Gotta love Bears fans booing their own team. They get 12-4 last year and a great defensive performance, but they boo.
I love Aaron I really do, but his constant throwing-while-going-backwards makes his throws so errant.
Just step into the throw like a normal quarterback and throw accurately for once
But that makes it so hard for defenders to catch them.
It’s genius!
Intriguing. Is the Packers defense that good, or is the Bears offense that bad? Probably a little of both. But the Packers get a win on the road even when Rodgers is just average. Good sign.
The Redskins may make Adrian Peterson inactive on Sunday? I can’t believe that. Yes, they’re loaded at running back and Peterson can’t play special teams. But still, this sounds bizarre.
I’d say the Packers defense doesn’t suck. Against a better offense later in the season you’ll get a better test but for now it doesn’t seem like a weakness.
Fuckin Bears. Hard to win a game when you don’t score points. People are saying that the Bears could lose every game this year.
I’m guessing that going forward, they will be sticking with Superbowl champs in the season opener. Yikes. Steelers @ Patriots will likely be a much better game. I mean, I like defensive football, but oofa.
(“Oofa” meaning “not good,” which I’ve only ever heard Howard Stern say but he says it enough that now I’ve caught it.)
I’m guessing they’re taking a “We need all the help we can get” approach. If I were Jay Gruden, I would.
I didn’t watch the game, thankfully, though I did check stats from time to time. Any reason the Bears went for it on 4th and 10, down 7-3 at the Packer 33 in the 3rd? 50 yd FGs should be makeable, right? Even in the wind tunnel that Chicago plays in?
Congrats on the unexpectedly great defense, Hamlet.
"Nagy’s explanation for not attempting a long field goal was that special teams coordinator Chris Tabor didn’t feel it was in the range of rookie kicker Eddy Pineiro going into the south end zone.
“I’m just putting trust into what our special teams coaches are saying, and so if they feel like at one end it’s different than the other, that’s just what he told me, and we have to stick by it,” Nagy said. “If we start breaking that and start reaching and we go out there and he kicks a 51-yarder and misses it and now they get the ball at that spot, it just breaks our rules.”
"“So I have trust in him making — he’s made multiple kicks past,” Nagy said. “But there’s certain situations, whatever it is, whether it’s the wind or whatever, that Tabes gives me that number, and I go with that.” From here.
Seems 51 yards at Soldier Field is out of Pinero’s range.
I didn’t do anything, but thanks. I’m cautiously excited, especially with the play of the secondary. Darnell Savage looked good, Amos got an easy pick, and most of the time the coverage and tackling was good. It certainly helps playing against Mitch Trubisky (I loved Tramon Williams’ comments: "“We wanted to make Mitch play quarterback. We knew they had a lot of weapons, we knew they were dangerous, we knew all of those things. But we knew if we could make Mitch play quarterback, that we’d have a chance.”), though. We’ll see how next week goes against the Vikings. Rodgers needs to improve too.
I dunno.
In the almost 20 years I’ve lived in the United States, I’ve watched my team win two Super Bowls: one with Trent Dilfer, and one with Joe Flacco. It seems to me that, if you can put the right personnel around them and get a little bit of the luck that any winning team needs, you can, in fact, go all the way with a “serviceable” quarterback.
But I guess we also have to consider what we mean when we describe a QB as “perfectly serviceable,” in the context of the game, the position, and the talent pool. See below.
I might be wrong here, but it seems to me that the thing to do here is not to compare the “average QB” to the absolute stars, but to the next level of talent below them. It might seem crazy to give someone like Prescott the same sort of money that Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers makes, but there might be some logic to it given the possible alternatives.
The problem is, with such a specialized and absolutely crucial position, just having someone “serviceable,” someone who’s good enough to get out of his own way and not lose you games, might be worth paying all that money for, because without it, all the millions you’re spending on that “tremendous O Line, a stud RB, a couple good pass catchers, and a solid defense” might well go to complete waste.
I don’t claim to be a football genius. In terms of analyzing the game and its strategies and the relative value of personnel, I’m a rank amateur. I don’t follow college ball at all, so I have no idea who’s coming up, and I don’t even really keep up with anyone who’s not a regular starter. I’m far better at baseball, where I have more interest and more baseline knowledge of players and strategy.
But it’s always seemed to me that the talent pool at QB is shallow enough that you can barely get one “perfectly serviceable” guy per team before you’re descending into the realm of either untried rookies who just aren’t ready for the speed of the NFL, or fringe guys who’ve been around a while but really aren’t able to perform at the top level for weeks at a time.
As I said, I could be wrong. I’d be interested to know, from people who watch more football than I do, and especially from people who watch a lot of college ball, whether there might actually be a whole lot of “perfectly serviceable” QBs who never get a chance at the big time. Could a team like Dallas tell Prescott to take a hike and find a “perfectly serviceable” replacement for replacement-level money? My impression, from my limited reading and my limited understanding of the game beyond the NFL’s starting roster, and from the way that alleged experts talk about quarterbacks, is that the answer is probably no.
