Mark Long Beach

Vick was the number 1 pick of the draft. I like Vick and think he's got real talent. Now that he's applied himself instead of just relying on his physical gifts I think that his passing will be quite good. He reminds me a lot of Randall Cunningham who was a running QB but by the end of his career he had a real nice touch. Especially on the deeper balls. They were beautiful to watch. Reid is pretty good coach and runs a good offensive system. Vick will take advantage of that.

Oh yes. But I wouldn't cry about keeping Ayodele to battle for a backup ILB with Batten, White et al. We're not deep at ILB at all. With luck, White turns out to be a player. I think Ayodele is below average, but as a 10 year veteran you know what you'll get from him, including effort. You never know beforehand about a rookie.

I really enjoyed DeHaven's part. He did a better job explaining a little more of the purpose of the play and what actually happened during it. Especially nice to see the high endzone view of the plays. You so rarely see that during the broadcast returns.

Absolutely. Essentially they've told us that a deal will get done and there will be a full season. Human nature and negotiating tactics mean that it won't be done until the deadline. We're near the deadline and lo and behold, a deal is imminent. Everything in the last couple months has been preparation for the agreement now. If they didn't have all the previous work it'd be much harder to do a last minute deal because of the complexity of it all. Before then it was all posturing and grand-standing. Fear not, football is coming.

Agree. I like seeing some first hand accounts and help make my own impression instead of solely relying on some writer. I've seen what good writing can do. What comes out doesn't necessarily resemble reality. So it's nice to have a first hand look at the people doing the work (coaches evaluating the players). Now I can see for myself.

Agreed that cherry-picking a few good plays doesn't mean much. But remember football is a game talent and teamwork. Our talent got worse through the year with some injuries, but our teamwork got a LOT better by the end of the season. It gives me some hope that our coaches can get everyone working together. We still need some better talent than last year, but hopefully with a good draft and more development of our young players we can get that too.

I really enjoy these segments and I'm glad that they do them. It's great to get to hear the coaches themselves. I've always thought that Andra's injury really hurt us in for the year. I know that we still didn't play well early but we that's what learning a new system can do. We played the 3-4 much better by the end of the season, but we didn't have as much talent due to injury. I was very excited by both Dwan & Andra's signing. I believe that they will both open our season as starters and hopefully can stay injury free. After our brutal start to the season 0-8 we finished 4-4 and pushed very good teams to the limit during that span (Balt & Pitt). Even with some significant injuries that really showed our lack of depth. (LB & ROT) On the other hand injuries showed our surprisingly good depth at WR which was a major question mark at the beginning of the season. Our young WR's showed pretty nicely and if they continue to develop could be pretty great. We've got a lot of young LBs in Moats, Batten & White. All three of them I think have some real potential. Having Merriman & Davis back as starters will significantly improve our LB corp IMO.

For what it's worth, Ralphy-boy is a part owner of my company. (through the Venture Capitalists) To bad we're not doing so well for him. The VC's are doing okay though.

I like your dream as well!

http://espn.go.com/blog/nfceast/post/_/id/28008/free-agency-in-the-east-tight-ends Not a bad little summary. I want a Tight end who's at least a good to very good blocker and good to very good receiver. I'd rather have that then one who's just a very good/elite receiver. From what I understand, an elite receiving TE comes at the expense of the receiving corp as there are still only so many balls being thrown per game. I think we have a good young set of receivers. For the first time in a long time I really like them and have high expectations of them getting better. We also have a much harder time protecting our QB. Fitz does a good job helping them out, but the OL is still not a strength of our team. So I'd rather have help with a very good blocking TE who can also relieve pressure by making the defense account for his receiving skills as well. To me, Boss or Miller fit that description well. Here's a description of Miller from year before: That's what I want. No more one dimensional TE's please.

Thanks for your write-up and interpretations! It was good and appreciated.

We do... We do.

In the comments someone noted that the stripe is the same as on the invitation to the uniform party: Which I think is a Nice touch. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2730/5785993841_46cf2f316f.jpg

yes, and the opportunity cost of using that money elsewhere.

I think it's just frustration speaking. We're all sad that we drafted a big-time boom or bust prospect who is doing an amazing impression of a bust. Not that I condone it, but some people can't keep their vitriol inside.

