WhoKnows

14 wins is the most in the league since our 15 wins in 2015. In the past 7 years, 13 or 14 wins has been the highest win total of any team, even in the past couple of 17 game seasons. 14-3 is actually saying the team would be the best in the league or at least tied for the best record. Again, not a problem if we disagree, I just don’t think this team’s ceiling is the best record in the league.

SMH. Would you say SF had more injuries than we did last year? Would you say our OL in 2015 was healthier than 2016. Yes, every team has injuries, but we were pretty healthy across the board. I’m just saying that that tends to regress to the mean. Look at Corbett still being out, that’s already worse than last year for the OL.

Yes, and 14-3 as a ceiling is best team in the NFL. I think that’s beyond the actual team’s best case. Just my opinion, which you are welcome to have as well.

Love the optimism but damn, 14-3? I’d go with: Likely - 8-9 Best Case - 12-5 (+4) Worst Case - 4-13 (-4) I do think we have a not so hard schedule so I think 9-8 is more likely than 7-10, but not by a ton. I do think in the optimistic crowd that we aren’t factoring in any injuries. I think we had a pretty healthy year last year. If we lost two starting OL in week 4, that would have hurt rather than the last week. With our depth, injuries could be a huge impact.

The funny thing is that I seem to recall 2020 being not so bad with Rhule. 5-11 with close losses to some really good teams (GB, KC) was actually decent after losing so much in Cam, Luke, Bradberry and others as well as being in a division with two playoff teams. While I wanted to tank, our results were better than expected as we were often picked as worst or bottom 3. Add in the 3-0 start in 2021 where the same optimistic folks, who hate Rhule now, were talking byes and playoff seeding. So, I’d say Rhule started off like a nice NY style cheesecake and ended with the realization that someone took a dump inside that cheesecake. I like cheesecake, so I’ll say 2023 is a top of the line, best restaurant level NY style cheesecake with a delicious raspberry topping and I’m really hoping no one took a dump in it.

If his father is a counselor/therapist, he likely has a pretty even keel type of personality and a father’s behavior at home does translate.

Yep. I know I cringe when I see the whole you must not have played sports comment most times, but I wonder if that’s the case here. Talking poo to teammates and making jokes was just common place and that’s not even opposing fans. Seeing Young’s mental makeup so far, I doubt he’s bothered by short jokes and I doubt this is the first time he’s ever heard them before.

Nice. Something tells me I’ll see many more until he shows out because I will likely make sure (assuming Heat take care of business) my buddy remembers how his Bruins and Celtics lost to 8 seeds in historic fashion. By the way, this was my favorite sent my way: That was after I sent this one of the Bruins goalie taking a nap at the wrong time.

Exactly. Amazing the multiple feels you see even in this small thread. I want Young to do great but I’m not going to take offense to a joke that was sent to me after I made a joke about my friend’s team looking like poo. Young doesn’t know anyone in here and standing up against a joke isn’t going to make him better. As you said, it is what it is and he’ll end up good or bad based on his own play not jokes.

I didn’t want to joke because of all the uptight people in here but I chuckled when he wasn’t in the picture. I’ll add in a picture someone sent me after I poked him about his Celtics.

I don’t think it’s a bad change, but it’s in response to them trying to improve offense by moving the ball to the 25. Because of that, teams are now incentivized to kick the ball to the 5. Before it was too easy to get past the 20 if you kick it to the 5, so kickers tried for touchbacks. Unfortunately, the idiots in charge don’t realize that they caused the increase in concussions because teams kicking off take the risk of stopping the returner before the 25 instead of a touchback. The only problem I see is that it’s harder to see a fair catch on a kickoff versus a punt so the refs need to be on their whistles quick.

No doubt we would be. If you compare the NFCS QBs to the top 3 divisions, it’s almost laughable. I know we are optimistic about Young but he hasn’t played a down and Carr being the best NFL QB says a lot.

