SoFFacet

It's almost as if "the media" is not a monolithic entity, and different journalists with different opinions wrote the columns you are comparing.

They violated the flowchart yesterday.

My thoughts exactly. Deep INT on 3rd down = Punt is textbook. I guess the play happens too fast for him to check his exact yardline, but based on where he caught it Peterson would have been better advised to let that sail out of bounds.

I don't know where people get this idea that it's reasonable to expect a QB that never makes mistakes or has bad games. There are like 2-3 guys in the league that one could accurately say make few mistakes and has few bad games. Unless you have one of those guys, your QB is going to cost you a game sometimes. It's just hilarious seeing some on that forum argue that Smith or Petty or Hack would give them better chances on average. Honestly, the same thing is happening with Cardinals fans right now. Palmer had a bad game and now apparently he is bad and the Cardinals are going to be bad as long as he's the QB. Never mind the totality of what that team has done since Arians took over.

The Texans were just stomped 27-0, so if this thread was premised on the idea that the Pats were supposed to be easy pickings next week...

Scoring is good. Whether it's better to score quickly or slowly is situation dependent. But you're obviously never going to order the offense not to score one way just because the other would be preferable. Whether you score or go 3 & out, fast drives do contribute to gassing the defense.

He's a good player on a bad team. Wins and losses are a team outcome. Dumb thread is dumb.

Guaranteed that if we had a DB corps full of Shermans people would be complaining about them getting undressed by New England's army of shifty slot guys. Backseat Internet GM ftw amirite?

So far this season.

Of course, but people are too busy memeing about 37 points allowed / fire OC to discuss the fact that the offense has been worse than the defense, on the whole, so far.

Roman was fine last year, maybe even good. I had no inclination that the offense would suck as much as it has through two games. But it was fairly obvious that the worst part of this team so far this year has been the offensive scheme. They can't pick up first downs and sustain normal drives. Almost every running play has been blown up in the backfield. The intermediate passing game is non-existent. The defense was just smoked, but that was a very good offense and the offense left them on the field for 40 minutes. They played well in week 1. Unfortunately, there's almost no way that a new OC will be able to fix this midseason.

I don't see how it's a scapegoat firing, the offense has legitimately sucked. We came within one down of being shut out last week. 31 points this week is incredibly deceptive, as 7 were off a broken play, 7 were from the defense, and 7 were in garbage time. Slightly more credit for the bomb to Goodwin. But we scored 3 points off of "normal" drives. The defense was actually playing pretty good in the first quarter. They were most likely worn down by the 2:1 TOP disadvantage that stems from a completely incompetent offense that can't pick up first downs.

They actually run very little out of heavy formations. It's mostly draws and treys out of shotgun formations. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that they would do much better if they would just go full Schaub/Foster/Johnson Texans and run power and play action rollouts the whole game. McCoy might not be an ideal fit for that but he could do it if it were blocked properly. Right now nothing is blocked properly, he's getting met in the backfield on almost every handoff.

The guy is getting met in the backfield on almost every play.

From what I understand Bosa's side have proposed contracts that are totally consistent with other top-5 picks under the current CBA (i.e. they either get no offset language or 100% 1st year SB). The Chargers are arguing that they've never conceded either of those things to one of their rookies. But of course, they've never had a top-5 pick under this CBA before. So I think it's pretty clear that the Chargers are the ones being unreasonable here. If Bosa meets the Chargers half-way, he's signing an arbitrarily worse contract than any other 3rd overall pick has signed. The Chargers seem to have the leverage to get their way by force, but why should they want to? It makes them look cheap, and now this public smear campaign against their own player makes them look petty.

Pot meet kettle. You are tripping hard on the so-called "law of averages": So, you set out a long-term benchmark, disingenuously selected an inappropriate statistic (39-57) to fail that benchmark, neglected the more appropriate statistic (23-25) because it contradicted your argument, and dismissed contextual considerations because you are apparently unaware that in this case the sample size of outcomes is never going to be large enough for your line of reasoning to have a rational basis.

None of those things have anything to do with being in "win now mode" or not... Context-less, outcome-oriented evaluation is an illogical thought process. For instance, strength of schedule is a factor that varies year to year outside of a team's control, and on that basis alone a team could improve or decline in a vacuum and not wind up with a delta-record that indicates that that is so. Same goes for injury luck and even just bounces within each game. Each game result is a probabilistic outcome and all that a GM can do is improve a team's chances. When you evaluate a GM you need dissociate from the results and look at the decisions. Did they increase the chances of winning? Did they make sense given the information available at the time they were made? Because you don't hire a new GM to make different decisions than his predecessor in the same situations. He's going to face new situations, and all that you will be able to ask of him is to make decisions that increase the team's chances of winning, and make sense given the information available at the time.

"Win now mode" is a garbage media narrative that was thrust upon the Bills after they traded their 2015 1st round pick. Its a gross oversimplification that willfully ignores that over the course of an entire career, player A could perfectly well be contribute more over the long term than players B and C combined. Fairly well put. Last year they hoped to build on a 9-7 team, and the FAs they brought in helped increase their chances of making the playoffs. Even so, their actions did not have a significant adverse effect on their chances in subsequent seasons, so calling it a "win now" season would still be a stretch. But the fact is that almost all coaching changes, particularly ones that completely change the defensive scheme, require transitional years, and we saw why last year. Now we are in year 2 of a coach's tenure, with several rookies being heavily counted upon on defense, and a "prove it" QB. None of those are traits of an immediate contender, but they still have decent chances of getting the wild card. Some people don't understand that the outcomes of games are just probabilistic results, and all that a GM can do is increase a team's chances. That's just a garbage notion that's only ever been "popular" with a certain small, loud internet peanut gallery. There is no evidence to indicate that their seats are even lukewarm. Truth.

Its a derogatory term used by trolls to refer to normal people that bother to argue with trolls on the internet. Sort of like a millennial version of the term, "libtard." Accordingly, the vast majority of the people wielding the cudgel are less intelligent and less reasonable than the vast majority of the people it is wielded against.

.... .... .... What is going on in this thread?

Spunky? The internet seems to have a difficult time with the concept that "competitive" and "mediocre" are synonyms in the NFL. By that logic, every team in the NFL is in "win now mode" to varying but similar degrees. Which means that nobody is. The term is meaningless. You singled out 2014 as the year we supposedly entered this mode and then listed some factoids about the year 2016 as "proof." So I'm going to assume that your statement was originally meant to refer to the Watkins trade. And the idea that trading up for Watkins somehow put us in a different mode than we were before, is a garbage media narrative with no basis in reality.

"Win now mode" is a garbage media narrative. What evidence is there that such a mode exists, and that we are in it? We're in the 2nd year of a new coach's tenure, our QB is still in the "prove it" stage, and last year's defense was legitimately bad. Which one of those is the trait of a contender?

I was of the opposite opinion only a few days ago but I'm starting to convince myself that we can take him with #19 even if he sits the whole year. Even if we draft an immediate contributor #19, most of the improvement on defense next year is going to need to come from increased familiarity. As long as the recovery is going smoothly and as long as there was no truth to that dumb ultimatum rumor, I doubt there will be anyone else available that we would rather have on the team for 2017 and beyond.

Recent reports indicate that its a very serious injury. Seems likely that he won't play at all next year. With so many immediate needs on defense and very limited cap available for FA this year , I don't think that we can afford to use #19 like that.

Thinking the projection was bad is purely retrospective thinking and therefore useless. Picking Graham instead of Wilson was a bad decision, not a bad projection.