Thurman#1

Having examined the grammar here, the word "guy" is neither a participle nor is it dangling. If supported better, both teams might well have come up with good QBs. Or not.

Precisely. There is no closer, there is no continuation ... Meaning it's all there. If there'd been a second tweet to continue it, then "but" could have been a cliff-hanger. There is no second tweet. It's pretty clear what he meant. Y'all are having fun with speculation, but ... " xxx Josh is our guy. xxx It's the only way it makes sense, and yeah, they left off the final quotation mark. Doesn't change the meaning.

Yeah, their skill position guys were maybe a bit better than ours, but their OL was a good deal worse than ours. It wasn't close to a push. Not that our OL was good. They weren't. But Arizona's was considerably worse. I only watched a few games and a few bits and pieces of Arizona, but they could not protect the passer, even as well as we did.

IMO, not yet. I don't think anything about the culture will start to feel permanent until they start winning and can therefore be sure that McBeane will be around for awhile. I think they'll be here for quite a while, myself, but right now that's only a guess. They'll have to have an idea that that culture and those leaders are not going away in a couple of years, and that their approach brings success. Once they see that, the culture will start to seem permanent.

This is fair enough, a good point, really. But the bottom line is that mocks are hugely possible for a reason. And that reason is that they combat boredom in a massively boring time of year. I respect people who aren't interested yet. I read a lot of them this time of year, personally, while still being aware that we know far too little to be realistic about team needs. They get me thinking.

The question should be more specific than that. Something more like ... of guys who hit a woman, then spend three or four years without hitting a woman or having any (off-field) violence issues ... what's the percentage who will do it again. And I don't know the answer but I know it's not 0% and I know it's not 100%. I strongly guess it's between 20% and 80% and I don't know enough to make an educated guess. And in that area, you can't depend on statistics. You have to look at the guy himself to make your decision.

This'll have a major effect. I might consider him a couple of rounds down. Doubtless they'll do due diligence on him, including interviews of him, of the people involved in the incident and of people who've been witness to how his life has gone since. If they are convinced, I wouldn't mind seeing them draft a guy who would be out for a year in the third or fourth.. More, at that price, you could cut him without much worry if he had another incident of some kind.

The idea that teams would run around offering jobs to good mockers is ridiculous. Picking good players for one particular team (scouts / personnel guys) taking into account what the coach tells you he needs and what you learn from interviewing and private workouts and doing all that while fitting into a little bureaucracy/hierarchy/mechanism/structure is a different skill from what mockers do, which is attempt with no mathematical chance of being correct the matches between teams and players. Will Mayock be good? I have no idea, but it's the Raiders. A lot of questions remain. And comparing Mayock and Kiper ignores the massive differences between them. Mayock is an insider compared to Kiper. He's worked for NFL films and the NFL Network, he played, and he's smooth and personable. Kiper is an outsider. Why would anyone think a guy like him would do well in a bureaucracy or a hierarchy? What did Mayock say at his intro PC? "I've been in all 32 buildings for the last fifteen years. I know what it looks, I know what it smells like." Mayock is pretty much the only mock drafter who can say that, or anything like it. Kiper works on evaluating players, but then matching them to teams while being entertaining. It's a different skill set. As for being seen as a clown ... maybe by some fans. Seen by the FOs as part of and maybe one of the faces of an industry that's essentially annoying to the FOs, though completely necessary to football as a whole? Yeah. But Kiper is well-known as a guy with a spectacular rolodex ... well, a spectacularly contact list of FO connections. One of the four or five best in the industry. Was Kiper way too overboard about what he knew, especially as a young guy? Yeah, sure. That old clip where he attacks Tobin is clearly overboard, though it was great TV. He's mellowed out considerably since then. He still stands by his opinion but doesn't attack the GMs the way he did.

Look to the upper right. The full sentence is, "Y’all are having fun with speculation, but ... Josh is our guy."

Or you haven't but your fans have ... endlessly.

Yes, he has a completion percentage issue. And an accuracy problem as well. No, the two aren't one and the same. But yes, he has both. Both may - or may not - be largely due to his mechanics problems. Hopefully he can get better at both.

You're right, they're all off the mark, because what they're attempting to do is statistically impossible. Back when he was submitting his mocks to the Huddle Report, Kiper had a five-year record that was in the top five of all mock-drafters. He's very good at what he does. A good mock draft will have guys in the right neighborhood and a thoughtful look at team needs. Predicting precisely what some one person will do, particularly when they're facing a board that will be different from what the mocker thought it would be ... is impossible. The only way to do well at it is to have sources on the teams feeding you info. And feeding a guy like Kiper or Mayock specifics is a fireable offense. General stuff about who you think is good, mixed in with some red herrings, is common, but actually tell who you'll pick and you'd be gone.

I wouldn't go that far at all. What if Allen got injured? What if they won ten games but didn't make the playoffs? It's all fluid. This early there really is no answer yet to the question of what would happen if they don't make the playoffs in 2020. Thank you for making my point. I was using the word "dumped" because SoCalDeek, the guy I was replying to, used it first. And IMO, "dumped" includes traded, especially when the trade was only for a low-round pick. If you disagree, fair enough, but I think it's pretty reasonable to say they dumped McCarron.

