Khyber53

I hope they all pan out. I do.

It is just soooo frikkin' hard to become a good head coach in the NFL. It's nearly impossible to get the job, nearly impossible to keep the job, and rare do they not become hated by their team's fanbase. Good luck to him, it's a rough ride for even the best of them.

Brad Hoover, Jordan Carstens, Nick Goings, JJ Jansen, Tutankamen Reyes, Al Wallace, Will Witherspoon. Edit to add: Keary Colbert. One season he lit up the charts as a receiver, the second was okay, then an injury that just killed his game from then on out. Got slammed bad by the fanbase, but didn't deserve it.

The missing word there is "quality" depth. We really don't know about these guys and soooo many of our free agent pick ups have quite a few injury bugs that could be issues. Right now, our biggest hope for a star in the making really relies on Sam Darnold. Sam Darnold. A guy the NY Jets might possibly have ruined. This season will depend on his resurgence to get onto the winning side of records. If not, then it is roll the dice at QB again. On defense, well, it's not about star power (we really have no stars that are known widely beyond our fanbase -- Brian Burns is wowed over here, but who?'ed over elsewhere), but about actually being able to slow down an opponent. There were games we weren't even a speed bump to opponents because we played so timidly. We really only had one outstanding defensive game and that was against the Lions... just like every other team that played them. Gosh, I have hope for this team, but right now we have a bunch of no-name starters and walking wounded vets. Maybe the coach can make something great of this, but at times I'm expecting this training camp to be like the training sequence of The Dirty Dozen. Maybe they will build something out of these misfits and make it happen. Hope so, would be a great story for the ages.

Exactly! I'm optimistic, but I realize that is just my nature. If I sit and actually think about last season, the team needs I thought were important, offseason pickups, the way the draft played out for us and the schedule of games ahead of us... then I have to say this is going to be very much a "prove it" year for the coaching and management staff, not to mention the players. Still, I have hope it will work out. But there's nothing on paper right now that shows it definitely will be better.

I'm going to be holding my breath a bit when it comes to saying we had a killer draft class. Our first year GM and Second-year Former College HC passed on some talents in the first round and then spent the whole draft trading back and back and back. It may work, it might work a bit, it might go down as the headscratchingest draft in recent memory or it could be an epic bust that we're cussing for years. We just honestly don't know. All of these guys are rookies coming out of the draft -- how they perform in the NFL is admittedly a crap shoot. We have no past history of draft picks for Fitterer to really see the trend. We have a HC trying to build a team his way, but he only turned out a 5-11 record last season while the guy he replaced took over a demonstrably worse team and rode it to the playoffs while battling cancer. Not saying there were bad choices throughout, but honestly, they are going to need to prove something pretty quickly to change my skepticism.

Fug soccer. It's like watching paint dry. I guess paint dries faster on artificial surfaces.

Nice to see your work again!

Sorry, Cam won't be starting QB by that time and there's a case to be made that he may not be the starter coming out of training camp. Not saying Mac is ready right now, but that bum shoulder Cam's been working with hasn't been getting any younger or better. I hate it for him, he was one of the most spectacular players to hit the field back in his heyday. He did things no one else ever had or might not ever will. But he hasn't been the same guy since Denver knocked the stuffings out of him in the Super Bowl and then did it again on opening day the following season. They tore the cape off of Superman and blew their noses on it. And it just started the long, slow slide from there. That's football, though. Few, if any, get to go out at their best and few get to hang on for very long at all.

That'd be like watching a really bad wreck happen, then walking up and making full value offer on one of the cars involved. Time to just let this just ride off into the sunset.

Heck, seeing @KB_fan back already makes this season better than last!

They've made an offer to his team. That usually comes with some exposition of information that basically says, "This is what will nail you, do you want to avoid it?" If he takes the offer, the court case goes away, the plaintiffs get paid and the attorneys get their cut. If he says he'll fight it, expect some of that evidence to "accidentally" be leaked to the public to put further pressure on him. Will he settle? Depends of if he is either 1) sure that he is perfectly innocent in every single case or 2) that he's not innocent but stupid enough to think he can somehow outsmart a team of lawyers. I think there's too many individual counts for him to have a shot at #1. Smart money says his attorneys will make a decent counter offer on the settlement, they'll dicker over the final price (no pun intended) and we'll never see it in court. What the NFL does to him then is up to the commissioner and his advisors. Since this is a civil case and it may not make it to court, it leaves the NFL with no legally binding judgement of guilt or innocence to use in their decision. That sucks if you are the league because now you have to look at the possibility of a suit filed against the league by Watson's attorneys and the NFLPA if he is suspended, or the potential public outcry if he is allowed to play again immediately with no repercussions. One guy's pecker hasn't had this much impact on the league since Jerry Richardson was caught cruising the secretarial pool.

Good post OP. Patience will pay off. Gotta believe!

He's going to be fine. His opponents are going to be flat on their backs.

Swole Bones the Lesser.

Even the greatest of QBs don't get a ring each year. QB is the most important position on a team, but it's not the end all be all deciding factor. The biggest deciding factor on success for a team is something they have little control over... injuries. Still, it's hard to sit back and say look at how good the guy we picked is playing while a QB you could have had is lighting it up out there.

Now if it will just play out that way, we'd be just sitting pretty.

Same arm length as Jordan Gross (and that's been said again and again). It's all about the skill and toughness. I hope he pans out and flashes greatness right away. Otherwise, we're all going to be talking about missed opportunities in the draft. I think Christensen will be the LT coming out of training camp. His college QB was the #2 overall pick for a number of reasons, and many of those required good pass protection. All of the other candidates we have are either journeymen (at best) or unfulfilled projects at the moment. It's really his job to lose.

Week 15 game in Buffalo is our only real cold weather, outdoor game to finish the season.

Honestly, it was just seeing the Lions there so many times that got me. Then again, their suckage has been storied and enduring.

Sure are some epically bad teams on that list. Not sure I like what it is pointing at.

This 100%.

Actually, when you look at our red zone and two-minute drill work last year, it's kind of hard to not go, "Ohhh, so that explains it." I've watched and thought Brady has some stuff that has carried over from being part of high-powered college teams that hasn't translated to the NFL. In college at LSU he was pretty much into throwing mad bombs and having receivers that were much, much better than most of the defenders they faced. Red Zone? That's something they'd be in for minutes of the game. Two-minute drill? Why they were never behind with the game on the line. In New Orleans, don't worry, Brees has this. Here, we need those fundamentals. One of Brady's biggest things that I think is a handicap is that he was often calling the offense from the sidelines, rather than from up in the coach's box where he could see the lay of the field and how defenses were setting up and reacting. Total non-pro thing that handicapped him and you could see it. I think he can be a great OC, but there's some transformation that I hoped he has grown into before we get out on the field (or practice field) this year.

Dang, I've got kids and a mortgage.

Baseball, the only sport where you can keep a beer in hand while playing it 90% of the time, even at the professional level.