Smith threw 5 TD passes in the effort, a new career high. Of those five, four of them went to all-world tailback Jamaal Charles. Of those four, two of those came on screens that were absolutely, positively textbook. A few hours later, an Associated Press reporter tweeted this:
Alex Smith's 5 TD passes traveled a combined 13 yards downfield
( which can't be true, due to the very gif I posted last night )
And the haters laughed again.
According to Pro-Football-Reference.com, in Chiefs franchise history, only two other men have ever registered a 158.0 rating or higher in a single game before Smith on Sunday: Len Dawson, twice (158.3 vs. Denver, Sept. 7, 1963, and 158.0 vs. Houston, Nov. 28, 1965), and Trent Green once (158.3 vs. Detroit, Dec. 14, 2003).
That's it. Yes, among the myriad of goofy official NFL statistics, the passer rating is among the goofiest. Like ERA or batting average in baseball, it's been supplanted, over the generations, by better metrics. Not all "perfect" games are created equal, even though the Chiefs have now only seen three of them over the past 50-odd seasons. But to somehow throw that back in the face of Alex Smith isn't clever. It's spiteful. The perception is that Smith is a dink-and-dunk artist. The reality is that people focus too much on the "dink-and-dunk" part of the equation and not enough on the "artist" part. The truth, as it often is, is more complicated than that. In his past 39 starts, the teams he's quarterbacked have gone 30-8-1. When he needed to get out of the way, he got the hell out of the way. When he needed to be good, he was good. When he needed to be perfect, he was perfect.
Without Alex Smith, there is no January football for the Chiefs. Period.
Tweet that.
http://www.foxsportskansascity.com/nfl/kansas-city-chiefs/story/Chiefs-Alex-Smith-doesnt-have-to-apologi?blockID=973187#.Uq5y3NTvY5M.twitter
