Sgt Schultz

I just treat everything about the NFL draft like it is some politician in Washington DC speaking. "Oh, look, his lips are moving......that means he is lying." That turns out to be correct almost every time. It's too much work filtering out any needles of truth from the haystack, and it is not worth the effort. I'll find out tomorrow night what happens in the first round.

Thanks for posting this, @therealmjl. I listened to Reich's, saw this but didn't listen thinking there would be nothing groundshaking. I'll give it a listen. I'm taking a blank slate approach to most of our roster, particularly younger guys. I have no idea whether they will be good or not, but I am certain we were never going to find out while The Process was here. Reich and company more or less a reset for them.

It's Wednesday, April 26th. That only comes once a year, so let's all raise a glass! Today is sort of a day of peace before draft day where we have the #1 pick, and not due to us stinking up the league so badly in 2022 that the cupboard is completely bare. I also think it is BigKat's noble effort to get people on the same page that have been treating the Richardson vs. Stroud vs. Young (in alphabetical order) debate like the Hatfields and McCoys. I don't know if it will work, but reading this beats reading the latest batch of tired threads that equate to a territorial dispute between those two fine families. Just seeing that nonsense end (assuming it does or at least becomes noise) is worth the price of admission, alone.

Nah, Rhule would have screwed that up.

You are correct. And to think, the point of this thread was to say the guy who has the best winning percentage of any coach we've ever had is worse than the guy with the worst winning percentage of any coach we've ever had. Then again, we had people trying to convince us that Sam Darnold would evolve into John Elway if we just gave him one more chance, so this is not completely unprecedented territory.

Matt, why are you trolling a Carolina Panthers forum instead of talking up The Process to some high school kid in Nebraska?

Now that they have the NHL, or at least part of it, I have actually turned ESPN on for a few hours. Otherwise, I'd thrown in the towel on them a decade or so ago. And they suck at NHL coverage, too.

I hear this guy wants a word with you.

Unfortunately, for a lot of Cam's time here he was THE rushing and passing production. If the coaching staff could have found a way for him to catch his own passes, he would have been responsible for the receiving yards, too. I'm hoping we have an coaching staff who knows more about offense than "they are the guys on the field when the defense is resting." When Cam was here our staff in general didn't know much more than that, and our offensive staff was lazy.

Exactly. Anybody who is going to compare the QB we select this Thursday or any time in the future to Cam is setting themselves up for disappointment. Cam was the best QB and offensive playmaker in our history. Normally a new QB operating in the shadow of the franchise legend ends after the first or second guy to follow the legend. I hope that normal comparison "expiration date" applies here, but I have my doubts for a good portion of our fans. We may wind up with somebody (Thursday or in the future) who is a better QB than Cam, but I doubt they will be a better playmaker. That is the part that may be untouchable. The good news is we have an offensive coaching staff who will answer questions about our offensive strategy with more than "we have <insert QB name here>," so success will likely be determined by more than just the legs and arm of that one person.

Thanks for this post, @TheMostInterestingMan. I just hopped on here after running errands all morning, and seeing the list of typical "the guy I want is the greatest ever, if you don't agree you are a moron, and if they don't draft him I am going to hold my breath" threads, I was thinking of logging out and not coming back until Thursday night.....and not necessarily expecting great things then. Then I ran across this. People can blame you that I didn't just punch out all week! I'm optimistic. Still a little cautiously so, but not nearly as much as in recent years. I'm not looking at the opportunity this team has with dread, like I would have for the past five or so years (aka - how are we going to screw this up?).

I grew up in St. Louis, and Busch Stadium had AstroTurf for a long time, too. Horrible stuff. I was a baseball umpire, and was on a crew that did an exhibition at Busch Stadium after a Cardinals baseball game one July. We walked out on the field and you could see the heat waves rising from the turf. Between that, the fact it was laid over pavement, and it caused "carpet burns" if exposed skin slid on it I never understood why anybody would use it. Then, in winter, it basically froze and was harder than hell. Field Turf and the newer surfaces are infinitely better than the original AstroTurf was, but they still aren't grass and dirt. George Toma (aka the Sodfather), the former groundskeeper at Arrowhead Stadium and the guy the NFL has used for every Super Bowl (he's 94 now) said once that to properly care for an artificial surface was just as much work as natural grass. But then again, he was so meticulous that when they brought him in before Super Bowl XVI in Detroit, he had a crew on their hands and knees for a week taking out clumps of fibers that welded together from the friction.

