Thurman#1

Yes, worst to first. Every year? Not hardly. But yeah, it's not wildly unusual. But that's a completely different thing from how long a rebuild takes. John's response was "It does when you are completely rebuilding it." You completely ignored that and talked not about rebuilding but about teams suddenly getting better. But again, John referred to rebuilding it. Of your two examples here, the Bears and the Fins, neither was a rebuild. Last year was Pace's fourth as GM. He had been working on putting together a good roster for a long time. You can act like the turnaround was all the result of what happened early last year, but it wasn't. It was a roster that had been improving for years, and a GM who decided to reload with a different coach. In your other example, 2007 was the third year, not the first, for Dolphin GM Randy Mueller. Yeah, they fired Saban but they weren't rebuilding. Bringing in your new starting QB in a trade (Pennington) is the textbook definition for reloading, in fact. For another example, the Walsh 49ers I referred to above went from six wins to a Lombardi in one year. But that year was the third year of a rebuild. In fact, that's how rebuilds work most of the time. There's two, three or even four years of team-building and then at some point the successful rebuilds hit a tipping point. Hitting a tipping point in one year doesn't mean all the improvement is only the result of one year's work. In fact, that's not the way it works, but most particularly so in rebuilds.

Sure it matters. Small good moves are what good teams are built through. And two good years of McDermott and 1.5 of Beane are not long enough to judge a rebuild by. Same deal as with one move, but more so. It's true that they're not there yet. But rebuilds take more than two years, that's just the deal. The best rebuild I know of is the Walsh rebuild of the 49ers, a Super Bowl victory in three years. But in his second year, they had 6 wins. Witchery is way overstating it, IMO, but it was a good deal for us, a very good deal. You're right, BillsVet, that they have a lot more to prove. But surely we can still talk about individual moves. What else would we talk about this early in the process?

That's sexist. Kegels are for gentlemen as well.

No, he was not comparing them. He said nothing about Flacco in that post.

Yeah, nobody good will sign here. Unless we like offer 'em money. I hate that.

Would Incognito - Martin count? Did anyone else get angry at the same time Barry Sanders retired? Or Megatron? I can't remember it. Did anyone leave the Steelers when Kevin Greene or Joey Porter got out? I don't remember it? Probably not many simply because the teams hold the whip hand, not the players. Leaving is a long, tough struggle, except if you retire, especially back before free agency, but even now unless your contract is up, and even then there are the tags. And honestly, I'm not convinced there's a ton of dysfunction there at Three Rivers. The Bell thing is mostly about money. That's not dysfunction. And I'm not clear what Brown's problem is but I think it's quite possible it's a problem with Brown himself. Is that dysfunction? Honestly, I don't know. Two very serious problems at the same time, that's for sure, but is it team dysfunction?

This has got nothing to do with rebuilding. Rebuilding isn't a tactic for every year. It's for when you absolutely suck or for when you've been mediocre for a long time. Of course they haven't rebuilt. But the Seattle renaissance absolutely started with a rebuild.

Well, if you're saying that "paying 'this' guy that much is a bad idea," then the fact that he's the 7th or 8th highest paid guy on the Bills has absolutely zero relevance to your argument. I'm "making that rookie ***** up," right? Yeah, I'm sure there must be someone out there who knows what the ***** you are talking about. Not me, though. Everything I said about rookie contracts is true. I may not have expressed it well ... I was editing it as you answered, but it's true. We're a young team and a lot of our better players are on rookie contracts and thus cheap. "Pay up for true difference makers," you say? Please. You don't get "true difference makers" for $4.3 to $5 mill after the rookie contract is over. And more, you're acting as if you know how this guy, Long, will do. And you don't. Your opinion is that he's a low demand castoff but actually he got a much higher 2nd contract ($9 mill a year if I remember correctly) till he was thrown out due to a regime change in NY. There might have been plenty of demand for him. We don't really know. What we can be sure of is that Beane valued him in this system as worth what they paid ... which is a sort of high-paid journeyman rate. We'll see if he's worth that. My guess is he will be, but we'll have to wait to see. And this really is the eternal cycle ... 1) Bellyache for two years at the pain of the rebuild and cap clearing. 2) Then get excited about all the cap space. 3) Then expect that the cap space will all be spent, and that lots of top FAs will be brought in ... despite the GM telling us he's going to be judicious about spending. 4) Then when the GM does in fact do his best to be judicious and the guys brought in aren't the top two or three guys in FA, we moan and whimper in two ways ... If the contracts are low, complain they're dumpster-diving cheapskates If the contracts are medium, complain that they spent too much without getting one of the top few FAs at his position. ... and on and on and on.

So, you're spinning this so that the many young guys on rookie contracts and therefore cheap, like Josh Allen, Tre White, Edmunds, Milano, etc ... that's somehow bad. Because that's all it means that Long is the 7th or 8th highest paid Bill ... that we don't have a lot of high-paid guys right now. A lot of rookie contracts. That's not a bad thing, just the opposite, really. Most teams are a bit older so a guy paid this much would be more like 9th to 11th. On the Rams it'd be the 13th highest. It cracks me up. People get all excited about having FA money to spend, they go on and on about how we need to get better at OL, and then when we start ... cue the moans and screams about how we're spending too much.

This is what it seems like to me. And it's precisely what Beane said would be their approach to free agency ... bring in guys to fill all the holes, so they don't have to draft from need. And yet spend judiciously. That's what we've got here. He looks like a guy who if they can't bring in a Paradis or draft a Bradbury or someone like him, that this guy would be a guy you wouldn't mind as a starter, at guard or center. An upgrade on what we have. But if we do bring in some of those other guys Long would be a backup far better than what we have now. People want Beane to go nuts and bring in tons of expensive FAs. That's not judicious. We'll be seeing a bunch of guys of Long's level brought in, IMO.

Having examined the grammar here, the word "guy" is neither a participle nor is it dangling. If supported better, both teams might well have come up with good QBs. Or not.

Precisely. There is no closer, there is no continuation ... Meaning it's all there. If there'd been a second tweet to continue it, then "but" could have been a cliff-hanger. There is no second tweet. It's pretty clear what he meant. Y'all are having fun with speculation, but ... " xxx Josh is our guy. xxx It's the only way it makes sense, and yeah, they left off the final quotation mark. Doesn't change the meaning.

Yeah, their skill position guys were maybe a bit better than ours, but their OL was a good deal worse than ours. It wasn't close to a push. Not that our OL was good. They weren't. But Arizona's was considerably worse. I only watched a few games and a few bits and pieces of Arizona, but they could not protect the passer, even as well as we did.

IMO, not yet. I don't think anything about the culture will start to feel permanent until they start winning and can therefore be sure that McBeane will be around for awhile. I think they'll be here for quite a while, myself, but right now that's only a guess. They'll have to have an idea that that culture and those leaders are not going away in a couple of years, and that their approach brings success. Once they see that, the culture will start to seem permanent.

This is fair enough, a good point, really. But the bottom line is that mocks are hugely possible for a reason. And that reason is that they combat boredom in a massively boring time of year. I respect people who aren't interested yet. I read a lot of them this time of year, personally, while still being aware that we know far too little to be realistic about team needs. They get me thinking.