Thurman#1

It's not clear. His offenses as OC haven't been that successful, but was that because he sucked or because it's not possible to be successful with the absolute crud he had at QB and on the rest of the roster besides. But the fact that he kept getting OC jobs, including from some of the sharpest coaches in the world, Saban and Belichick, makes it very likely indeed that there is at least a very good argument that he was indeed a good OC hamstrung by bad talent. Yup. But that was because he had good players. See, that's how it works. When an OC you don't like has good players, he doesn't deserve the credit for his offense having success. And when the same guy has bad players, it's not the players fault, it's the coach's fault.

That sums it up for me. He's a rook, but that's not a good look.

It do rollover. https://www.dawgsbynature.com/2018/2/23/17045734/browns-carry-over-58-9-million-in-unused-cap-space-from-2017-to-2018-league-year

I respect his talent but don't think RBs, even Bell, are worth what he wants to get. This is a fiscally conservative front office. They may well agree. They have a lot of money to spend, but also many needs. If they do give any FA a huge contract, I'd bet they do so at a more important position. I could be wrong, though, of course. Agreed. I have no problem with what he's done, but if I were a GM I just wouldn't give him the money he's looking for. But I wouldn't consider a guy who did that any kind of character problem or think of what he's done as anti-team.

Especially as Daboll may not have been in any danger in the first place. It's very reasonable to think they may have considered that most of the problems on offense were caused not by coaching but by young, new or not good enough QBs combined with a roster that has, on offense, more weaknesses than strengths.

Cool. I enjoy yours too even when I disagree.

Nah. The Bills got the win today. Advantage the Bills. Wins are not a QB stat, they are a team stat. Who is posting about what might not have negative relevance to what these two guys will become and what will be said about their careers in the future, but it sure doesn't have any relevance above zero. It's way way way too early to know about Rosen and Allen. And the Taylorheads mostly disappeared within a month of letting him go. Sorry you saw my post before I edited it for politeness, or rather for my rudeness.

It's way way way too early to know about either guy. Gunner's post here makes sense. There's reason for hope ... for both of them, really.

Oh, you're right, it was not confusing. I read the first quarter of your post and it was so very far off-target I didn't bother to read the rest. Once you said Zay Jones was a "complete whiff here. Jones is a backup caliber WR" I figured I didn't need to continue. That is such a poor evaluation. You had been far off on Milano, Phillips, Dawkins and Johnson as well. Why respond to the nonsense in detail, I figured. Looking back again, I was quite right. As for several posters understanding that post ... there's no real evidence of that, is there? Not one person but me responded to it. Looking back, I probably shouldn't have bothered.

Yeah, they traded away the now one-dimensional Dareus and filled it with the one-dimensional Lotulelei. Who gets to meetings and buses on time and avoids legal problems, drug suspensions and the like, unlike Dareus. Whatever else you might think of McDermott he's earned the right to say he knows how to put a defense together and if he wants Lotulelei, he probably has a reason. And that's some pretty nice spin there about defensive incompetence after the trade. Doesn't hold up to examination at all. The defence was pretty awful for three games in a row there and then played well for the rest of the season. In their last six games plus the playoff game so seven games total, they allowed more than sixteen points only twice, both times to the Patriots. And total over five seasons isn't the way to look at charges. It's not how they're looking at it at OBD. They are getting their cap house in order. To do that they used a strategy which works together with the rebuild. They were willing to use dead cap money to move money that would have strangled us in the future forward into this year's dead cap category. Yeah, that hurt us this year, but opened up a ton of space and possibility in the future, precisely what's called for in both a rebuild and in a cap cleanup. Couldn't agree more that they got lucky to get in the playoffs. I wish they'd lost a few more games last year. I was hoping they would completely rebuild, dumping guys like Tyrod and McCoy and a few others without whom we would have won several games less. Instead, IMHO they valued winning too much, which meant they had to give too much draft capital away - two seconds, the #23 pick and Corey Glenn besides, to trade up for Allen. If we'd been picking higher we could have gotten him at the same spot much cheaper, or maybe they could have traded up to the #3 spot and pre-empted the Jets, giving them a wider choice of QB.

