Thurman#1

I'm sure they will. But part of the way they sustain it may well be refusing to cover certain things like this one.

I like your post a lot. Worth noting, though, that on guys like Taron Johnson and Phillips, you're not allowed to renegotiate before three years are finished.

A well-paid QB makes it harder. But not impossible. You can argue that Brady isn't highly paid compared to most QBs and you'd certainly be right, but he's still expensive. This year his cap hit is $22M, and next year $27 M. And the Pats seem to do OK. The Broncos won recently with a highly paid QB. The Giants and the Saints too.

It completely looked like roughing the passer, a hit to the head. Until the video was slooooooooooooooooooooooowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. It was a wrong call but extremely close. Which is why the announcers also got it wrong till they saw the slo-mo.

Not very exciting to me, as they're all either rushing records or rookie records or both. I'm hopeful, though.

'Cause it's the truth and so obvious it's too dull for those who need more than the truth. And a perfect example of how nuts home-town fans are. No way they rig any of this because it's too stupid. Monster risk for negligible reward and enough people would have to be in on it that it would be absolutely guaranteed to go public. Nobody's that stupid. It would be like being married to Kate Upton, she has a prenup that says you get absolutely nothing if you get caught doing any form of cheating and when you're flat sober you see an unattractive woman at a party who says she's not going to do any more than kiss you ... and you somehow decide to do it. I suppose there are people out there that dumb, but the NFL knows it has a golden goose.

The Hogan play could have been called either way. The other two were bad calls but the Brady call at real speed was unbelievably close. The announcers called it roughing the passer and it looked that way to me too. It was only after the slo-mo replay that the announcers and everyone else too, could see it wasn't a head hit. The officials don't get the benefit of slo-mo. The Chiefs made a lot more mistakes than the officials did.

A lot more mistakes are made by the players than by the refs. MIstakes are part of the game. Coaches, refs, players, hell, I'm sure the waterboys miss a guy here and there. It's humanity. We ain't perfect. Fans too.

OK, we won't tell you. But even if we don't, they're not. What you see is people making mistakes, which happens in every human endeavor.

"... enemy of good." Am I right? Do I win something?

First, the Colts also brought in Glowinski in FA, which was huge. And Slauson, who played five games, also was an FA. More, the Colts did a great job fortifying their OL, yeah ... but wasn't an awful lot of that because really good OL prospects happened to be available when they picked? There doesn't appear to be a Quenton Nelson in this draft, and you can't force that to be so just because you wish one was. Long-term, this team should work hard on building the OL, and that includes using the draft to seriously address it. But that doesn't mean we should force OL even if it's bad value. I'm not sure whether or not there will be good value at OL when we pick. If there is, I would not be against going OL. And I disagree about your take on FA. There will be plenty of solid decent guys available, guys who will be real upgrades for us even if they're not top ten guys at their position. And with their available cap space they might even bring in one of the top two or three guys available at C or RT.

Yup. The Pats are maybe the offense in football over the last several years and virtually the whole country except New England wants them out of the Super Bowl. Good competition is the key thing to keep people watching. Inigo, I respect your point but disagree. 9-6 games at half-time can be found very exciting indeed, and by large audiences. It depends whether the 9-6 is a result of poor play or excellent defense. You're right that a 9-6 game between two three-win teams at the end of the year can be seen as boring. Because it's bad football. But was the Philly - Chicago game boring last weekend when it was 6 - 3 at halftime? Eagles - Saints was 14-10 at halftime and only 10 more points were scored. Was it boring? And yeah, Rams - Chiefs was often thought of as the game of the season. Would that be true if there was that much scoring in every game? It was considered terrific because it was so unusual.

The rule changes are most of it, but yeah, those rule changes also allowed things like the spread offense and other strategies. But while overall the passing game is favored by the league ... the league is also a cyclical thing. First defense gets the upper hand, then offenses adjust and innovate and catch up and become more important. Then the defenses adjust and innovate. It's the way things work. It's also never the way fans think. Each time there's a change, most fans think it will last forever that way. But the cycle will happen again here. Defenses will better become able to handle the spread and the rule changes over the next two to three years.

