The Frankish Reich

I would agree if the Jets won 7 games with mediocre QB play. Think Jimmy Garoppolo, or Derek Carr, or even some journeyman like Jacoby Brissette. But they won 7 games with truly awful QB play. Like laughably horrible from Wilson and Mike White and Joe Flacco. It was so bad that I think Flacco has an argument that he was the best of the 3. They don't need Rodgers to be the second coming of the God of Green Bay. They just need him to be a Jacoby Brissette to get better, or a Jimmy Garoppolo to get a lot better. Or a 90% of peak Rodgers to be really good.

I left off Mahomes because he didn't meet my "averaged 30 yards per game rushing OR had a 400 yard rushing season." You could argue that he belongs. I do think there is a significant difference between how he plays the game vs. Allen, Hurts, and the other "running QBs" with respect to designed runs, pulling the ball down and taking off downfield when plays break down, etc. He strikes me as more of a pure situational buy time/scrambling QB who will run in important game situations when the opportunity is there. And that's reflected in the lower rushing yard totals. Terrible after the injury. That great 2004 season when they still only went 8-8? 26th ranked defense. Give him the Bills defense of 2021 and it would've been a different story.

We're just starting to get an inkling of the panic that will set in among Republicans if we avoid recession prior to the election. Right now the markets are pricing in about a 60% chance of a recession in late 2023/first half 2024. Which means a 40% chance of the Biden wet dream (not that those are happening anymore, at least I hope not) of a "soft landing." And consumer confidence is trending strongly in the right direction. https://apnews.com/article/economy-consumer-confidence-inflation-interest-rates-567ac06e3d904967ab76b429ca777b00 Bidenomics!

No surprise, I'm not a DeSantis fan. Actually, I would be a fan of what I think DeSantis would be without Trump in his head all the time, with DeSantis trying to out-Trump the OG. But I will admit: this counts for something. If you are the governor of a state and the people of that state overwhelmingly support you, that says something.

The rich man's CJ Spiller! But when you've watched a team without a breakaway runner for several years, you would kinda like to see a prime Dalvin Cook. At least I would, if it's the prime version anymore.

I disagree. Objectively, he is probably the closest comp to Josh. Tremendous size, great athlete, came into the NFL pretty raw but put together this season at age 27: Historic season Culpepper enjoyed his best statistical season as a professional in 2004 and, though they were only 8–8, the Vikings reached the playoffs for the second time under Culpepper. Passing for a league-leading 4,717 yards, a Viking-record 39 touchdowns, and only 11 interceptions, Culpepper was named to his third career Pro Bowl. Culpepper also broke Dan Marino's NFL record for combined passing and rushing yards, amassing 5,123 total yards. His 2,323 rushing yards from 2000–2004 also made him only the fourth quarterback in NFL history to run for more than 2,300 yards in a five-season period. (Michael Vick had 3,570 from 2002–2006; Randall Cunningham had 3,232 from 1986–1990; and Steve McNair had 2,387 from 1997–2001). Culpepper’s career rushing average of 26.1 yards per game is fourth-best among quarterbacks in NFL history. Only Vick (47.3 yds/g), Cunningham (30.6 yds/g), and Bobby Douglass (29.8 yds/g) have averaged more rushing yards per game during their QB careers. After the 2004 season, Culpepper said the game had “slowed down” for him, saying I feel like a Jedi Knight.[11][12][13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daunte_Culpepper 69.2 completion percentage that year too. He was tremendous, and he was just entering his prime years. Or so we thought ... https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/C/CulpDa00.htm He ripped up his knee downfield when a tackler hit him low. He was never the same (although off the field behavior also helped to derail his career). Yes, he had Randy Moss, but Moss only caught 49 balls. He also took a ton of sacks and had the likes of Onterrio Smith as his lead RB. We forget how good he was for a brief shining moment.

I get it. Thanks for the info. My point, of course, is a more general one. A libertarian one I guess. When you see companies abandoning a market where money can be made, there's generally a reason to be found in looking at the state/city's legal/regulatory structure.

Colorado. Why?

And the guidelines are ... GOVERNMENT guidelines, right? If there were no such guidelines or better guidelines, insurers would raise premiums commensurate with increased risk (a totaled home now results in a million dollar claim rather than a half million dollar claim) and they'd stay in the market. I hope you don't teach economics.

No. California has similar problems. A market failure there too. Markets typically don't fail by themselves. Bad policy is the usual culprit. Gavin Newsom isn't running for President (yet). Ron DeSantis is (for a little bit longer)

The real trafficking/child labor crisis: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/labor-dept-says-number-children-found-working-illegally-up-44-percent-rcna96480 Immigrants being put to work doing hard physical labor and not going to school. Not as sexy as, well, "sex trafficking," but far, far more prevalent. The sex-obsessed alt right should be paying attention to this, particularly since it meshes with the immigration issue.

