating. Passer Rating is made up of 4 key stats, 3 of which Caliban was legitimately good to great in: INT%, which Caliban might be the greatest at of all time for anyone with anywhere near as much usage at less than 1 INT per 50 passes, TD%, which Caliban was also near the best all time with barely less than 1 TD per 20 attempts, completion percent, where Caliban currently sits 18th all time (OK, but not great considering his nearest contemporaries are full percentage points above him), and yards per attempt, where Caliban is also 18th all time, with the exact same story as the completion percentage.
Passer Rating is an extremely poor stat, mainly because 2 of the 4 stats that go into it are stats that really don't matter that much. Completion percent is not only a worse stat than one already in the stat, y/a, but a stat that often punishes good play. A player who forces balls to the receiver, or just takes sacks, will have a better completion percentage than one who does neither of these things. This seems like it would benefit Caliban, and technically it does...but it's more than countered by TD% just being a bad and frankly worthless stat. The amount of times a ball is thrown to get into the end zone on any one drive really shouldn't matter, especially considering the possibility and likelihood of someone running the ball in from short yardage after a QB got them there. That is literally 1/4th of passer rating, and it would equal 0 for a drive like above, despite being as good of a drive as someone who threw the ball from the 5 instead of running it.
Passing TDs instead of running TDs is something that the Colorado Yeti did a lot during Caliban's career, and this inflated his passer rating a lot. This is borne out in instances such as S28, the time of his first award win. The Yeti had 10 total rushing touchdowns that year, and all the teams around them who scored that little just didn't score much at all that year, with the exception of NOLA. But NOLA made sense, their leading rusher that year was Mike Rotchburns, who was never a bellcow back after his rookie season and was one of the worst starting RBs in the league. This cannot be said for the Yeti's starting RB, Richard Gilbert, had over 1K TPE and was one of the highest TPE backs in the league at the time.
Moreover, there is a significant problem with his passer rating even besides that, and it's the main brunt of my argument against him both during his award votes and his Hall candidacy: The era. We had just moved to a new sim, and Caliban was one of 3 QBs who spent some small time in the old sim and then spent most of their time in the new one. The sim change did a lot to the league, but one thing that is undeniable is that it made QBs lives a whole lot easier. If you go to WolfieBot, the entire top 10 in passer rating spent more time in the old sim than the new one, as well as most of the top 20. Wait, there's one exception to that top 10 stat: Colby Jack. Which actually leads into my next point.
Caliban was a good QB but not a great one in his time by efficiency. Passer average, which is Yards per Attempt, tells a lot of the story here. If you go to WolfieBot right now, Caliban lies behind way too many QBs that were his contemporaries in the early days of the new sim: Colby Jack who was 2 years older is far ahead of him; he falls in right behind Dexter Zaylren and Gimmy Jarroppolo Jr, as well as players like Jackie Daytona and Mike Boss Jr. Charlemagne Cortez, who fell off the ballot in a single year and is the only one of the QBs in that list not named Colby Jack who should be in the Hall leads Caliban by over a full yard.
This also bears out in the Awards voting; every single award that Caliban won involved him being the best high volume QB in the league on good but not great efficiency. Well, minus the S33 vote in which he wasn't even the best high volume QB; Jackie Daytona was. Somehow he won the QBotY award over both him and Wendell Sailor despite getting less votes than them in MVP and OPOY voting in the same year on the same ballot. But in both his MVP season and his 1st award winning season, he was the only QB with anywhere near the Yards and TD output but was not anywhere near the best in efficiency.
It feels a bit like kicking someone who can't fight back to say that someone whose player left the league should not be in the Hall, or at least should not have even half the awards they do have. Heck, if you say that you'd vote for someone with one OPOY and one QBotY who also happened to be top 3 in both passing yards and touchdowns, I wouldn't even say that's wrong as a vote, you could really claim that he's a Drew Brees-like figure in that respect, and Brees deserves the Hall.
But the awards attached with the stats are tremendously wrong, and if someone was to look at Caliban's awards and records at a bird's eye view, he might look like a lesser GOAT candidate. In my estimation, he's closer to a borderline HOF.
I honestly didn't think I'd have such an easy time of this, but believe it or not, there is a unanimous first ballot Hall of Famer who I don't think even deserves to be in the Hall. Or at least, I believe he got there on faulty premises due to bad awards votes the years prior.
