RuntheDamnBall

Especially if the terms, or failing that, the goals of those contracts are not being met, and this has a direct bearing on our strategy and ability to do anything good there. This is not about getting news from the Op-Ed page, as much as anyone might like it to be. It is about a failure of approach and a failure of execution, whatever the goal at hand was supposed to be or was made out to be.

Gay bashers calling out others for gay bashing is just oh-so-priceless, dareIsay fabulous. The point is there is a big amendment vote coming up that this guy has been a vocal supporter of. If it turns out that he is himself gay (no one has called him as such yet) or has personal issues with this, it means that his authority to call out a lifestyle that he himself embraces, secretly or not, is sort of undermined. Your posts reflect an ignorance of the situation at hand, of social understanding, and of English grammar.

Might want to note that on the second night of screening at Venice, the audience gave "The Fountain" a standing O. Aronofsky's films (PI, Requiem for a Dream) can be pretty disturbing but the guy does really bring something new to the table in terms of filmmaking technique. I am really interested to see how he does a visually stunning sci-fi without CGI, something that hasn't been tried in a good long while.

Agreed she is hot, but she is hottest when she's smiling. I don't really care for most of the stare of death model shots. A good smile and a happy look is really, really attractive.

How aggressive does one need to be? Like it or not, this team is not the Redskins. This means we can't backload contracts and ask questions later. It means we can't drop huge upfront money every year. It means if Takeo Spikes gets brought in for big money and gets hurt, hell, it hurts! It means if Nate Clements looks more like Nathaniel Hawthorne out on the football field at a $7M clip, that it hurts! It means that if 15 guys are brought in in the first year of a GM's tenure, who are value free agents meant to fit an emerging system, that it will take time for them to build that system. It's rebuilding. One kind of has to forget the Donahoe years at this point. The only way they factor into this year are as the impetus for rebuilding THIS year, and as providing some of the very RAW material in the players retained. You will see a bunch let go after this season, be certain of that.

Would you have read the damn article if I had removed the name and given a better response than this? I'm not elevating Krugman. I'm posting his point in the hopes of receiving some more intelligent responses than yours. Guess my hopes were too high. What does it say that contractors -- who are getting paid ample amounts of money to get Iraq going, who are being given the jobs without competition, and who are for all intents and purposes arms of the administration -- are leaving without finishing the job, after all the money they are spending (wasting?). The failure to build an infrastructure that works there rates high among the reasons we're in the shitstorm we're in right now. And you want to dismiss it because you don't like the messenger? How many more people need to go on the ignore list around here?

I don't think anyone would argue that those guys are upper echelon guys. And Samuels has been in and out of the doghouse, dangled as trade bait, and was drafted quite a bit ago.

Hutch was coming at near-tackle money and he gets to play dome ball 8 weeks of the year instead of at RWS. I think it would have crippled us to spend that kind of money on a guard and best Minny's offer. Also, I wasn't looking at numbers but their line didn't look like anything special against NE. Best course of action really would be keeping your Ruben Browns unless you have a really good guy waiting in the wings to supplant him. Bringing in the outside guys is just going to be very costly. That said, if Steinbach is coming for less than Hutch money we might have an outside chance. Depends on the other needs, confidence in finding a guy in the draft, and more importantly on the next 9 weeks of the season, where we find out if Gandy can play guard much better than he played tackle -- and if Pennington has any potential whatsoever. I think Villarial is going to NEED to be replaced, within the next 16 Bills games, so that still puts us with a need at guard. Last thought, if stuckincincy is right and Steinbach might be perceived by anyone as tackle material, he is going to come at an unapproachable premium.