Yeah, it's weird. Because outside of this case, pretty much every player you can think of who is dumped by one team never gets another shot or stays on another roster. Weird. That never happens. Not even to good teams. Take the Super Bowl winners, for example. They've never dumped a guy and had him stick on another roster. Yeah, um, no. There's no way to say "literally" that someone is the worst. Worst is a value judgment. An opinion. You could probably, with enough grammatical and factual rejiggering, come up with a sentence that specified certain statistics in which he was the worst, but that sentence would have a ton less impact. Peterman shouldn't have been on the field, we now know. But sometimes you have to put a guy in game situations to be sure of that. And when the results come in, then you have more info to base a judgment on. The final story of Peterman hasn't yet been written. He might end up surprising. Or not. We'll see as time passes. As for criticizing the decision ... they've already admitted it was a mistake. The point has been made, by Beane himself, that he made a mistake by not bringing in Anderson earlier.

Dude, really interesting article. Thanks for posting it. I ended up going through the mentions of specific plays and running the plays on NFL Game Pass. Fascinating stuff. Thanks again. Make or break year? Not at all. They pretty much get another year outside of a complete and utter meltdown. Yes, that was a mistake, one they've already owned up to and learned from. But the owners love them and understand the value of patience and continuity.

Didn't realize you were in Europe. I have some of the same issues with various sites because I live in Japan. 1) Tyrell Williams 2) John Brown 3) Adam Humphries 4) Devin Funchess 5) Golden Tate 6) Cole Beasley 7) Randall Cobb 8 ) Donte Moncrief 9) Tavon Austin 10) Cordarrelle Patterson Capaccio does have notes in here that some of these guys might cost too much, some are mostly slot guys and some are less receivers than "give him the ball in space" guys. I thought it was an interesting article.

The autocorrect on here is nuts lately. I get "corrected" to different words a couple of times every post, it seems.

Yeah, a lot of these guys spend their free time hanging out with film school guys. So they can talk about The Sorrow and the Pity and custom order videos. If it were friends, only a few guys would have videos out there. More, those videos don't help the players market themselves to the teams. The teams don't look at highlight videos, they look at game videos to see the good but also the bad as well. It's guys looking for lots of Youtube hits. For high school guys it's different. They might have to market themselves to colleges if they're not the five-star guys. But those videos aren't the ones you're seeing in this thread. Here's an example of a site that makes videos. One of Polite's videos comes from them. He's not doing it because he's a Jachai Polite fan. He's doing it for hits. https://www.youtube.com/user/gticki Here's another guy who has yet another Polite video and he's got a ton of FSU and Auburn guys along with a ton of other stuff. https://www.youtube.com/user/ChrisLee1204 Another: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGFxp2JvE08LUSA0bRbdHKQ Don't blame Polite for this stuff. A lot of people do these things without knowing anything about the guy but that he's a good popular player. Not that it never happens. About halfway down this story is the video his uncle took with his cellphone of the play on TV where he chased the guy down about 30 yards downfield. The quality's a bit different. https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/10/23/jachai-polite-florida-gators-mom-twitter-nfl-draft

OK, I think I get it. But it still seems that you're saying this is more about you than about Kelsay. Which is much about what I'm trying to say. Kelsay should not be blamed for being the guy he is, as long as he gave everything he had to improve himself as much as possible. From all accounts Kelsay was an extremely hard worker. You wanted someone else? A different kind of player? IMHO that's reasonable, but singling out Kelsay for blame isn't. It's the GMs who brought him in and didn't bring in a pass rusher who could beat him out ... or maybe the coaches who said they didn't need pass-rushing DEs and could scheme pressure. Your post here is pretty reasonable, much more so than much of the vitriol Kelsay receives. But he does receive it. When the blame should fall on the personnel staff.

