Thurman#1

"Full input to draft"? Not sure what that means. If it means that he can tell Beane what he wants and what he thinks, and that Beane will give it serious consideration, yeah. Beyond that, nobody's ever said anything. In any case, one thing's for sure, and that's that McDermott doesn't have any influence with the Injury Fairy, or for that matter with the COVID Opt-out Pixie. This D would probably look much different with Star in there and if Milano, Edmunds and a slew of CBs hadn't been injured at various points this season. That they seem to be getting better seems to me to indicate that a good part of the problem was the lack of on-field practice time together in the off-season. Particularly at D-line there are a lot of new guys there, and the scheme really only seems to be coming together a bit the last three or four games.

Yeah, um, no.

A healthy Milano is a liability never.

Yup. The last guys we've picked up are, not including guys we've let go and then re-signed like Deon Lacey, Cam Lewis and Lafayette Pitts ... listed in reverse order from the most recent: CB Daryl Worley LB Darron Lee TE Charles Jones LB Ahmad Gooden TE Nate Becker RB Antonio Williams CB Jonatthan Harrison DT Brandin Bryant G/C Jordan Devey DT Chris Slayton WR Jake Kumerow I was only going to go back ten, but the last two were signed on the same day. One Panthers guy, which is around 9% out of a group chosen for recency. Anyone still harping on about this is only showing that their RES has been activated about Carolina. They did step it up among some of the bigger FAs last offseason, but why wouldn't you? By the time the season started it was beginning to seem likely that COVID was going to cause problems with offseason get-togethers. It's not a mistake that most of those Carolina pickups this year were on defense. In a season that looked like it might not have a traditional offseason, why wouldn't you concentrate on guys who had already played in your system and wouldn't be hurt as badly by missed offseason activities?

With Star it was anything but soft. He's been doing a very fine job here, though many fans didn't get it till they saw what the defense looked like without him there. And outside his injury, Ed Oliver has been playing really really well since the middle of last year. Softer now, though. 1-tech is the position where McDermott wants a big strong block-absorbing space eater, and without Star we haven't got a good one.

Just for the record, there are excellent arguments that the GOAT is someone like Otto Graham or Unitas or Montana. Even Manning or Rodgers. Brady's career is without question sensational and it's hard to imagine defending anyone putting him outside of the top five or six, but beyond that it's not all that cut-and-dried. And yeah, this walking off without the handshake thing is a terrible look.

You can kid yourself as you often do - remember how you loooooooooooooooooooooved Tyrod, Trans? Remember "near-elite"? - but the idea catchable and uncatchable, no matter how you set up your criteria, is subjective. The fact that we regularly have arguments on here about dozens of catches a year makes that very clear. It's subjective as hell. Arguing otherwise is kidding yourself. And again, catchable and uncatchable doesn't particularly address accuracy. It's a much easier bar to get over. Sure, uncatchable balls are inaccurate. But Drew Brees, as an example of a really accurate guy, would call tons of catchable balls inaccurate failures. And he'd be right. A ball that forces a guy with a chance to get YAC to stop is inaccurate. A ball that forces a guy to reach back on a play when nobody's ahead is inaccurate even if it's caught. In many cases a catchable ball just has to get into a target that's maybe 8 - 10 feet wide and 10 feet high. Not always. If the coverage is extremely tight it can be smaller but very often we're talking a huge target, so big that hitting it doesn't begin to show accuracy. And yeah, you provided examples, but that proves nothing. When I did my studies, I annotated every play. It's the way to show you're working hard at avoiding confirmation bias. And a guy convinced for three years that Tyrod was a franchise QB is no stranger to confirmation bias. You give a few examples, but we don't know on how many others you let your biases take over. There's no way to know. I'd been riding you on that years before you began this study. You weren't willing to make it bulletproof. The reason why is what observers have to look at. It's why what you have there is a wonderful collection of your opinion. And again, nothing wrong with that. Opinions are fine, whether they make sense or not. Well, you've said much the same thing your past few posts. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that either, but anyone who's watched you talk Buffalo QBs knows that you will never not get the last word even if it means a thread drags on till it's necrotized. Me, I used to crack myself up by urging you on. But I'm over that.

