Khyber53

Good insights. Maybe he's not a fully realized safety yet, but he's getting his game into place. It's a danged hard job to be a professional football player.

We need Coker to step up no matter what. He's been a little below his capabilities since he got back from his injury. He was, at one time, supplanting XL on the field. We need that guy back.

Honestly, coming into this season, I'd never heard of him. Glad we grabbed him, seems to be a fantastic pick up!

Thanks, man! I really appreciate it! Writing can be a lonely and quiet career. And here's this week's story, run on our secondary channel. Editors really shortened it, but I just write the scripts.

Looks like Mays will be our C this week, ain't no one really shining as a TE yet, the XL thing may just be the old adage that you never see the real WR until the third season. And I'm not saying he's anti-Bryce, but just that he's a realist. Working with what he has. And a lot of the decisions as to who gets playing time are made based on stuff you and I will never see, because it's behind the scenes. Time will tell, but in the meantime, what a curious season this has been and one with more opportunity than we've seen in a while. I plan on enjoying the roller coaster ride for what it is and I'm looking forward to next season as well. I've said it before, and it bears repeating, something's being built here and it looks like it might be good if we're patient.

I agree whole-heartedly. Or perhaps Canales has already made his decision about the future and he's just minimalizing Bryce because, well, that's the only option. It's not like we can promote Dalton to starter (he's just spent), we don't have anyone else on the bench for real and we are past the trade deadline. And the few free agents that are out there are rusty and unreliable at this point. After writing that, I'm pretty sure that Canales has a change at QB already in his plans for next season. It would take miraculous play from Bryce to change that at this point.

I sure hope so. Everything seems to be pointing to the table being set for it. Really, as I've said before, Bryce is in the position to make his statement about what his future will be.

He's not trying to build a winner... yet. He's building a locker room. He's building a place where the players know they are part of a team and that they are valued. Now, if we all had a crystal ball and a genie with a wish, we could go back and have us a Tom Brady just waiting in the wings. But that was one team, one time. Not a viable strategy for building a team. Ask Belichick. He couldn't manufacture it again once the miracle moved on.

There's an old unwritten rule in the NFL that you don't lose your starting position due to injury. The guys in the locker room know it and live by it. Rico knew it coming in and he never said a word otherwise except for praise for Chuba. And when Chuba came back, the Coach put him back as the starter and gave him the lead job for the game. And now it seems like Rico is in the first chair and Chuba is the supporting running back. We may see it move back and forth. And that might not be based on prior game performance but because of injury or fatigue issues we have no knowledge of, or because one or the other can handle the game plan details better than the other. It could be something as simple as one of the guys being better at pass protection from the left or right side and they are comparing that with where they are seeing tendencies from the opposing team. More than anything, I think that it's much like our inactivity at the trade deadline, Canales is building a very solid, traditional pro football culture here. And it may sometimes deal with more of what the players expect than what their fantasy football stats are.

I'm seeing so many teams moving to a run heavy offensive style. It's a cyclical league and I'm here for it. I love smash mouth football. And we did a text book job of it against Green Bay.

Cowboys. Patriots. Couldn't ask for two bigger villains.

I think we're all struggling with what things are right now and what they have been. It's like getting ready to have bandages removed after a long period of injury. The healing, the new growth, they aren't going to be pretty, there's going to be some ongoing issues for a while at best and there's every chance that we're going to have to go back into the bandage situation all over again. And that sucks. But it's also a place where maybe, just maybe, the recovery is going to finally start happening. The bad days will be getting behind us. It's not going to happen this year, but I believe from what I see that this year is showing that improvement. We focus on the QB because that's what all the pundits focus on, because it's the flashiest and most heralded position on the field. No one wants to put out a tweet about how a center is holding down their job and anchoring a line. They rarely celebrate that blocking tight end or special teams gunner. That fourth CB on the depth chart? Not a mention. And yet, those guys are the kind that we've been building here, we're building the lunch pail guys AND finding some future stars. Is Bryce one of them? Might be a cornerstone of the team in the future as the second QB, might somehow just show out to end the season. Might flame out like many expect. But if that uncertainty is all we concentrate on, we're just going to miserably look at this team and maybe miss out on some solid green shoots that are finally beginning to poke through into the sunlight.

Hooker is a Greensboro native, so I was pulling for him to make it here. Sorry that it didn't work out. Of course, I'm not saying he's dead in the water. Baker Mayfield and Same Darnold were flameouts here, so maybe he finds a new home elsewhere and rises up from these ashes. Our QB room sucks, but it might be something about how it was built and how it is developed. Either way, he wore the uniform here so he deserves our respect and a good luck on the way out the door.

Ayup. No argument here. See above.

Oh I agree. I don't think we see the same QB room next season as we have this season. Dalton has reached the end of the line it appears. He's just not even got the staying power to come in for Bryce right now (talk about not setting the bar very high). I think we'll probably pick up a new QB in the draft and give Bryce the opportunity to stay on the bench here or be traded out on that fourth contract year. Long term, we need someone with more oomph. Bryce is tougher and more resilient than I thought he would ever be, but he needs to be able to regularly move that ball down the field more. There's no doubt about that.