DCOrange

I don't think a relatively low ranking for them is all that surprising to be honest. They're just ranking based on the WRs, RBs, and TEs, so Baltimore's elite O-Line doesn't factor in at all. On paper, they're probably bottom 5-10 at WR in the league. Their RB committee was ranked 9th best. I imagine the TEs are ranked around the same after trading Hurst away. Obviously they still have Andrews and to a lesser extent Boyle, so still pretty good. But it's not the three-headed monster that it was viewed as last year. I would imagine the WRs are viewed as the most important part of a QB's supporting cast, so it's not too surprising that their ranking is weighed down significantly. The ones that I think you could legitimately argue Baltimore ahead of would be the Giants and Eagles. I'm good with the rest of them being ahead of Baltimore.

18 feels about right to me. Curious to see how the rankings ultimately look. There's a few I disagree with right off the bat, but as is usually the case, it's easy to nitpick rankings rather than tiers. For all we know he might view the 30th guy as roughly on par with Allen right now.

Just my .02 on police/public safety in general. For reference, I've worked directly on the budgets for police departments, fire departments, and pretty much every other form of public safety, courts, etc. so that's where most of my perspective is coming from. Part of what I'm struggling with with the "Defund the Police" movement is the lack of clarity about what exactly it means. It seems to me that some factions of its supporters simply want to reduce police budgets and some want to get rid of the police entirely and replace it with multiple other organizations that would handle different sorts of scenarios. I think we're probably a very long way away from the latter group getting what they want. Recent polling has shown that the support even just for cutting funding is almost non-existent, though support for many attempts at police reform are overwhelmingly supported, even across party lines. So just getting to the point where we can reduce police budgets is going to be a very tough haul, much less actually abolishing it. At any rate, I think for this movement to have success, they need to figure out if they're really pushing for reducing budgets or getting rid of them entirely, and they should probably change their messaging accordingly, because "defunding" will be easily misconstrued for getting rid of the budget entirely and that will likely push people away that could theoretically get on board with simply making some cuts here and there. To my personal feelings on the matter, police budgets (and public safety in general) most likely have a ton of fat that can be trimmed off their budgets. My personal experience was that in recent years, our city's projected revenues would increase by, let's say 5%. Cool. Since the city's budget must balance (i.e. can't be set up to run a deficit and also can't have a profit), this means that we get to take that 5% of revenue and spread it around to different priorities. Unfortunately though, wage increases, benefit rate changes, etc. increase by roughly 10%, so suddenly you don't have any additional revenue to spread around at all and you actually have to make cuts instead. Touching the schools or public safety has generally been treated as political suicide (which makes sense considering the polling referenced above), so ultimately, we end up needing to make cuts to social services, cuts to the internal departments that actually run the city, etc. Every department is asked to brainstorm ideas for how we can more efficiently run their respective departments. Since the other departments are actually at risk of losing funding, they oblige and come up with cheaper ways to do their current jobs. The public safety departments, however, don't need to worry about that; we could say we trimmed $100,000 off the police budget due to a budgeted position that hadn't been filled for a decade and all the public would see is that the police budget was reduced and freak out. At least from my personal experience, there is just so much that could be trimmed off of our police department's budget that wouldn't impact the services they provide at all. As for the idea of abolishing the police altogether and replacing it with something new, that's a much more extreme idea. I would tend to lean towards not supporting it, but maybe there is some plan out there that could convince me. I do think there are plenty of services that officers provide today that aren't really necessary or should be provided by someone else. So introducing new roles to provide some of those services is something I could theoretically support, but I think it will be incredibly difficult to really accomplish. Assuming each jurisdiction handles things individually as they do here, cities that go this route will likely lose out on a ton of qualified candidates since they'll almost certainly be offering lower wages due to the reduced responsibilities. Likewise, the transition to whatever new system you put in place will be incredibly difficult. Announce that police officers are mostly going away or are getting hit with a significant paycut (which will almost certainly be required in order to fund the new positions you're likely replacing them with) and you'll probably see a mass exodus of police officers before you're in a position where you can absorb that level of attrition. As is, our city loses on average 3 officers per month almost solely due to paying a couple thousand dollars less than some neighboring jurisdictions. If you cut their wages by a significant amount, you will certainly be driving a lot of them away and they will get scooped up very quickly by jurisdictions that aren't reforming. TLDR: I think reducing police budgets would (ignoring the political appearances) be very easy to do and would help a lot of cities around the country. Abolishing it entirely will be incredibly difficult and I would definitely still need to be convinced before I'd ever get on board with that.

