Thurman#1

With these contracts the devil is often in the details. That's a lot of guaranteed money. But how backloaded is it? Is the 4th year likely to be paid out or not. The stories say it's a maximum of $56M. What's the minimum? It should be interesting to see. So far looks like they overpaid for him.

The 2022 study was analyzing data from 2013 to 2018. The 2019 study looked at data from 2013 to 2017. The 2017 study looked at incidences from 2006 to 2012. Relevant today? Yeah, but the data is still old. And things appear to have gotten a lot better in the past few years.

Now you're making me want to read about Koufax too. Amazing story. I've just been reading a bunch about Brit triple jumper Jonathan Edwards. Here's a guy who was never really special, and then at age 29 he suddenly started kicking ass. Before he was through he set a world record that STILL has not been beaten 25 years later, which is absolutely insane. The new generation is closing in on his record, but he still holds it. People develop. When somebody takes the fact that a backup is now playing better than the guy who was ahead of him as proof that the coaches screwed up, it only shows that that's the way that person thinks. It's confirmation bias.

They're really not. This is the season of rose-colored glasses. Everybody looks great in shorts running routes with no D-backs. Everything out of every camp is positive. But you have to strain pretty hard to take a positive and say, "See, that's a negative if you just look at it right."

Good stuff. IMO they'll be significantly better. But how much? IMO Zach is the one most likely to develop enough to give us trouble consistently. But while QB talent is huge, it's not everything. It's a team game. But I don't see any of those teams playing close to us this year. I could see us losing one of six somewhere, though. Maybe even two if balls bounce really badly for us.

People seem to assume that because you can now outplay someone that that has always been true. And just logically, that premise makes zero sense. Maybe Bates got better recently, started playing better and they put him in. This was his third year. That is precisely the time in a UDFA's career where a bunch of guys who hadn't been quite good enough start to become enough better that they get noticed.

There is indeed a legitimate chance he returns with decreased performance. But you're leaving out a bunch of things from those studies. First, the gears of science grind slowly. Even the 2022 study you refer to was looking at data from 2013 - 2018. And things seem to have gotten better since then. That's anecdotal, but appears real. People weren't really saying the same things nearly as much back in 2018. Second, at the bottom it says RBs, DLs and LBs performed the worst after injury. QBs the best. CBs take a lot less impact than RBs, DLs and LBs. CBs are not among the most affected positions. More, the figures they're comparing are affected by losing time after the injury and by the inclusion of the figures from the first year back. There does indeed seem to lasting effects the year after. So you'd expect that to affect both games played in the first three years back and average performance in those same first three years.

Yup. And I think they are convinced, probably correctly, that for other ticket buyers the product will be better if those seats are filled with more loyal fans who can make friendships and relationships in the seats. Not to mention filled with Packer fans. Yup, that would eliminate the wait list. And fill the stands with fans of the opponents and with corporate buyers who aren't likely to root for the team the way the fans who can afford the tickets at current prices do. You're exactly right, it's a trade-off. Out of the tens of thousands of loyal great fans, letting about a hundred seats go is NOT going to make Packer fans angry about this, except for that hundred. Who weren't being good fans anyway.

And if I have a product that you want me to sell to you, and I don't like the way I think you're going to use it ... then I should be able to use that product however I want to, including selling it to somebody else. Many times it's Pittsburgh fans, Cleveland fans, fans of whatever team we're playing that week.

There have been plenty of winning teams that didn't have serious cap concerns. The winningest team in the last twenty years, for one. Every team makes choices they wouldn't make in an uncapped environment, but plenty of excellent teams didn't keep digging themselves into cap holes all the time. Agreed, though, that Beane is really good at cap stuff.

It might indeed be five or six years before we have major cap consequences, but we are already seeing smaller effects. There would be small consequences and moves that go unmade every year if they did just keep over-kicking cans. I don't think they'll do that, myself.

