Thurman#1

Good point. Don't think I've ever seen a team win a playoff game by having a miscue or two and winning anyway.

That's nonsense. Last year they started out with a spectacularly easy schedule and ended with a much harder one. This year their 8-3 is much much more impressive. You don't want to get excited about 8-3? That's on you, this is an exciting season. Heh heh.

"Give them a pass"? Who do you think you are? Is your last name Pegula? In any case, nobody needs a pass for a win by ten points. Yet another genuinely bad post.

He was going past the DB but Allen had slightly underthrown it. Five yards further and Diggs catches it running away. And in any case, it was a success. And you can bet is scared the bejeesus out of the Chargers D. Singletary and Moss are both excellent receiving threats. Yeldon too, for that matter. We just don't throw to them much, probably because our WRs are so excellent.

IMO there's no such thing as a Trump-like figure. He's a one-off. Not since Huey P Long. The things that make him so popular, omni-present and hard to beat are his mastery of public relations and his outsider status. There's nobody else out there like that in politics. If there were, he or she would be president if Democrat or a massive and unmistakable figure waiting in the wings and ready to step in if Republican.

Referring to what you say about Belichick there, the 1991 - 1995 Cleveland Browns (whose cumulative record was 36-44) would beg to differ. And the Patriots are 4-6 this year. Yeah, he's still done a good job coaching this year, but no, not everyone is a world-class athlete and some rosters are much much better than others. Also, Belichick isn't really a good example, because he isn't just a coach, he's a GM as well. And through most of his term in N.E. he's actually been a very good GM, though the roster this year is certainly unexceptional.

Yeah, I agree. A lot of the impact that good coaches have is that they aren't bad coaches. Bad ones can really kill a team. Good ones let the roster play up to it's potential though they also do a bit more. You watch, the Lions are going to jettison Stafford one of those years. And if he then find a good situation, expect sudden surprise "improvement" from Stafford.

"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.