Blokestradamus

Would you be so kind as to tell me which nations have become socialist over the past decade?

@GoBills808

Brexit means Brexit. Don't come here.

A round of applause for Chicken Boo (and not in a sarcastic way). I always end up in a cold sweat when a thread gets bumped that I've posted in. Didn't embarrass myself too much

I suffered fractures to my non-dominant thumb in a workplace accident in my early 20's and that was bad enough. I cringe at the thought of gripping a football with that damage. I can definitely see why some guys would try to tough it out because they're not guaranteed to get that starting spot back. Add in the loyalty to guys you're with every day, it's probably tough feeling like you're letting them down.

Me turning up to put in an offer:

It's officially Spooky Season, b-words.

Hope he's sleeping alone tonight or he might start kicking the girlfriend in his sleep.

Robyn is the nicest person on Earth. If you've pissed her off, you done ***** up.

What a lovely human being.

I have a suggestion. Just don't be near a school doing it.

I'm rooting for the tie.

The ***** Money Badger? Deserved to miss it, the weirdo.

QUACK!

Cleveland have two receivers that QB better than Hill. I don't understand Payton's infatuation.

Watched it last night and it was pretty difficult to get through for me. It's interesting to see how the process worked (or didn't). The loved ones of the crew are better people than I. I don't think I could ever forgive the key players for the decisions taken.

Protect Bill Murray at all costs!

Sweet Caroline is a terrible sports song. That's my WR.

There's at least a couple of kids in the next class born in 2000. I feel ancient 😂

Smoking is bad for you.

When I watched him before his final year, I put his athletic ability on a sliding scale with Mariota at one end and Wentz at the other. Turns out that he tested like Wentz as well and even had the ball security issues he had at NDSU. I've worked out a method of judging athletic ability for the skill positions but not quite mastered QB yet. I suppose that I haven't tried as hard with QB because I would ideally not want my QB running all that much. Like I said earlier, bias is a B word. I know that it sounds like a real cop-out but there's a lot of information that we just don't get as well-intentioned amateurs. If I had time to pick a guy's brain like teams do, I'd like to think that I could judge future likelihoods of progression a little better. Given the kind of access we've had to Josh as a professional, a teammate and a leader, I'd like to think that I'd have had more faith in his work ethic and drive to succeed. I had a chance to do that with Dion Dawkins a while back and his football IQ shone through. Alas, without it, I work on the idea that progress is neither guaranteed nor linear. I don't know that I'll ever truly appreciate guys like Josh because I'm a boring bastard, risk-averse and don't particularly like high variance players. I've got to try and work through that though.

This might end up as both a proper ramble and multifaceted so bear with me. I also don't mean any of this directly at you. We've 'known' each other for a while and I certainly harbour no ill will towards you. You know that I've put some of my thoughts to virtual paper over the years, not just here but a number of places with varying readership levels. I can tell you from personal experience that there is an element of this fanbase that has an absolute pathological zest for revenge and/or vengeance which has resulted in more than one threat to my physical wellbeing. In even the broadest of terms, I don't think it's advisable to rile people up over a sport. If the worst thing in your day is someone not acknowledging Josh Allen's improvement, you're doing fine. Secondly, these people don't owe you or I anything. They are spewing their opinions into the ether in the hope that people read them enough that they generate enough views to make a decent living out of this. If they are not going to change their opinions for the sake of convincing themselves that they're correct or to enrage people into giving them hate clicks, let them do it. All you have to do is stop reading them and giving them the reactions. If nobody reads their work, they either have to change their approach or give up entirely. I cannot stand Jon Ledyard as a human being but he can certainly play some people like a fiddle. As an individual, we all have to know what we value from content creators. If you love the work that Erik Turner does for Cover1, read their articles, interact with their YT channel. If you love the investigative work that Tim Graham does, subscribe to The Athletic. Make the world of sports journalism better by supporting people that make the kind of content you want to read and, for the love of all that is holy, stop entertaining people that make you miserable enough to want a pound of flesh from them. They get more out of it than you do. That concludes the rant. I love you, buddy.

I don't remember any specifics on what I said but I know myself well enough that I was probably pretty disrespectful to at least a few people. Especially when it comes to talking about someone that I see as something of a mirror image of myself (apart from the hot tub, that was a ***** massive red flag). The timing with Mahomes just wasn't right and I can accept that. I was a pretty vocal advocate of his but in the grand scheme of things, they probably made the right decision to defer a QB pick given the instability within the front office at the time. Ending up with Tre and ammo for the year after definitely adds positives to that side of the argument. Hopefully, Josh can start to be seen on something of a level footing to Mahomes and the rest of his peers because he's certainly trending in the right direction. The biggest thing for me going forward (and I'd imagine similarly for @GunnerBill) is trying to work out what lessons to take from this. Is Josh just truly an outlier that's bucking the norms or did I miss something more fundamental with him?

Josh Rosen was a tough one for me in terms of his character. He seemed obviously atypical in comparison with most of his peers and he did seem to polarise opinion amongst the people around him as much as the wider football public. I'll admit that I saw quite a bit of myself in Josh Rosen and maybe that made things harder for me to judge accurately. I have noticed within the past 2-3 years that my personality type doesn't seem to mesh with "football culture" and maybe he's much the same. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone that I talked down to over the issue at the time because I know that I was guilty of that. I also think it's unfair to hold Josh to any different standard than anyone else but I think the Mahomes factor plays a part in that. Especially damaging with Mahomes being a year ahead in terms of development and using Mahomes' success as a stick to beat Allen with. I suppose it's human nature to think "Look at what you could've won" when one seemingly hits the ground running in ideal circumstances while the other is part of a systemic rebuild. I don't begrudge Josh any success because he seems like a good lad. To be perfectly honest, this is about the first time I've talked about him in any level of depth since he was drafted. I decided to keep my mouth shut and let him develop. I know that I have some pretty distinct bias regarding his play style and I wasn't interested in jumping into the debate every time he did something wrong. All I would say is that player evaluation isn't often personal; if an obstinate percentage want to stick with their bias as the evidence changes, those people deserve to be questioned. I just have a particular disdain for the culture of piling on everyone that had doubts as being some kind of 'hater'. Also, big pre-draft fan of Dion Dawkins and Matt Milano, praise me for that!