Thurman#1

Not yet. And a guy like Minshew shouldn't be on your list. He's a 2nd stringer. Foles is the Jagz starter, injured or not. Same with Rudolph, Roethlisberger is the Steelers QB, even if the 2nd stringer is playing for the rest of the year. And I find it hard to understand your question about Lamar Jackson. I suspect Allen will in the end be better, but right now there isn't a question that Jackson is better based on how people are playing now, which is all we have to go on for these 2nd year guys taking a step up. Looking at the QBs you list, and putting Roethlisberger and Foles in, as should be done, I'd say Allen's top twelve, with a good possibility of earning a higher place as soon as mid-season as we figure out who guys like Darnold, Brissett, Mayfield, Lamar Jackson, Flacco in the new offence, Rosen, Mariota, Carr and for that matter Josh Allen really are. Two games - particularly when teams don't yet have video on most of them in their new offenses or after important offseasons.

I've seen many people with your concern. Seems obvious and easy to me. He is released. At 4:00 he was free to sign with anyone. The Pats notice, call him and work out a contract quickly, and it's a good contract for both sides. I hate the Pats, and I think they've cheated in DeflateGate, Walkthrough-WatchGate, and a few more besides, but this seems like it could easily be worked out between two sides who are both motivated to find a deal quickly. It's a two-year deal, but the Pats didn't worry about the second year (offering $20 mill as salary in year two, when they expect to cut him or re-negotiate) , which greatly reduces the complexity. Under time pressure, with two willing parties, this could have been worked out easily.

Either Nsekhe or the blocking scheme got Allen knocked down but not sacked at 1:10 in the 2nd quarter. It's on the NFL highlights package. They put the RB outside Nsekhe and he chipped the rusher on the way out for a pass and Nsekhe went and blocked nobody in the middle leaving Allen to get popped just after he threw a completion to Brown.

You're right that Doug Williams "didnt" take the Skins to the SB that year. He QB'd them very successfully in the playoffs, but that's it. Williams didn't "take them" to the Super Bowl. During the season that year he started two games. Very questionable if they'd have made the SB with Williams at QB all year. Like Hostetler's Giants, if Simms doesn't get them to the SB, we probably wouldn't even know Hostetler's name. During the season that year, Jay Schroeder went 8-3, someone I don't even remember named Ed Rubbert went 3-0 and Doug Williams went 0-2. You have to give Cam credit for QBing them to the SB.

Nicely put. Good post. It's hard to get a sense from the outside of exactly how much of a tactician or master of the mental game he is, but he's never given much of an indication that he's really good at that area, and you're right on that you've got to improve there as your physical abilities wane, which they will. Never liked Cam as a person, but he was fun to watch in the games. Not so much so far this year.

Those were hardly the most optimistic reviews. You could probably say those were the most likely positive career scenario for Josh, something like that. And again, the MVP indicates clearly that Cam was very good in his time. If he has indeed run out of gas, that wouldn't mean that Josh is also going to run out of gas after his ninth year. Plenty of other paths to success for Josh. Yes.

Yup. Winning the NFL MVP also a reasonably good indicator.

First, he says, "I'm done," not "I'm done with the Jets." I think you overstated that. Second, great quality of the video. Third, I suffered along with him and understood everything he was feeling, with the exception of when he looked at the stadium replay of the offensive pass interference about ten times and then said, "I don't see anything." What? Could not have been more clear.

4 - 0? Really? Possible, but me, I'd give that maybe a 5% chance. Assuming even odds on each of the next three games you'd make it an 8:1 shot, but it's more like 70% chance against the Giants, 50% against the Bengals and 15% against the Pats. Comes out to about 5%. Hope we beat those odds. But I wouldn't bet the lunch money. Schein's article came with a bit of a twist. He said it was week one and he was happy about that and so he was going 100% positive. That fits a prediction of 4 - 0.

You have a problem with one word? And they ranked us 19th? Looked like a pretty reasonable writeup to me. They think Darnold and Bell are going to suck. They could be right or wrong about that, but it's not an unreasonable guess. I agree with you that the D didn't look pliable at all to me, but 19th looks pretty reasonable to me.

I like him so far. I think he's got a chance to be good. But changing up tactics when you're failing utterly early can hardly be considered genius.

Good stuff, though with this small a sample it means little. Still, I'm not worried about the defense at all.

No.

Trubisky's not bad. And in the first game of the second season, a problem is just as likely to be a problem that will disappear or a fluke as a long-term problem.