Yup. All males. Mostly Americans. Athletically talented. But no, there are plenty of teams that aren't particularly happy with their last two drafts. Plenty of teams that haven't showed as much as these guys. It's early. A lot to show yet, but it's a promising list. In comparison, look at Miami, and I'm no big Miami fan but would anyone trade the Bills drafts for these guys? 2018: Minkah Fitzpatrick, Mike Gesicki, Jerome Baker, Durham Smythe, Kalen Ballade, Cornell Armstrong, Quentin Poling, Jason Sanders 2017: Charles Harris, Raekwon McMillan, Corder Tankersley, Isaac Asiata, Davon Godchaux, Vincent Taylor, Isaiah Ford Or look at Detroit or Tampa. Those were the first three I thought of and they would trade their guys for ours in a second, IMO. I bet plenty of other teams would too in terms of quality.

Yup. Two GMs. McDermott ran the first draft, and then Beane. And yeah they traded talented players. Which has nothing to do with how well they seem, so far, to have picked. They still have a lot to prove but so far so good in their drafts.

Yup, a brilliant OC. Undermined as an HC by a flawed personnel acquisition staff. And probably a bad DC as well. OP, thanks for posting, it was a good article. Amazing to think their two top QBs were Brodie Croyle and Damon Huard ... and then both got injured and they had to go even further down the depth chart ... and did pretty well on offense. I mean, after the top two were out and they put in Thigpen and the new offense they went from 257 YPG to 340. That's insane. In those days making that leap was going from 31st in the league to 16th ... by installing a new offense mid-year with Thigpen as your QB. And now we see how very influential all that stuff has become. Again, thanks, OP. No, look at the stats. It worked very well. Most of his carries were direct snaps and he averaged 4.4 and 8.3 YPC in his two years here. Not a lot of carries. I think one of the main reasons they ran him was to give defenses yet more to prepare for, to make the Bills harder and much more time-consuming to game-plan for.

The problem there wasn't so much drafting for need. It was drafting poorly. But yeah, go for talent. Don't reach.

We'll fill in the offence in FA. When the draft comes along we'll be going BPA, as we should. We have needs on D as well as on O. How would you feel if we go O in the first at #9 and he plays like a #20 pick, which is where he should have gone? That's what happened with Donte Whitner. Picked too high and was treated as an underachiever for the rest of his career here when the fault was the Bills for picking him too high. Ideally we would go offence. But if there's no guy there worth the pick on O - and that's how it maybe looks - it would be crazy to force it.

Goff was always considered very highly ranked. Wentz played at a small school, so it took things like the Senior Bowl and interviews to show that he belonged. "Plenty of quarterback prospects from small schools have found success in the NFL, but they lean on the pre-draft process to prove themselves. The start of Wentz's meteoric rise in NFL Draft circles really happened at the Senior Bowl. In January, Wentz went down to Mobile, Ala. on a mission to prove he belonged despite playing in the FCS. He approached the week of practices at the Senior Bowl knowing he had the mental makeup to fit in. His size, 6’5, made him stand out even next to players from Alabama and Clemson who had just recently played for the FBS national title. The issue was whether the speed of the game would catch up and ultimately overtake Wentz. It didn’t. He looked as comfortable as any quarterback there and quickly showed off his leadership. When the North team did warmups, it was often Wentz leading the way. He was the one directing players, and giving encouragement after a blown play. He was doing all the little things you see the best quarterbacks in the NFL doing." "'I think about a month ago, Carson Wentz was an idle curiosity, a I-AA kid from North Dakota State,' draft analyst Mike Mayock said on NFL Network. 'He went to the Senior Bowl, confirmed his status as a top-tier quarterback, came to the Combine and I think had the cleanest workout of anybody in terms of arm strength, his feet looked good, he showed his athletic ability. For my money, he made some money.'" https://www.sbnation.com/nfl-mock-draft/2016/4/21/11477652/jared-goff-carson-wentz-2016-nfl-draft Not the same thing as this year at all. None of these guys are coming out of nowhere from North Dakota State. This really is a pretty weak draft for QBs. It's not as weak as 2013, but it's not a good year. And while trading down could happen, this isn't the year when it's an obvious likelihood. This year the numbers for us can come from free agency. We're in good cap shape for the first time in a very long time. What they need from the draft this year is core guys, impact guys. And the odds on getting that kind of guy usually drop as you trade down. I'm nearly always hoping for a trade down. Not so much this year. If a QB or two does slide above us, it will hopefully push down a real impact player to us.