Agreed. Yes, Young is key but I don’t think OP meant 1 player. I don’t think the CB group has nearly the potential of the WRs. Donte was never close to the top CBs and the rest are kind of garbage beyond Horn. I think they end up being Horn and meh without much upside or downside other than Horn missing a lot of time again.

The post you replied to that specifically said the offense was better without CMC because we spread the ball around more. Your post sure seemed to be in agreement. I gave simple stats that showed we scored a lot more per game with CMC (against good teams). You are backtracking a bit which is fine after you see the stats, but I hope you saw that post you replied clearly said that we were better off without CMC. The stats don’t appear to support that but this fan base seems to have a weird inferiority complex that makes us lash out and change the past when it comes to ex-players even if the team moved on.

What? We got the 1st pick and gave up 2 firsts, 2 seconds and DJ Moore. You can’t just ignore pick 9 and say pick 56 was 20% of what we traded. “Swapped picks” doesn’t mean anything. The overall value we got was 3000 points and pick 56 was 340 points. That’s 11% of our entire package, including pick 9, we gave up to get Young. All told, I’m sure we gave up more than 3000 in true value. You are still completely missing the point on future picks. Do you truly believe that this year’s 2nd round picks are more talented than next year’s 2024 1st round picks? Do you truly believe that this year’s 4th round picks will be more talented than 2025’s 2nd round picks? If you do, you’re completely wrong. If you don’t then I don’t know why you are not getting my point. Rebuilding teams are looking for those future 1sts and 2nds to build a more talented team overall knowing that they have the time before they are competitive so they can wait to make picks of more talented players. According to your simplistic view of future picks, teams should be trading future 1sts for current 2nds and 3rds all the time since they are 100% equivalent. Again, the main point still stands that the CMC trade had nothing to do with getting Young. We make that trade very easily with the picks we already had and not trading CMC wouldn’t have stopped us from making the Young trade. I’m sure you’ll reply but that’ll be my last on this.

Seems like it’s getting worse. I read about an office building that just sold for around 25-30% of the price it sold for in 2020 ($67M versus $250M). I know work from home has made more vacancies but a 70-75% loss in value is a sign of something much bigger.

Yeah, I was fine with the trade knowing we weren’t a SB contender last year or this year. Heck, I would have made that huge Burns deal as well. It’s just sad for people to act like CMC sucked and we are better off without him. The team traded him, he didn’t ask to be traded.

So, we scored 26 a game when CMC played with Teddy including two games against SB teams and we scored 21 a game because it was more diversified? I’ll take the 26 a game. Also, interestingly enough we had over 300 passing yards in 3 of 16 games and 2 of those 3 were in CMC’s 3 games. We also scored 30+ in 3 of 16 games and again 2 of those 3 were in CMC’s 3 games. Weird how the passing game was more effective with CMC playing and we scored more. We only had 2 300+ passing yard games with 30+ points and those 2 games happened with CMC who agin played only 3 games. Yep, the offense was much better off without CMC, SMH.

Picks don’t just drop a round dude. Not to a team like Chicago that is rebuilding. It’s not reality. They see that 2024 pick as a 1st rounder that could be high considering we have a rookie QB. The player they pick in the 1st is not going to be equivalent talent wise to a 2nd rounder this year. Yes, teams discount future picks but it’s laughable that you would equate the 2023 2nd we gave them to our 2024 1st. You’ve got to be crazy to think the Bears think they are close to the same, especially with 5th year options and potential huge difference in talent. Same with the 2025 2nd. That’s likely a starter level talent to them versus a 2023 day 3 long shot at starting talent. The Bears aren’t making the SB in 2023/2024 so they can take better talent picks that they’d rather have than lower talent picks this year. The team making the trade has to give up enough to make the other team give up that pick and usually the team getting the haul is rebuilding. Did you notice the Bears didn’t ask us for our 2023 4th instead of the 2025 2nd and didn’t ask us for another 2023 2nd instead of the 2024 1st? I sure hope you’ve noticed that the teams trading down tend to take future 1sts over current 2nds or later. Also, #1 pick is worth 3000 points in draft trade value charts. Pick 56 is 340 points. Sorry, 11%, I was rounding.

