First and foremost, I don't care if Matt Cassel ever wins an MVP award.   I only want him to be a Super Bowl winning quarterback.  My honest opinion about Matt Cassel is that we will never win a Super Bowl BECAUSE of him (a la Peyton Manning), but he can help guide the Chiefs to a ring.  So I've compiled the regular season statistics of the past 20 Super Bowl winning quarterbacks and compared them to Cassel.  The results surprised me.

First, it's important to note that many of the quarterbacks listed below did not play a full 16 game schedule.  I put an asterisk next to these quarterbacks' names.  I then calculated what their numbers would have been had they played an entire season at the same performance level.  This includes Matt's 2010 season, as he only played in 15 games.  

Conclusions

There are, of course, a few rock stars in the group that one could argue dramatically increase the statistical expectations.  But there are also a few quarterbacks that, while they may make great NFL analysts (cough, Trent Dilfer), did not have statistical seasons that quarterbacks dream about. So all in all, I think it evens out.

Cassel's attempts are surprisingly above the average of a Super Bowl quarterback.  This really shocked me as we have the number 1 rushing game in the NFL and are clearly a run-first team.  His completions, however, are about 30 less than the average QB on this list.  Who knows, maybe the addition of Baldwin and McCluster/Urban's health improvements will increase Cassel's number of completions.  

The biggest area for improvement in my opinion (along with most Cassel critics on AP) is his completion percentage.  If he can bump it up 3 or 4 percent he will be a much more effective quarterback.  Can he do it?  I sure hope so.  

He really did well on the TD and INT numbers.  Perhaps this is also why his completion percentage is low.  Last year if he had to get it in a tight spot that might be picked off, Cassel would throw the ball away.  Let's say he threw away 3 balls a game (48 total passes), and let's say that if he tried to get those to receivers in tight spots, he completed half of these (24 total passes).  This would have bumped his completion percentage up to 59.4%, but most likely he would have thrown another 3-6 interceptions too.  I'm assuming this is a trade off that Haley doesn't want Cassel to make.  So it will be interesting to see if Cassel's completion percentage goes up again this year.  If it does, I'd assume it is because of better receivers and personal improvement on Cassel's behalf, and not because he is taking more risks.  

It looks like Cassel's numbers are on the low end across the board, but pretty close to the middle of the pack.  If he continues to improve as he did last year, he'd be looking at a completion percentage at about 61.5 and an increase in yards of 400.  That would put him right in the middle.  Of course, using this same logic he'd also be on pace to throw negative 1 interceptions this year, so projected stats shouldn't be too heavily relied on.