Mark Gaughan of the Buffalo News. https://buffalonews.com/2019/02/11/buffalo-bills-josh-allen-completion-percentage-analysis-2019/ Excerpts to come: "Josh Allen has a lot of low-hanging fruit to grab in his quest for better accuracy in the NFL. Allen completed an NFL-low 10.1 passes per game within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage in 2018. The league average for the 32 starting quarterbacks was 16.5 completions per game on "short passes," within 10 yards of the line, according to an analysis of data from Pro Football Focus. "Allen also had the lowest completion percentage on short passes. The Bills rookie completed 75 percent of his throws within 10 yards of the line, which isn’t quite as good as it sounds. The league average for starting QBs was 81 percent." ... and ... "Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll acknowledged at the end of the season that Allen needs to hit his checkdowns better. 'People are playing Josh a little bit different than they play some other people, whether it’s a deeper safety, the corners bailing off,' the Bills’ offensive coordinator said. 'I think we can help ourselves, too, by taking what they give us on some of those verticals.' "The Bills did not try to be a horizontal, possession-passing offense for most of 2018. That’s not necessarily best suited to a rookie quarterback. Allen’s big arm is a deep-passing threat to the defense, and the emergence of Robert Foster helped the deep passing game improve the second half of the season." ... and ... "In an annual study by PFF, Allen’s 'accuracy percentage' was a league-low 33 percent on 'underneath' throws. Those are specific routes defined as longer than screens and swing passes but shorter than intermediate crossing routes in which the receiver needs to be led with the pass. And that 33 percent isn’t the actual completion percentage, it’s the rate of accurately delivered balls, essentially into the frame of the receiver. Only two other QBs were under 50 percent on such passes (both Eagles QBs, Carson Wentz and Nick Foles). "On the plus side, Allen’s accuracy percentage on “stick routes,” essentially intermediate routes, on a line with the receiver facing the QB, was 71 percent, according to PFF. That was better than the league average of 68 percent. "Another indication of the need to improve the Bills’ possession passing game is how long Allen held the ball (3.2 seconds on average) – the longest in the NFL, according to PFF. Of course, part of that figure stems from the fact Allen has more ability to extend plays than most QBs. "But when Allen got rid of the ball in 2.5 seconds or less, his completion percentage was 75.7 percent, near the league average of 78.6 (and adjusted for drops, throwaways, etc.) When Allen held the ball 2.6 seconds or more, his completion percentage was second worst in the league, at 53.5 percent (with the league average at 68.9)." There's a bunch more in the article, including mentions of footwork and throwing technique mechanics he needs to work on. The numbers are interesting. Clearly he's got accuracy issues, which we're all aware of. But it's interesting to see that two specific areas where it turns up are specifically what PFF calls "underneath throws" and throws where he held the ball longer. Gaughan of course mentions that another year of experience should help and that improving the receiving corps may also help.

And they took over a bad defense and built an excellent one. They cleaned up a horribly bollixed salary cap. They finally after all these years bit the bullet and did what had to be done to trade way the hell up high and bring in a guy who at least has the potential to be a real franchise QB. And the two drafts have been really good. Yeah, they've made some mistakes. But for every coach they've fired they've kept more. Two veteran QBs to assist Allen and back up? Nothing wrong with it ... they're both dirt cheap. Beane has admitted he should have brought in Anderson as soon as he traded McCarron. So yeah, they have made some real mistakes. But the mistakes are in the minority. They still have a lot to prove but they've been obviously promising and their methods are smart. Seems like that hasn't been true of a Bills GM since Polian ... and Butler if you ignore his inability to handle the salary cap. They still have a lot to prove but I'm really excited about a group that seems obviously to be headed in the right direction.

Of course he has. Beane has only had one draft. Not to mention that most of the personnel work they've done have been all about bringing in a QB while cleaning up the cap. GM work, especially when it starts with a rebuild, nearly always takes longer to evaluate than coaching. Beane's been here a shorter time and is doing a job that takes longer to (reasonably) evaluate. Considering Polian's son Chris was the one making the personnel decisions the last three years of Bill's reign in Indy, the last team Bill worked with in a personnel capacity were the 2006 Colts. Who did alright.

I don't have a problem with criticism of the GM for not bringing in better players. It makes sense. I think it makes no sense to criticise a guy for playing at his absolute best, doing everything he can. And Kelsey did that, in games, in practice, and he was a team leader in the locker room. We had plenty of players who weren't especially good. Why single out Kelsay? There is no real reason. After the first season or two they knew he wasn't going to get a lot of sacks except from persistence. The guy they brought in to get him out of the lineup was Maybin. That should not be blamed on Kelsay. Do you think it was Jachai Polite who made that highlight video? I would bet that is not the case.

LDE is not the most important defensive position and it was even less so back in Kelsay's day. Kelsay was a very good run stopper who didn't have a lot of talent at rushing the passer. If he is emblematic, it's only because fans keep saying it's so. It's not his fault he was a bit overpaid or that they never brought in someone who could take his job. Larry Triplett, John DiGiorgio, Angelo Crowell, Donte Whitner, Ko Simpson, Jeff Posey, Lawyer Milloy, Tim Anderson, Keith Ellison, Kawika Mitchell, Drayton Florence, Nick Barnett, Spencer Johnson ... there were plenty of other players without a ton of talent. Blame the GMs. Was it Kelsay's fault that when the GMs decided they needed a pass rush from the left side the guy they chose to accomplish that was Maybin? Agreed. I like Polite. Not sure he's a top nine guy but I like him. I'll trust that Beane will spend a lot more time ranking these guys than I will. Not sure if this has been posted here yet, but this is a good article on Polite. Did you know as a freshman he put on ten pounds because the coaches wanted to get him on the field so they put him at DT? https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/10/23/jachai-polite-florida-gators-mom-twitter-nfl-draft

He did. No player or coach ever questioned his motor or his work habits. He simply wasn't talented. Speed but no muscle. Please. Nobody is saying that a high motor is enough, or that a high motor guarantees success. Of course you have to have talent. Polite appears to have it. Maybin played at 230 in college. Polite at 261. It's not a good comparison. Or the success of Kyle Williams, another lunch pail guy.