1of10Charnatives

Sorry I don't speak Norwegian.

So we should expect him not to survive camp cuts? Got it.

I would love for Marshall to be even better than DJ, but predicting that an unproven college star will be better than a proven NFL receiver and a Top 20 one at that is not the kind of prediction that makes one seem shrewd and insightful. They all look great until they go up against NFL talent. DJ has proven he can produce at a high level in this league. Marshall has yet to.

I C wat U did thar.

Throw the ball. Mostly past the line of scrimmige. Occasionally not.

I just want to throw this out there: The best case scenario is quite obviously he plays great on a new team with a fresh start and quality skill position players around him. That's a no brainer and what I'm sure we're all hoping for. But after that I think it gets a little interesting. I don't think the worst case scenario is Darnold flops hard. If he does, we go back to the drawing board and yeah it sucks, but we'll have a high pick in the next draft if he does and we're only out meaningfully a 2nd rounder. Even if Darnold fails fast and obviously, that was worth the shot. I think the worst case scenario is if Darnold plays well enough to give us a middle of the road record with a rapidly improving roster around him, but not well enough that it's obvious he should be the guy we build around for the future. What if Darnold shows flashes this year and teases everyone and is able to show just enough that he *might* be the guy, but then gets hurt somewhere middle to the later part of the season, say after we've won six games or so. That's the one that keeps me up at night remembering the endless parade of 7-9, 9-7 seasons that we've been stuck with far too often. Don't get me wrong, I want him to succeed. But if he doesn't or can't, I'd rather him fail hard than tease us and the coaching staff. What worries me is my own perception that this coaching staff might be overvaluing it's ability to coach guys up and overemphasizing raw physical traits and talent which they can't coach. Maybe they turn out to be great at that at the pro level, but at this juncture I say it's still an open question that could lead to us getting stuck in a very familiar feeling rut with a talented roster but a middling qb. These are the kinds of thoughts I have when I'm bored and I've already watched all the pr0n. That's right. All of it. Except that weird @#%$ with furries. If you like that you need therapy. And probably a cattle prod.

That's a fair point, although I think it's possible that at this point both things could be true.

Really like the way he thoroughly explained his position in the post. Comes across as a professional who just wants to be treated fairly, not a whiny malcontent. Would definitely be worth looking into at minimum. Not like your secondary can be too good in the NFC South.

Literally can't. My job is very demanding M-F 9-5, and that's when I'm in town. In the past year I've been on the road 21 weeks. My job is training others so if I have to take off from work to receive furniture or pick up furniture, it delays the training of about 20 people for a six figure job. I can't rent the uhaul and do it myself because the freight companies aren't open on the weekend or after 5. They will not allow me to pick up then. Basically what it boils down to is they aren't customer service oriented at all because I'm not their customer, they're not accountable to me, they're accountable to the furniture seller I bought from, so unless a whole lot of people like me bitch to the sellers, the freight companies are fine being uncooperative assholes. It works for them. Meanwhile, any time I want to buy furniture, it's a fuging epic saga of frustration just trying to get it here, all because I actually have a job, the job is demanding, and I don't have people in my life who can just sit around waiting for stuff to arrive. My pops is gonna wind up driving over an hour one way from SC to be here because there's literally no other option but cancel the order. fug. those. guys.

Unless you need them to be hard working outside of 9-5 M-F because you have a 9-5 job you can't just take off work for to receive furniture and you don't have friends or relatives sitting around on their arse nearby who can do you that favor because they have lives too. Then those hard working guys are straight stickup artists. $918 bucks they wanted to deliver a 2k couch on saturday. @#% that noise. Also this is not my first rodeo with furniture delivery people. Every single time it's drama and incompetence from the companies bringing my stuff. Not the actual guys on the truck. The people at the company behind them. Every. Single. Time.

No. No I do not. And you can't make me. Also I can't hear you over the sound of Brady crying to the refs, something the greatest qb of all time shouldn't have to do from the beginning to end of his very long careeer.

This information makes me happy. Also optimistic. As opposed to most news, which makes me want to shoot everyone connected to government, the media, and furniture delivery in the face. With a bazooka.

This.

This.

Yeah. Now if only he could put all of that considerable talent on display without being a whinny bitch to the refs....

Sir, you appear to be bringing actual verifiable facts to support your position. That's just now how we do things here.

