Thurman#1

I'm concerned they might not progress more. But not much. They've showed progress, they've made the right moves. They've been smart. Not worried about the games particularly at all. I'm with Beane and McDermott ... my goals are long-term. I don't care all that much about this year, though I"m sure McDermott absolutely does. I see them having a decent shot at making the playoffs but see them losing to the two or three best teams in the conference. They're not there yet. Amazingly after all these years, though, they appear to be headed in the right direction.

This is how it's looked to me. That offense has very few real players. When he has talent around him, I think Dalton can really play. Does Cincy still spend less money than other teams on scouting, as they used to? When Marvin was there they always had a defense, but there were always real holes in the offense, except for that one year Dalton was terrific till he got a season-ending injury. I wonder if we'll see him hitting a real franchise at some point and "becoming better."

Glad I've never made a mistake or a brain fart. All of us here are perfection incarnate, so we can look down on people who have to cover all 32 teams and make mistakes.

I've never really much bought into ELO. So they use QBR, a number that is already very questionable, before performing a number of calculations on it that they are creating from scratch? And this year is their tryout year for the QB portion of this rating? Still not much buying it. Looks like it was fun to create, though.

OP, nice find from Barnwell. Thanks for posting it.

Yeah, they're tougher matchups than they looked. But we're going to need the whole rest of the season to tell us what we need to know about this season.

Foster is 6' 2". And we throw to the TEs reasonably often. I've got no problem with the height we've got out there now. If they can find a use for Duke, great, but it's not a need.

How? A hurryup wouldn't in the slightest mean Daboll isn't telling him what coverages are showing. Can't see anything in that snippet you provided that indicates it's not happening a lot.

You don't find that out or prove it in one game. It's a long process.

That NFL teams use their data? Or that their data is reliable? Not sure which you meant, so here are some articles addressing both claims. There's lots more out there, but here are a quick few: https://www.si.com/2015/01/25/pro-football-focus-nfl-neil-hornsby-cris-collinsworth-analytics Four or five relevant stories at that link https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/06/27/nfl-analytics-what-nfl-teams-use-pff-stats-llc-tendencies-player-tracking-injuries-chip-kelly " Longtime Bengals offensive line coach Paul Alexander last season reviewed about 600 plays where PFF had downgraded one of his blockers; he told company founder Neil Hornsby that he disagreed with perhaps 12, “which is pretty remarkable,” Alexander said. " https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/09/20/__trashed/ "[from the 2017 Washington Post article just above, Chip] Kelly didn’t confine his critique to those meetings, either. Late last season, when a reporter covering the 49ers suggested that one of San Francisco’s offensive linemen was statistically superior to another, citing PFF data, Kelly let loose. “I mean, I’ve said it all along: How can they grade an offensive lineman when they don’t know what the play is?” Kelly asked. He went through the standard complaint: An outside analyst can’t know what play was called, or who had what assignment, and thus the grading process is unreliable. I think there’s a lot of players and coaches that feel the same way,” Kelly said. “You can do whatever you want with it. It’s like me going into a bank and grading a teller because they gave me a lollipop. I gave them a 94.3.” After the season, though, Kelly did what the company has invited its critics to do: He studied its process. He met some of its analysts — who watch every player on every snap — and watched them make evaluations. And then, according to Collinsworth, he bought a share of the company. “The coaches that have come in there cannot believe the process and how thorough it is,” Collinsworth said in a phone interview this week. “Is it perfect? I’m sure it’s not perfect. But it’s pretty darn close.”

Yeah, this, I think. He hadn't been the old Milano through a fair part of the year, but he does seem to be playing like his old self now. So, you've talked to the NFL teams about what they use? Come on, you don't know, 'cause neither side says. Why would a team reveal what it uses and doesn't use. Yes, PFF provides a ton of extra stuff to the teams but that they pay them for data shows the teams believe in PFF and their data. Does that mean they believe in all of it and use all of it? Not necessarily, but there's also no particular reason to think they don't. If PFF says Milano is having a bad year, why wouldn't teams want to know why they think so and go take a look at Milano's film more carefully? Wouldn't they want to have the opportunity to think, "Gee, we've generally thought Milano is a fine player ... is there something he's not doing well right now that PFF is picking up that we haven't? Is he, for example, not moving as quickly laterally as he did last year, and can we attack that? Let's go hit the film and see what we turn up." Why wouldn't they want to have a chance to have that kind of conversation? PFF does a damn good job. Not perfect, nobody is. But damn good.