Matthias Caliban, when he retired, was 2nd in passing touchdowns, 3rd in passing yards, and 10th in passer rating. This seems like it should be an easy slam dunk hall award, especially considering his 3 QBotY awards and his MVP award. But that's the thing, at least from my point of view. Most of his awards are wrongly earned; at most I feel he should have 1 QBotY and 1 MVP award.
But to fully tear this down, I'm going to start with Passer Rating. Passer Rating is made up of 4 key stats, 3 of which Caliban was legitimately good to great in: INT%, which Caliban might be the greatest at of all time for anyone with anywhere near as much usage at less than 1 INT per 50 passes, TD%, which Caliban was also near the best all time with barely less than 1 TD per 20 attempts, completion percent, where Caliban currently sits 18th all time (OK, but not great considering his nearest contemporaries are full percentage points above him), and yards per attempt, where Caliban is also 18th all time, with the exact same story as the completion percentage.
Passer Rating is an extremely poor stat, mainly because 2 of the 4 stats that go into it are stats that really don't matter that much. Completion percent is not only a worse stat than one already in the stat, y/a, but a stat that often punishes good play. A player who forces balls to the receiver, or just takes sacks, will have a better completion percentage than one who does neither of these things. This seems like it would benefit Caliban, and technically it does...but it's more than countered by TD% just being a bad and frankly worthless stat. The amount of times a ball is thrown to get into the end zone on any one drive really shouldn't matter, especially considering the possibility and likelihood of someone running the ball in from short yardage after a QB got them there. That is literally 1/4th of passer rating, and it would equal 0 for a drive like above, despite being as good of a drive as someone who threw the ball from the 5 instead of running it.
Passing TDs instead of running TDs is something that the Colorado Yeti did a lot during Caliban's career, and this inflated his passer rating a lot. This is borne out in instances such as S28, the time of his first award win. The Yeti had 10 total rushing touchdowns that year, and all the teams around them who scored that little just didn't score much at all that year, with the exception of NOLA. But NOLA made sense, their leading rusher that year was Mike Rotchburns, who was never a bellcow back after his rookie season and was one of the worst starting RBs in the league. This cannot be said for the Yeti's starting RB, Richard Gilbert, had over 1K TPE and was one of the highest TPE backs in the league at the time.
Moreover, there is a significant problem with his passer rating even besides that, and it's the main brunt of my argument against him both during his award votes and his Hall candidacy: The era. We had just moved to a new sim, and Caliban was one of 3 QBs who spent some small time in the old sim and then spent most of their time in the new one. The sim change did a lot to the league, but one thing that is undeniable is that it made QBs lives a whole lot easier. If you go to WolfieBot, the entire top 10 in passer rating spent more time in the old sim than the new one, as well as most of the top 20. Wait, there's one exception to that top 10 stat: Colby Jack. Which actually leads into my next point.
Caliban was a good QB but not a great one in his time by efficiency. Passer average, which is Yards per Attempt, tells a lot of the story here. If you go to WolfieBot right now, Caliban lies behind way too many QBs that were his contemporaries in the early days of the new sim: Colby Jack who was 2 years older is far ahead of him; he falls in right behind Dexter Zaylren and Gimmy Jarroppolo Jr, as well as players like Jackie Daytona and Mike Boss Jr. Charlemagne Cortez, who fell off the ballot in a single year and is the only one of the QBs in that list not named Colby Jack who should be in the Hall leads Caliban by over a full yard.
This also bears out in the Awards voting; every single award that Caliban won involved him being the best high volume QB in the league on good but not great efficiency. Well, minus the S33 vote in which he wasn't even the best high volume QB; Jackie Daytona was. Somehow he won the QBotY award over both him and Wendell Sailor despite getting less votes than them in MVP and OPOY voting in the same year on the same ballot. But in both his MVP season and his 1st award winning season, he was the only QB with anywhere near the Yards and TD output but was not anywhere near the best in efficiency.
It feels a bit like kicking someone who can't fight back to say that someone whose player left the league should not be in the Hall, or at least should not have even half the awards they do have. Heck, if you say that you'd vote for someone with one OPOY and one QBotY who also happened to be top 3 in both passing yards and touchdowns, I wouldn't even say that's wrong as a vote, you could really claim that he's a Drew Brees-like figure in that respect, and Brees deserves the Hall.
But the awards attached with the stats are tremendously wrong, and if someone was to look at Caliban's awards and records at a bird's eye view, he might look like a lesser GOAT candidate. In my estimation, he's closer to a borderline HOF.