Packers fans and Aaron Rodgers himself? "Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers says he wants to play until 40 without losing any of his athletic ability. 'My goal is to be able to move like I do or close to how I do and still be able to do that at 40 … just because nobody’s been able to do that and still move around the same,' Rodgers told King ..." https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=kuxBXODIJMXk-Aaz6K2QCA&q=aaron+rodgers+athleticism&btnK=Google+Search&oq=aaron+rodgers+athleticism&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2198.7596..8229...1.0..0.128.2320.22j4......0....1..gws-wiz.....6..35i39j0j0i10j0i22i30j0i8i13i30j0i13i30j33i21j33i160.8_sVYITTfBY Hell, even Brady talks about Rodgers that way. "'Well I think he does things that no one in the league has ever done or can do, just because of his physical ability. And some of the plays he makes, they're just phenomenal,' Brady said. 'And I've seen a lot of them. Not just the throws, the scrambles, he had one in the Giants game ... some of the plays yesterday, it's just his style of play. And he's been doing that for a while. I always love watching his tape, admiring all the things he can do, because I can't do many of those things.'" https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/tom-brady-gushes-over-aaron-rodgers-i-cant-do-many-of-those-things/ And of course they don't talk about the other three you picked as athletic, because they're not especially athletic. But Rodgers really is. And gets talked about that way. As did Steve Young. As do Russell Wilson, Marcus Mariota and Andrew Luck. It's not code for anything but being athletic. And yeah, some people say Allen's got problems in the passing game. But they don't need to use code to do it. Hopefully he'll develop out of it.

It isn't blind faith to think the experts - in nearly any area - know more than the people whose expertise in medicine is checking the internet. It's sense. Ah. Trolls or internet experts who know everything from their couch. Desperate to get the thread ended, and with less than 50 posts. Why am I engaging? Driving nails through my head would be a better use of time, self, than discussing things with people who know way more than the experts 'cause they read a few articles.

It isn't about what you think. Unless you're trained as a doctor. The experts say it is. "The consequences can be dire. A study published in The American Journal of Medicine found that for every 10 pounds football players gained from high school to college, or from college to the professional level, the risk of heart disease rose 14 percent compared with players whose weight changed little during the same period." Even if they eat better now they've already caused damage. Habits - good or bad - are viciously hard to break. Which doesn't free them from the responsibility of looking after their own health. But playing football requires acquiring this terrible habit. It's sad.

Nothing but you is really your responsibility. But you give to charity a bit, I hope, right? You care about others who are in trouble, right? And they very much did care while they were working. On the DL and OL many or most of those guys need to be overweight and eat like hogs just to do their job. You can't get an NFL job as an OL or DT or 3-4 DE if your weight is 260 normally.

Generally in a crucial year like this one I figure you need impact guys and I don't trade down. This would bring in two firsts, so I'd strongly consider it. If there was someone high I thought might fall to #9 and I was desperate for, or if I thought there were exactly nine guys who were blue chippers and would help this team, I'd understand them turning it down. But I don't see Oakland offering a deal like this. Yup.

This.