No. You really don't. Stop misrepresenting my position. You keep insisting on asserting that my position has something to do with this particular player or that particular player when it doesn't, it's about organizational use of resources. I don't care one way or the other about Mayfield. What I care about was that when the Lions took Sewell, we pretended in the 2nd that OT wasn't still by far our most pressing offensive need. 9 tackles went off the board between Sewell and Christiansen. You're going to tell me that none of them was a better option than a luxury pick at a position group we're not hurting at, or that making additional moves to pick one of them plus someone else wasn't an even better option? Receivers can be had in FA or via trade with relative ease. Good luck getting a quality tackle that way, or do you wanna take another swing at next year's Matt Kalil? Almost the only way to get your hands on a quality LT without paying through the nose for him is through the draft, so here's a really complicated idea, since LT matters a ton: Draft more than one every decade. Go hog wild and draft two in the same draft. If you whiff, get even crazier and try again next year til you get something. What you don't do is shrug your shoulders and go, oh well, we didn't get the best prospect, guess since we like a guy who will be available middle of the third we should ignore our massive need til then and just hope that one guy pans out. What does every coach always say in NFL? We wanna create competition. Good, draft two guys with solid potential and see which one earns it, instead of taking a shiny toy and crossing your fingers that your one mid round guy works out since you couldn't get the elite prospect.

misses the point. In every SB some talented WR's catch passes from a much harder to come by talented QB. That QB is usually upright because an also much harder to come by pair of quality tackles keeps giving him a clean pocket to throw to. The point is not about whether TB's WR's are good, they are. The point is about the scarcity of talent and where it makes a difference. Too many fans focus too much on skill position players because of fantasy football, highlight plays, and stats that make it much easier to quantify what they do. Quality LT's don't put up stats, they don't create Sportscenter moments, they just get you closer to winning championships than quality WR's do, because almost everybody has quality WR's.

I would absolutely not hesitate to pull the trigger on 2 second round OT's. I have nothing against Marshall personally, and now that he's ours I hope he tears it up and I'll root for him every Sunday. I just dislike picking that position in that situation, regardless of whether it was Marshall or anyone else. Typically it's pretty easy to make use of a guy who can play tackle by moving him inside. It's much harder to move a guy outside or live with poor tackle play while your talented WR corps can't go deep because the rush keeps getting to their QB.

I really don't see how anyone looks at that SB and how TB shut down a KC offense that had absolutely tore the league up for the past few years and says anything else was the decisive factor. KC not breaking double digits was the game, period. You don't win a SB in the modern era with 9 points, ever. Looking at it any other way is absurd or not well informed about football. If you want to specifically focus on how the TB offense was better than in the past, you could point out that while Brady only threw for 200 yards, he did throw for 3 TD's and no INT's. *looks pointedly at Jameis Winston*

Is that really what most people think of TB, or is it the fact Godwin and Evans had been on that team for years while it went nowhere, Brown had one good wild card game and then was a non factor the rest of the playoffs, but the difference was QB play and a D that shut down the KC offense? You named 4 receivers, Brown's contributions as significant are laughable past that first playoff game (a game TB won by 17 points btw, so it's not like his contributions there were the crucial difference), so we're really talking about 3 guys and you threw a name in there off of past glory. 2 of those 3 guys were on that team when it couldn't sniff the playoffs, way way back in, oh yeah, season before last and everything before. It's not the receivers that were the difference, but QB play and D. Thanks for making my point for me. TB with Evans and Godwin but average D and bad QB-going nowhere TB with Evans and Godwin, good QB play and top flight D-SB win. They aren't the difference makers, they are good but they were along for the ride. WR just isn't a position that moves the needle on winning in the NFL that much because while TB has Evans and Godwin, and they are quite talented, most teams have a pair of quality WR's as well. The way you win in a hypercompetitive league is to have talent at the positions that matter most and where talent is relatively scarce, not by focusing on positions where there is plenty of talent to go around to 32 teams and it's hard to show a consistent correlation between superior talent at the position and winning. Just ask Megatron how many playoff games he won.