Fair enough either way, IMO. If it's less than, say, five, that's less than a ton ... ... unless you compare it to teams across the NFL. How often does Atlanta run RPO? Or Denver? Are we a top ten RPO team in terms of percentages? Top seven? And if we are, isn't that a ton? Could go either way, I think. But whatever, really. Heh heh. Yup.

You can play aggressively without sacrificing your ability to run the clock down. No matter how aggressive your play calls are, running the clock down when we were ahead by two possessions simply makes sense. We should have been doing it. This is about the only theory that makes sense as to why we should have been snapping so fast.

Disguising your coverage till under 15 seconds would work ... unless you snap when they start to change their alignment. And while I'm willing to believe that McVay might've stunted Goff's growth, I'm pretty sure there might be a way to do it so that doesn't happen. For instance, have Daboll talk to him over the next three or four games and get Allen used to how Daboll thinks ... and then taper off gradually. Maybe gradually change from telling him what you see to asking him questions about what he sees. I think that might be very helpful for his development. Potentially, anyway.

Nah, Archuleta's good. There are some announcers that really don't thrill me, but he's smart and perceptive and he shows it.

My guess is we will.

Probably gonna play a meathead in a movie, with maybe three lines.

Wow, this hindsight stuff makes it all look so easy. Turns out we all knew after it happened that those two QBs were bonafide! McDermott has gone public saying he simply hadn't had time to evaluate the QBs thoroughly enough what with putting in place the structure of his new system and administration. It's a shame we didn't have a GM he trusted at that time, but we didn't. And none of that will be a problem if we turn out to be consistently competitive over the next few years, which could easily happen. And they likely would have loved to keep that DB, but he would've cost a ton right in the middle of a rebuild where they were in cap jail due to bad decisions by the previous administration.

What? Oh, my Gosh! I can't believe nobody's thought of this before!!! It seems so obvious in retrospect, and yet until you came up with this idea, nobody had ever thought of this or said anything even remotely similar. I hope that was sarcastic enough. And as for Brown not being a borderline #1, that's utter nonsense. You can say he's not a "true #1" as some people seem to call the top 6 or 7 guys in the league, but he's absolutely a #1, and there's not the slightest doubt about it. He's 8th in yards in the league, for Christ's sake, he's 15th in receptions, and that's with Josh Allen throwing to him, on a team that has the 7th lowest passing percentage in the league. He's absolutely a number one, there's absolutely nothing borderline about it.

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Nobody said this team had no talent before McDermott got here. McD absolutely did have to do a complete overhaul, but not because we had no talent. They needed a massive rebuild because they had no franchise QB - not even a potential franchise QB - and had mid-level talent while they'd far overspent on the cap. They had to rebuild to get a franchise QB and get out of cap hell. A new admin coming in with cap trouble and no QB is not an ideal situation, even if a fair amount of the roster is decent. And Tyrod's OL had some very good guys, Wood, Incognito and Glenn most specifically. They were good. And you conveniently left out that Tyrod wasn't very good at passing in 2016 either, when our top three WRs were Marquise Goodwin, Sammy Watkins and Robert Woods, and we had Percy Harvin besides. It was about the money, about the large amount of money spent on the average supporting cast. And our talent is very young right now. Nowhere near maxed out.

There's no situation in which $16 mill is nothing. It's very very reasonable for a franchise QB. And far too much for a QB who's not a franchise QB. And it's certainly not nothing for a QB who plays like Tyrod. For a guy like that, it's too much. It's not a mistake that Tyrod's new contract has him playing for $5.5 mill a year average. $16 mill was a major overpay and cutting him made a ton of financial sense. Right now, there are four QBs within $5 mill a year up or down from $16 mill a year. Here they are: Jacoby Brissett, Andy Dalton, Cam Newton and Phillip Rivers. Tyrod does not fit in that group.

Yeah, I can argue that. I can argue nearly anything that's true ... and that is true. You 're wrong that I can argue anything. False things, I try to stay away from.

Again, it ain't tanking, it's rebuilding. And no, you don't have to get a high draft position to get a good QB. But doing so raises your odds of getting a good QB, and gets you a better chance of picking better players in every other round as well. Not all or most franchise QBs were taken first. But most were taken in the first round. If your team team decided to reload instead of rebuild because they figured #11 would be high enough to draft Pat Mahomes ... your team will beat themselves to death for years. Drafting higher helps. It certainly does NOT guarantee you'll get the right guy or that you'll get a high enough pick to get the guy you want. But it gives you better options in every single round.

Over and over and over you read, write and say that there's no such thing as a tank in the NFL, that what there are in this league are rebuilds, not tanks. Over and over, people ignore it and say someone or other is tanking and get shown to be wrong.