woahfraze

I’m not going to sit here and say he played “amazing” in this game against the Eagles, but you’re selling this performance short. Stats do not tell the whole story here. If Leggette doesn’t drop that late 32 yard pass, Bryce ends up with 223 yards and 2TDs and doesn’t end up with 2 additional incompletions after that drop trying to force things to the end zone at the end of the game. So that’s be 20-32 instead of 19-34, good for a 62.5% completion percentage. His YOA would be 6.96 and his QB rating would have been 91.2. And the story everyone is talking about after the game is how Bryce led a game winning drive to beat one of the best teams in the league, the team we did not know at the time would become Super Bowl champions. But none of that happened all because of an awful drop by Leggette, something totally out of Bryce’s control. Bryce played well that game.

Why are you so fixated on yards? Even if yards were a good judge of QB play, his low yardage totals in some of those games were partly a function of drops (looking at you Xavier Leggette…). I’m not advocating that Bryce was elite for the last half of last year, but the eye test certainly supported high level QB play for large stretches. He made a lot of high difficulty, put it on the money/drop in the bucket throws. He converted on 3rd and 4th down, kept drives moving, and put the team in position to win games. And it’s not on him that the defense blew it late after he led game tying drives, Leggette dropped a game winning TD, or Chuba fumbled the ball in OT. We could have finished the season close to .500 with wins against 3 playoff teams including KC and Philly during that stretch largely due to Bryce’s play. Has he sustained this level of play long enough to deserve an higher ranking? No. But for judging based in that stretch alone, he would. But whether he can perform more consistently at that level or build on that, and thus earns a higher ranking, remains to be seen.

We’ve invested enough money in the offensive line to justify a top or market free agent contract. The end of the year showed us that we have a unit that has developed good chemistry and can be really effective in both run blocking and pass protection. From a needs and capital allocation perspective, it makes much more sense to invest in the defense and another playmaker on offense. The offensive line should not be ignored this offseason, but the focus here should be to maintain/build depth in the position group rather than bring in a new starter.

Impressive catch by Coker.

Love it. Very nice 4th and 1 call. Falcons loaded up to stop the run on. Good fake. Easy pitch and catch.

Still should be a catch. On the regather into the chest (which you could possibly argue is really just part of the catch, not necessarily a bobble), Thielen still had two feet dragging when he got it into his chest.

The defense is absolute ass, but it was not even really bad defense on the last play specifically by the CB IMO. That was just an absolute dot by Penix. He did it twice in a row. Just got lucky on the first one that it was a tad long/a wierd “tie” with the CB on the catch.

I’m not saying culture is all that matters. But you just named: A 4th round pick (Amon Ra St Brown) Two 2nd round picks (LaPorta and Branch) The 20th overall pick (Ragnow) The 18th overall pick (Campbell) The 12th overall pick (Gibbs) The 7th overall pick (Sewell) The 2nd overall pick (Hutchinson) Two free agency signing (Montgomery and Smith) A player obtained in a trade (Goff) So only two players (Sewell and Hutchinson) where is losing ground in draft position from picking ~5 to ~10 would have mattered at all. All the rest were either the front office making the right choices with their draft selections or bring in veterans who fit what the staff wanted to do schematically, or the staff developing those players (FYI, it’s certainly a combination of those two things).

If you think that the Lions draft position had more to do with where they are as a franchise than Dan Campbell and the culture he has built, there’s nothing more to discuss with you. You just don’t get it. Our franchise isn’t in the toilet because we’ve ruined our draft position year after year. It’s because we haven’t had a Dan Campbell come in and implement a program and a culture of winning.

And look at what Darnold has done this year and how Mayfield has played in Tampa since leaving here. There is no way of knowing whether Herbert would have performed well here or if we would have ruined him.

Note the second sentence of my post….

There’s no guarantee we would have taken those players, even though we as fans wanted them. And there’s not guarantee the coaching staff we had at the time would have allowed/turned those players into the players they are today.

The team has to learn how to win. That’s inclusive of the players and the coaches. Hopefully getting this one under their belt will mean there are more the come.

Learning how to win > slightly better draft position. Winning builds culture. At least if you have the right leadership in place. Not sure we do, but we aren’t going to improve long term and start to consistently win if we don’t start winning some. That winning culture doesn’t just turn on like a light switch. It has to be built over time and winning these sorts of games helps do that. And given teams make bad draft selections all the time, the difference between pick 5 and 7 isn’t great. You still have to make the right pick wherever you’re drafting. And then you have to have the winning culture and infrastructure to develop that pick into a successful one.