There was never a moment that I felt he was a good QB.

I think that rule was meant to be for other positions since everyone was required to draft a QB. I do agree with the idea that since this exercise was about winning a ring in the next 5 years, it might be best if you miss out on the good/average QBs to just stack the deck at other positions and draft a QB the following year (though I wonder if they were allowed to even think about it like that for this exercise lol).

This issue with this of course is Cinci didn't take Burrow to lock him in as the 32nd best QB in the league. They took him because they think he can be an elite QB just like Young can be an elite pass rusher. This fantasy draft is a completely different concept, especially considering the rules in place. Why take the 32nd best QB in the first round when you'll still get the 32nd best QB in the 4th round? With the rules they had in place, once you got to a certain point in the draft, you knew you'd be able to get a QB from a certain tier no matter when you pick them, so you might as well take elite talent elsewhere and get the same QB you would have taken anyways. Your logic works in terms of arguing against taking Aaron Donald at #5 for example. But once you get like 20ish QBs in, there's really no point in taking a QB until the end (unless of course there is one QB at that point that you value significantly higher than the rest).

The Jets are definitely higher than they should be due to Gore being ranked as a top 30 RB in the league. SF is understandably underrated because he's only basing it off the starter and first backup. The 49ers RBs aren't all that special individually, but they have 3 or 4 solid options, and that along with Shanahan's schemes is more important than their individual talent.

You seem to be misrepresenting my point or just aren't really interested in hearing it.

I'm not saying it SHOULD cost him his job. I'm just saying the idea that doing something at 20 and getting punished at 21 isn't really a big deal if the crime is serious enough to warrant it. You also frankly have to live with different standards when you're living in the public eye; one of the costs of fame.

This is a better question with regard to Josh Allen's tweets when he was actually a kid. Someone getting in trouble at age 21 for something they did at age 20 isn't really much of a leap. It sucks for him, but this is also why people should think more before they say/do things.

Carr is fine, probably around a league average starter. He's not good enough to elevate the Raiders but it's not like he's a legitimately bad starter either. They have enough talent there to be a good offensive team this year. Obviously have to wait and see if it actually comes together, and even if it does, the defense is still a pretty big question mark. Having said all that, I don't really see a good case for arguing that they should be ahead of Buffalo. The Raiders should probably be somewhere around 15 IMO.

I haven't been able to participate personally, but our neighbors have been going the past couple days and I think we might try to go tomorrow or Friday assuming people are still out protesting. One of the protests definitely made its way past our street but nobody has physically come down our street so no action in front of the house yet other than police cars and firetrucks speeding by every once in awhile.

I more or less agree with this list. I don't think I'd bother trading him for anyone on the maybe list outside of Burrow, though I wouldn't be surprised at all if the others end up being better QBs long-term. Also on topic of the OP, I think Dak would be a maybe for me and I'd probably lean towards doing it (with the condition that he signs a long-term deal immediately). I think Allen could end up being better than Dak but I think I might lean towards locking in Dak, who is roughly a top 10-12 QB IMO rather than hoping Allen gets there, especially considering this team is ready to win now.

This seems like one of many cases where neither team would trade their guy for the other.

Close, but not quite. It's a measurement of wins above an average player at their position. QBs contribute the most to wins, so if you get above average QB play out of your QB (which apparently PFF believes Tyrod and Fitz provided during their time here), they're almost certainly going to come out on top in this metric.

This isn’t surprising. PFF views QBs, DBs, and WRs as 3 of the most valuable positions in football.