Contracts are differently cap-friendly or unfriendly every year, as the salaries and bonuses generally go up and down each year. And why didn't they write them better? A lot of that is because generally when a GM writes his contract in as cap-friendly a way as possible, he then unfortunately has to give it to the player, whose reps will have problems with it. Contracts have to be agreeable to both sides. They're a compromise. More, as the contract ages, the player ages. He becomes better or worse, cagier and tougher or more lackadaisical, maybe better conditioned but older. But beyond that, the environment changes. When the contract is signed, it makes the player maybe the 3rd highest paid WR in terms of Average Annual Value. Three years later maybe he's a much better player and he's 24th highest. You're going to have to give him an extension, but you want to wait a year or two so re-structuring moves some cash forward, making the player happy and delaying the need for an extension. And the team's overall cap situation changes and affects the contracts and the team's happiness with it. It's wildly complex, but basically the environment is fluid. Things change all the time. The cap issues absolutely have major impact on the team and what you can do. It really is a concern. Beane came in with a plan to stay pretty conservative on cap issues. He also had a plan to clear cap space and over the course of three or four years put together a roster within that conservative framework. The changing situation from year to year means you'll spend a bit more one year and a bit less the next as needs and situations change. But just as their roster got better and their QB entered his years of Super Bowl competitiveness, Covid hit and it seriously reduced cap totals across the league. This threw Beane's plans well off-target. He had to either cut some guys that would make the team competitive or write contracts that would make the cap tighter in future years. He chose the second option. It's why the roster is excellent, but the cap is tight and causing restriction. He'll be trying to get to his original goal of a solid core of well-paid guys and a nimble use of low- to mid-range FAs seeded in and being conservative with future cap. Getting back there can be done, but it's a lot harder from where we are now than it would have been from the situation we'd have been in without the Covid cap hit. it's possible, but there will be roster consequences.

Yup, $12.4M above the cap with 41 signed after the draft picks all penned their contracts. According to Spotrac. IMO that's the reason Bradberry was never a consideration. The minute they brought in Von Miller there was not going to be another big FA on the menu.

Hap, your post above makes total sense. This one really does not, IMO. Did McDermott use what he knew of Carolina's draft prep from before he left them? Of course he did. It would only make sense. It's neither immoral nor unprofessional. But for Beane to use info he acquired on Carolina's dime to help McDermott after he was up in Buffalo? This would be industrial espionage not to mention flat-out immoral. Neither McDermott nor Beane is that kind of man. All you have to do is look at how Beane took it when the Commanders didn't stop trying to get their RB back after the Bills and McKissic had agreed to a contract. Beane believes in the spirit of the law, not just the letter.

Nonsense. Yes, it was a skillful move by KC to trade up to get Mahomes. Equally, it was a skillful move by Beane to trade up to get Allen. And there's no guarantee that Mahomes without Reid becomes what he is today. McDermott has made it very clear that with putting all his systems in place that first year, he simply didn't have time to fully go through the process of a deep enough dive into the QBs that year. And while he would never come out and say this part of it, he didn't have enough faith in the GM he was stuck with - the guy who bought into EJ Manuel - to let him make the decision.

Great post, Shaw. Maybe the best on here all year. Thanks.

I assume he was talking about the OL when he was talking about bringing attitude. Particularly the first two years of his stay, he really did appear to provide some attitude when he was on the field. The line appeared to play tougher when he was out there. But he regressed in his level of play last year. Many think it's the weight he lost, and maybe they're right. But it was real and they couldn't put him out there.

Releases don't save as much as people think they will. There are often dead money costs, and the released player will be replaced on the top 51 by someone else, whose contract - though it will not be large - will need to be subtracted from the cap. Re-structuring works, but it is simply borrowing from future years. It's simply putting things on the credit card. And we are already well over the cap for next year, 2023. That's nonsense that it's just accounting work. It's active borrowing from the future, and if you're releasing guys who would otherwise make the team, doing so actively makes the roster weaker. There are real-life negatives to doing these things. It's not just accounting

It's not really true ... that they give every player a real grade on each play. They watch every play. But they are perfectly free to not grade performance on a play where it's not clear whether the job was done. "YOU DON’T KNOW THE PLAY CALL? "We are certainly not in the huddle, but we are grading what a player attempts to do on a given play. While football is extremely nuanced regarding the preparation and adjustments that go into each play call, once the ball is snapped, most players are clear in what they’re trying to accomplish on each play, and we evaluate accordingly. Of course, there are always some gray areas in football. Plays in which there is a clear question mark regarding assignment, we can defer to a “0” grade and not guess as to which player is right or wrong. These plays are few and far between and since we are grading every snap, missing out on a handful throughout the year should not affect player evaluations. Examples of potential gray areas include coverage busts, quarterback/wide receiver miscommunications and missed blocking assignments." https://www.pff.com/grades And I totally disagree that teams would only give pass/fail grades to players. There are plenty of times when player performance that goes beyond adequate can make huge differences in result for the team. When a run-blocking guard knocks his guy out of the play and then keeps going downfield to make another good block downfield, for instance. A team wouldn't say in that case, "Well, it's only a pass grade to us. His excellent performance there didn't really make any difference to us from the team's point of view."

