Red Squirrel

I'm not a fan of Mays; he may have great size and a fantastic 40 time, but ball skills are nowhere to be found. I've seen a lot of him, and his game consists of roaming the defensive backfield looking for kill shots. That's about it. Kind of like Roy Williams, minus the horse-collar tackles.

There is no earthly way they should give up a 3rd for a guy who has thrown ZERO passes in 4 years in the NFL, and basically stunk in college. I'd MAYBE give them a 7th. Seriously...there is no reason to think he has any more value now than the past 4 off seasons, and if they could have gotten a 3rd then, they would have done it in a heartbeat. This situation looks comparable to RJ/Hasselbeck/Schaub, but it really isn't. Those guys played at least a little bit. Whitehurst hasn't, and has also pretty much sucked in preseason, too.

I agree; it should be implemented for the regular season, too. BUT...and this is a big BUT....when making a change, one must consider the following question: What does TV want? TV wants 3 hour games. The current OT system came back in the day when the league wasn't run based on TV's whims; otherwise, we'd have gobs of tie games. They know that going backwards to having no OT would cause a major uproar, so TV regretfully prefers things as they are. CBS/Fox are probably ecstatic when OT's last only one possession. I really prefer the college OT. But that ain't gonna happen because the TV overlords would have a fully grown cow if a game lasted 4 and a half hours.

I have never heard anything to indicate that Tillman's death had anything to do with Plummer quitting. And I followed these guys fairly closely because I went to ASU and had season tix in 1995 and 1996. I am not saying it wasn't a factor; I just doubt it. I think the overriding factor with Jake's retirement was Shanahan. Jake had a great year in '05; he made the pro-bowl, cut way down on picks. And one bad playoff game (not even that bad, really) caused Shanahan to turn on him. Shanny drafted Cutler, rushed him into the lineup the next season even though the team was winning, and likely cost the team the playoffs. Jake then wanted to be released; instead Shanahan traded him to a team that had about 37 QBs under contract, and was set to have a free-for-all competition. Jake had had enough, and quit. From what I've heard, it is extremely unlikely he would make a comeback. I would have loved it if the Bills had drafted him in 1997. I think it would have made a tremendous difference on both his career and on the Bills. But it's 13 years too late.

It depends on how you look at the stats. I've tried to go over this in the past in an old thread, but here we go again: Ryan played 2 WHOLE GAMES against the best pass defense in the league, and those two games killed his numbers. Trent played 2 series against the Jets, completed 5 of 5, remarkably (or typically) for only 1 first down. Ryan came off the bench twice and got significant playing time after NOT getting 1st team reps during the week; Trent, in the same situation, threw about 3 passes (and then got hurt). This sounds like excuses....yeah, for Fitz' stats. I take the trouble to do this because remarkably, Fitz is treated like a dog's dingleberry here after winning most of his games, while Trent could only beat the mighty Bucs and still has a thriving fan club. One more thing for the people that like stats: check out the splits for these two guys on ESPN.com. You'll see that Fitz and Trent are almost statistically equal on passes under 10 yards. Isn't that supposed to be what Trent is so wonderful at? The LONGER passes are why Ryan's stats lag; he attempted a massively higher percentage of them, trying to jumpstart a dead team. There is no denying that Fitz had some ugly throws this year; the game in Toronto was so hideous it was hard to not claw my own eyes out. But he still put 10 more points on the board in that game than Edwards did against the effing Browns. Edwards seems like a nice kid; I will not attack his character or read a lot into offhand remarks. But I have watched him enough to think he needs to go somewhere else.

The question I'd have to ask you, and the dozens of other people who keep at it with this line of reasoning, is this: if he can't win games, can't score points, can't gain first downs with a bad line, then why do you think he'd be better with a good line than Fitzpatrick would be? Wouldn't a good line help Fitz? I'll try it this way: If Fitz + bad o-line > Edwards + bad o-line, then Fitz + improved o-line > Edwards + improved o-line I'm all for exploring other options...McNabb being the best one that's perceived as possible. But going back to Edwards....this is not justifiable. One other point: LeFevour was passed like he was standing still by not only Tony Pike but also Jarrett Brown (who no one talks about here) during Senior Bowl week. He was better than Tebow, but that isn't saying much. Not saying he can't develop, or that he isn't worth a late draft pick, just that LeFevour fever at this point is pretty silly.

This is absurd. Nobody thinks Whitner was a good draft pick; this is no secret. But Leonhard is AWFUL. If you get sick over this, you need to be put in a padded room.

"Welsh" is the original expression; the insulting usage that we are talking about here originated from English snobbery (I know; hard to believe ). "welch" has been used so often in place of "welsh" that it has come to mean the same thing.

I watch the show regularly and the contestants NEVER have interesting anecdotes; most of them just make you cringe, like that black kid tonight who talked about losing his 5th thru 8th grade class elections. If he went to his speech therapy class and stopped lisping, he might have picked up a couple more votes. And he was the cooler of the two boys tonight.

The other thing that needs to be kept in mind about OJ is he started out with a dimwit coach that had no idea how to use him. 3 years were wasted that way. To put it in perspective, they flashed a stat on the screen during the pro bowl about Peterson, Emmitt, and a handful of other guys getting 4000 yds in their first 3 years; OJ had less than half that total. It wasn't until Saban came back that he was used properly.

