Thurman#1

Yup, you learn more on the field. But some of the things you can learn are really really negative. Look at David Carr. He learned a lot, like how to feel shell-shocked. You can learn to concentrate on the plays and the defense while your mechanics go to hell, for instance. When you're feeling lost out there you're not learning positive things. As for Newton, yeah he had 850 yards in his first two games, but also eight sacks, 3 TDs and 4 INTs, in two losses. And he ground it out for the first four years not ever convincing anyone for sure he'd be a franchise guy until that fifth year. Could he have sped that up by sitting and learning? I don't know. But I know that while Cam had people saying he might well not start, it wasn't nearly as unanimous as the pre-draft word on Allen. More, Cam didn't exactly win the job on great performances. His pre-season totals were 42.1% completions, 1 TD and 0 INTs and 5.3 YPA and a 64.9 QB rating. Derek Anderson was much better for them that preseason. I've said this before, but the three best QBs in the NFL right now are probably Rodgers, Brees and Brady, yeah? All of them started with a year or more on the bench learning the things a QB needs to know from the fundamentals up rather than from the game-plan down, which is what the starter is generally worrying most about.

With that lineup, 1-31 was not unexpected. The Browns know this better than anyone. That's why Hue is still there. In that case, bust please. I'll be much happier if we don't see him on the field for any more than token appearances this year.

Starting a guy can really help him improve. Or it can help him get worse. It doesn't automatically improve you. There are plenty of ways it can hurt you. People don't seem to get this but it's true. It can ingrain bad habits. It can destroy good habits which are in development but not fully ingrained. It can cause your mechanics to degrade at a time when you can't concentrate on repairing them because as a young starter you're much more focused on specifics of game-to-game preparation and adjustment. It can destroy confidence when you fail at times when a better-prepared QB would have succeeded. Concentrating on the wrong things can make you miss out on what you should be concentrating on. And of course it can result in physical injury. When you're prepared and ready, playing is less likely to cause bad habits, as the good ones are already ingrained. You don't have to focus on basics which would otherwise require thought and take away from your handling of the game's subtleties and refinements. What we need to be working on as our #1 priority this year isn't winning this year. It's developing a team that in the middle-term future will be consistently good enough to challenge for titles each year. You don't do that by valuing the short-term over the long-term. Beane and McDermott are highly aware of this and have stated that's what they're working on. The single most important thing that will lead to that is getting Allen ready. Not playing him. Getting him ready. Most likely the best way to do that is to spend a year or so learning from the bench. McCarron and Peterman are plenty good enough to not throw Allen out there right away. Because winning this year's games is less important than developing Allen for the long-term. Because McCarron and Peterman could easily be better than you think. And because it's likely better for Allen. It's great that Allen spent time with Jordan Palmer this year. That could easily cut down the development time he needs. But he's still very likely to need a bunch more than many here want to give.

At the time it was obvious the Pegulas liked him from the beginning. But within a week or two stories came out saying that watching him work had given them tremendous faith in him. He'd been hired to work with Whaley but within that one or two weeks they trusted him a lot more than they had ever trusted Whaley. They saw that in the interviews that he had good plans. When he came in and started working they saw he had the wherewithal to make those plans work and to get things done in an organization.

They aren't. Some are broken by national reporters and some aren't. Anyway, that's like saying "If oranges are so respected how come apples are delicious?" These two things are sometimes sometimes related and sometimes not. There are plenty of ways to get respect. Just in the last couple of days, Graham broke the Brandon story. Nothing wrong with disliking any writer (or movie star or player for that matter). But generally the dislike flows when someone says something bad about the home team, who have been a mediocre to bad team for a very long time.

That and the Triple Crown they also won. And a long history of respect.

You're right that we can't be sure in advance. But Gruden said Wentz was the most NFL-ready guy in years. https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/news/one-nfl-analyst-thinks-carson-wentz-is-the-most-nfl-ready-qb-in-years/ Plenty of people disagreed at the time but it was a bit more of the "He might not be ready," type of thing than the "the team that drafts him will need to give him time to develop" that had been the consensus on Allen ... until Bills fans found he was on our team and got excited.

By camp of, say, his third year? I would feel absolutely terrible. In his first camp? Absolutely fine. No problem at all. It's what to expect. In fact, it's what you expected and rabidly told us for months was true, right? Until he was drafted by Buffalo and so the rose-colored glasses came out in like a day and a half. And using the word bust in a player's first year is flat-out ridiculous. By that standard, Brees is a bust.