Um, no, Transplant was the guy who hated him with a wild and unceasing passion. Until about a week after the Bills drafted him. As I said earlier in this thread, and Trans will back me up - because he was arguing with me telling me that success by Allen was not even a possibility - I thought he had a good chance to succeed. I wasn't convinced he would, but I thought he had a good chance, and thought him being a top ten guy was reasonable. So, nice try.

No, Shaw. It really was not even close to a misunderstanding. He didn't just say that Allen had mechanical problems. He went into detail over and over again about what those mechanical problems were and what he was doing to fix them. As one of several examples, here is an excerpt of a pre-draft interview with Jordan Palmer, but after Palmer had spent months working with him. And it's very very clear that he sees at least one very very specific problem (though he's talked about several others at different interviews at different times as Josh developed. "Of course, the big question with Allen is his accuracy and his 56.2 completion percentage, which scares the heck out of offensive coaches. But guess what? " 'We've fixed it,'' said Palmer. "He said with Allen's poor completion percentage 'there are two ways to look at it: one, what he's doing mechanically, and then two what's happening around him, receivers and the concepts and the coverages that they're seeing and there's a lot of complexities that go into both of those.' " 'From a mechanics standpoint you have to be athletic enough take an old muscle memory and create a new muscle memory. Take something that was an old habit and replace it with the new habit. With Josh, it was tied to his base and kind of where his feet are placed and how short his front stride is. And so making a small adjustment has made a huge impact.'' He said "the growth in accuracy that you're going to see throughout the draft training process and throughout his transition into the NFL and to being a franchise starter, is going to be tied to that.'' https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2018/03/jordan_palmer_on_browns_candid.html He's referring specifically to the low completion percentage when he talks about other things than accuracy, like "... what's happening around him, reciever and the concepts and coverages ..." But he very specifically addresses accuracy, specifically in terms of replacing bad old habits with good new ones. There was no mistake in communication here. Palmer is a very erudite, well-spoken guy, specific and educated in what he's talking about. More: "When the ball comes out of a guy's hand crappy on a good player, it's the sequencing,'' said Palmer. "You actually have to fix the sequencing and build muscle memory around that. If he has a bad throw, he'll follow it with a really good one because he has the fix.'' And again, this is one of several times he's mentioned various mechanical problems he and Josh were working on and changing.

Well, yeah, but that's kind of what defenses are supposed to do. Using the defense to attack Taysom Hill is ridiculous. If you want to attack him, do it for his performance, not because some other group of guys is doing their job well. Did you attack Josh Allen last year when the defense played well? People did, and it made no more sense then. Hill played really well. The offense scored 24 points. There should be mostly good things to say about that game. Sure, as I said, he's still got a huge amount to prove. But so far so very good. Yup. Precisely. But it's like talking ... well, this isn't much of a metaphor but it's like talking to someone who doesn't get it.

This is far far far too early. I really hope you're being sarcastic, and naming Tommy Maddox and Randy Johnson and the rest of these wanted-to-be's "notables" makes me think you may be. But it's still a horrible idea.

It's not Hill's problem the Falcons scored nine. His own offense scored 24 in his first game as a starter. Respectable. A decent start, though certainly he still has a lot to prove.

Chris Simms said as far back as last season that he thinks Hill is being groomed as their next QB. He said if it didn't work out that it wouldn't hurt the Saints so badly since he can be a gadget guy as a fallback. But that he thought that Payton was confident he could put together an offense that Taysom could win in. Made sense to me. The age is indeed a drawback but perhaps not a deathstroke.

Right. In spirit anyway. You don't need to spend a first on an RB. But if the OL isn't holding up it's part of the bargain, nearly any RB isn't going to do all that well. Seriously? "All stats prove he is about the same as he was last year in production"? Really? To me, a guy who goes for 5.1 YPC (in all his stats) one year, which was third-best in the league that year and then ... 4.1 YPC (in all his stats), which put him at 28th best the next year has a pretty decent statistical argument that he isn't doing nearly as well the 2nd year.

Larry Fitzgerald actually didn't run at the combine at all. I certainly agree that 40 isn't everything. I went to the NFL's combine data site since I didn't remember such a slow 40 from him, and he wasn't listed at all as having a 40 time. That led to finding the above.