I think we've seen that the draft pretty much is THE viable method to building a strong team, with a complement of value free agents that fit the system. The Washington Redskins are living proof that making a lot of impact free agent buys doesn't necessarily translate to success, though one might argue that they don't drop that big FA money on the lines, but rather on more skill positions (the bane of BfNYC existence ) Contrast with New England. They do pick up a free agent from time to time, but the bigger moves they've made a la Colvin actually haven't been the ones that helped the most. Corey Dillon was a trade, not a free agent move. They don't let huge free agent demands sway the way they do business. Now, one might argue that if the AFCE competition was a little stronger, NE might not find the same success, and one might be right. Look at the Bengals' line success. Draftees, most of them. We do need to start picking up 2nd and 3rd round interior linemen with regularity. Tackles, I'm not sure what the right way to go is since they just seem to be so hard to find. Sure, not all will work out, but if we are picking from the higher end of the talent pool, chances are we'll hit the jackpot more often. Right now we're betting real low and occasionally hitting with a guy like Peters. The rate of return is just not real high on this kind of method. Long story short, I think you're right. Drafting is and will remain most important.

A pretty salient commentary this time from Krugman/NYT:

WHO ARE THESE GUYS?!

You're not getting jumped on for not liking Losman. You're getting jumped on for saying that you will root against him. That's the hallmark of a bad fan, someone who wants more to be right than for his team to win.

I'm really loving this idea of fans "giving him that last shot," as if it's theirs to give. There's a coaching staff in place here that makes those decisions. I'm pretty certain you people would have run Jim Kelly out of town if there had been an internet in 1986.

Both. Look at his post history.

If reasonable people disagreeing means that the rights of some people are trampled, then it's not reasonable. I'm willing to go as far as saying a stable partnership of two people can be marired and adopt a kid, and that's it. Anything else can be pretty much proven to be statistically far less stable, with or without kids. I'm with BlueFire. Not buying the slippery slope argument for even a second.

Peppers would be a dream come true. But does anyone see him wanting to leave his home state for cold weather? We'd have to throw a sh---ton of money at that.

The costs will either come now, at what seems like an unreasonable price, or later, at a much more unreasonable price, when there are no other options.

Problem is you think you've addressed the problems (Reyes, Fowler), given the dearth of talent out there, you find out you've rolled snakeeyes again, and you have to give it another roll the next offseason. Sure, we could have tried to bring in Bentley (neglecting that he was dead-set on the Browns). We could have bested what was an astronomical offer for Hutchinson. But look at what that bought the Browns. It's hard to ever tell in the NFL these days. I'm of the opinion that very few teams are very good, and these are the ones with the bona fide stars, possible Hall of Famers i.e. Manning. Others have good team management and are able to plug in, catch a fire and it will sometimes work ala Belicheck and Cowher. Knowing that we likely don't have that HOF caliber player, that's what we're hoping for here and it doesn't happen all the time, everywhere.

You got it right.

I think they were the Coors Light house band, IIRC.

Let's break out the "goodness" chart and see...

Which is why he's a prime candidate for the ignore button. I've learned. Let his thread die, folks.

Now I get it. What the hell, nothing is working on defense, so why not start DiGiorgio over Spikes and Jason Jefferson over Schobel? To be serious, I think you make the O-line moves to see if they help your QB. If part of JP's problem is play under duress, perhaps this helps. If he continues to make bad decisions, you re-evaluate. If his most egregious decisions remain getting blindsided immediately following the snap count, I just don't think that's a fair shake. We know what Holcomb gives us and they're obviously not certain that Nall is the guy. If they were, he'd be #2 and competing in practice. The whole point is that the coaches see patterns in practice and need to translate them to the field. Obviously not enough of that is happening, but there is something happening in practice that says JP is the better guy, or the rest of the competition is not good enough to supplant him.

Coli, goodness is an honest-to-goodness quantifiable statistic, just like hit points and charisma.

daq... I don't buy for a minute your "take away his long runs and his YPC is this" platform. The point is precisely that a guy has those short runs and will hope to burst one every once in awhile. I hate the Pats, but would LOOOOOVE a guy like Maroney on this team. He just cannot be tackled. He turns what should be a clean tackle into a miss. We'll see how he develops over time and how teams begin to game-plan for him. But he is as elusive a MFer as I've seen in the NFL in a long time. Back to my point, those long runs are part and parcel of the YPC. Nobody averages 4.0 between the tackles consistently. The long runs are the reason YPC gets to be 4.0 and up.