Yeah, but Russell Wilson was considered NFL-ready from minute one. It's correct that guys like that don't need to sit. But that's the opposite of what Allen is considered. He's a guy who needs development. Yeah, he's done some of that with Jordan Palmer. But he's no Russell Wilson, who was considered mentally ready but questionable whether he'd ever be tall enough. That ain't Allen. And yeah, Bills fans have changed their mind on how ready he is. But deciding something is true because you want it to be true is a path to be wrong nearly every time. Find, say, three pre-draft evaluations that say he's NFL-ready. Pre-draft, back from when Bills Nation wasn't desperate to see him start as soon as possible. Four quick ones that suggest sitting: Mike Mayock, Peter King, Dane Brugler, Jordan Palmer said he'd benefit from a year to sit. And I could find more, easily. Allen's OC at Wyoming, Brent Vigen. "I think he needs to be put in a situation where they're willing to coach him," Vigen said. "Because there's still room for growth as far as his understanding and how to apply it. I think, obviously, a situation where he could sit and learn, that would be the best for him. But if he is forced into it, what are the pieces around you? What's the defense like? What pressures are put on you to score points? All those things come into play." http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/23244329/josh-allen-wyoming-cowboys-ultimate-boom-bust-2018-nfl-draft-prospect

Hard to see with the quality of the video, and the usual caveats about highlight videos, but he really does seem like he's shot out of a cannon on some of these plays. Impressive. I hope he makes an impact.

I know fans don't like to hear it, but the News is very highly respected nationally for it's sports coverage. Fans tend not to like them because they say bad teams are bad and fans tend not to like that. I don't know Harrington well as I'm not much of a hockey fan but in the AP Sports Editors Awards, this year he won as one of the top ten beat writers in sports writing. And Skurski was in the same top ten. I think the dog tweet is pretty funny, personally, and that Harrington's response was pretty weak. But I like their coverage a lot, personally.

The most recent ancestors built for climbing trees were about 3 million years old. We weren't deceiving anyone back then. We weren't even Homo Sapiens then. And even then its feet weren't climbing feet, they were walking feet. But it was a nice post, Meanie. Glad I had a chance to read it.

If nobody liked Rosen, he'd be looking for a team now. He went #10. Plenty of people liked him, including Arizona. Throughout the process, people have been saying that plenty of traditional teams wouldn't like the guy, that he will challenge coaches and only some teams could handle that. Exactly. And the Giants and Denver both had their guys that they wanted above anybody else. Denver made a deal before the draft to trade back with Buffalo unless their guy was still there. And he was. Durability issues with Rosen? Yeah, fair enough. And that old-fashioned teams and coaches wouldn't want him? Yeah, people have said this all along. Yup, agreed.

The overall data picture tells us very little or nothing. There just isn't a large enough sample of guys from the last 15 years or so who had completion percentages below 60% and yet were picked in the top ten. Three guys? Stafford, Ryan and Allen? Are there any more? What this tells you is that he is an outlier for being picked in the top ten. Guys with completion percentages as low as that, and there are probably hundreds of them over the last 15 years, are generally not considered pro prospects. Yet Allen was, and a top ten guy besides. Why? Because stats don't tell the whole story. Because when the professional evaluators looked at his game they saw some bad signs and a lot of good ones too, and the good outweighed the bad.

The thing that makes people worry is that very few of the people on that list are from the last 12 - 15 years. That's 28 years of data and most of the people are from the first ten years or so, when QB ratings tended to be much lower. If you look at only 2005 and later, the last 13 years, excluding Allen himself you have Henne, Derek Anderson, Hoyer, Matt Ryan, Cutler, Orton, Stafford, Kaepernick and Tyrod. And outside of Matt Ryan and Stafford, that's not an illustrious group. The bottom line, though, is that situations differ, and Allen's success will have little to do with college completion percentage. It'll be about how well he sticks with his mechanics changes, how well he comes along on understanding NFL defenses, and how well he learns to go through progressions correctly and make the right decisions quickly. And likely how quickly he will be asked to play. Like DeShaun Watson last year, Allen is thought of as a developmental guy. But also like DeShaun Watson, Allen spent months working with Jordan Palmer after the season ended. This catapulted Watson forward in his development and understanding of the NFL game. It may well have done the same with Allen. I personally hope that he still sits the bench this year ... the more he knows before he gets out there the better. But if he does end up starting sometime this season, Jordan Palmer's tutelage will likely be a large part of the reason and hopefully will have him much readier than he would(n't) have been otherwise.