I'm not exactly sure why people would get their shorts in a bunch over the concept that the competition Young, or anybody else for that matter, will see every week in the NFL is better than they saw in their college careers. That same sentiment has been said before by NFL players, coaches, and scouts. The SEC may have some teams that are full of future NFL players, but that is limited to maybe two or three teams. Don't lose sight of the fact that the NFL is the best of the best.......unless maybe The Process assembled the roster. When you parse that outlier away, the opponents are in uniform because they are the fastest, most savvy (football intelligence), hardest hitting, and have the best technique. That's one reason why QBs usually are hit and miss, especially right out of the chute. The ones that seem to start the fastest are guys like Purdy, who had little film on them and very little scouting information for opponents to prepare for. But that changes soon enough, too.

This discussion is really all theoretical, as they all are. We have no idea how many of the potential choices they are fine with. We have no idea who ranks where on their list. We have no idea how strongly they want their #1 vs. their #2 or even their #3. We get reports from people with inside sources, but it is unlikely those sources are named Fitterer, Reich, Tepper, or anybody else at that level. Their inside sources may not have any real idea or have their own biases.

The AR rumor has been circulating for a while. I doubt we are higher on him than we are Young or Stroud, but who knows? The latest is he may be our #2 (behind Young), so then you get into how far behind #1 is he and all that speculation. Richardson has perhaps the highest ceiling of all the QBs in the draft, but the chances of him being ready to start week 1 or in September or even October are not all that great, IMO. I think we are looking for a more immediate impact. There is also a chance he is a complete whiff. But that's just my view of the world.

I'm not surprised by that. Before we traded up, I had him on my Radar. Not at 9, but somewhere that may have involved trading to later in the first and scooping up other picks.

Personally, that is my position, too. It doesn't hurt to churn the waters to see if somebody puts something on the table that is really absurd, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim.

If they pull the trigger on something like this, and I highly doubt they will, it would be for Richardson.

Panthers. Sorry about the vagueness, I am in a Zoom meeting that I don't care about, but I have to listen enough to make sure nobody says anything incredibly stupid. Merely stupid is normal, but incredibly stupid I have to speak up on.

If the rumors that they love Richardson are true, the status of Young and Stroud makes no difference. Don't get me wrong, I think Richardson is a huge gamble with a potential huge payoff and he is not my choice. I sure the hell would not draft him at #1, though, so if they are thinking that way........

There could be other "influences" that pump the price of #1 up....like Houston thinking Indy is going to make us an offer we can't refuse and take the guy they want. The trade value chart is like any other set of numbers: it is a pretty accurate guide over the long haul, but the caveat "all other things being equal" needs to be added to the end. For the #1 pick or even a top 3-5, all other things are rarely equal.

That's where I am. There are concerns about both of them, even though the people hard-over on either one of them want to deny their preference has any concerns, and anybody who says otherwise is a neanderthal. I hate checking in on this forum right now because it seems like most of the threads are the same dung just repackaged. If The Process and company were still here making this pick, I would have a lot less faith (like zero) in who we were going to settle on. Luckily, those days are over and there is cause for optimism, either way. Not only in who they pick but how they use them.

Sadly, they are almost always true!

All to say that Nike has finally managed to be able to produce blue jerseys in the right shade and there may be blue pants coming. This is about like talking to my wife, who works in PR. I can ask her a simple yes or no question, and I'm sure she could go on for 18 pages without using the words "yes," "no," or the phrase "I don't know," or any synonyms for those words, or words in another language that translate to any of those words or synonyms of those words. And she wonders why my response is usually "that's great, now could you please answer the question, Senator?"

Oh no, I am devastated. It will take me seconds to get over losing them.......or not. In honor of them both, I offer the following: