Thurman#1

I don't think too many people remember how terrific that defense was. One quick measure of that was that if you look at DVOA, they weren't just the best team in the league that year, they were about 50% better than the next-best team when using unweighted figures and around 70% better when using the weighted figures, weighted for strength of schedule. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/nfl/team-defense/2004 More FootballOutsiders has that 2004 defense as the 7th best ever!!!!!!!!! They only look at teams from 1950 and onwards, but still. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2014/historical-dvoa-estimates It's a real shame that that offense, and in particular Bledsoe, just weren't very good. The offense was listed as 21st when unweighted and 18th when weighted for schedule difficulty.

60% doesn't matter so much. It's a convenient benchmark, but what matters is accuracy. And while you should absolutely not judge accuracy using only completion percentage ... if you do reduce Allen's drop artificially to NFL average, what you get is a QB who is in the mid-30s in completion percentage. Yeah, it's fractionally above 60%, but that doesn't make it actually good. And again, no, there are NOT a lot of guys who have improved accuracy. Some, no question about it. But not a lot. And Brees isn't one. In college he was already considered deadly accurate, though not so much on long balls. His negatives were his height, having taken few direct snaps and the usual college to pro development worries. Brees' problems his first couple of years in the pros weren't about accuracy so much as reading defenses, quick decision making and generally getting used to the far more complex pro game, not to mention the lack of talent SD had at the skill positions when he was finally put in in his second year. Plenty of guys improve their completion percentages but not many have significantly improved their accuracy. Agreed that Allen appears to already be one of those guys who can improve and has. How much will be a question, but it's certainly hopeful that he already has. And agreed about Cam also, he shows it's possible to be a very good QB even with accuracy problems, but he also shows that guys like that need a lot of things to go right at the same time. It's hard for guys like that to make their teams consistently competitive at the highest level. But if you are going to try, it helps if you've got a defense that is consistently excellent, and it sure looks like McD knows how to do this.

I get the sarcasm. But he's not wrong when he says it's a skill and it's hard to learn. It is hard to learn. Not impossible, but hard. Some QBs have clearly improved themselves over the years in accuracy, and I'm sure you all know the usual suspects. Equally, though, every year in the draft there are a few guys who aren't very accurate and the pundits and draftniks say it's in their mechanics and they can be improved. They may well be right that the mechanics are the key to the problems for a lot of these guys. But a very very large majority of those guys who "can be improved," ... aren't. Some can, and Allen himself appears to be one of them. But he's right when he says it's hard to learn. Oh, and anyone who says that completion percentage and accuracy are not the same thing ... is dead-on correct.

It doesn't necessarily all go on the WRs. Remember that in John Brown's last year in Balt, he was on track to end up with more than a thousand yard when Flacco was QBing, and then when Jackson took over, Brown's yards plummeted. Here are Brown's game by game totals that year. 3 receptions for 44 yards 4 for 92 5 for 86 3 for 116 4 for 58 2 for 28 7 for 134 3 for 28 3 for 15 Jackson takes over 1 for 23 1 for 25 0 for 0 2 for 23 1 for 9 2 for 27 1 for 7 ... and then 72 for 1060 the next year with Josh Allen. I don't think anyone would say that the blame for his late season lack of productivity should all or even mostly go to Brown.

Damn those depraved young QBs. Typo, yeah? Agreed with your range. 3rd to 7th sounds about right. And I agree the Bills wouldn't take that deal.

Well, yeah, if you throw in Allen's rookie year that was supposed to be a redshirt, yeah, you can make things look bad. But last year Allen was 20/9. More, he greatly improved last year after the NE game. In his last 12 games he had 17 TDs and 3 INTs. But yeah, throw in the old data if you want to make him look bad. Not that Allen doesn't have a long way to go. He does. But your argument ignores his trajectory totally, which for a young and improving guy distorts the picture.

Not to defend Bill so much, but I agree with this much, that New England has helped a lot of guys reenergize their careers or create them from nothing. It hasn't worked with everyone by any means, but their tactic of bringing in undervalued guys has worked very well over the years. Welker Amendola Dion Lewis Chris Hogan Kyle Van Noy Ninkovich Brandon LaFell LeGarrette Blount Dan Connolly Randy Moss (yeah, he'd clearly been dogging it in Oakland) Danny Woodhead Vrabel Larry Izzo Corey Dillon coming off a down year Reche Caldwell (RIP) had by far his best year for them David Patten Joe Andruzzi Antowain Smith Revis was expensive, but helped bring a championship his one year

IMO this evens things up. I had us as the team to beat if they started Stidham, but with someone better, it's a horse race. Which is more than has been able to be said for a long time. I think it could go either way. Gronk wasn't exactly a shrinking violet. And nobody has said that Cam doesn't give it his all on the field. Nor is Edelman. Nor was Moss.

No, it'd been determined on here that the NFL was going to bury this because they couldn't stand the publicity. Just yesterday, wasn't it?