The o-line and Benjamin stuff is about next year. And frankly, the first year performance of a rookie QB is not worth worrying about. Even the ones who turn out to be good are often bad the first year. And Allen may well spend that first year on the bench. As for his performance this year vs. last year there are some concerns there. But comparing yards totals and TD totals is absolutely flat-out ridiculous. He threw 373 passes in 2016 and 270 in 2017. Of course he threw for much less yards and TDs. He did have some regression but using qualitative rather than quantitative stats here shows nothing. As for the quantitative problems, it's been reported very widely that he lost all of his best players this year, and that caused a lot of problems. Believe that or not, but that's most of the reason. That and what Peter King reported that "as one official from a quarterback-needy team told me, how difficult it was to scout him because he had so many free rushers coming at him consistently." 41% of the plays he was under pressure, far far more than any of the other QB prospects had. Allen 41% Jackson 36% Darnold 31% Rosen 29% Mayfield 28% Rudolph 23% That would erode anyone's stats. https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/04/18/josh-allen-draft-cleveland-browns-mmqb-peter-king Not that I am convinced about the guy. I'm hopeful but very unconvinced. He just needs to show us, it's that simple.

Nice article. Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

Why? It's not like he's been arrested. He's been fired from his job. And yeah that's been covered in the newspapers but that comes with highly public positions like his. Looks to me like that's exactly what happened. He knew that could happen if he broke the rules, and he didn't just break them he broke them extremely publicly. And then lied to his boss about what was going on. Yeah, his family will be horribly disrupted by this. But it's nobody's fault but Russ's. Assuming that this is what it looks like, that he just had consensual affairs with subordinates. EDIT: I see I'm late and this has already been discussed. But ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances and Russ took the wrong chances.

That could be the explanation, or it could be as someone above suggested, that it got too public. No longer able to be passed without notice because it was just too noticeable. Or loud enough that the boss finally heard about it. It just sounds congruous to me that the Pegulas find out about it and ask some questions. Russ chooses to lie and is found to be lying. I think Kim Pegula at that point might be ready to see the back of him. I have no evidence for that, though, it's just a guess.

Pollock compared him to Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey and Garrison Keillor in terms of behavior. "It was the same type of behavior that sabotaged Matt Lauer ..." He only mentioned the others in this way ... "Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, et al, and now ... Russ Brandon? The list of powerful men brought down by inappropriate behavior with women grew by one ..." http://www.oleantimesherald.com/sports/pollock-brandon-s-exit-wisely-staged-by-kim-pegula/article_cb7fd29e-4e5b-11e8-ad2c-3b2526f9cbbb.html He was only comparing Russ to Cosby and the criminals by saying they were brought down by inappropriate behavior. Not in terms of what that behavior consisted of.

Sigh. Two mistakes in a row for me. I'm not looking good here. Maybe I need to take a few hours off. Thanks for pointing it out, Gunner.

Yeah, assistant GM and director of Pro Personnel. There's never been any real evidence that it was Whaley's deal. Rumors have swirled, but nothing has ever been released about that. Makes sense that he was involved to some degree, perhaps a lot.

D'oh!! You're 100% right, that's what I get for posting too quickly, without fact-checking. Fits the argument I was making even better now, but you're right, I just plain blew that one. Thanks for pointing it out.

That thing we "know," according to you? We don't know it. It's a guess. What we know is who the buck stopped with, which was Nix. And no, again, the Hughes trade happened during the Nix administration. It's a reasonable guess Whaley was involved, as he was Director of Pro Personnel. Which is a position that reports to the GM.

Whaley and the Pegulas were the ones who hired Marrone. Russ was in the meetings. But yeah, once the relationship deteriorated something was going to break. Had we kept Marrone and Whaley, one of them would be dead and the other in jail for his murder. They came to hate each other. One was leaving. The worse one stayed, unfortunately. Agreed on that. From the evidence, McDermott is the best coach we've had in a long time, certainly since Wade. But IMO Marrone was the second-best. They did have a really good defence, but that defense had two starters brought in after Whaley became GM, and neither of those two was a core player or a great talent. The overwhelming majority were Nix guys, with a couple pre-Nix.