First, dividing things up by how many catchable and uncatchable footballs a guy throws is in no way measuring his accuracy. Accuracy is far far more nuanced than that, it has to do with how well you hit a guy in stride, how well you lead him away from defenders, whether you hit him between the numbers and so on. You're not measuring accuracy there. You're measuring whether or not some guy on the internet thinks your balls are catchable or not. And that's fine, it's just quite far from accuracy. As for whether your method is objective, it couldn't possibly be clearer that it is absolutely not. Saying that your method was objective is a joke. The fact is that we often have people on these forums arguing whether the ball in a given case is catchable or not and disagreeing violently. It's an opinion. Now, some cases are obvious and everyone would get them the same, but many are not. Many are very subjective. And it's a simple fact that beliefs, opinions and prejudices affect perception. You could've made your analysis bulletproof by pointing out what you thought of which plays. I challenged you many times to do that. You refused, for reasons that seemed pretty obvious to me and many others. And again, you're a guy who did many of these little studies, all of which seemed to produce results showing that Tyrod was a franchise quarterback back when that's what you believed. Which was basically the whole time he was here, except the long period of time when you thought he'd gone far beyond a franchise QB and was "near-elite." If you want to continue believing that Allen was as accurate as others, that's fine, but you have never given us any reason to believe it. You're pretty much alone on that. He certainly has improved a great deal on decision making as well, but that's not that unusual. Nearly every QB coming into the NFL takes quite a while to improve that, and if they don't, they fail. Impovement of deicision-making isn't that big a deal, as it's common among guys who become successful. Improvement of accuracy is far far less common. Many pundits, coaches and scouts have argued that it's not possible to do. That argument never made sense, as plenty of QBs have improved accuracy to some degree, from Brady and Rodgers on to many others. But very very few have improved it to a really large degree, which is I think what those pundits are really talking about. Luckily for us, Allen is one of those very very few exceptions who have made really large improvements in accuracy. But yeah, you're right, decision-making, too.

Yeah, I get it. You have an opinion, and nothing else. And you're telling us that opinion. Which is fine. But again, we knew your opinion before. Thing is, other than that opinion of yours, backed up by ... well, your opinion, there isn't any evidence or really anyone else saying the same thing. Allen had accuracy problems, which he has really successfully addressed. You don't think so. Both of those things are just fine.

Very unlikely. Barkley is a replacement level backup. And Darnold would be too expensive in trade and possibly in salary as well. A few years down the road? Well, who knows, maybe. But next year? Really unlikely.

I wasn't answering you, Bill. I was referring to something entirely different. As to your point, I don't find it worrying that Singletary didn't live up, particularly, to those first two games, during which he managed 17.5 YPC on four attempts in the first game and 9.5 yards on six attempts in the second game. I mean, in those first two games he managed 127 yards on 10 carries. He was absolutely never going to maintain anything close to that level. That was simply a small sample size. Did they figure him out after that? Well, enough to stop him from getting 12.7 YPC, yeah. But as for the rest of last year - leaving out those first four games just for the sake of argument - in the remainder of the season he went over 5.0 per carry in 4 out of 8 games and over 4.5 in 6 out of the 8. I don't find that concerning. Just the opposite. And again, that's leaving out the first four games, which contained his three best. Instead, I find concerning the weakness of the whole run game this year. I'm hoping that when we finally get Winters on the bench and the best five OLs out there things will look up a bit. That's my best guess as well, but we'll have to see.

Um, no, comparing rookie Allen with rookie Brady or Brees is just fine, as is comparing college Allen with college Brady or Brees. More, it appears I never mentioned Brady or Brees. That was you, desperately trying to acquire a point. This is the post you replied to: Could you just quickly point out where I mentioned Brees or Brady? No, right? I said, "He had plenty of times when he made the right read, made the right decision, and airmailed the ball or threw far in front or far behind the reciever. He did this at a much higher rate than pretty much any successful pro QB did." Neither Brees nor Brady were anywhere near as inaccurate as Josh - even in college or early in their careers - and that's the comparison (to "any successful pro QB") I was making. Clearly, I was also comparing him to guys much further down the QB ladder, guys like Dalton or Derek Carr. Very very few QB as inaccurate as Allen was in college and early have done well.

