Khyber53

We're going to see a lot of rugby and Aussie rules football guys being brought into the league if the new kick-off rules prove popular. Those guys can both kick and tackle, as well as receive and run.

Here's a quick one for laundry to cut back on water and electricity. Unless you have a really grimy job like masonry, carpentry, road construction, etc... you really should just be using the quick cycle on your washing machine for all loads except for whites. And set your dryer to medium heat, it will make a difference. Also, use about half of the detergent that they say for you to. On top of the savings, your clothes will also last longer.

Prediction: Eddie will be the next excellent kicker we can't come to terms with and ends up in Kansas City.

Had we just stuck with that... It was a bad decision from a team building decision to move on from Wilks. It was a bad decision from a winning games perspective to move on from Wilks. It was a bad decision purely based on karma. Last year, hopefully, put the karmic balance back to even, or tipped it in our favor some. I really wanted Wilks to stay here as HC, not gonna lie.

We're just going to have to see what happens. I sure didn't like what I saw last season, but I remember seeing pretty much an entire team that stunk, sort of the whole pile of turds not just one shiny new one. Let's hope things get better this year. Somehow.

Yeah, I'm serious. You take all of the first year jitters any rookie QB starting will face. Then you put him behind an inept line, give him a group of WRs that features a 32-33 year old slot receiver as their only reliable guy and use him as WR1, no TEs to speak of, pay big bucks for an undersized and over-touted RB that isn't out competing practice squad players AND THEN pair it up with a dysfunctional owner/HC/OC combo that keeps running the same play concept again and again and again. (And coaches that were already at each other's backs with daggers don't develop young QBs... heck it's the hardest skill ever for any HC.. Jon Gruden never could do it and there's a case to be made that Belichick never did it (the QB developing the coach possibly there)). Yeah, he was bad, legendarily bad, but he was in possibly the worst environment imaginable for a rookie QB. You can take away some mechanics issues that should have been worked on and still need to be worked on, but everything else was tainted by that environment. I wasn't impressed by him in the least for anything except for his character and willingness to go back out there and just get killed again and again. At least he wasn't running away on every play, little girly screams lifting to the cheap seats, like Pickles was. Will he be good this year? Honestly, the odds are stacked against him. They are on every young QB in the league, and he had more piled against him. Maybe Canales can fix him and the team. I sure hope so. If not, it's back to the drawing board and we'll have wasted two seasons. I really don't want that to happen.

Right now, no one can know how Bryce will perform this year. There's nothing we can take from last year's work that wasn't tainted by bad coaching and bad players all around him. And we really don't know how the team rebuild is going. Or how the teams we are opposing will do. Or where a key injury to our team or others will affect the games. We're just going to have to tune in or show up at the stadium to find out. And that's kind of exciting. Can't wait for September and decent football to return. Hope we're playing some of it.

Karloff, Chaney, Lugosi and Chaney, Jr. Yep, that's the Mt. Rushmore! Nice paint job, too! Have fun and hope you're feeling great!

Honestly, sports fuged up education. And it isn't even close to be done.

Always loved Pep and I understood why he went to Chicago and cheered when he eventually came back home.

One of the catchiest rock tunes.

And another new one. This one was pretty astounding how someone would just flip and run. Gambling is a hard, hard drug man.

High character players will win seasons for you.

Bryce. Not that Juan isn't trying, but yanno.

He's such a good kid. I really hope he can shine this season and prove the doubters (including me) wrong. I'm really pulling for him to make it.

I think, in the future, that if municipalities are pretty much required to levy a tax to support these kinds of renovations, or rebuilds, then the amount of money should be weighed against purchasing that percentage of ownership of the team. Imagine having 1 million Charlotteans as 30% stakeholders in the Panthers. Yeah, that would scare team owners into financing their own massively profitable ventures.

New story I wrote just went up. We tripled our research efforts to get this one, let me know what you think of what turned out. Powerful moments in it, particularly when the detective says, "She wasn't a very big girl."

You know, like classes outside of the business school. Just spin off all college sports into developmental, for profit leagues and let universities and colleges get back to educating people for their careers.

I just don't know. New coach, new system, new management, new weapons, excellent draft, great free agency pick ups. I mean, that's gotta create optimism, right? Except we've heard this before. Like three times in the past six seasons. I hope Canales has the answer, but they're going to have to make me believe this time. Show me something. Anything.

I want us to become a smashmouth football team again. On offense and defense. It has been a long time since we dictated the terms of a game to the other team. Yeah, run heavy will be great and will give whoever our QB is a chance to make the most of their skills.

The organization was poorly put together from top to bottom and it shows. Management was in bunker mode and we had a guy as GM who could not evaluate talent either in the draft or free agency. We had just gotten away from a "culture" HC who needed to stay at a mid-majors college and replaced him with a guy who had a lot of emotional ties to the team but had just come off of a collapsing team of his own in Indianapolis. And that guy built a coaching staff, one heavily influenced by ownership, that was just not ready for the roles they were given and could not gel because they could see the collapse and were oftentimes worried about their own skin more than what the team needed. On the field, the team was just atrocious. The o-line suffered some early injuries and could not hold together because there was no depth and little coaching. Game planning seemed to make no effort to shore up the line and the rookie QB could not make adjustments, did not have the tools in his tool box yet, to offset this in even the least. Our highly recruited FA RB turned out to be a powder puff, our receivers were slow to the point of making people pine for the days of Kelvin Benjamin. We had one receiver who could actually run a rout and catch and he was double covered on almost every play. Our tight ends were just completely ineffective because of a lack of talent and using the same play concept over and over again. And our defense? Well, statistically, particular in yardage given up, looked great on paper. But it sucked, too. It just didn't suck as bad as our offense, which was historically bad. The highlight of our team last season was our Special Teams play. We had a good kicker and punter. The saving grace of our team last season was this: The NFL had not gone to an 18-game schedule yet, meaning the faithful didn't have to sit through another week of watching that mess. Good luck to the new coach. I'd like to say there's nowhere to go but up from here, but I said that about this time last year, too. I don't want to be amazed by how wrong I was again.

There's more to coaching than play calling, even down on the field. Madden isn't going to simulate how your WR1 had a big fight with his wife the night before the game and is stiff from sleeping on the couch. It's not going to simulate that the fight was because the QB's wife was flirting with the WR and now, because she went full on ballistic that the QB now knows about it. It's not going to simulate that questionable bucket of wings your o-line shared three hours before the game is now causing cramps and gas. It's also not going to simulate the real wear and tear of the season and how about December even the moderately good teams are about halfway spending their brain power on picking their January vacation destinations. But for a video game, it's pretty good.

He's terrible until he proves that he's different. We're the worst team in the league until we prove otherwise. Same story, just a different year. It's up to the 53 guys on the team, the coaches, management and ownership to change that and it is going to take a lot of work to pull us out of the ditch they've driven us into over the last five years.

Good! It's time for him to get even more acknowledgements for what he did on the field and what he has done off the field. A couple of incidents in practices have been hung around his neck like an albatross. Deserved or not, he has more than redeemed himself for all of the good he has done. Sorry, I love Smitty.

Great guy, had some hard luck. I was really hoping he'd have the opportunity to really come back. Well, here's hoping he has better luck in his future endeavors. Good people deserve good things.