Geno is a good quarterback and can distribute the ball. The issues that he has always had is when it comes to crunch time he rarely if ever comes through. That’s the difference between a good quarterback, and a great quarterback.
Clutch
performance is a very real thing. Every one of us has seen players come through (or fail to do so) in clutch situations (by a variety of potential definitions of "clutch"). Clutch
ability, on the other hand, has been shown repeatedly, across many sports, in many different ways, not to exist. A player may even be better "in the clutch" by at least one of a variety of different definitions and measures over a whole season, but he's then no more or less likely to have a good season "in the clutch" the next year than any other player whose overall performance is as good as his. Obviously, a very good player has a better chance of playing better "in the clutch" than a not-so-good player, because he's more likely to be better in
any situation.
What happened to Tom Brady's magic clutch game-winning powers in the two Super Bowls against Giants teams with inferior rosters? He failed in both. Does that mean he's a choker who can't win in big situations? Of course not. First, it's a team sport. Second, we know he succeeded in other "clutch situations" too. But not at a rate any higher than you'd expect from a player who performed at the level he performed in
all situations. People around here say Wilson is a killer in the clutch, so who was that fumbling away the game against the Jets last week when down by just three points with plenty of time to get into field-goal range? Did he forget how to be clutch?
Saying a "clutch player" used his magic to make his team win (or that a "choker" failed to do so) is the kind of lazy talk-radio or talking-head-mediot narrative that people eat up. For one thing, it's easier to understand than actually looking into what happened schematically on the two teams and looking at actual strengths and weaknesses of players and specific good and bad things they did on specific plays. Never mind that it's made-up and false. It's easy, and people are lazy. For another, sports mediots have gotten us used to using tiny samples (in the case of the NFL, single games or even specific moments from specific games) in team sports to draw conclusions about the character of individual players, which is just plain silly.
The Colin Cowherds of the world want us to believe that even among guys who are among the top 0.4% of the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of the world population in what they do, some guys are just "winners" and others are just "losers." In Cowherd's case specifically, I think it's because he enjoys feeling smaller than the athletes he crowns "winners" (like the guys who get off on having their wives cheat on them, because feeling like they're inferior to the guys screwing their wives is exciting to them) and bigger than people who disagree with him. What's interesting is that even in Cowturd's bizarre world, being a "winner" isn't consistent. I can't remember if Cowherd had tagged Wilson as "not a winner" before he decided Wilson was a "winner," which held for at least a few years before he decided Wilson is "not a winner."