This is the perfect reason you can’t box score scout. At half today, he’s got a 10.3 YPA and a QB Rating of 100. Whereas the past 3 games, he’s had a lower QB Rating (low 80s), which has been due mostly to relatively low completion percentage and YPA. But if you watch the film, the last three games, he’s played with more anticipation, made better reads, and threatened down the field more than he has today. His numbers were deflated by drops that would have increased his TD%, YPA, and completion percentage. Today, he’s playing worse but his numbers are buoyed by an 83 yard TD. It’s also a good reminder that level of play can fluctuate. Just because he played better the past few games doesn’t mean it would continue forever. But it also doesn’t mean that him playing like he is today will continue forever. Signs are pointing up. He’s got to improve more, but he has the ability to, he’s not hopeless.

I was an apologist last year. I certainly didn’t think he shouldered none of the blame for the poo show we all endured. He was not put in a good situation to succeed between the offensive line, coaching scheme/playing calling, etc., but he also wasn’t playing well enough. Those things can both be true at the same time, and all the deficiencies can reinforce and amplify one another. But I was out on him after Game 2 this year. To come into the season with a much improved situation and a whole offseason of being within a pro football infrastructure, his play those two games was unacceptable. So color me very surprised that he’s returned from his benching and played this way. Something has clearly clicked. He’s got more improving to do, but anyone who remains a full on hater is ignoring a lot of good tape that he’s putting out. Whether he can perform more consistently remains to be seen, but he’s showing that he can be a functional NFL QB working from the pocket, who can also excel outside of structure. Obviously you want more out of the No. 1 overall than a mid-level starter. I think he has the potential to be more. Probably not an elite level ceiling, but an above average one. He’s not there yet, but there’s hope. He could also plateau where he’s at. Or regress. We just don’t know.

Ok? Where in my post did I defend Bryce? I described the effort as I saw it and then said I didn’t see anything that makes me think he’ll ever get there? Why are you quoting me with this?

The bar is really low, but certainly showed some progress. He had some nice plays but also lots of bad ones. It was an inconsistent effort. The stats would be better if David Moore doesn’t drop a deep shot that Bryce put in a good spot and if the Saints CB doesn’t make an incredible interception on a play where the officials should have called DPI on another deep shot. That was a really nice deep throw to the outside, which is where he’s really struggled. He had plays where stepped up and navigated the pocket better than he has in the past. But he also had a bunch of plays where he didn’t manage the pocket well at all. And a lot of plays where he was to quick to dump the ball down behind or at the line of scrimmage. Those types of plays are drive killers and mostly negate the positives he showed. So I don’t really take much away from this game. He performed better than he’s done in the past because it went from zero positives to a handful of positives. But that’s not the bar we should be judging him by. We need to see more consistency from him. And we need to see it over a sustained period of time. Right now, there are no indications we’ll ever see that.

My wife is destroying everyone in our fantasy football league, so maybe she does know more than me hahaha

^yep, this tracks.

The reverse jinx to the rescue!

Before the TD, I just said out loud to my wife that we absolutely losing this game by 2. TD plus failed conversion and then D can’t hold Saints.

That was a damn hold on Horn

Yep, pretty much. Bryce has proven that he isn’t the guy. But zooming out, it’s astounding how poorly the front office has operated over the last 4-5 years. They’ve drafted poorly, and where they’ve managed to identify good talent, they’ve ended up trading it away. And in the process of trading it away, through a combination of poor timing on their part and poor in the moment negotiating, managed to get a poor return for that talent. And because the drafting and free agency moves have not worked out, they’ve compounded the issues by trying to patch holes in the roster via trades where they have overpaid. I don’t think they could have done a worse job in all of the areas. I’m not sure you could do a worse job intentionally trying to be bad. It’s crazy. We can blame the coaches for not getting the most out of the talent in the roster. They are not blameless in all this. A better culture, some better scheming, some better development could have kept us from being quite so bad. But at the end of the day, this mess falls at the feet of Scott Fitterer. Such a shame Tepper kept Dan Morgan on, because he’s culpable for the mess too as Fitterer’s right hand man. And of course you’ve got the blame Tepper for making the wrong decisions on who to place in the GM and scouting roles. I’m not as big a believer that he’s interfering and overriding the front office people. There may be some of that. Regardless, he is responsible for hiring them, so he takes blame too. Just total top to bottom failure.

He had nowhere to throw both on the initial blitz or after he broke out of the pocket. So there’s an issue there with either scheme/play call, blitz recognition, not having a hit route etc, and with WRs coming back to ball on scramble. But jeez, Bryce, you have to have situational awareness to throw it away and preserve the FG attempt