KSpan

What's weird about that? Not arguing the Meyer is likely to flame out but I bet a lot of coaches hate those conferences and Meyer, being a brand new head coach, has no precedent for participating in them.

Taylor is even more cautious/conservative than Teddy. His career arc reflects that.

That TD throw alone highlights the difference in dynamics between Sam and Teddy. It's a splash play and no guarantee of any kind of future success but Teddy does not have the physical ability to make that happen. It's exactly the type of quarterbacking capability that the best teams have in their toolbox. Also highlights the nonsense about 20 yards being a deep throw. That was a momentum-changing play and is the type that breaks games open. 20 yards is not an accurate metric for this capability.

I'm so confused.

Johnson and Chase Daniel have been in the league for 13 and 12 years, respectively, and have 529 passing attempts between them. That's impressive.

Thinking hard about it.

That was definitely a joke.

I always envision him going full Cajun and spewing sounds like Farmer Fran from The Waterboy whenever I see that clip.

They drafted Mahomes because they'd already determined that Smith wasn't going to get them where they wanted to be and fully intended to move on at that time. Like Teddy, Smith did not throw for many TDs, once going 21 straight games without throwing a TD to a WR in that Reid KC offense, and only hit his career high 26 when Mahomes was drafted and the writing was on the wall. Prior to that he had 23, 18, 20, and 15 TDs thrown and never broke 20 in San Fran. Mahomes, on the other hand, has thrown for 50, 26, and 38. Smith is absolutely a slightly better version of Teddy from the same mold. They may be 'starters' but that doesn't mean much if they can't beat the best competition.

Yup. Watched Smith for years here in KC and Teddy is a second tier Alex Smith. Same style and same mental limitations with being conservative. Smith had a better arm and better leadership, but ultimately that same nature capped his ceiling. With respect to the question, not really. Smith didn't have what it took to get the team over the hump without an elite defense, and the team needs to shoot better than that or be at constant risk of Garoppolo-led San Fran-type performances. For example, Denver's elite defense was beatable in the 2015 Super Bowl with better coaching; that game wasn't as lopsided as fans like to make it sound, even with the ugly plays Carolina had.

Call me skeptical of his 'leadership' when it actually matters.

Many couldn't stomach much, if any at all, of the first one.

Erving's been nicked throughout camp and Elflein's been unremarkable/unnoticed so yes, inclusive of that and camp in its entirety. This isn't complicated. No one is making a definitive statement but they both have years of performance to measure against and thus far are what they appeared to be.

Again, I'm not making definitive statements. The difference with FA though and particularly the guys signed is that there is already extensive film on them. Expectations can be reasonably set and thus far they're right on par with those performance-based expectations, which were fairly low.

I'm not calling out Fitterer per se, was just making the comment. I do think thoguh it's a bit worse though given the attention that the OL and LB corps needed heavy attention and that all of the FA additions in those areas haven't look good, with Perryman already gone entirely. Fortunately, the 2 drafted OL are showing some promise..

Just to play devil's advocate here, that means 3 of the top FAs signed this off-season at positions of need are injured (Erving), look bad (Elflein), or gone (Perryman). Not ideal.

Probably about the same as he's played for 7 years now.

I think it depends on how one defines a starting QB. If defined as one of the 32 QBs in the league who trots out for their team's opening snaps on gameday, then yeah, and he might even be one of the top 32 overall. If defined as a QB who can do enough that one reasonably believes they can overcome better opposition, I don't think he or a fair number of other of the 32 'starting' QBs really meet that definition. Perhaps though that second definition treads more into quality QB territory than starting.

"Do you know who Mike Martz is? No? Well, want to go prank call him with me anyway?"

Good luck with that, Denver. Maybe this truly will be the year he turns it on and transcends beyond 'Discount Alex Smith'.

Consider your sources there. Lo and behold, the first citation has some significant potential conflicts of interest: For your second citation, that looks at one specific type of product, conveniently the one that the company sells. However, the studies I cited also note that this particular type of product may not carry the same risk profile, which I noted in the very first sentence of my initial comment.

While risk levels of specific lesions can vary by product, several of those statements are incorrect. A general study about disorders resulting from smokeless tobacco use: https://www.cda-adc.ca/jcda/vol-66/issue-1/22.html As one example regarding cancer risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15470264/ Another regarding oral cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4268996/ Smokeless tobacco also quite literally elevates blood pressure upon use (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12704595/), and while far from the only activity to do so this represents an unnecessary risk factor, particularly for regular users. Also a strong association with CHD: With respect to the second half of your post I'm not sure how that's relevant to a discussion about risk of tobacco products and no one made the type of claim you're seemingly attempting to refute but yeah, those are known to be unhealthy as well. I won't make any more comments about this here so as to avoid further derailing.

Maybe fair to say it doesn't harm the lungs like smoking but it's still a major factor for heart disease, store/blood pressure, and cancer, and even worse in other ways such as oral cancer and disorder due to the direct contact with oral tissues. Not to derail the thread, but having had an old acquaintance need a portion of his jaw removed due to oral cancer really drove home the myths around dip vs cigarettes.

Interesting. This Football Outsiders analysis showed the opposite in some cases, though it is several years old at this point. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2017/turf-type-and-nfl-injuries-part-i "Here we see a bit more variation. For knees, natural grass (2.8 per 1,000 AEs) has the lowest injury rate. Matrix Turf is elevated at 3.2 but includes a lot of uncertainty. Once again Momentum Turf and A-Turf (both 3.8) have the worst injury rates; Field Turf is also substantially above grass (3.6). The difference between Momentum/A-Turf/FieldTurf and grass is about one per 1,000 AEs, which translates to four fewer knee injuries a year for a team strictly working on grass versus these turfs. It's important to take account of the uncertainty in our data, but grass does appear to beat out at least certain kinds of turf for knee injuries. Ankle injuries are more muddled. Here grass is near the middle with an injury rate of 2.0 per 1,000 AEs. Fieldturf is somewhat elevated (2.4). Momentum is once again at the top with 2.8, but a lot of uncertainty. All other artificial turfs are basically in line with grass." An analysis by stadium is here and it isn't overly positive for FieldTurf, which is what Carolina installed. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2017/turf-type-and-nfl-injuries-part-ii "FieldTurf still looks bad, though -- those stadiums hold the second-, third-, and fourth-highest rates of lower leg injuries. The other two FieldTurf stadiums also rank in the top half. The stadiums with the six lowest lower leg injury rates are all natural grass. Houston remains essentially tied with Tennessee for the worst grass ranking. ... Conclusions All else being equal, natural grass fields seem the safer choice, especially for lower leg injuries. The issue, of course, is that they may not be suitable for all climates and stadium types. There's also a lot of stadium-to-stadium variation -- if you choose grass but use Houston's tray system, that's not helpful. Getting the right turf can pay huge dividends, as the difference between average and bad turf can be around half a dozen injuries per season. Any extra upfront costs of making the right choice pale in comparison to the cost in wins and game checks of getting it wrong."

I'd call it a grace period more than a honeymoon. Throwing that much money and/or control at a college coach has rarely, if ever, worked out, and Rhule's performance against ranked teams and in bowls was not impressive. He was Tepper's choice though and deserves his shot, but skepticism was, and may still remain, justified IMO.