Not at all. It only made sense. He's got a $16 mill a year contract to play only against the run. He's wildly underperforming, as he has since pretty much the instant he signed that huge second contract. Letting him go cost us $13 mill in dead cap. But keeping him would've cost us around $49 mill over the rest of his contract, (not including the salary money we saved by shipping half his 2017 salary over to Jax) and he is greatly underperforming that contract. Yeah, he's costing us a ton of dead cap, but we're saving a lot more over the next few years by not keeping him. And this rebuild has as one of its many causes that they promised the Pegulas that they'd clean up the cap by the end of this year. And one way to do that is by eating dead cap this year in exchange for cap room down the road. And the pick we got for Marcell turned out to be Wyatt Teller who so far looks very promising indeed. Plus he may have been more talented back in the day. But not any more. The Jags are playing him only on run plays. It is pretty questionable whether he's any better than Lotulelei. He was back when he was averaging seven or eight sacks a season. Not so much so now he's averaging less than two a season.

It isn't about mental toughness. Or more specifically, that's one component but quite a small part. And again, the NFL pretty much accepts that guys get ruined. Josh Allen himself has been quoted on this. It's not nearly as clear exactly what ruins guys, but it's pretty much accepted at this point that it happens. And it ain't toughness that's the big problem. It's about how difficult it is to very quickly master an immensely complex system. Which is why some guys are considered NFL-ready and others are considered projects. The project guys aren't less tough. They know less. They have a great deal more to learn. They often have mechanical changes which need to be made, and mechanical changes aren't made as easily when you're on the field trying to survive. Guys in that situation who reach the limit of what they know and get in trouble have an overwhelming likelihood to revert to what worked for them in the past in complicated situations of jeopardy. So if their mechanics were cleared up in college they're reverting to good habits. But if the mechanics have bad problems they're reverting to bad mechanics and bad habits. It's got nothing to do with toughness. It's far more about how humans learn and how they cope with adversity. The NFL is a spectacularly complex series of systems. Aaron Rodgers, as pointed out above, was bad for his first three years and then the light came on in his fourth training camp. That wasn't because he'd gotten tougher. It was because McCarthy had made major mechanical changes to his motion, because he's spent years in film rooms figuring out how NFL defences worked and how to counter their various strategies and had had time to work out not just the major outlines of what he had to do but to move on to the subtleties. And that's not even mentioning what McGinn talked about as far as he'd had crappy relations with other players but watching Favre handle the huddle taught him how improve himself. Brady was the fourth stringer for a lot of his first season. But by the beginning of the next season he was 2nd. Again, that wasn't because he'd gotten tougher. He had been able to understand the game better. He had a much better framework as far as understanding defences, offences and the rest of it. Handling adversity isn't the problem. Not having the tools to handle the complexity, that's where problems tend to develop. Some of that can't be developed, but plenty of it can. There's a reason that airlines have pilots spend thousands of hours of flight time, hundreds and hundreds of hours on simulators and as co-pilots before they get to pilot the plane. And flying an airline is far far less exacting and complicated than being an NFL QB. Some guys are ready to be NFL QBs, and others aren't. And some can be developed, ala Brady, Rodgers, Mahomet and Brees, though some will never have what it takes. But getting the correct scaffolding is huge. There's a lot of variety in how much people can learn, how well they learn and how each person learns. But even more there are things people have in common, limitations on learning, ways people learn better. And doing something immensely complex when you're not ready doesn't help you learn it. See you on the boards.

Nothing in your quote from Benjamin says he's checked out. It says he's frustrated and angry. Which is reasonable in a guy having a bad season.

This. Kids from that background have a huge advantage in reaching the 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.