I think he believes every word of those. He just avoids saying anything about the areas he feels negatively about on those teams. I think he believes that he owes respect to those teams, that he owes that respect not because of what it means to those teams, but because if he doesn't feel genuine respect for every team every week some of those teams will beat him. Do you ever hear him say stuff like, "Well, we think they're better than us and we're likely to lose." Nope. He is very good at finding the areas where even bad teams are good, pointing them out and not mentioning the things that suck. Remember how he used to say great things about Kyle Williams, Jason Peters, Takeo Spikes, Fred Jackson and a ton more Bills? He did that because he really thought Kyle Williams, Jason Peters, Takeo Spikes and Freddy, among others, were terrific players. Now, did you hear him saying great things about guys like Demetress Bell? He wasn't touting those guys for the Pro Bowl. He'd find ways around that, saying, "The offensive line seems to be improving there, they're young and hungry." He'd play the game and play it well. I think he wanted, maybe needed, to believe deep inside that every team was good enough to beat the Pats any given day if New England didn't give their best. He wanted his team and himself respecting those other teams. That's a part of his culture, I think. And again, Belichick isn't re-hiring anybody out of a desire to be nice. Just isn't happening. He believes in Lombardi.

Nice. Thanks. Every time I see that play, the 4th down recovery and lunge for the first down it puts a smile on my face for hours.

Um, yeah. I believe nearly everything Belichick says to the media. When he doesn't want to answer questions he just doesn't. When he doesn't want to compliment guys, he just doesn't. Doesn't mean I like him. I hate him. But anyone who doesn't think Belichick doesn't have tremendous respect for Lombardi just doesn't get it. Lombardi worked for Belichick for years in Cleveland. If Belichick didn't have complete belief that he was very smart and very capable, he simply wouldn't have hired him again in New England. Belichick doesn't re-hire guys "just being nice."

Lombardi was also an assistant to the coaching staff of the Patriots from 2014 to 2016, during which time the Pats won two Super Bowls, and Belichick knew what he was getting because Lombardi had worked under Belichick before, in Cleveland. Belichick said, "Mike's...one of the smartest people I've worked with. He was huge asset to me for the two years he was here...he studies football and he knows it very well." He also worked under Bill Walsh, and his book about his time under Walsh, Al Davis and Belichick is really really good IMO, and from the reviews as well. IMO his TED talk is pretty good, too, though the untucked shirt look doesn't do him any favors. Spends a lot of time on why culture is huge, which I think our current leadership would back him up on all the way. And while the Browns were going through a pretty bad time when Lombardi was there, they improved four games in their second year under him. He looked to have been doing a pretty solid job in an absolute tire fire of an administrative structure. In any case, how smart Lombardi is does absolutely nothing to do with whether he's right in this instance. Attacking the messenger is the name of a logical fallacy. Who the messenger is has no logical relevance to whether or not he's right. Sometimes Einstein is wrong and sometimes Stalin was right. Wanna discredit an argument? Attack the argument. It's the only logical way to go about it.

That's hilarious. Nice find.

By no means is it over 10%. Allen threw 461 passes and though there are several different sites counting drops, none of them list the drops as high as 10% of that. If you go by Stats, the most common one used, it puts the drops at 26, which is far below 10%. And the NFL average is about 18. So that's about 8 more than average. Take eight off Allen's stats and he still ranks in the late 30s in terms of completion percentage. This is not a particularly significant factor. It raises his completion percentage about one and a half percent. Lombardi was right in his main idea. But "a huge hole" is a wild exaggeration. He shouldn't have used that phrase. And there have absolutely been guys who improved their accuracy, particularly early in their careers, guys like Rodgers, Favre and Brady being a few examples. And Allen's another example, having gotten better at accuracy between his first and second years by most measures and in most opinions.

Wow. Call TMZ.

The most successful coach of the modern era, Bill Belichick, comes from a defensive background. Agreed that solid defensive teams with an average or slightly below offense don't consistently succeed these days. Thing is, you also say the opposite. If either side of the ball is average or slightly below, you're not going to consistently succeed. The reason more than 20 teams have hired offensive minded HCs is more about group-think and the way NFL trends move in cycles than anything else. And the new hirings this year seem to show that trend slowing. And if anything "needs to be scrutinized" about this regime, it's that they seem to be doing an absolutely terrific job so far.

Nicely put, and very true. It certainly wasn't "pure" luck. They won 9 games. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have made the playoffs. Yes, some luck was involved, no doubt about that, but by no means was it pure.

Losing when you win the turnover battle isn't the indicator of a too conservative offense. It can mean a bunch of different things ... poor defense, poor offense, bad luck, too may penalties and on and on. But if it does come down to the offense it's not so much about a too conservative offense as it is an unsuccessful offense. And plenty of teams beat elite teams by running when they have the lead and the ball late in the game. You just have to do it successfully and probably have the rest of your team stand up as well. He's a bit conservative for me too, but was that about belief in the defense, no faith in the pass game, was it a career-long hallmark or was it due to his belief about what he had to do with that particular team in those particular circumstances? We don't know yet.