One problem for the NFL, especially at QB, is that not only is QB an absolutely crucial position, but the season is so short. These things combine, it seems to me, to make it rather difficult for a team to experiment at the position, especially if the guy they’ve already got has shown that he can handle the top level in a “perfectly serviceable” way. You can run all the reps you want on the practice field, but you can’t really know how good a new guy is going to be in the big time until you put him in there against a real NFL defense that’s trying to kill him on every play. And if you already consider yourself to be competitive, you don’t want to risk one of your 16 games trying to find out. So we’re left in a situation where the teams most likely to dip into the grab-bag and take a shot on an untried QB are teams that are in some sort of rebuilding mode, or teams whose #1 starter has just torn an ACL or separated a shoulder.
That seems to be the prevailing wisdom amongst fans. No way better to justify overpaying a QB than pointing to a shitty QB and saying “at least we don’t have that”.
I think Dak is better than a lot of the scrap heap of QBs, but he’s not $15 million a year better. Andy Dalton. Derrick Carr. Nick Foles. Marcus Mariota, maybe. All would be comparable and none worth $30 million a year.
If the pool is shallow, it’s because of experience, not talent. Teams draft and play rookie QB’s, investing 4 or 5 years into them before finally realizing they’ve been average or worse the whole time. As long as you don’t play like hot garbage like a Paxton Lynch or Johnny Manziel, you’ll get a long leash, get excuses made, and you’ll gain experience. And as you play, you (usually) get better. Even washouts like Blake Bortles, Blaine Gabbert, Ryan Tannehill, Geno Smith, Teddy Bridgewater are all cashing checks in the NFL because they have that valuable experience.
I think guys like Nick Foles, Derek Carr, Andy Dalton, Russell Wilson, Kirk Cousins, and even Dak himself show that experience is much more important in QB play than draft capital expended. So I think, yes, teams can develop a “serviceable” QB without having to invest huge amounts of capital.
I agree.
If this is true—and I have no reason to believe that you’re wrong—then I wonder whether the NFL’s reliance on college football might not hurt as much as it helps. Sure, the NFL gets a massive pool of talent to draw from, without paying a nickel. But it is also limited in a way that, say, AAA baseball is not.
I wonder if the NFL would benefit from a professional “minor league” that would field not only kids fresh out of college (or even high school), but that might also give a talented player some time to develop experience in a venue that’s not as tough as the big time, but that might be bigger and faster and more akin to the pros than college football is.
I know this isn’t going to happen, of course, but I wonder whether it might allow for the development of more experienced players for the league to choose from.
I’ve long hoped that the NFL would get a minor league system like MLB, but recently my opinion has been changing. I think that it wouldn’t work. Football can’t do what baseball does, because the sports are too different. Football uses up a player’s body in ways that baseball doesn’t. If you take a player out of college, put them in a minor league, and let them play for a few years to get experience then by the time they’re “ready” their body might be used up.
Let’s look at running backs. You draft a guy who’s 23. You put him on your developmental team. He plays for 3 years, grinds it out, and shows he’s ready for the NFL. Now you have a 26-year-old who might play for a few years before he is too banged up.
A baseball player peaks around age 29, and a successful player retires between the ages of 33 and 40. NFL players peak around age 25 and retire around age 30. (Kickers and QBs who aren’t slamming into other people on a regular basis are more like MLB players in terms of peak years and retirement.) That smaller window for football players makes a developmental league less attractive. You’d rather draft a young guy with talent, give him a year maybe to play with limited snaps or in an otherwise limited role, then in his second year try playing him full time. You don’t want to use him up getting him ready.
The AAF agrees with you
The AAF, NFL Europe, and the like are attempts to do that, but they generally fail for lack of monetary interest. College Football is so ingrained in the culture that I can’t see a true developmental league catching on. In addition, the CBA for the NFL tends to limit the amount of time teams have to develop players.
I think that the difference between college and pro football systems also tends to exacerbate the lack of experience, especially at the QB position. So much of what works in college football, especially in the passing game, doesn’t translate that well to the NFL. Even very, very good college QB’s need time to adjust (and some never do). Luckily, Mahomes had a year (and Andy Reid) to help him adjust. Other rookie QB’s aren’t so lucky and have to learn on the fly or have coaches who aren’t good at developing QBs.
Obviously they’re cool with it, or he wouldn’t have a job, but that strikes me as completely unacceptable for an NFL kicker. 50 yards is not 60. An NFL kicker, IMHO, should be expected to have a greater than 50 percent chance to score a 50 yarder, and certainly a far higher percentage of scoring than the chance of converting a 4th and 10. I can’t find the wind at the time: was it really howling?
And the whining about ‘well now they get the ball closer to our end zone,’ it’s a 7-8 yard difference between where they’d likely turn it over on downs from a failed pass play versus the spot of the missed kick. Even in that part of the field, the change to scoring probability for 7 yards can’t be that significant.
If it is, and they know they can’t punt where they are, and will have to go for it if they don’t convert on 3rd down, then change the play call on 3rd down to make the inevitable 4th down attempt easier to make. Call a run or check down on 3rd and 10 if you know you have to go for it anyway on 4th down. Who knows, maybe they get enough yards on 3rd down that it’s a ~46 yarder instead of a 50 yarder, and they feel comfortable letting him make the kick? The only thing I can think of is they may have been relying on a greater incidence of pass interference or other defensive penalties that could bail them out of their situation.
Just a shitty, dare I say, Bill O’Brien-esque job of game management.
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Strong opening drive by the Browns. O-line looking very good. Maybe there is something to the hype.