42 catches this year? 41 catches last year and 9 before that? I'll need to see an awful lot more. Is this guy really a first rounder? How much separation is he getting? The one route on that tape where he cut, it was really rounded off. He's skinny, will he hold up? Great balance and determination, though, that was impressive.

Yeah, putting him above Orton, Fitz, Flutie, Bledsoe and Tyrod, and really Rob Johnson, VanPelt and Trent for that matter, is based on pure hope. He's got a shot at being really good, but he hasn't been, and any rating that doesn't reflect that begs the question of what they're actually rating. Hah!!! Good point. You got me smiling here, and that's hard to do when talking about 21st century Bills QBs.

The offence has been terrible but it's not so much because of poor personnel decisions. It's more because we had massive salary cap problems we had to solve and haven't committed a ton of financial or draft resources to the offence. Which is reasonable this early in a rebuild. We had too many holes to fill on this team. There were always going to be holes in this roster with their cap problems and the need to bring in a franchise QB without a high draft pick to start with. On offense, they've drafted Allen, two 2nds who you agree appear to have both worked out (Dawkins and Zay) and two 5ths, a 6th and a 7th, in two years. Of course they still have a lot of holes there. Croom's been a pretty decent pickup for a UDFA. Chris Ivory is another good pickup. Isaiah McKenzie looks decent so far. The bottom line, though, is that they simply haven't committed many resources to the offence yet. There weren't enough resources to go around.

They all matter. But yeah, he matters the most, by far. And we simply don't yet know what he is.

Yeah, absolutely, as should anyone be. Your opinion that they've drafted "OK on D, horribly on O" says a lot more about you and how you're forming opinions than it does about how well they've drafted. Defense: 2017 1st: TreDavious White 2017 5th: Matt Milano 2017 7th: Tanner Vallejo 2018 1st: Tremaine Edmunds 2018 3rd: Harrison Phillips 2018 4th: Taron Johnson 2018 5th: Siran Neal That's excellent drafting on defense. These are all very very young guys, of course, But for all but Vallejo (7th) and Neal (5th), they're all either producing above what you'd expect from their draft slot or looking like they have a very good chance of doing so soon. Offense: 2017 2nd: Zay Jones 2017 2nd: Dion Dawkins 2017 5th: Nathan Peterman 2018 1st: Josh Allen 2018 5th: Wyatt Teller 2018 6th: Ray-Ray McCloud 2018 7th: Austin Proehl Thinking that's horrible makes it likely you're either not paying attention or not understanding what you see. "They essentially have nothing from their drafts on offense"? That's a laughable opinion. Wanna say something more reasonable, like, "They still have a lot to prove"? Fair enough, they do, as does nearly everyone drafted that recently. But Jones and Dawkins both look good. Allen ... who knows, it's still incredibly early. With Teller it's still early days, but so far he's outperforming his draft slot and looking promising indeed. The rest, a 5th, a 6th and a 7th haven't showed much but that's pretty typical for guys picked that late. That's a case of not putting many resources into the offense - outside of all the picks it took to bring in Allen - but decent to promising results so far with those they did choose.

This is a hiccup. If there are bunch more incidents then it might be a worry.

How many points did KC have against Arizona with 11 minutes left in the game? 20. Arizona absolutely slowed up the Chiefs. How many points did the Saints score against the Browns? 21. And 24 against the Ravens. And the Broncos held the Rams to 23 points. So they've all been slowed down. Would the Bills be able to do it? The best we can say is maybe. The defense is playing extremely well this year. But the odds against the Bills offense scoring enough to keep the games close are high indeed.

A better time to win? A season or two from now, when our record is, say, 9-3. Or how about the first Super Bowl against the Giants? There are lots of better times to win.

Thanks for your civility. I appreciate it. You ask for my honest reply, and you're not going to like it. Yeah, I absolutely think there's a good chance things wouldn't have gone as well for them without that year / years to learn. A smart, hard-working QB can use a first year on the bench to groove changes to mechanics that can turn out to be career cornerstones, changes that might never have been grooved if not. Mahomes famously stood ten yards or so behind Smith at practices and did the same drops, same movements and saw the same things, and he also spent a ton of time in the film room learning defences and how to handle them. Young QBs can spend a ton of time doing mental reps and film study and can put things together mentally so that when they get their chance, they're far more prepared and ready, so the reps are more valuable and they can concentrate on details and subtleties far more than the rookie who's just trying to survive. The Chargers thought so too. They didn't put Brees in despite having a QB in front of him who was having an awful season. They won 5 games that year, they were really bad and bad QBing was a big part of that, as the guy in front of Brees was the post-Buffalo Doug Flutie, throwing 15 TDs and 18 INTs, putting up a dink-and-dunk 6.6 YPA and an absolutely awful 72.0 passer rating. They didn't keep Brees on the bench because they wanted to keep their playoff chances alive or because they thought the 39 year-old Flutie was the future of the franchise. They did it because they thought it was the best way to give Brees a better chance going forward. And it's very very clear that with Rodgers at least, he indeed made huge steps forward during his time on the bench. He was awful in training camp his first three years or so, but when he came in for his fourth year, with very little game experience under his belt, he was very suddenly a great deal better. Look at this interview of long-time Packers beat writer Bob McGinn: The MMQB: "You documented how fortunate it was that Aaron Rodgers didn’t have to play the first couple of years—he just wasn’t ready." McGinn: “He was a very poor player here for his first two summers and regular-season practices. Fortunately for him, and he knows that down deep, he didn’t have to play early. His delivery was a mess, bad body language, he didn’t know how to deal with teammates. He learned so much from Brett Favre on how to in some ways be one of the guys and relate, and he became much more of a leader. He was really poor and how many great players have ever had a start like that? Not that many. A lot of scouts look at that exhibition tape those first two years and he was a little bit better the third year, but not to any degree, and then he just really developed. He lost a lot of close games in ’08, but by ’09 he was playing great and by 2010 he was maybe the best in the business. " https://www.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/13/themmqb-exit-interview-bob-mcginn-green-bay-packers-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-nfl-beat-writer The widespread NFL opinion on this is that yes it is possible to ruin a QB by playing him too early. No, not every QB needs time on the bench. Some are ready. Others will never be ready no matter what you do. But some guys need development more than others. It doesn't hurt and it's extremely helpful in terms of better understanding by the time you get out there. Hell, Josh Allen himself has himself been quoted saying this.

Hunh? Three first-round picks? No they didn't. Are you counting 2015 #38 pick Preston Smith? I'm going to assume that's what you meant. But I'd argue it's way too early to judge the success of those moves or that kind of tactic, especially with the two 1sts being a rookie and a 2nd year guy at this point. If the Redskins spent two first-round picks and a 2nd as well on their D-line and didn't field a good team (arguable, since they were on a 10 - 11 win pace before Smith went down, but let's assume they weren't good) does that mean it's not a good idea to pick three D-line guys high? Or is it just too early to see how good Payne and Allen will turn out to be? Or did they just make some bad picks in terms of people rather than personnel. In a year or two will that line be destroying QBs? Since they brought in Alex Smith as an FA might that have been a good complementary set of moves? IMHO it's very far from clear, and while drafts generally make up the core of your team, you have to look at all personnel moves together, I think. You make an interesting point, though. It could turn out to look like a real mistake a few years down the line, but I don't think that's a sure thing yet.

Slow down the Rams, Chiefs or Saints? Yeah, probably. They're genuinely a good defense. Make it a competitive game? Nah, our offense isn't going to score much at all. They're genuinely bad. Only well-balanced teams are likely to cause problems for those three teams you mention. The Redskins spent $91 mill on their offense this season and $66 mill on the defense. Just sayin' https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/washington-redskins/positional/ And the Niners spent $105 mill on the offense and $61 mill on the defense. As evidence that you should spend less on the defensive side to avoid being bad, these two teams don't really make your point.