Thurman#1

We can agree that he has the same problem but worse? Great. I'm glad too. As for the discussion over there, I've seen it before and it's beside the point. Accuracy and precision are listed as synonyms very often. There's a slight difference in physics labs. As for the real world, though, they're much the same thing. Bottom line is this. Those people who make an equivalence between completion percentage and accuracy are wrong. That is a false equivalence. As is "balls that can be caught" and accuracy. A ball thrown well behind a guy who manages to jack on the brakes and dive backwards and make the catch is a "ball that can be caught," proved by the fact that it is caught. But the idea that it's accurate is completely laughable. They are not the same thing and not even particularly close. Accuracy can't be counted. It's nebulous, in football. You counted "catchable," which itself is reasonably often debatable, but far more countable and quantifiable than accuracy. More countable, less useful, as most QBs, including the not very good ones, can throw a very high percentage of catchable balls while still not being good enough for NFL starters. Tyrod threw a lot of catchable balls.

Yes, correct, he has an accuracy problem in the same manner as all the other rookies do. But worse, as pointed out in this article and plenty of others. He could improve if his mechanics can be improved. I'm hopeful, myself. And you keep conflating accuracy as "balls that can be caught," which is just as false a comparison as saying it's equal to completion percentage. It's equal to neither.

Saying Rosen is a failed experiment is like saying the bread has failed because it hasn't risen ... before you put it in the oven. Way way way way too early. With maybe two or three more way's.

I think that's overstating it. He's not looking further down the road completely. He's hoping things come together this year. And they could. The way I'd put it is that they're expecting success in 2020 and expecting improvement in 2019 with some degree of hope that there's enough to make a real run. But yeah, his primary goal is continuous long-term success, and he values that over immediate success. And you're obviously correct that a lot of fans here and generally focus on the next year rather than the long term.

Yes, worst to first. Every year? Not hardly. But yeah, it's not wildly unusual. But that's a completely different thing from how long a rebuild takes. John's response was "It does when you are completely rebuilding it." You completely ignored that and talked not about rebuilding but about teams suddenly getting better. But again, John referred to rebuilding it. Of your two examples here, the Bears and the Fins, neither was a rebuild. Last year was Pace's fourth as GM. He had been working on putting together a good roster for a long time. You can act like the turnaround was all the result of what happened early last year, but it wasn't. It was a roster that had been improving for years, and a GM who decided to reload with a different coach. In your other example, 2007 was the third year, not the first, for Dolphin GM Randy Mueller. Yeah, they fired Saban but they weren't rebuilding. Bringing in your new starting QB in a trade (Pennington) is the textbook definition for reloading, in fact. For another example, the Walsh 49ers I referred to above went from six wins to a Lombardi in one year. But that year was the third year of a rebuild. In fact, that's how rebuilds work most of the time. There's two, three or even four years of team-building and then at some point the successful rebuilds hit a tipping point. Hitting a tipping point in one year doesn't mean all the improvement is only the result of one year's work. In fact, that's not the way it works, but most particularly so in rebuilds.

Sure it matters. Small good moves are what good teams are built through. And two good years of McDermott and 1.5 of Beane are not long enough to judge a rebuild by. Same deal as with one move, but more so. It's true that they're not there yet. But rebuilds take more than two years, that's just the deal. The best rebuild I know of is the Walsh rebuild of the 49ers, a Super Bowl victory in three years. But in his second year, they had 6 wins. Witchery is way overstating it, IMO, but it was a good deal for us, a very good deal. You're right, BillsVet, that they have a lot more to prove. But surely we can still talk about individual moves. What else would we talk about this early in the process?

That's sexist. Kegels are for gentlemen as well.

No, he was not comparing them. He said nothing about Flacco in that post.

Yeah, nobody good will sign here. Unless we like offer 'em money. I hate that.

Would Incognito - Martin count? Did anyone else get angry at the same time Barry Sanders retired? Or Megatron? I can't remember it. Did anyone leave the Steelers when Kevin Greene or Joey Porter got out? I don't remember it? Probably not many simply because the teams hold the whip hand, not the players. Leaving is a long, tough struggle, except if you retire, especially back before free agency, but even now unless your contract is up, and even then there are the tags. And honestly, I'm not convinced there's a ton of dysfunction there at Three Rivers. The Bell thing is mostly about money. That's not dysfunction. And I'm not clear what Brown's problem is but I think it's quite possible it's a problem with Brown himself. Is that dysfunction? Honestly, I don't know. Two very serious problems at the same time, that's for sure, but is it team dysfunction?

This has got nothing to do with rebuilding. Rebuilding isn't a tactic for every year. It's for when you absolutely suck or for when you've been mediocre for a long time. Of course they haven't rebuilt. But the Seattle renaissance absolutely started with a rebuild.

Well, if you're saying that "paying 'this' guy that much is a bad idea," then the fact that he's the 7th or 8th highest paid guy on the Bills has absolutely zero relevance to your argument. I'm "making that rookie ***** up," right? Yeah, I'm sure there must be someone out there who knows what the ***** you are talking about. Not me, though. Everything I said about rookie contracts is true. I may not have expressed it well ... I was editing it as you answered, but it's true. We're a young team and a lot of our better players are on rookie contracts and thus cheap. "Pay up for true difference makers," you say? Please. You don't get "true difference makers" for $4.3 to $5 mill after the rookie contract is over. And more, you're acting as if you know how this guy, Long, will do. And you don't. Your opinion is that he's a low demand castoff but actually he got a much higher 2nd contract ($9 mill a year if I remember correctly) till he was thrown out due to a regime change in NY. There might have been plenty of demand for him. We don't really know. What we can be sure of is that Beane valued him in this system as worth what they paid ... which is a sort of high-paid journeyman rate. We'll see if he's worth that. My guess is he will be, but we'll have to wait to see. And this really is the eternal cycle ... 1) Bellyache for two years at the pain of the rebuild and cap clearing. 2) Then get excited about all the cap space. 3) Then expect that the cap space will all be spent, and that lots of top FAs will be brought in ... despite the GM telling us he's going to be judicious about spending. 4) Then when the GM does in fact do his best to be judicious and the guys brought in aren't the top two or three guys in FA, we moan and whimper in two ways ... If the contracts are low, complain they're dumpster-diving cheapskates If the contracts are medium, complain that they spent too much without getting one of the top few FAs at his position. ... and on and on and on.

So, you're spinning this so that the many young guys on rookie contracts and therefore cheap, like Josh Allen, Tre White, Edmunds, Milano, etc ... that's somehow bad. Because that's all it means that Long is the 7th or 8th highest paid Bill ... that we don't have a lot of high-paid guys right now. A lot of rookie contracts. That's not a bad thing, just the opposite, really. Most teams are a bit older so a guy paid this much would be more like 9th to 11th. On the Rams it'd be the 13th highest. It cracks me up. People get all excited about having FA money to spend, they go on and on about how we need to get better at OL, and then when we start ... cue the moans and screams about how we're spending too much.

This is what it seems like to me. And it's precisely what Beane said would be their approach to free agency ... bring in guys to fill all the holes, so they don't have to draft from need. And yet spend judiciously. That's what we've got here. He looks like a guy who if they can't bring in a Paradis or draft a Bradbury or someone like him, that this guy would be a guy you wouldn't mind as a starter, at guard or center. An upgrade on what we have. But if we do bring in some of those other guys Long would be a backup far better than what we have now. People want Beane to go nuts and bring in tons of expensive FAs. That's not judicious. We'll be seeing a bunch of guys of Long's level brought in, IMO.

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.