Shaun Hill, Ty, and a Dead Dog

Good to know, I guess.

Before I start gibbering on about Shaun Hill, I want to take a moment to plug my man Ty's site, The Lions in Winter. Ty recently redesigned the site(or sight, as I stupidly declared on Twitter) and it looks really, really nice. If you are a Lions fan and you are reading this, then chances are you already know about Ty and what he does, and I'm not sure if I can really drive any traffic his way, since that would require that I have actual traffic. Okay, that's not entirely fair. There are people who read this, and aside from my asshole friends and fellow degenerates(you know who you are and by the way, I love you. Andrew WK pointed out that it's a good idea to say that from time to time), most of those readers have been sent here via the generosity and great kindness of Ty. Out of everyone in the Lions blogosphere, Ty has been by far my biggest champion, and to say that I appreciate it would be to severely undersell how much that means to me. After all, I write some strange and savage bullshit, and I know that it's easy to dismiss it all as empty sophomoric gibberish, but from the moment he discovered Armchair Linebacker, Ty has seen through a lot of the loud noises and fart sound effects to see the heart of what I write, and even though I sometimes feel like I am writing all this in a vacuum, Ty's kind words and support have always made it easier for me to keep writing this silly gibberish. There have been others who have taken notice and said some nice things about what I do here, and I have seen my stuff linked in some strange and unexpected places, but Ty's voice has consistently been the loudest and the most friendly, and I sincerely thank him for it. Of course, it also helps that Ty is a damn fine blogger and writer. I read everything he writes and if you are a Lions fan, then you should too.

Okay, so love notes to Ty aside, let's move on to something I probably should have talked about a while back. A couple of weeks ago, the Lions traded a 2011 7th round pick to the 49ers for quarterback Shaun Hill. I mentioned it on Twitter, saying that the best thing about Shaun Hill was that he was not named Daunte Culpepper. I then said that the worst thing about Shaun Hill is he is still Shaun Hill. This wasn't entirely fair, but it was the natural punch line to the joke, and sometimes my flair for bad comedy outweighs my desire to provide accurate analysis. But to hell with it, you all knew that already.

Anyway, Hill isn't that bad. In fact, he's actually been sort of decent as an NFL quarterback. He has a 7-3 record as a starter, including a 5-3 record in 2008 with the 49ers. That season, in only 9 games, with Mike Martz as his offensive coordinator, Hill completed 62.8% of his passes for 2046 yards, 13 touchdowns and 8 interceptions. Pretty good numbers, no? Of course, the gaudy yardage total in only 8 starts can partially be explained away by the presence of Martz, whose throw the ball, throw the ball, throw the ball, fuck you, I ain't running, throw the ball, and then throw the ball some more philosophy is extremely helpful if your goal is to throw for a billion yards. See also, Jon Kitna.

But, aside from the actual stats, what's more impressive is that Hill went 5-3 as a starter on a fairly shitty 49ers team. That's the real eyebrow raiser. Our own Tim Livingston said that Hill was solid down the stretch that season and was a solid every-man sort who was supposedly well liked by coach Mike Singletary. It sure seemed like he was the man coming into the season last year, and reading the tea-leaves, it looked like he was the chosen one, while poor Alex Smith and his tiny hands were about to be shipped off to the Arena League or a circus or sold into white slavery. Really, the details aren't important, but the general feeling seemed to be that Hill would probably be the guy. And then . . . he wasn't.

Indeed. Having read through(or at least skimmed)our 49ers archives, it occurred to me that even while Hill was seemingly succeeding as the 49ers new quarterback, our very own P.B. didn't seem wildly impressed with Hill. The sense that I got was that Hill was a caretaker quarterback just playing out the string, winning a bunch of meaningless games after the team have catastrophically tanked under quarterback J.T. O'Sullivan. It seemed like the consensus was that O'Sullivan was Martz's boy, but couldn't cut it, Smith was a complete disaster and that Hill was just there to pick up the pieces and do the best he could with what he had. He seemed to do pretty well, but even given that, there didn't seem to be all that much excitement over what he brought to the table.

So perhaps it's not all that surprising that he didn't turn out to be the guy in San Francisco after all. While the stats look nice and the win-loss percentage is certainly eye opening, it's obvious that Hill was never really embraced as anything more than a temporary band-aid stuck over a serious wound. It says something - not particularly good - that Hill was beaten out by Alex Smith last year given Smith's disastrous stint as the starter following his selection as the number one overall pick in the 2005 NFL draft. Of course, it could probably be argued that the amount of money the 49ers have poured into Smith made it extremely likely that they would give him every chance in the world. After all, they were heavily invested in the guy and probably really, really wanted to see him succeed, if only because the economics of the situation demanded it. Meanwhile, Hill was just a body, a fairly inexpensive, replaceable body. I'm not saying that is how it should have been looked at, but it sure seems like that was how it went down.

Obviously, it's not a particularly good sign that Hill lost his job to Alex freakin' Smith, and it's not a good sign that the 49ers were willing to part with Hill so cheaply, but again, just look at the stats and the winning percentage. Frankly, it's kind of confounding. There is an obvious disconnect here, and I am sort of at a loss as to explain what it is. It seems like that's a dude you want to hold onto, but instead the 49ers sold him off for the equivalent of a single bean that they can't even plant for another year, and that bean is already half rotten. It seems like the 49ers were ready to tie Hill up in a burlap sack and then fling him off the Golden Gate Bridge if the Lions didn't give them something, even a rotten bean, in return. And there were reports that the 49ers were planning on releasing him had they not traded him, so yeah, for whatever reason, this doesn't seem like a guy they held in real high esteem.

But again, look at the stats. The guy is a career 62 percent passer with a TD to INT ratio of 23 to 11. Look at the winning percentage. It's 70 percent. What the hell is going on here? As Lions fans, those are the things we must embrace here, and we also must embrace the fact that Hill won't be competing for a starting job. He's strictly a backup here, and doesn't a backup with those kind of credentials seem awfully comforting after the horrors we witnessed over the past couple of seasons?

And then there is the incredibly soothing fact that Hill's presence means that the door on Daunte Culpepper can be safely slammed shut. Good fucking bye. I don't want to hammer Daunte too much because, really, the past half decade has done a good enough job on its own. At this point, Culpepper is like the beaten up remains of a once much admired Husky that was hit by a semi on the highway. He's just roadkill now, but no one will do the decent thing and scrape his remains off the road, both because they still cherish the memory of a time when that dog meant something to them and it's just too damn painful, and because really, that shit looks gross now. Okay, so that may not be the most apt analogy, and it's kind of disturbing and for that I apologize, but I got carried away, and well, it happens as Forrest Gump once said. The point is, is that Hill is here now and while Culpepper's beaten up corpse may still be lying on the side of the road, it's not our job to clean it up anymore. That's on someone else now, and thank God for that.

And finally, there is this. Last year, the Lions used the waiver wire like a junkie. They just couldn't get enough of that shit, and one of the moves they made was snagging quarterback Kevin O'Connell after he was dumped by the Patriots. They then traded O'Connell for a seventh round pick, which they then turned around and traded for Shaun Hill, meaning that they just got Shaun Hill, their backup quarterback, for absolutely nothing. Martin Mayhew, have I told you lately that I love you? No, not you, Matt Millen. You get back to fellating Hitler in hell.

To sum up, Shaun Hill seems like he's an ideal backup quarterback. I do have concerns with how little the 49ers seemed to value him, but what the hell, for the Lions situation and for what the Lions gave up to get him - essentially nothing - those are minor quibbles, and since I am an optimist and a gentleman, I will let love open the door to my heart and so should you.