I'd take Allen moving forwards as well but that's just me betting on his upside. Tannehill was clearly better this past season and while I think he's overrated, the general consensus is that Rivers was too.

NFC East is clearly ahead of the AFC East. Dak and Wentz are both better than anyone in the AFC East at the moment and Daniel Jones is arguably in the same tier as any of the AFC East guys as well. AFC South is only a possibility if Rivers and Tannehill both fall off significantly (or if the AFC East guys show a lot of improvement). Watson is obviously easily the best QB of the bench and Tannehill was comfortably better than any of the AFC East guys last year as well. I think if everything breaks the right way, the AFC East could pass the AFC South this season, but based on last season's play, AFC East is pretty clearly the worst.

I doubt it's the worst in NFL history but I think it's pretty indisputably the worst in the league right now.

At best, Allen has proven himself to be an average starting QB. The general consensus would probably put him somewhere in the 20-25 range of QBs while I would say somewhere in the 15-20 range is probably more accurate. It's not a stretch at all to think a rookie QB could play at that level, especially one as highly touted as Tua.

They have them as less than a win better. I don't think the gap is very large at all.

The idea that all QBs from a school, no matter the coach, system, etc. can't succeed in the NFL is a worse take. For all we know, Tua will never fully be himself after his injury, but absent that, I'd be shocked if he isn't a productive pro.

I've defended Gore a decent amount around here and Rumblings...he was legitimately an adequate starter most of the year before he gassed out and became pretty much useless as a runner down the stretch. Certainly did not have the space to operate in that Singletary had just due to the personnel on the field when Gore got his carries. Singletary proved he was substantially better down the stretch though even when you account for the context around their carries. And having said all that, Gore is tied for the 28th best RB in the league by these ratings...that just doesn't make any sense at all. I also just can't fathom how anyone would rank Lynn Bowden, a WR/QB that is transitioning to RB this year, ahead of Moss. Even more shocking because I know Miller liked Moss as a prospect. Keeping Bell as a fringe top 10 back is whatever...the Jets were an absolute mess last year and he did the best he could in that awful situation. But some of these ratings just don't make sense at all.

That seems pretty unlikely to me. At any rate, let's take QBR for example just because it's an actual metric we can look at. Allen and Darnold finished 24th and 25th last year. Rookies to rank 23rd or better since 2010 (bolded if they ranked in the upper half of the league): Kyler Murray Daniel Jones Baker Mayfield Deshaun Watson* - didn't play enough games to qualify but he was awesome as a rookie in his 6 starts Dak Prescott Jameis Winston Teddy Bridgewater Andrew Luck Robert Griffin III Russell Wilson Cam Newton Andy Dalton So in all likelihood, there's 1 or 2 QBs in this draft class that will rank ahead of where Allen and Darnold were this past season (obviously not accounting for any improvement those two might make). Obviously this is just QBR; there's many other and better ways to analyze the QB position. But point is, Allen and Darnold haven't been anything special up to this point; there's no reason to think a rookie couldn't conceivably be better and there's no reason to think a rookie couldn't be at least an average starter right away. Obviously we won't know until we actually see Tua play (and I agree with you that I tend to think Fitzpatrick will be the starter at the beginning of the year in the very least and possibly the whole year). But I also think Tua is a very special prospect if he can stay healthy. The only QB prospects I've given a higher draft grade to in the past 4 years are Lamar Jackson, Pat Mahomes, and Joe Burrow. TLDR: Barring Allen or Darnold making a leap this year (which is entirely possible and maybe expected), Tua (provided he's healthy and actually plays) and Burrow should have a decent chance of outplaying those two.

I don't really see how that's a question. Orlovsky obviously thinks Tua will translate right away. It's silly to think it's impossible for a rookie to come in and be an average QB right away and that's obviously how Orlovsky is projecting him to be. I personally had a higher draft grade on Tua (ignoring the potential injury risks that I have no idea about) than Darnold or Allen and it's not like either of them have lit the league on fire so far. It's entirely possible Tua is better on Day 1 (assuming he's even healthy...I still personally expect Fitz to start) than Darnold and Allen currently are.