Not trading back does not make you "thinking like Hurney" drafting is not that binary. "Do this thing and you're not like a shitty GM, do this thing and you are." Hurney traded UP to take a tackle prospect that almost no one else had rated that highly and then whiffed on him. That is materially different from letting nine other prospects get drafted while you take a player at a position in the 2nd that is much easier to fill and much less of a need on our current roster. Hell I would have been more than happy to take one of those nine prospects and still take Christiansen. That would have been the move that improved your odds from the crapshoot, given that a lot of scouts project BC's short arms and lack of bend to land him at guard eventually. The statement that draft position after elite players is a horrible indicator is not one I find to be very supportable. Look up the statistics for how long players drafted in each round last on average in their careers. If draft position really mattered so little, you wouldn't see the clear mathematical progression of shorter careers and teams wouldn't waste money year after year paying for large scouting staffs and sending them all over the country to scout players. They would confine their efforts mostly to scouting the clearly elite players to discern key differences. Is draft position an absolute indicator? No, but the notion it has no value past say the first is absurd. NFL teams would not behave the way they do in many respects if this were true. No one would bother to trade up in later rounds because it wouldn't matter. It is what it is, an inexact science, but let's not pretend it's meaningless. Overall I think the strategy of trading back was a great one this year. The pandemic meant that this draft more than most was a crapshoot, so I'm not taking issue with the overall strategy so much as how we didn't use it to target more OL and earlier in the draft, while instead choosing to spend a high pick on a much easier to fill position we didn't have a need for, and which tends to have less of an overall impact on winning (Quick, name me a Super Bowl winner that when you think of them, your first thought is, they won primarily because they have great receivers. I'll wait). Have you ever looked at the NFL in the current pass wacky era and thought "You know, it seems like a better the team's receiving corps is, the deeper they go in the playoffs." You know why you haven't had that thought? Because plenty of teams with good WR's and crap Olines are sitting at home in January. And nobody goes deep in the playoffs without outstanding QB play, which is hard to come by when a guy is running for his life. I got no beef with the Horn pick. We couldn't get Sewell so we picked an elite prospect at another key position where elite prospects make a huge diference and don't grow on trees. Outstanding. But don't strawman me and put words in my mouth by implying I should like a player simply because they're a former first rounder. The Kalil and Okung signings were under Hurney, a GM whose FA track record was vomit inducing and I was not a fan of either move at the time, so let's dispense with this distortion that implies I'm some simplistic goof who likes guys just because they were taken in the first. You're trying to oversimplify where I'm coming from in order to discredit it, but your implications are off base. In point of fact you're only strengthening my argument by indirectly pointing out how difficult it is to acquire a quality LT via FA, thus why we should put an especially strong emphasis on acquisition through the draft. Where is it written one may only draft a single tackle prospect per year? Get two, get them early and often with all your trade moves, and improve your odds. Oh both of them worked out? What a horrible position to be in, having an excess of talent at a hard position to fill in this league. But WR? "Honey pick up a guy who's six two and can run a 4.4 in the 40 while you're at Wal Mart would ya?" He's not really gonna move the needle for us as a rookie, and we weren't thin at his position group, but the Oline can wait, this guy puts up flashy highlights and numbers.

Wait. There's a national writer who knows actual non obvious non fluff stuff about our team like Donte's QB rating despite lingering foot injuries? I will now sit quietly and await the flying pigs with confidence.

I got a similar read on their moves but 9 guys is an awful lot of guys to pass on while taking a freaking WR in the 2nd. Decent WR's at the NFL level are a dime a dozen, and they simply are not as key to success as LT. You can sign good ones in FA practically every year, while getting your hands on a quality LT without some kind of issue takes an act of Congress or a raft of draft picks. Believe me if Christiansen pans out I'll be ecstatic and singing Fitt's praises, but after nearly a decade of not replacing Gross and yelling obscenities as some of the truly turnstile guys bungled around while Cam ate another facefull of dirt or took another helmet to helmet hit (thanks again Super Bowl 50 officiating crew for letting the whole league know it's okay to headhunt him), forgive me if I'm not exactly patient with moves that don't give the impression the position is a priority.

Hurney traded up and drafted Little in the second. Hurney's deficiencies in drafting anything but first round picks are well documented. You can talk up Christiansen all you want, and I sincerely hope he turns out great, but that does not change the fact that 10 tackle prospects were drafted ahead of him. How often does the 11th drafted player at his position really turn out great? Draft position does not equal performance, but it's a better overall indicator than some fan on a message board saying so and so is a great prospect and then backing that up with the team that drafted him's scouting grade. I think you're missing the point. I'm not arguing that Christiansen is a bad prospect. I'm arguing that our organizational offseason moves with regards to the offensive line did not prioritize upgrading the position group to the degree that it probably should have.