Mr. Scot

Not a fan at all of the way he ran training camp, especially not giving Ekwonu and Mayfield The lion's share of the starting reps. His "process' still reflects the thinking of a college coach rather than a professional one. And again, outside of "let's be optimistic", I haven't seen much in the way of real reasons to be optimistic. She's still relying on Phil Snow as his defensive coordinator. That's a pretty important position. As far as the claim that he's "improved in every area" I'm going to need specifics.

He was given complete control of the franchise. Not a single move that was made came without his approval. It's pretty difficult to excuse him for "the situation" when the reality is he had complete control of it...and proceeded to make it worse.

I don't support making fun of his appearance, and personally I've probably called things he's done dumbass more than I've called him dumbass, but unfortunately as a descriptive term, the name fits. If you really want to fight those things though, this would be my challenge: Defend his performance and his results. If you want to say the criticism is unfair, show me an objective reason why. And to be clear, "well he might get better", "this year could be improved" or any other such hypothetical thing does not count. Likewise, I can give you hiring better coaches as a positive, but even that doesn't mean much until we see results. Bottom Line: Nobody's going to improve their view of them until he gives them a reason to, and that's a perfectly rational outlook. Show me winning, show me improvement, show me real progress, and then we can talk.

Eeehhh, it makes for a nice story to frame it this way but I still don't buy that it was necessary.

All valid... And frankly, I dislike using the word "hate" in this context. I seriously doubt anybody here hates him personally. The majority here feel that he's not qualified for his job and should be replaced. That's a perfectly valid point of view, no hate required. Frankly, it's kind of lazy to just say that people hate him. It excuses you from having to debate any of the points they make about his deficiencies. Much easier to say "you just hate him" than to actually try to defend his record. Heck, I used to get told that I "just hated" Marty Hurney too. I'd love to ask any of the people who said that back then if they would want him back now.

Denial doesn't equal support. It's one thing to say "I want the Panthers to win". Quite another to say "Sam Darnold is a great quarterback who can lead us to the playoffs". One of those statements is valid. The other is delusional. Bottom Line: Matt Rhule just isn't qualified to be an NFL coach. You can tell people you don't want to hear that or argue against it all you want, but none of that is going to change the truth of it. I get wanting to be a fan, but dismissing reality doesn't make anything better.

Keep in mind that mindset would also make the "Matt Rhule typically starts winning in year three" argument meaningless.

The OL that he built with Erving and Elflein didn't happen in his rookie season. It happened in his second. And sorry dude, but if the primary point of your argument is that he's learned from his mistakes and is improving, year two should have been better than year one. Not only was the record in that year the same, but the team actually looked worse. I get wanting to be optimistic about the team, but I'm somebody that has to have a reason for that. When it comes to Matt Rhule and his coaching, I just don't have one.

Optimism is a great way to go through life. It's also the facilitator of a lot of bad decisions. Keeping a bad player like Sam Darnold or Cam Erving because they might get better next year would be a really bad idea. The same applies to bad coaches.

If even the "meh" coaches are having more success than Rhule though, where does that put him?

Coaches that "can just coach" generally show improvement from one season to the next. We saw regression.

What I expect the fourth quarter to look like...

They also had to coach him up. And seriously, how often do you see a guy picked in the top ten not start?

I'm not that worried about Buffalo resting their starters for this game. I would say though that if our starters look bad against Buffalo's backups, this board's servers are probably going bye-bye.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of "tricking" guys into playing well. I much prefer seeing them coached. But even accepting that premise, how do you answer for the failure to let the starting OL practice together to build chemistry and gel into a cohesive unit?

Pretty sure Ricci is still listed as a fullback...

Pretty much...

Not so much a specific comment on this particular trade, but I will say this... If I have to choose between "not enough footballs to go around" and "not enough weapons to threaten", I'm going to take option one every single time. "Too many weapons" is a problem I am perfectly comfortable having.

Here's the thing, though... Training camp is about getting starters ready for action, not backups. Yes, it's possible to have people compete for positions. But come on, everybody and their brother knew from the minute Mayfield was signed that he should be the starter. Likewise, pretty much everyone knew that Ickey Ekwonu should be manning the left tackle spot. Forcing those guys to compete for those roles was stupid. All it ended up doing was taking away valuable time that could have been used for the starters to gain chemistry with each other. Could it still work out okay? Possibly, but that doesn't take away the fact that it was a dumb idea. And no, it isn't just fans that have been saying that.

I don't use week one as much of a benchmark for anything, honestly. But if you want to use it as a benchmark for how training camp went, that might be a bit of a risk. Most teams go into week one looking kind of sloppy on offense, especially given the training camp and practice rules that were imposed by the most recent CBA.

That's a defendable position.

I mean, if you wanna use week one as a benchmark, then the game against the Vikings would have counted as the benchmark for the 2001 season. Kinda didn't go so well after that, though

And this year, Belichick will be leaving it in the hands of Matt Patricia and Joe Judge. Good luck, Mac

In on every deal... Probably not this one given the expected cost, but certainly a position where we could use a guy.