Khyber53

Why in the world would Teddy do anything but say, "I'm gonna sit here and make my $20+ million on the bench while you pay Watson even more"? No one is going to be foolish enough to trade for Watson with that contract. Right now Watson and the Texans are floating this out there to see if anyone is crazy enough to make a massive trade AND pay Watson the money. Someone might, but most likely it will be announced before the season that Watson and the Texans have made up and worked out a more cap-friendly deal spread over multiple years.

One of the best ones out there. Sad to hear this.

How about they give us two firsts so we can take that contract off their books?

You are just a hand grenade looking for a cesspool aren't you?

I think Tepper is doing a bit of work to drive prices up in the market with no intention of going there. Some times a fellow can sit in an auction and be a troll, just politely upping the price to keep the pot boiling. What if the Jags and Jets decided to instead grab Watson and Stafford? There's a lot of spin out there and I think Tepper isn't playing chess, but poker instead.

Hits never look that forceful in slow-motion, which is the way this is all being judged. It's not that someone gets hit in the head or their head hits something, it's if the brain sloshes around in the brainpan and bruises itself against the skull. That can happen easily without a direct exterior impact, especially when someone gets whipped around like he did, at the speed it actually happened.

Best of the world to him. Good guy. He'll have a gold jacket in a few years.

I certainly hope so. You build lines, you don't buy them. Draft OT and C. Find the biggest, meanest, smartest UDFA guards available. Want to change the culture and change the toughness of the team, start with the five big guys on the O-line. The o-line should look like the final boss' most dangerous henchmen.

Because of the fat contract, because there is a new coach/GM there and because he can refuse a trade to a deadend team, most likely he will remain a Houston Texan.

He has his work cut out for him.

I'll say it again, this place will have a total meltdown if Ron and Marty make it to the Super Bowl there before we do. Ron already beat us to the playoffs. Back when Ron was still our coach but the writing was on the wall, I warned that Ron could make his team relevant before we were rebuilt and rolling again. That's kinda already started happening. Now with Marty there, the slap against us could be even louder. But hold faith, because I think we're trying to do something with a longer lasting impact and that will take some time as strong foundations take a lot of work to build. We may see Football Team (dang what a stupid name) advance before us thanks to a weak NFCEast, but I think we are trying to position ourselves for the long run in a tough division that is aging out of its prime. We'll win the marathon even if we get beat in the sprints.

If I were him I wouldn't mention renegotiating the deal. Some fool wanting to make a big impression will drop a bundle on him and ride that out. Or no one will and DeShaun will stay in Houston and make them pay it until they can finally cut him after 2023 for the smaller cap hit. He's a marvelous player and could make a huge impact for a team like ours. The sticker shock and already openly wanting to leave his first team, make him an unattractive partner with us, in my opinion... especially when we can take one of the upper tier QBs in the first round on a much, much more attractive rookie deal.

If Watson comes here, it's going to be massively expensive. The 2022 and 2023 cap hits are $40 and $42 million. 2021 is a very nice numbered year ($15.9 million) but that balloon payment following is going to be an anchor tied around our necks as we swim into the next season. Yeah, he's good but no one can take up a third of the salary cap and expect to see much of a team built up around them.

It is! Hopefully it's going to wind out into something cool and not just a "It was just a dream" kind of stories. Or worse, do a JJ Abram's Lost wind out where the incredibly intricate plot has no real conclusion because it was just built to be nothing but complication after complication to keep people guessing.

There's also S.W.O.R.D. showing up in places. S.W.O.R.D. is the outward facing version of S.H.I.E.L.D. The Strucker watch with the Hydra symbol on it (and Baron Strucker from the comics was a big part of Hydra and AIM). The beekeeper coming out of the sewer is a reference to the emergence of A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) that was a Hydra-like group that was seeking the Cosmic Cube throughout the 1970s. Their headgear looked a lot like beekeeper helmets and screens... In many scenes the Vision still has his Infinity Gem ... the Mind Stone meaning it may have been replaced post Infinity War time loop and this may all be in his head. He and Wanda may well be stuck in a time-free loop within the stone. Alternately, and this is my take: After Vision was killed in the Inifinty War, his consciousness (the old Jarvis) went right back into Cyberspace where he had hid from Ultron back before they both got bodies. The Wanda seen in the show is actually his very detailed impression of her and he is keeping it alive while trying to build some sort of life construct for the two of them (since she was taken out in the Snap), but it is all in his head. He is using old TV shows (The Dick van Dyke Show and Bewitched so far) as an analog to build their life on and preserve who they are. If he can hold on long enough to get the Mind Stone again, he can bring the two back to life with at least some sort of shared time between them. As a further complication, I believe Arnim Zola (remember him as the Nazi scientist that worked for Red Skull and then got computerized in the Captain America movies), might be hiding out in the same part of Cyberspace and is the reason behind the commercials from Stark Industries (the toaster) and Strucker watches coming through. Or at least that's my take.

