Thurman#1

For anyone else old enough to remember him, I find it hard to imagine anyone saying anything but Billy Joe Hobert. A backup QB put into the game on injury, he was awful and afterwards admitted he hadn't bothered preparing. Jackass. #2 Marshawn and #3 Mike Williams and #4 McGahee.

No, they haven't. Last year was the first year they poured significant resources into it (excepting bringing in Allen the year before) and there was very real improvement.

I was a News afternoon paperboy as well. Good memories for me.

Yup. And Shanny at least had the GM he knew he was going to be working with in the future. McDermott was working with a place-holder who'd been on board for picking up EJ Manuel.

You're sitting at your desk, working hard, and your boss comes to your and says, "Dude, we traded you to another company. We really like you but this is best for the company. You'll have to move all the way across the country and they expect you there tomorrow. Good luck." Of course you're shocked and scarred. The players get over it but naturally they're hurt. Not being hurt only be an indicator that you hated the job you were in, the neighborhood you lived in, and everything about life in that city. Of course he was hurt. What is the big deal about this?

I'd be surprised if most trades didn't leave the players scarred. It hurts to know the organization you're with doesn't need you as much as you'd thought. They don't talk about it, most of them, but of course he was scarred a bit.

I hear you but I couldn't disagree more. I see the comparison, they're both physical specimens and both very good after the catch. But Patterson used his 4.42 speed against guys in college to run a lot of go routes successfully. Shenault hasn't had elite speed to fall back on. He has to get open, and he does. Shenault gets open downfield, consistently. It's true he doesn't have advanced route running skills, but he's already getting open a lot with relatively little coaching on advanced route running. With Patterson there was a major concern with drops, and major worries about running the whole route tree. If I remember correctly he was often starting routes behind the line which led to concerns that he might have problems getting off jams. Patterson was considered even then a terrific returner who might someday develop into a great receiver if he could learn to harness his physical skills. I haven't seen signs that Shenault will require anywhere near as much development as Patterson did. Patterson's one year of major college ball he had 46 catches for 778 yards. That's not a lot of experience and good but not great production. Shenault has three years at Colorado and while his last year did look like Patterson's one year, in Shenault's 2nd year he had 86 receptions for 1011 yards, in only nine games. I'm not pounding the table for him or anything like that. It's just I've seen the Patterson comparison elsewhere and a lot of people think he's going to be very developmental and I don't think there's enough evidence to be convinced. Being tough as nails and the strongest guy out there is a terrific start.

Here's a better link, ranking by average salary rather than total salary. It's a far more reasonable way to look at it: https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/rankings/average/fullback/ DiMarco gets $2.1 mill a year. It's not a big deal. DiMarco is used a lot on a couple of the STs groups and he gives them options on run and pass plays. It's not that big a deal. Juszczyk gets paid two and a half times more than DiMarco and played in 32% more snaps and put up about 200 yards more from scrimmage. Some teams value FBs and some don't.

Plenty of teams put guys outside who they don't expect to make the catch. It discombobulates the defense and sometimes draws a bit of extra coverage to the guy going deep. The play design worked ... it got them so confused they ended up triple-covering McKenzie, and it got Singletary wide open around eight yards down the field and with one guy around ten yards downfield of him. Getting Singletary open in space is a win, and even if tackled without a gain, an eight yard gain is good on a 2nd and 12. More, John Brown was open for first down yardage on the left the minute he broke inside. The surprising thing wasn't that they'd put a guy like DiMarco out there, it was that Allen would throw to him.

I'd love to get Thuney, but if that's the neighborhood he'll be in, I don't see our FO signing him.

Yeah, it really is. The Pats have always had really good OLs without committing as many resources to the OL as you'd expect from their performance. They've always out-performed and over-achieved and Scarnecchia is a lot of the reason for that. Good luck to him in retirement, but I'm happy to see this.

It absolutely is a passing league. Every team in the playoffs passed well. And yeah it does help if you run well too. You found two games that fit your narrative. That proves nothing. I can switch it around and do the opposite with the Chiefs, how they went 36 of 50 for 446 and 3TDs and no INTs and won even though they ran for only 97 yards, what a surprise! You don't make the Super Bowl in one game. You have to play well enough in 16 to make the playoffs. Garoppolo and San Fran have been very good at throwing the ball, as of course have the Chiefs. Agreed with your emphasis on OL. I love it that the new FO takes the lines seriously.

Well, yeah, but it's not like he hasn't always been productive when asked to run. He just was almost never asked to run. They thought they had better guys and they mostly saw him as a kick returner. Here are his run stats by year: Before 2016, no runs 2016 (now on SF) 1 run for 6 yards, 6.0 YPC 2017 SF 6 runs for 30 yards, 5.0 YPC 2018 SF 34 runs for 261 yards, 7.7 YPC Not that you don't have a point that their OL is very good and that that helps. They are, and it does..