Russell Wilson concerns me. He can still throw. But his mobility has declined greatly, and it's made him a below-average starting QB by the age of 33. Yes, there's a lot of hits behind the line of scrimmage thanks to bad O lines and his propensity to hold onto the ball too long. But there was also a ton of wear and tear in getting to 500, 600, 800+ yards running downfield in his 20s. Steve Young was also a guy with unusually low mileage on him for his age. There was the USFL spell (not sure how much damage he sustained there against lesser players), and then he sat behind Montana for 4 full seasons.

It is government failure because an insurance market - which could be profitable despite tropical storm risk - is in turmoil. And it is not profitable because government regulation doesn't allow the companies to charge a premium sufficient to protect against risk. In those situations, the government needs to fix the regulatory structure.

Agreed. Which is why I tried to separate scramblers from runners. I see where you could move a Rodgers into the “runner” category (he did have some 300+ Yard rushing seasons) and make him another Steve Young exception. But what 70s QBs like Tarkenton and Staubach did seems very different to the way Allen, Lamar, Hurts, Fields play the game today. Well, yes. There's a difference between Lamar's Ravens offense and Allen's Bills offense (not to mention Fields and the Bears so-called offense, which involves Fields running for his life on every play). I think Hurts/Eagles is closest. It's not designed-run dependent, but the designed and undesigned runs are very important parts of their respective offenses.

Elway ran for 3400 yards over 16 seasons. Allen has already run for 3100 over 6. I hope you’re right about Allen’s future tracking Elway’s, but right now they’re not comparable with respect to how much their success depends on running. I forgot that Cam ascribed his shoulder problem to trying to make a tackle on an interception. So yes, you can carve out a “freak injury” exception for him. But to me he showed an overall decline in ability that went beyond that.

I’m saying we don’t know. RG3, Culpepper, Vick - all could still throw, but after the run was no longer a real threat they were backup quality at best. Randall Cunningham made the transition and was great in that one fluke season, but again … we just don’t know. He recovered and could still throw, but without the huge run threat he just wasn’t very good anymore.

So the Bills and Allen are also damn fools for paying attention to such things. Or “this is why you are not in NFL management.” Other than Young, while these guys could run, they weren’t heavily run dependent like Allen.

I tried to use an objective standard. - an average of 30 yards rushing per game (roughly 500 yards per season) over a sustained period of 2+ years of starts. QBs who are mobile and more like old fashioned “scramblers” pretty much never hit that level. So it weeds them out and leaves us with the clear running QBs OR - QBs who had at least one season (usually multiple seasons) of 400+ yards rushing. Again, this weeds out the scramblers and guys like Mahomes and Rodgers who don’t often run by design. So … not perfect, but it avoids cherry picking to prove the hypothesis. Would he? I mean, I think so. But take away the run threat and would he be anywhere near the same guy?

Well, those things aren't exactly independent from running the ball a lot and taking hits ...

Uh oh. Looks like we're in a battle for 4th place with the Pats.

Exactly. I'm not saying Josh is doomed to an early retirement if he doesn't stop running with the ball. Every guy is different, and the NFL of the 2020s is different too. But it is playing with fire to keep running and taking hits. I expect to see more of a situational approach. He'll run when it really counts, like in the playoffs or when a key game for playoff seeding hangs in the balance. The rest of the time? Slide, run out of bounds behind the line, or throw the ball away. That only makes sense.

I don't think so. I think the criteria I set were objective, and also fit reality. Roethlisberger wasn't a guy with designed run plays or who was eager to tuck the ball away and take off. His style was more to move around and use his massive size to shed would-be QB sacks. Rodgers is a special kind of QB, more like a right handed Steve Young in some ways, but again - all those years and never a 400 yard rushing season tells us something.

Sure, that's true of some, or even a lot. But it's not true at all of others. McNair had a huge arm and was a very accurate passer in his day. Culpepper too. And Russell Wilson. I see the point in that a lot of these guys were runners because they were totally unsuited to the classic pocket passing game, and that (we hope) Josh actually is. That's why they want him to change before its too late.

It was not a hoax. It happened. The question was whether Trump and the Trump campaign invited it, looked the other way as it happened, coordinated with it, etc. They may not have "colluded" with Russia in the end (although some Trump campaign people got convicted for what anyone would call collusion in common parlance - for example, Manafort sharing Trump campaign polling information with Russians), but yes ... the Russians (and Russia) did most definitely interfere.

In other words (and note that the quote here is to Barr's somewhat slippery synopsis of the report): Russian-affiliated individuals (including some we now know were Russian state agents) DID make multiple offers to the Trump campaign. So: yes. Russians, and in turn Russia, did try to interfere to help Trump win the election.