And it’s very misleading. When he played 3 games in 2020 we were 0-3 and when he was hurt we were 5-8, but that doesn’t tell it all. 2 of the 3 we lost with CMC were against the teams who made the SB and the other was the 8-8 Raiders. Lost by 2 to KC, 4 to the Raiders and got to down 7 against Tampa with 2 minutes but failed an onside kick. 2021 was a bigger sample size and we were 4-3 with CMC and 1-9 without him. So in those 10 games, we were 4-6 and 5 of the 6 losses were to teams .500 or better and 2 were SB teams. Without CMC we were 6-17.

CMC’s trade didn’t matter in terms of Young, we had plenty of picks including our 50% more valuable 2nd. CMC’s 2nd was a dime of value out of the dollar we gave up for Bryce. We still easily make the Young deal regardless of CMC.

The whole better without CMC talk is amazing. Again, there’s a valid reason why they call us the most obsessed fan base. As soon as a player leaves, even if they didn’t want to, they are an enemy and they made our team worse. CMC came from a dysfunctional team with Rhule as coach, of course he thinks the sun is shining brighter. He went from the playoffs his rookie year to watching Cam miss 16 games the next two years and get released. I watched a few SF games and it was obvious they were better with him. He started 13 games for SF including the playoffs and they were 12-0 before losing to Philly due to a bad non-challenge followed by having no QB. SF was 3-4 before CMC was the starter.

Lol. The late 2nd round pick was the lowest value piece of the trade. Chicago probably would have taken our 2025 2nd over that late 2nd. Let’s not exaggerate here. We got a late 2nd, late 3rd and some throw in day 3 pick(s) for CMC. That’s it. If we made the Burns trade and used those picks to get Young, sure, you could say that trade was great because it got us our future SB winning QB (knock on wood). CMC’s trade did not get us Young.

Our IOL right now doesn’t have the potential of the Ts. An upgrade at LG would be huge and frankly pulling a Humphrey in a future draft wouldn’t hurt either. Corbett played well but he’s coming off an ACL. Bozeman is average which is a better than what we’ve had but he’s not elite. BC is just OK. I still think back to the 2021 draft. The draftniks in here really nailed it with guys who ended up being key cogs to KC’s SB win. It’s gone but 2021 should have been a heavy OL draft considering that and QB (who sucked in that draft) were our gigantic holes. After watching Iky improve, just thinking about an Iky, Corbett, Humphrey, Smith, Moton OL makes me feel warm and toasty. Only would have cost us TMJ and a released LS to make that happen, but I digress and will come back to reality!

I don’t look at that lineup and feel like it is really solid. Our skilled positions on offense are overall below average. There isn’t a single true impact player. I see a lot of hop. Thank goodness we added FAs because after trading CMC and DJ, we had a terrible set of players to put around a rookie QB. Even though it’s greatly improved, we still don’t have a top tier WR, TE or RB. There’s no one that a DC worries about. I’m happy with Young and the OL although I do think it would be good if our IOL was upgraded and healthy. Feels like we have some depth there but again if we somehow end up with a top tier LG, it would really help. On D, I like Luvu, Brown, Burns and Shaq, but Tuttle, YGM and Haynes are easily replaced and in need of upgrading. CB is is a true weakness. Horn has to stay healthy. End of the season hurt players means unavailable for playoffs or playoff runs. Donte tore his Achilles and wasn’t great before that and the rest is terrible. The other note is that again, our depth is not good. Compare us to a contender like SF or Philly. SF in particular had tons of injury issues but they had depth that still got them wins. What if Brown and Burns are hurt or Iky and Moton? Last year we were pretty healthy until the last meaningless game. Could we survive a rash of injuries like the 2016 OL? We didn’t really survive that but we were still a bad K season away from 9-7 even with all the injuries in a much better division. We couldn’t come close to staying competitive if we had bad injury luck. Trading away so many picks the past couple of years and some bad picks hasn’t helped with depth.