But again, saying that the best rushing teams mostly are mostly good teams who make the playoffs is confusing cause and effect. Good teams get ahead a lot. And yeah, when you're ahead, you run it a lot to drain the clock. So a lot of times the teams that have the most running yardage are simply the teams that ran a lot of run plays. Doesn't mean they're especially good run teams, just that they ran it a lot. The best run teams are the ones with the highest YPC. When you get a lot of yards per carry, you're good. Here are the best 10 teams by YPC: Baltimore 5.5 Arizona 5.0 Tennessee 5.0 Cleveland 4.8 Dallas 4.8 Carolina 4.7 NYG 4.7 Houston 4.6 SF 4.6 Seattle 4.6 There are some good teams there. Also some bad ones. And it's the same with pass defense and run defense. Look at the top teams in pass defense and you see very good teams. Look at the top teams in run defense and you see a mixed bag.

Yup, but it's worth remembering that that year was when they had acquired a ton of draft capital ahead of going after a QB with a tradeup. Yet even that year, when they made two big tradeups, they didn't leave themselves an empty round (by that I mean they didn't leave themselves without a pick in a round unless they had already picked twice the round before. So they traded a 3rd for Edmunds but they still had a 3rd left over for grabbing Harrison Phillips. It's only been three years but Beane has never emptied out a round unless he'd already had two picks the round before. My guess is that he sees the first three rounds, perhaps even four, as tiers, out of each of which he really wants a player. And that it would take an exceptional opportunity for him to give up a shot at one of those tiers. They've got two 5ths and three 6ths, though, and they've showed themselves very willing to trade picks when they multiples in the same round. I think they're really conscious of those tiers. And that is exactly how Astro arranged this very interesting info.

None have proven themselves except maybe Singletary, and though he's proven he's an NFL talent, how much of a pounding can he take? On the other hand, they look promising. Basically, it's the old stand-by ... it's too early.

But not how they operate, as they've made very plain.

Very fair point. But if we're going to talk about it at this point, we have even less info to go on than the pundits do. Might as well listen, feeling free to disagree.

Yeah, a lot. When he was submitting his drafts to the Huddle Report, the main source for draft accuracy, his five-year average was fourth out of all mock drafters. He's very good. But what he's doing, mocking the draft, is impossible to do with an extremely high rate of accuracy in terms of getting a lot of the direct team-player matchups right. It's just too complicated a system.

You're calculating all of this wrong, for all of these guys. If you want to know how much cap relief/charge it will be to cut a guy you DON'T subtract dead money from cap space. That's entirely misleading. You subtract dead money from the sum total of all they will pay him in cash that year. That's usually salary plus roster bonus plus workout bonus and any other bonuses ... but NOT the amortized portion of the signing bonus. That already counts as part of the dead cap. Kroft's actual total saved would be around $5.1 mill saved, not $6 mill. Lotulelei's total saved would ... wait ... nothing would be saved. You have them saving $2.3 mill when it would actually cost them around $125K, unless he's still on the roster till the league year opens when he receives his roster bonus and in that case it would cost them $625K.

Agreed that cutting Star makes no sense this year, financially or on the field. But you wouldn't even save $2.2 mill. Star's dead cap is $7.8 but they would only cut $7.675M from the cap ($6.425M in salary plus $1M [combination of roster bonus and Per Game Active Bonus] plus $250K workout bonus). Cutting Star would cost them $125K this year. And if he's still on the team in mid-March, he gets the $500K roster bonus then and it costs them $625K in sum, instead of $125K to cut him. Would make zero sense unless you replaced him with someone as good or better, and doing so would mean costing more money. The OP posted two figures for each guy, cap hit and dead cap. But cap hit isn't what you use if you're figuring the impact on the cap to cut a guy.

You act like bringing in new guys is the only purpose of a cap. It's a very videogame-reminiscent focus on change and keeping things moving. More fun. But not what has brought about NFL success. They've made clear what their goals are. Not to get good as soon as possible. Not to make big splashes. Not to churn contracts and certainly not to spend all their money. Their goal is to be a team that consistently competes for championships. Consistently. So you look at the teams that do that, teams like the Steelers, the Pats, the Pack, the Ravens and one or two others. What is their approach? They aren't the teams that make big splash signings. They aren't the ones that spend all their cap space as soon as they can. They're financially conservative, and they all share those same two or three core beliefs: - build through the draft, supplement with mid-level and low-level FAs - prioritize signing your own guys ... you already know they fit and you give continuity a huge boost - maybe don't completely rule out splash signings, but if you do them do them infrequently. Look at those teams, how many make a splash signing more often than every five or six years? That's how those teams operate. It's industry best practice. And it's what our FO have said is their philosophy, again and again and again. Root for a different approach if you want, but you're spitting into the wind.

We will see, Scott. But what we will see is that their core principles don't change. The things they say every single year, will continue to be said every single year and will also be followed through on. That's what you're dealing with here, core principles, things that they have said every single year and at their introductory press conferences. They ain't changing, Scott, because this is how they believe in building a team. Again, they've literally said this since their first moments. They're believers in financial conservatism. And thank goodness they are, because history shows that's how the teams that are consistent competitors go about it. Now, if by "big contracts" you mean $10 or $11 mill, hey, I wouldn't disagree with that. I'd call those mid-level contracts and wouldn't find a couple of those very surprising at all. But two at genuinely high levels? Ain't gonna happen, Scott. Not because I say so. I'm just some schlemiel on a message board. Because they say so, again and again.

Evans 56.8% Perriman 52.2% Evans is terrific. I'd have to go pass by pass to figure out whether the low percentage was on QB or WR. I don't know either way on Perriman, but he's the level of guy I'd expect them to look hard at.

HOFer.