A pretty reasonable answer for this. I don't know if it'll account for the (estimated) $100m+ estimated debt, but it absolutely could. Remember signing bonuses were one of the ways that Snyder was abusing the salary cap limitation. Giving large amounts of hard cash up front as opposed to promises in future years. But you need a boatload of cash to do this. Ralph doesn't have that kind of $cash$ to burn.

Rarely does a post make me laugh out loud as much as this one did. Well done! Especially appreciated after a rough day.

Also, other teams will run a similar scheme to some of our preseason opponents. It's good to understand that scheme (even though it's likely a pretty vanilla version of it) so that you can test a couple things out with your players to see how they'll work for the future.

Well Spiller's out-performed McGahee for his first year.

I completely agree. I also didn't like but hoped Green would be "serviceable" as a temporary RT. He sure wasn't. Most people if they were in over their heads.

I agree with the optimism when some of those events happened, but Optimism didn't linger for me so much. Optimism has gotten stronger for me with Buddy running the show. It's really funny that you said a pig in slop because that was the exact image I had when I was writing the thread!

NFL Week one on schedule (OVER=After or not at all) UNDER CJ Spiller 800 yds RUSHING UNDER CJ Spiller 1500 yds from scrimmage UNDER FITZ TDs 23.5 OVER # Fitz game winning drives 1.5 OVER Stevie Johnson TDs 8.5 UNDER Terence McGee missed games due to injury 2.5 OVER Chris Hairston starts at RT 3.5 UNDER Michael Jasper games dressed 2.5 UNDER Wang starts 2.5 UNDER Merriman sacks 3.5 OVER Bills wins 6.5 (optimism is high right now) UNDER Division wins 2.5 OVER Moats sacks 4.5 OVER Defensive Total Rank 18 (under is better) UNDER # home wins 4.5 (Oak, PHI, WASH-TOR, DEN, TEN, MIA, NYJ, NE) UNDER Easley yds 475 OVER Easley tds 3.5 UNDER # Games Dareus makes tackle for loss 6.5 OVER # Games K Will makes tackle for loss 9.5 OVER Maybin sacks .5 UNDER Fitz beard length week 17: 1/8 inch (will he grow one again?) OVER Bills Probowlers 2.5 UNDER # rooks start by game 5: 2.5 (williams, dareus, shepperd, hairston, searcy, white, white, jasper, rogers) OVER

I've really been enjoying his recent interviews and in my eyes it sure looks like he's having a grand time being in charge of football. He came out of retirement but he doesn't show signs of weariness or regret of that decision. (unlike Levy IMO) He looks more comfortable than when he first took the job and at this point it looks to me like there is nothing else in the world that he'd rather be doing. I have grown to really like him as our GM.

He's by all accounts a work-a-holic. What he's doing is preperation for stepping up one more rung in the ladder to be the GM where he'll be responsible for even more things. I have no worries that he can't handle it. He's getting good hands-on experience with his scouts in preparation for him to delegate more when he moves up. He'll know more about them, how to interpret their results and what things he can trust about them.

Agreed, but they got the best FA tackles out there. The best piece of junk is still a piece of junk. Definitely a disappointment, but his career is hardly over. He certainly has talent. Well according to most reports that I hear of, you hope to get 4 good players out of a draft with the average being less than 3. It was clear from the draft that they were not expecting a quick results from their first draft class. It's tough to make the transition from college to pros and even harder for small school guys to do it. They drafted a lot of small school guys. Clearly indicating that they were looking for long term value rather than a short term fix. As for being a bad team, their record was bad for sure, but what I saw was a team that struggled mightily to make the transition to the 3-4, but got better the second half of the season (finishing 4-4). Yep, RT was a disaster and we wasted several games highlighting Marshawn Lynch so that we could trade him. (The correct decision IMO) Rough transition to 3-4. Some people can never make the transition, others like Kyle Williams excel no matter what. Besides years of poor drafting had left our cupboard bare. We were already getting worse before last year. Totally agree. DeHaven is not as good as Bobby April. But April was as good as gone since we didn't pick him for interim coach. I have NO idea if he'd be a good head coach, but he's a damn fine ST coach. He's the only recent coach that I miss. It's called humility or self-deprecation and most people consider it a virtue.