Dell Bayless

Dell Bayless is a 23-year old, ex-third round pick from a small school who's obviously had an rough go of it so far in the pros. He was humiliated on national television on multiple occasions last year as he replaced an injured Raja Peterson in Philadelphia. For most people, it was the first time they'd ever heard of him. He's now known for the 7-for-21 games that littered the Dreadnoughts stat sheet. He's known for his dozens of ugly panic throws, the ones that have wide-eyed defensive backs waiting for the ball to drop in their arms like circling sharks. News of his release from Philadelphia this offseason went over as expected as the news of Kanye West's bipolar diagnosis.

So, naturally, he's become a meme:

(Because the Dreadnoughts had to carry Bayless' dead weight to the playoffs. Ha.)

But you know what? He won games. A 7-4 record is nothing to sneeze at.

Bayless is at rock bottom right now, a third string quarterback given the "major developmental project" title. He wasn't even expected to make the Bandits roster this year. Fans see him as a joke. Front office execs see him as an example of another team's disastrous oversight: giving a semi-promising, yet totally unprepared youngster the backup job and hoping for the best. Bayless had 11 straight games to make a name for himself, many of which on national TV and one in the playoffs, and blew it so badly he was barely in the league the next year.

But you had to look twice when you saw him on the depth chart. He was a third rounder for a reason, right? You have to think there's a universe where it turns out he was just in over his head on a huge stage as a youngster, and actually has some legit starting QB talent once he learns from all his mistakes. It's within the realm of possibility. Nobody's saying it's going to happen, but there have been far crazier stories to come out of pro sports.

And if it happens in New York? If Bayless somehow takes Travis Beachum's job away from him and wins a championship or something? Now it's Linsanity/Tebowmania all over again. C'mon, it's not just me who daydreamed this when they first read that Bayless signed with the Bandits in a totally inconsequential Adam Schefter tweet, right?

Hey, I guess you've found something of an Easter egg here. This is me speaking directly to you. If you followed the link to read about a 59-overall backup quarterback for the Bandits, you must really be digging this stuff. So I thought I'd take you behind the scenes a bit with this one.

Bayless always caught my eye when I was looking at the "Brooklyn Beats" roster. I wanted to write about him somehow. I knew he was the bum low-overall guy who replaced the Dreadnoughts' Raja Peterson when he got hurt, and odds are we're never going to hear from him again. So I didn't list him with the rest of the Brooklyn Bandits normal team preview (59 overalls tend to just disappear from the save file after a year or two, very small chance for any real development). But he had 11 starts and played in a postseason game last year! He had to be relevant somehow.

It turns out he really was - I didn't know he was a third round pick, nor that he was still only 23 years old. Now he reminds me of a more extreme version of a Nathan Peterman/Deshone Kizer story. With these guys, every offseason they'll sign somewhere and I'll read it in a random reddit post with like 50 upvotes, then stop and wonder "what if this is the next Kurt Warner?" in spite of myself. So I wrote about Dell Bayless like that. Imagine if Nathan Peterman signed with the Jets. What if a couple years down the line, he ends up winning the starting job over a struggling Zach Wilson and takes them to the playoffs? The whole world would explode. It really would be like Tebowmania, but this time on Steroids (although there may have been a little bit of steroids involved with Tebowmania already, wink wink).

But I almost know for a fact that Bayless is never going to do anything in this sim. He's a 59 overall. I've got the stats right here in front of me.

This is the kind of bluff I do all the time on this website, and it's why I made the decision not to share the actual ratings with you.

There are plenty of 65-70 overalls in here that I know probably won't be starters next year, barring a miracle. But let's say they were picked in the top three rounds: I would look for what they're least bad at ratings-wise, and imagine being the GM using that to justify why they have them on the team and why they took them as an early pick. That's what being an NFL fan is like.

How boring would it be if you knew the exact likelihood of Sam Darnold doing well for the Panthers? Right now you can assume he's probably gonna suck, but I bet there's still a small, stubborn part of you that thinks he still might be destined for greatness. It keeps you invested.

(And, on the flip side, what if you saw that Shaq Barrett was an 87 overall with superstar development when he was sitting on the bench on the 2018 Denver Broncos roster? You'd know in advance that his breakout season in '19 would almost be a given.)

I write about the superstar development scrubs and normal development scrubs under the same guise of uncertainty to make the ups and downs of 2021 as unpredictable as a normal NFL season.

Of course, I get surprised by this sim all the time. Guys similar to Bayless can come out nowhere and end up being good.

Take Baron Halger, for example. He went from a 55-overall normal development to a 74-overall star development in one offseason for no real reason. I didn't even notice it. Then I went to the next year's save file and I saw him popping up everywhere leading in all the stats. He had jumped from a 74 to a 89 over the course of the season. Now he's one of my favorite guys in the sim. So it's not impossible for Bayless to actually matter at some point, but I know the odds are very small.

I mean, that's just like the real NFL, only we don't actually see the numbers. Sam Darnold could be the 87-overall superstar development, or he could be the 73-overall normal development. We won't know until he takes the field and we watch him play in Carolina. It's just that in my case, I know which one he is before he takes the field. It's not as much fun to read about in retrospect, so I don't let you guys see the raw numbers. But it makes looking through the rosters at the end of each offseason (to see which players developed into stars overnight and which ones didn't) feel like Christmas morning for me.