AU-panther

Sam. You don't trade a player, you trade their contract. We traded for the right to pick up Sam's 18m contract next year. CJ has a few years left on his rookie deal.

I don't mind Rhule, a lot of new to the NFL coaches have struggled their first few years, but he has to drop the ego. All the coaches at this level are pros, you aren't special and you aren't going to work magic on these players. Once a player has been in the league for a few years you have a pretty good idea of what you have. The exceptions are far and few in between.

correct, but he isn't guaranteed to be the 1st or 2nd QB off of the board either, which could be good for us. I'm think there is going to a good bit of variance among the top 4-5 QBs among teams this year. I'm not sure there is a QB in this class that would have been top-4 QB last year, but at the time i could see QB 3 or 4 falling to that 10-14 range. In reality you can't get caught up in this year vs last year vs next year talk, at the end of the day you evaluate the QBs in front of you and go from there. If you don't have a franchise QB you have to try, its not about finding a guy you are 100% right about, its about finding a guy that you think has a good enough chance to be worth the gamble.

Like who? Most really good FA QBs don’t make it to market unless they are really old. I just think sooner or later we need to draft our guy.

and you might be right, waiting until 2023 might be the smart move. My opinion though, is that at some point you need to draft a guy early and let him develop and quit hoping for shortcuts. You can't wait for the perfect prospect and the #1 pick.

lol, that was our options going into the season. better?

I'm going to try and be positive here. The Darnold experiment had 3 possible outcomes. Option A: He plays great, we pay him a lot of money and he becomes our franchise level QB for the next 10 years. Option B: He plays terrible, we eat next years cap hit and we look for a new QB. Option C He plays just good enough to win, when everything else goes well, and we pay him big money to be average. Its looking like Option B, which is better than Option C. There are some really bad teams this year ahead of us in the draft but I could see us drafting in that 8-12 range which might open up the possibility of QB 3 for us. Who are we looking at?

trying to fix the QB situation in free agency (or by trading) is what caused this situation. For most the part, franchise QBs are drafted by their team and drafted early. I agree that it is a longshot, but finding one later or fixing a vet is a longer shot. Sooner or later we need to draft one, in the first round, surround him with good coaching a good team and let him develop. Maybe not this draft, but maybe the next one, or the one after that. We tried to take shortcuts with both Teddy and Sam, it cost $50 in cap and multiple draft picks. Time for the short cuts to be over.

This narrative that Teddy was a stop gap was wrong from he start. Somebody in the organization thought they could win with him, same with Sam Simply put, somebody thought they could win sooner than later by "fixing" two established vets.

I'm not saying force a pick next year, maybe we wait until 2023 to draft a QB, and yes fixing OL would be huge but the Browns aren't a good example to use when talking about not drafting a QB. Browns had one of the best LTs of all time and at times good OLs, it did them no good. Them trying to find a QB wasn't their problem. Their problem was they weren't good at finding one. QBs are almost always a reach in the draft, there will almost always be a better positional player available, the fact is though, that QBs are that much more important that you have to gamble to find one. I don't know if there is a decent enough one this year, to make that gamble, but the front office has to decide that.

We gave up that luxury by having the Teddy and Sam experiment. Now we are going to be forced into chasing a QB, in a year that by a lot of accounts, is not as good as some years, specifically last year. With that being said there will be QBs from the 2021 class (which was highly regarded) that won't work out, and there is also a good chance that one of these QBs, in this years class which isn't highly regarded, will work out.

wrong. I've said every since we signed Matt Kalil that signing players to become something they haven't shown to be in recent years is a proposition that usually doesn't work out. Said the same with Teddy, Said the same with Sam. None of this is surprising, nor not supported by history.

To NOT put pressure on Sam. I think sometimes teams don't really want a backup that is that good. It can cause QB controversies. This entire time I think they have tried to create an environment for Sam to succeed and take the pressure off of him. Even in the preseason they didn't play him much.

us "common fans" couldn't have possible seen this coming when "paid professionals" were making football decisions.

Who cares if he loses the team? At this point you are playing for draft position. Nothing you can realistically do is going to give this team a realistic chance of winning anything important this year.

There is no easy fix for this. Going to PJ won't fix it. Signing some midlevel FA won't fix it. You have to draft a guy and give him time to develop or sell the farm for an established guy. The worst part is you can't force it. We might not be in position to draft a guy you actually like next year or a quality FA QB might not come available. Maybe we have to wait 2 years. In the meantime you build the rest of your roster without wasting resources on players that won't help us when we finally do find our guy.

You are talking about a very specific scenario that really doesn't apply here.. What we spent on Teddy would have rolled over to this year. Even if you reach a point where its not rolling over you extend a core player early and use that cap space to basically pre pay a lot of his contract.

wrong Cap space rolls over. All of this money that we wasted on Sam and Teddy could have been used to help whatever QB we find in the future. Maybe one day we draaft a QB, that $50m would help improve an O-line alot.

If our QB did the same thing most people around here would be making the excuse that he was preventing the defender from going after the fumble.

He was keeping a defender from going after a fumble. I would hope my QB did the same.

I agree. People need to realize that sacks and pressures are QB stats as much as they are O-line stats. Not saying we don't need to improve our O-line, we do very badly, but the QB does bears a lot of the responsibility. Speaking of Teddy, do you think he would have done better, worse, or the same this year, instead of Sam? Our PPG were actually a little higher last year, with a defense that wasn't near as good. Often a really good defense makes your offense a little easier to play.

stats say otherwise his accuracy has always been terrible.

Of course they can, the only thing is the older you are the greater the chance you are already close to your maximum, but there is chance for growth both from technique and strength/flexibility. Everyone wanted to make fun of Mac's shirtless picture but in reality that was a plus. Its clear he has the potential to improve physically, if he was built like Cam and had his current velocity that would be concerning. Brady is probably a better athlete in his 40s than he was his 20s. I'm not saying he is going to work out and have a Josh Allen type of arm but its foolish to think he can't improve his velocity some. QBs are hard to evaluate, everyone likes to talk about ceilings and floors but its hard to quantify the traits that make that up. People are saying he would get killed behind our line because he can't scramble. Maybe does a better job of reading pressure and calling protections, maybe he gets the ball out quicker. Sam has all the tools in the world that you would want for a QB, as far as arm and mobility and size, but would you consider him to have a high ceiling? If a QB has terrible accuracy or processing is it possible for him to still have a high ceiling?

Good coaches tend to have good QBs....

I’m not an outlier guy myself but I think at times we do get hung up on arm strength a bit with QBs. Or maybe we don’t factor enough variables into the “ceiling” equation. What about decision making and accuracy? To be honest, I wasn’t a Jones guy myself, just makes you wonder.