Khyber53

Nice to see your work again!

Sorry, Cam won't be starting QB by that time and there's a case to be made that he may not be the starter coming out of training camp. Not saying Mac is ready right now, but that bum shoulder Cam's been working with hasn't been getting any younger or better. I hate it for him, he was one of the most spectacular players to hit the field back in his heyday. He did things no one else ever had or might not ever will. But he hasn't been the same guy since Denver knocked the stuffings out of him in the Super Bowl and then did it again on opening day the following season. They tore the cape off of Superman and blew their noses on it. And it just started the long, slow slide from there. That's football, though. Few, if any, get to go out at their best and few get to hang on for very long at all.

That'd be like watching a really bad wreck happen, then walking up and making full value offer on one of the cars involved. Time to just let this just ride off into the sunset.

Heck, seeing @KB_fan back already makes this season better than last!

They've made an offer to his team. That usually comes with some exposition of information that basically says, "This is what will nail you, do you want to avoid it?" If he takes the offer, the court case goes away, the plaintiffs get paid and the attorneys get their cut. If he says he'll fight it, expect some of that evidence to "accidentally" be leaked to the public to put further pressure on him. Will he settle? Depends of if he is either 1) sure that he is perfectly innocent in every single case or 2) that he's not innocent but stupid enough to think he can somehow outsmart a team of lawyers. I think there's too many individual counts for him to have a shot at #1. Smart money says his attorneys will make a decent counter offer on the settlement, they'll dicker over the final price (no pun intended) and we'll never see it in court. What the NFL does to him then is up to the commissioner and his advisors. Since this is a civil case and it may not make it to court, it leaves the NFL with no legally binding judgement of guilt or innocence to use in their decision. That sucks if you are the league because now you have to look at the possibility of a suit filed against the league by Watson's attorneys and the NFLPA if he is suspended, or the potential public outcry if he is allowed to play again immediately with no repercussions. One guy's pecker hasn't had this much impact on the league since Jerry Richardson was caught cruising the secretarial pool.

Good post OP. Patience will pay off. Gotta believe!

He's going to be fine. His opponents are going to be flat on their backs.

Swole Bones the Lesser.

Even the greatest of QBs don't get a ring each year. QB is the most important position on a team, but it's not the end all be all deciding factor. The biggest deciding factor on success for a team is something they have little control over... injuries. Still, it's hard to sit back and say look at how good the guy we picked is playing while a QB you could have had is lighting it up out there.

Now if it will just play out that way, we'd be just sitting pretty.

Same arm length as Jordan Gross (and that's been said again and again). It's all about the skill and toughness. I hope he pans out and flashes greatness right away. Otherwise, we're all going to be talking about missed opportunities in the draft. I think Christensen will be the LT coming out of training camp. His college QB was the #2 overall pick for a number of reasons, and many of those required good pass protection. All of the other candidates we have are either journeymen (at best) or unfulfilled projects at the moment. It's really his job to lose.

Week 15 game in Buffalo is our only real cold weather, outdoor game to finish the season.

Honestly, it was just seeing the Lions there so many times that got me. Then again, their suckage has been storied and enduring.

Sure are some epically bad teams on that list. Not sure I like what it is pointing at.

This 100%.

Actually, when you look at our red zone and two-minute drill work last year, it's kind of hard to not go, "Ohhh, so that explains it." I've watched and thought Brady has some stuff that has carried over from being part of high-powered college teams that hasn't translated to the NFL. In college at LSU he was pretty much into throwing mad bombs and having receivers that were much, much better than most of the defenders they faced. Red Zone? That's something they'd be in for minutes of the game. Two-minute drill? Why they were never behind with the game on the line. In New Orleans, don't worry, Brees has this. Here, we need those fundamentals. One of Brady's biggest things that I think is a handicap is that he was often calling the offense from the sidelines, rather than from up in the coach's box where he could see the lay of the field and how defenses were setting up and reacting. Total non-pro thing that handicapped him and you could see it. I think he can be a great OC, but there's some transformation that I hoped he has grown into before we get out on the field (or practice field) this year.

Dang, I've got kids and a mortgage.

Baseball, the only sport where you can keep a beer in hand while playing it 90% of the time, even at the professional level.

He flashed for about a minute and a half here (but loved his sack celebration). Would be great to find out he is ready and able to play, but that's a lot of time off and not much tape on the guy.

I'm optimistic by nature. I like the coach, even if we really didn't see many wins or great performances last year. I think the Darnold pick up was probably a smart gamble that could pay off well or crater. Cratering, though, would come with some upsides in the next draft and we wouldn't be on the hook for a terrible amount of money for too long. Honestly, the thing that worries me the most is our defense. They didn't do us many favors last year and we ended up in some shoot outs where the other team never had to send out their punter a single time. I don't think it was personnel that did it so much as our non-aggressive play style in most of the games. There were games where it looked like their mamas had told them not to get their uniforms dirty, yanno? I'm optimistic that we're getting closer to what the coach wants and has been planning for. I think we'll see a less competitive Saints team, but we're staring down the barrel of Tom Brady and the Falcons have a lot to prove. If we can take the Saints twice and split with the Bucs and Falcons, then I like our chances with the rest of the schedule.

Meh. Jags gonna Jag.

Me, too.

I'd want to see him at LT before we talk about paying LT money. Moton is really good, the best we've got, but if there were plans to move him to LT from RT, they'd have really tried it last season for a few games. I think we'll see him offered $12-14 million which would put him in top three salaries for RTs in the NFL and they'll let him test the markets at left tackle. Sadly, that's going to mean he's going to walk. That might not be the worst thing to happen to us, though. Right tackles are easier to come by than LTs, we all know that. We can, if we have to, replace him in the draft or develop one from the guys we've got on team at the moment. One of those modest LT prospects could be a solid RT for a whole lot less money. And while Moton looks great on our team, we'd have to be major homers to not recognize a bit of bias created by the fact that the other guys around him just haven't been all that good. Like Andrew Norwell a couple of years back, he looked like a beast bookended by a couple of Kalils, but he was just meh when he got the big bucks to go somewhere else.

Yeah... right. Canfora's just throwing darts at the map and making clickbait with it now.

I'm holding out hope that Darnold will flourish here, mainly because that's my nature. Realistically we'd be in good shape if he got us to nine wins because we could see growth and some promise to the next season, but that's going to all be on coaching and the kid. He's got the best weapons to work he's ever had, but our O-line is still a question mark. And our defense, for all the "names" (names that we know if others outside of the fanbase don't) was fairly lousy last year and may or may not be improved moving ahead. Bad defense means a QB who is always chasing the lead and fewer opportunities to get the ball -- not a good recipe for someone with Darnold's resume. Still, if he is able to live up to his promise, we could see maybe four more wins than last year and feel good about growing the team. The other two sides to this are the bad, bad side: He comes in and just cannot do it. We end up putting one of the unheralded bench sitters in by mid-season and we just ride it out. Maybe he plays out the pre-quel to 13 Ghosts, maybe the coaching isn't as good as we'd hoped, maybe there's a key injury. We're on the hook for another season with Darnold and we could end up with a high draft pick in an iffy QB class. The remaining side, the wow! look at that side, could see the kid have a renaissance under Rhule and Brady, he works wonders with the WRs, TEs and CMC and generally lets everyone say that QB isn't our problem spot anymore. We roll on with him into the playoffs and maybe make it a ways. No one freaking knows at this point and honestly, there are so many moving pieces to the change Darnold has been given that watching old film might be nearly pointless. (Just please don't be like David Carr was when he came to the Panthers.)