You are mistaken; the drug suspension was for 4 games in '88. In 1991, he missed all but 5 games because of knee surgery.

Actually, I corrected you.

I think you mean David "Deacon" Jones; "Too Tall" wasn't even the best pass rusher on his own team; that would have been Harvey Martin.

I like your list, but I take some issue with your characterization of the K-Gun era. Yes, they ran more than they passed, but a lot of that had to do with having 4th quarter leads and grinding it out until the clock read 0:00. I thought the beauty of that offense was that they did what ever was working the best. Except for SBXXV, which is a big reason why I'm not on the Kelly bandwagon for this. That was their best chance, and he chose to call almost 40 pass plays when the Giants D hardly had any linemen on the field and Thurman was shredding them. But as annoyed as I always have been at Kelly for that, I'd still put him ahead of Cookie, who may have been a great talent but didn't do it in Buffalo very long...and was a pain in the ass

+1 The first time I heard of Owen Wilson was when I read a movie review that said he looked like his nose was broken by a DC-10.

You might want to edit the name out of there; I did the same thing, but don't want to help others beat our scores! Anyway, there's another name, much shorter, which fouled me up. And about 3 guys I wouldn't have come up with if I had 8 hours.

I got 45; got all but one after '95, but pretty much blanked out on the earlier ones (other than '83; those ones are easy to remember). re-edit: Sorry about briefly giving one away; talk about brain farts.

The lengths some of you go to defend Trent speaks loud volumes, too.

Once again, someone misses the point. Jauron was Fitz' coach, too. The line sucked for Fitz, too. TO dropped balls for Fitz, too. The tight ends all got hurt for Fitz, too. The D didn't stop the run in Fitz's games, too. If anything, Fitz had things worse....3rd team in 4 years, o-line MORE beat up after he took over. I purposely avoided defending Fitz with stats in my last post because I know the short attention spans here really aren't suited for long explanations, even when they make sense. But here we go: Fitz completed over 65% of his passes at RWS. That is not wildly inaccurate. In the games where he was the primary passer, he was under 50% twice...both times against the Jets, the best pass defense in the league. Contrast that to 5 (FIVE) games where he completed over 60%. And ironically, according to the splits on ESPN.com, Fitz is MORE accurate than Trent on the shortest passes, and is equal to him on all passes thrown under ten yards; he falls behind Trent in completion percentage based on the massively higher number of attempts he made of over 10 yards. And once again, we are back full circle to my original point....Ryan tried to force the action, while having all the same negative issues circulating around him; his stats took a beating, but the TEAM responded well to him. And by the way, he's about 10 times more elusive in the pocket than Edwards. Do you think Trent can be coached up in that area? I sure as !@#$ don't.

God, I hope you're being sarcastic.

Since you took the time to pore over the stats to figure out how all the wins in '09 were due to opposing INT's, I thought I'd point out a few stats, too. 1st, you seem to be impressed with the first half of '08. You do realize that the 4-0 start was against teams that wound up a combined 16-48, don't you? And that Trent threw a whopping 1 TD per game in those wins, right? And that he threw more than 1 TD in a game only once the whole '08 season? Actually, his three best games the whole season were after the opening winning streak (and, for those who want to bring this up, AFTER the concussion). I could also pick and choose stats to defend Fitz (like how his numbers are skewed from 2 relief outings when he wasn't getting 1st team practice reps, and how they are REALLY skewed from having 1/5th of his attempts against the best pass defense in the league), but that isn't really what my point was about. My main issue is with the tendency of Edwards supporters here to blame all of Trent's woes on the O-line (and Adrian Wilson, which I already debunked), but ignoring that Fitz was playing and more often than not winning under the same (if not worse) conditions. Adding to this is you saying Fitz makes poor decisions; on this issue, I have to wonder whether you watched the games. Edwards makes one decision, over and over....dump it off. You are NEVER going to win throwing 2 yard passes on 3rd and 8 (although you do save your QB rating). Fitz, on the other hand, gives his WRs a chance. His decision making is so much better than TE's that there isn't even a choice between these two.

Exactly why do you see Edwards as having higher upside? And the OL excuse; this is just stomach turning. They both played with the same line! Fitz: 5-4 Edwards: 1-5 There's all you need to know to make a decision.

Could it be....the 3 DUIs? And that after getting suspended for a couple games for this issue already, he might wind up getting half a season if it happens again? Not to mention what a judge might do to him if there's a 4th.

I don't deny they love him, but I sense less childishness than I normally get from Jets fans. In '06, they had Mangenius posters on their bedroom walls by week 2.

I'm not so sure I agree with the highlighted part; I'm in their media market, and my sense is while there are some Jets fans that eat up the trash talk, Ryan is still viewed warily here. They know they really jumped the gun by nicknaming their previous fat slob coach "Mangenius"; they know that for all Mangini's quirks, he didn't leave the cupboard bare. And there is some recognition that shooting your mouth off like Ryan does creates bulletin board material. Of course, one more win, and he'll be the best thing since Rockne, because that's just the way Jets fans are.