Nice.

Germany has strong borders? Please. And yes, their combined populations are less than half that of the USA. But the USA has about 4.2% of the world's population and 26% of the world's coronavirus cases. The fact that we're doing worse than nearly anyone else at stopping this thing is not due to our population numbers. Nor is it due to our borders being more open that countries like Germany's, which they are not. Oh, and as for Germany's "spiking in cases," Their highs for new cases were back in late March and early April, around 5K - 6K per day. They're now closer to 10% of that. Those "spikes" brought the infection rate up to 50 new infections per 100,000 people. How does that relate to the US rate? There are many contributing factors, but probably the single biggest one was slow and poor reactions right at the beginning, which is the most crucial time in a pandemic. We needed to listen to the scientists and doctors. We didn't. Bad decisions were made, and they were not restricted to one side of the political map.

Lee Smith had 329 offensive snaps, 30.2%. Google Football Outsiders snap counts

I greatly disagree, Shaw. You say he doesn't have a coherent theory, but he does. It's just that either it's not one that you want to hear. The problem is that his problems aren't a one-step fix. That doesn't mean it's not a coherent theory. Theories can be coherent but still talk about a problem having more than one component contributing to a problem. People often want to hear that whatever fix for whatever problem you have should be simple and not multi-phasic. Sometimes that's realistic. More often it's not, particularly as a system which has a problem often develops further problems in an attempt to compensate for the effects of the first problem. He's got mechanics problems. Nobody who has known what he's talking about has ever said different about Allen. Including Allen himself, Dorsey, Jordan Palmer ... everyone. You say he's not a rebuilding project and that's right, he's not rebuilding something he had. But he's absolutely a project. Has been since day one. And he's progressing. He's working the process. It's interesting to see what the details that he's working on are. And yeah, guys work with Rodgers and Brady on mechanics. It's a great example, but misses the point that both Brady and Rodgers took a long time to get where they could be what they are now. Both of them had a year (Rodgers a lot more) when they could focus on long-term improvement in things like grooving their mechanics, something Allen needed even more than those two did as youngsters, and yet he didn't get the time. Yeah, those guys still work on mechanics, but at this point it's offseason tweaks on the smaller problems that crop up during the season when they don't have time to work on mechanics. Every pro athlete goes back to basics in the offseason. What Allen has to do goes far beyond that. And what McCarthy did to Rodgers in terms of mechanics absolutely did. You can look at his preseasons early and he wasn't early what he's become. He made massive progress before he saw significant NFL regular season experience, particularly in what McCarthy called his "Quarterback Camp," and you can follow it through Rodgers' preseasons. -------------------------- The MMQB: "You documented how fortunate it was that Aaron Rodgers didn’t have to play the first couple of years—he just wasn’t ready." McGinn: “He was a very poor player here for his first two summers and regular-season practices. Fortunately for him, and he knows that down deep, he didn’t have to play early. His delivery was a mess, bad body language, he didn’t know how to deal with teammates. He learned so much from Brett Favre on how to in some ways be one of the guys and relate, and he became much more of a leader. He was really poor and how many great players have ever had a start like that? Not that many. A lot of scouts look at that exhibition tape those first two years and he was a little bit better the third year, but not to any degree, and then he just really developed. He lost a lot of close games in ’08, but by ’09 he was playing great and by 2010 he was maybe the best in the business. " https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/06/13/themmqb-exit-interview-bob-mcginn-green-bay-packers-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-nfl-beat-writer -------------------------- And yeah, Allen has to work more on decision-making. Sure. But his passing problems are real. His long-ball problems last year are a perfect example. Those weren't decision problems. They were great decisions and very bad passes. It's not reasonable to say he's one of the best throwers in the league. He's not. One of the most powerful? Absolutely. One of the best on some of his throws? Yup. But consistently one of the best throwers? He just isn't. He'll thread a gorgeous needle one down and then the next throw three feet over his receiver's head. He's good ... inconsistently, and it sure looks like a very significant amount of that is due to his mechanics problems and inconsistency. Do you get coaches telling kids, "Do it like Josh Allen does. Watch film and do it like that"? No, you don't, and for the obvious reasons. I love the way he improved. He definitely improved in throwing consistency between his first and second year. But he still has a way to go.

Yeah, disappointing when the first sentence goes so far off course in terms of hyperbole and garbage. Much better when they get all the way to the second sentence before the nonsense starts, as you did.

Pure guesswork. Either way. As with most predictions of the future in near infinitely complicated systems, it could go either way. It's boring but the right response ... we'll see. They might. Losses so far due to the lockdown are far far in excess of 15 billion. Benefits are tens of thousands of lives saved. Again, they might. Or not. There is an absolute ton of evidence for your position. And just as much suggests the opposite.