Saw the news about the Pats on the screen at Tony Roma's tonight eating with the wife. Immediately thought about getting back here and pointing out how thunderously, magnificently wrong I was. I mean, there's wrong, and then there's stunningly dumb, and that's what I was here. "1000 to 1 shot," jeez what an absolute eejit. This'll be a good thing for me to learn from. It's hard to be wronger than I was here. I can't imagine him lasting on that team, but if I've proved anything today, it's that you shouldn't listen to me on this issue.

That's not so much AB as it is AB since 2017 or so. As a young guy, he was a team player. For whatever reason, his last two or so years in Pittsburgh, that changed. Could it be CTE? Maybe. Could it be ego and success and riches? Yup, absolutely. Success has ruined a lot more people than traumatic brain injury. But for whatever reason, he's changed. And it's not like things that start in locker rooms stay in locker rooms. If that were so, we wouldn't have learned about his problems in 2017 and 2018 in Pittsburgh or this year in Oakland. But we did. And that's a huge change from the beginning of his career. Somewhere I remember someone being quoted early as saying something like, "when he gets money, he'll become a monster." He wasn't a monster at the time. I'll quick look it up and edit it into this post. He wasn't always the dick he is today.

Can't see NE signing him. They sign guys who've been humbled for a year or two, guys who are cheap (maybe Brown will be this time) and guys willing to subvert themselves to the system, often because they've been out in the cold for long enough to make them desperate for a way back in. Brown shows no signs whatsoever of being willing to subvert himself to Belichick's system. 1000 to 1 shot right now, IMO. I can see him getting a contract, but can't see any team giving him significant guarantees, and he asked out of Oakland when his guarantees disappeared. I wonder if he's going to take the year off. Purely a guess, but I think that's what will happen.

I'm happier with the News than the Athletic, though I get both. The News just provides a lot of solid content. I was surprised by how few Bills stories the Athletic has. Good writing, deeper stories, but not much content. And it's hard to crank out deep content consistently. They do a good job but most stories aren't significantly better than you find elsewhere, IMO. I'll stay with both, probably. Neither is as good as the News was before they let so many people go. That was the Golden Age, when Graham and Sully and the rest were with the News.

Didn't seem lukewarm on Allen to me. More like 80% positive but noting that he has work to do. More like balanced and acknowledging that he is a youngster, IMO.

Used to live there during the Riggins - Theismann - Gibbs glory years. They were a smart, hell, a textbook organization with obnoxious fans. Glad to see what has happened to that organization since. I don't see them ever becoming great while owned by Snyder, happily.

Yes. But also 6-10 one year before.

I'm not a Gruden believer, but I don't see anything terribly damning there. Rebuilds suck, it's the nature of the beast. The question is what happens in the third, fourth and fifth years. I think Gruden's going to fail there, but that could easily be dead wrong. I hate the move they made to get rid of Mack. But if they're competing at a very high level another couple of years down the road, it will be a non-issue.

Yeah? I don't think that's correct. Some Steelers did indeed say that, but I've never seen even one example of that referring to his early years. They were talking about his last couple of years in the black-and-gold. Many have said that he has changed a great deal.

That's a good point. One of the things I noticed from the research (it ain't like I made a career of it, I only spent half an hour. The word "research" here is probably overselling what I did, but it was actually really interesting.) was that several sites noted that the word can really sting in the South but that in the North it has no real effect or power. I would suspect most Buffalo fans (me too) are looking at the use of this word as an insult from the outside.

That's one guess about the origin, but there are others. There's one use of "cracker" from Shakespeare. "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?" I found your post interesting and researched it, and it just isn't clear how it developed. Here's a quote from a CBS article on it's use in the Trayvon Martin case: "The origin of cracker is murky. Some sources suggest it came from overseers who commanded slaves. Others say it derives from a Scottish word for boasting. At The Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, Bill Ferris says it emerged in the 1700s as a descriptive term for drovers who used small whips to move their livestock through the pine barrens along the Gulf of Mexico. 'They were basically poor people. White people. A class of people who were landless.' Initially, cracker was not a pejorative term, but Ferris says it has become one, the equivalent of redneck. Its meaning and intensity as an insult depends on who is saying it and who is listening. For example, a white who might not object to being called a cracker by another white might consider Martin's use of the phrase offensive and evidence of ill intent." Here's another, from NPR: "Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.)" It's interesting that both say that if "whip-cracker" is indeed the basis of it, that it refers to cracking the whips referred to doing it when driving animals (a career for poor people), that it's not a slavery reference at all. Instead it's a reference to manual labor. And that's if whip-cracking is indeed the origin, which is not clear. As for Antonio Brown, the Steelers say that early in his career he was a terrific guy, very team-oriented and selfless. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering if the way his behavior has become so very erratic is a result of too many blows to the head. Whether or not that is a factor, it's a sad sad story about a guy losing his way.