Shaw, it would be reasonable to think that "the problem was not that he had mechanical flaws that had to be corrected," if it weren't for the fact that we have dozens of interviews from Jordan Palmer and from Allen himself talking about the bad mechanical habits he had that they were working on correcting, specifically over-striding, stepping in the wrong direction, not rotating his hips into the throw, etc., and that it would help his accuracy. Was some of the work they've done with Allen that they needed to tame him, calm him down? Absolutely. Without question. But was taming him anything to do with his accuracy? I don't think so at all. The taming part was much more towards getting him to take checkdowns when it made sense, to go with the design of the play rather than hanging on to the ball in hopes something would come open later down the field, and so on. And those changes have definitely made Allen a better QB. He's improved in so many areas it's incredible. Startling and wonderful. But he also had a lot of bad mechanical habits he'd fallen into that they have largely corrected that directly affected his accuracy.

You did state it. Unfortunately, that doesn't affect the fact that you didn't prove anything there but that when you look at film you came up with an opinion that is very very different from nearly everyone else in pretty much the NFL world. You went back and looked at old film from a lot of guys. You then gave us your opinion on what happened. And that's what it was, your opinion. Which is fine. You've proven what your opinion was by going and looking at film. At the time you were doing a ton of these studies. I did a few too, particularly to combat your opinion that Tyrod was "nearly elite." In my studies I went back and looked at every Tyrod pass. And I then posted a brief five or six word summary of each play so that anyone could check my opinions and find out if I was being unreasonable by going back with my work and finding any examples of plays where my opinions were unreasonable. Nobody ever posted a single example of something they found unreasonable. You kept on doing the same studies, and even though I again and again challenged you to do the same, to tell us what you thought of each play so we could find out how reasonable your opinions were by comparing individual plays, you never ever did any of this. That was a year or two before you did this Allen comparison, and you still didn't do a bit of it. So nobody can check you. What you've done there is prove that your opinion is that Allen wasn't more inaccurate than other QBs. And I can't speak for anyone else, but I already knew that was your opinion. I didn't need more proof of that.

That doesn't show he's not a 5.1 YPC back. It shows that he gets yards the same way everyone does, in larger amounts sometimes and smaller amounts in others. Statistics tend to work in the bell curve. You get a few very small values, a few very large, and more towards the middle. That's not Singletary. That's running backs, football statistics and in the end it's just the way the world works. Look at other RBs, you'll find that nearly all of them have a few games where they get higher stats than normal. So unless you're going to go around and cut off the top three games of every RB, don't do it to Singletary either. He is absolutely a 4.1 YPC guy this year and a 5.1 last year. It would make just as much sense (none) to say that Singletary had two games below 3.0, so he's not really a 4.1 YPC guy, he's actually a 4.4 YPC guy. You say he "wasn't getting a consistent 5.1 a carry." I'd bet you won't find a single player in NFL history with more than 10 carries who consistently gets their average carry. It's a virtual statistical impossibility. Should we say that Derrick Henry isn't really a 4.71 YPC guy because he had three games this year where he was over 5.4 and two when he was over 6.2? Sorry, this is the way stats work. You can't pull out the numbers you don't like, look only at the rest, and then think you've proven anything.

Yes, this.

Star is plenty of it, and as you say, his absence causes others around him to have to try to do more than they did last year, which destroys the ability to just "do your job." There's more, though, obviously. New d-line guys, the absence of Milano for much of the year, Edmunds' injury, Oliver's injury and the consistent injuries to CBs all hurt. A lot. What isn't mentioned nearly as often as those is maybe one of the biggest reasons, I think. This defense is one that requires everyone to be on the same page all the time. More so than most, it's varied and multiple. Every year they seem to have times when people are having problems with run fits, since responsibilities change quickly and often depending on the call and the offense's personnel and formation. We've seen a significant uptick in defensive performance the past three or so games. I believe the reason for that is that the lack of a preseason hurt this defense more than most that are more just see-ball get-ball styles. They weren't acting together. They needed time to get on the same page and I don't think they got it, and that all the injuries and personnel shuffling they caused has hurt their ability to cohere.