Yes, so did Chip Kelly. Then PFF asked him to check their grades, he agreed to watch the tapes of one game and compare them to the PFF grades and he came backs surprised, saying they'd pretty much nailed it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/09/20/__trashed/ It's happened several times. Film isn't some kind of opaque thing that's wildly difficult to understand, it just isn't. If it were, teams wouldn't study opponent film. They wouldn't use it to diagnose what they might do in various situations because it would just be too difficult to understand. There's a reason that teams watch opponent film in incredibly large quantities ... even though they don't know what the coaches specifically said in the meeting rooms about the responsibilities of each player were on every play. Somehow they find extreme value in watching this tape, even without that crucial information. And I bet that if you looked back, you'd find that Eric Wood and Williams both did a ton of work watching opponent film and probably learned a ton. Even not knowing the opponent's calls.

That's questionable even if you're talking about 2nd year Tua. And there's no reason to think 3rd year Tua might not be quite a bit better than that old relic. Whatever your situation at DB, $10M for 1 year absolutely is a very big deal for a team that's got $5M in cap space this year and is already $10M under the cap for 2023. And our Super Bowl window will last probably 12 years from now.

Dude, the Red Sea doesn't have to part for the weather to be quite a bit better or worse year to year on a set of eight days per year. In fact, the probabilities will tell you that's quite likely to be true when your sample size is so small. Small sample sizes increase the impact of pure luck, chance and variance. Not to mention that the strength of schedule in a random segment of eight games per year will also vary quite a lot. So, while a data set this small might indeed show that he is playing better away than he is at home, it might easily also be greatly affected by factors like varying weather, harder or easier schedules, games where they are behind requiring more throws and more risks be taken and better or worse opponent pass defenses.

I suppose I could have better said something like "McDermott deserves an awful lot of the credit." That would have more precisely stated my point. Sorry I didn't say it well. And of course you're not going to debate a dumb point like that one you made there. They're both among the absolute best at what they do. Allen is likely a bit better. But McDermott is absolutely terrific. Both are top five at what they do.

I see. You were there. On the sidelines? You heard McDermott make a mistake? You've got the whole story? Nonsense. The only first-hand data we have on this is from the interview with Levi Wallace. He says that the coaches made the right call and there was bad communication on the field, specifically that he didn't look back and see where Hyde was playing, that he thought Hyde was playing closer in and that they left a big gap. And there's no reason whatsoever to think we won't have as good a chance as we did. It could easily happen. Did we blow a good chance? Yeah, we did. Might easily get another chance that's just as good or better. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a damn shame to miss that chance. Yeah, you're right. Your take here is really stunningly bad. And again, who drafted Allen? Who was the guy who developed the system in which Allen was developed so very well? Who brought in Daboll and Dorsey? Yup, McDermott.

McDermott gets most of the credit for Allen. He'd one about as well as a coach can do to bring in and develop him. He and Beane brought him in and have maximized him. Plenty of other coach/GM tandems would have chosen the other Josh or someone else. Allen of course also gets a ton of credit for hard work and for just being good. But they brought Allen in, they And you can be comfortable blaming the loss on the head coach if you want. But it's nuts. Does he get a share of the blame, as everyone does? Yes. But again, the reason Allen wears a Buffalo on his helmet when he does amazing things because he was picked by this front office. And the reason Allen was required to do Josh Allen things in that game is because Mahomes was on the other side doing Patrick Mahomes things. Any team later in the playoffs with a great QB is going to have that QB doing amazing things to be in games. And teams without great QBs tend to not make the playoffs or to go out early. This is an excellent roster, and if you put Josh Allen on a team with a poor roster and a poor system he might easily not have become the Josh Allen he is today and he simply doesn't win anywhere near the number of games he's won.