I'd have said more, but really not wanting to give any spoilers.

The first two episodes are fun and a completely different twist on things. And there is a lot going on under the surface. Easter eggs abound. It's a clever concept and if you're a fan of Marvel and the Marvel Universe of the movies, there's a lot to talk about and speculate on.

Took it, but yeah, I think it is geared for someone decades younger than me! Best of luck with the survey and the thesis!

Just look at the crowds. At the BLM protests, almost everyone was wearing a mask. At the Trump rallies... well, let's see how it shakes out, but advance word is that if you are a true believer in Trump you won't wear a mask and don't need to. COVID doesn't differentiate, but the practices of the participants will probably differentiate them for it.

Wow! You're on the front line there, man. I wonder how many times the local outbreaks start from exactly the situation you saw in the ER? Something tells me it's just about every one of them in rural areas.

I think we also need to look at that as the first wave in our major urban areas (particularly NYC). The rest of the US, smaller cities and rural areas, have not actually hit their first waves, but are still in the fringe introduction moments of the disease here (except for maybe the outbreaks in meat packing plants which could be the canary in the coal mine moments for rural regions). We need to look at how influenza spreads from big city hot spots to get a timing/travel rate for the virus into the heartland. There's always a lag, and this one may be longer for COVID-19 than the flu simply because of the lockdowns. I don't want to see it hit hard again (too many lives have been lost already), but I won't be surprised if you see outbreaks in secondary cities like Omaha, San Antonio, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Charlotte and Memphis, along with a major hit to Las Vegas and Miami as soon as leisure travel kicks back in.

Some mentally challenged 12-year old in Cleveland points a toy gun (orange barrel-end and all) at a cop and gets shot for it. These turds carry a fake .50 cal machine gun and an inert AT-4, and they dare anyone to bat an eye or a cop to arrest them. Now that's a white privilege if there ever was one.

Those were attention-seeking, lawsuit baiting dweebs who would have been shot on sight/site had they been black, walked into a place of business armed and wearing masks. And in the one photo, Muscle-dude, what the hell are you compensating for with two wheelguns and a used AT-4 tube slung over your shoulder? Let's not even get into the guy who was carrying an M2HB rigged for anti-aircraft roles slung onto his shoulder. What quasi-militia poo stone did these threats to the Second Amendment crawl out from under? They weren't exercising their rights near so much as threatening the rights of responsible gun owners. Turd heads.

Ohh, I agree heartily with what we've been doing. More than anything, our self quarantining has kept every hospital in America outside of New York City capable of handling the cases on hand. Had we all just kept partying on the death toll would have been astronomical. The move saved us, even if it did hurt economically -- and we have to realize that not everything in the world is less important than economics. And honestly, I think we should continue social distancing and self quarantining for a while longer just to allow us to rest and refit our healthcare sector. It will also give us more time to develop treatments and best practices for combating the illness. In the end, though, this pandemic wasn't just COVID-19's big debut, it was the coming out party for coronaviruses the world over. It (all the other COVIDs and SARS) are here to stay, mutating a bit each year and rolling through the populace, just like Influenza and Rhinoviruses (the sicknesses we refer to as the common cold).

Sadly, it is going to require folks going out, mingling and potentially infecting each other to get us to the next step in living in a post Coronavirus world. We'll know soon whether we get slammed again or if it will just be a moderate rate of infection. Sooner or later, we'll have to all go back out, but as Magneto said, "Let the pawns go first." We've been living in a post Influenza world since the 1918 epidemic, learning to live with it's reappearances, learning how to treat it and alleviate symptoms, developing vaccines and sadly, burying tens of thousands of terminal cases each year because it can't be eradicated now or ever. We'll do the same with the Coronaviruses that will come along over the years.