WhoKnows

There were tweets on all four of the prospects. Young was the the most often, but there were guys who said Reich loved Richardson, Stroud and Young, which conflict with each other. We’ll never actually know because you don’t even know what tweets are for clicks and who the insiders are and whether or not they were sending out false messages. All I know is that we appear to have done something wrong and I have a really hard time thinking that an all star coaching staff including Reich would let an owner choose the QB for them.

I wish I wasn’t there with you but yesterday was awful. The second pick 6 and Young’s jump throw made me really feel like the height will always be an issue. Also, the first pick 6 was the same. The angle of the throw made it go right over Sanders to a defender a few yard behind him. I felt like week 1 that he couldn’t see Bates on at least one of the interceptions. We know he doesn’t have a cannon and has no weapons outside Theilin but I do feel like we’re going to try and build around him and he’ll never be that guy and we’ll have a decade of under .500 seasons before our next try.

So Reich and Stroud rumors are based only on McCown? I’m happy to read something else but Fitt and Reich linked to Stroud never crossed my path in all the discussions/articles/tweets. Young was all over the place and I do remember Richardson being the surprise contender but outside of McCown, it seemed like we eliminated Stroud.

McCown liking Stroud and asking him to play a pickup game in Charlotte doesn’t mean Reich had him above Young. Teams looking for QBs almost always have quotes about QBs that could be construed that way. Wilks said nice stuff about Josh Allen. He probably said nice stuff about Mayfield, Darnold and Rosen too as I’m sure they looked at all four of them and did dinners and pro days/visits. You posted the same thing that Stroud called Nicole Mama Tepp. Heck, we said nice things about Pickett, Willis, Corral and likely others the year before. Reich is on record saying he and Fitt were in lock step with their “proposal” pre-draft. Don’t care about McCown. Where were the rumors about the Stroud love from Reich himself? Again, I remember pre-draft articles saying Reich liked Richardson almost as much as Young, but nothing from Reich himself on Stroud. The Richardson talk with Reich was interesting because it made it seem like Stroud wasn’t in the mix as we got closer to the draft.

Yep and CMC having the Diggs breakaway capability makes Allen think a dump off to CMC could be big. His biggest issue IMHO isn’t just turnovers but not just taking a 4 yard play on 3rd and 3. If you have confidence in your RB and know he could take it to the house, that simple play is no longer “just a dump off”, it’s a get the ball into Diggs like hands to let them make a huge play. Look at what CMC has done for Purdy. I watched a few games last year and CMC opened up the middle of the field like crazy. You could see Purdy not throwing great balls as the season progressed but he was throwing to wide open guys because CMC sucked coverage to him and the OL blocked. When Purdy is forced to win games due to their D being meh this year, he’s not shining.

I will always say that the Bills completely fuged up not trading for CMC. Their running game works sometimes when the D is fooled. The RBs are not really big safety valves. I think Allen would flourish with CMC because he is always trying for the huge play and CMC is a huge play waiting to happen even on dump offs. Gabe Davis is fine but until the last couple games with Kincaid it was still always Diggs that Allen relied on for big plays. CMC would have kept the Ds more honest and given Allen a serious threat so that he’d force a 20-30 yard pass on 3rd and 2 way less.

When did the rumors about CJ Stroud and Reich come about? I distinctly remember articles where Reich and Fitt were both on Young as the top and I do recall hearing that while Reich liked Young the best, he also liked Richardson a lot before the draft. I remember this because it seemed like Stroud was out of the equation really early whether or not McCown wanted to play hoops with him. It seems to me that Reich preferring Stroud didn’t happen until well into the season after Young was meh, Richardson got hurt the first time and Stroud had a few great games, when the seats starting getting warm. I truly don’t think Tepper forced Young on everybody. His point guard quotes came a couple months after Brown’s point guard mentions and as you said, Fitt in the draft process mentioning they had already zeroed in on Young a year before the draft and Fitt and Reich crowed about how sync they were at the start and end of their decisions again with no mention of Tepper at that point. People jumped on Tepper’s post draft interview explaining the choice of Young and the trading of Moore, which IMHO was spitting back out the reasonings Fitt and Co. gave him. Even the meetings with Frank were no big deal to me because that to me was a come to Jesus of why are we worse than Rhule and Wilks when he was promised a contender now that we had our QB. That said, I don’t want Tepper making any future decisions either. Between Hurney staying, Rhule and Fitt hiring and Fitt staying, he’s bungled they key calls. If he’s helped out on personnel decisions, well he’s sucked there too.

Agreed. I’d love for him to blossom but we’ve got such large issues it’s disheartening as a fan. Not having what is now the #1 pick* in 2024 or our 2nd in 2025, we are well behind the 8-ball. The OL appears to have seriously regressed so it feels like we have no strengths. We’ve had so few draft picks because of our other trades as well, so very little young talent who could become impact starters. Maybe Mingo and that’s it. *Arizona is 1-8 (no bye yet) but we win tiebreaker if we finish with same number of wins.

I don’t think I’d boo him at all, but we are 1-7 after being told in the offseason (before preseason games) that we’d be competitive, we traded away CMC and Moore for peanuts and we don’t even have our 1st round pick, which looks like our best pick since Cam. Being 1-7 after Rhule is really bad. It’s not surprising that there’s a ton of frustration because it doesn’t feel like when Cam started with us. I don’t care if Young might be good down the road, he lost the game for us yesterday against a mediocre team and the interceptions were bad. They felt like he was jumping and throwing to his check downs without being able to see them.

So who do you think we’ll trade Young to where he’ll become great and who will be our Rivers?

Agree completely. Rhule didn’t have CMC for many games and didn’t have the “fixed” OL, it felt more competitive until the team got to the we can’t make the playoffs point. Look at what we did with Wilks to Detroit and what they did to us even though we “fixed” the QB hole. I remember joking in the preseason hot takes that Reich would make us miss Rhule. It’s feeling like that wasn’t a joke.

Yep, this is the case. We’d be a much better team.

I was talking about the Hurst catch and then the LOL was that as I was typing bam, pick 6.

Good night and god bless. Game over. Bears getting pick 1.

Nice pass but damn, Young still got hit is there a pass play anymore where he isn’t pressured. LOL as I type. F this team.

CMC isn’t just another RB.

It really wasn’t. The top pick was pick 61. It’s end of the 2nd. SF is paying $10.6M a year for an MVP candidate. We got a late 2nd as the key pick in the trade. The Rams 2nd that they offered ended up being pick 36. That’s would have been better. For some reason, Fitt overestimated who bad SF would be and underestimated who bad the Rams would end up.

Also, just to be clear, I’m glad we didn’t do a Commanders fire sale. We had our amazing offer last year.

I’ve said the same thing as well. We traded CMC too soon and for too less. Had we known about the Burns value to the Rams, maybe we make that deal and are able to just use their picks and still have Young, CMC, Moore and our 2024 1st. As a rebuilding franchise, which IMHO we have not done well, you’ve got to sacrifice some players. Stafford was Detroit’s best player. Tunsil and Fitzpatrick were Miami’s beat guys. Same with Ramsey and the Jags. What the teams (who rebuild properly) realize is that you need volume of good draft picks so you can draft Tua and Waddle and throw a first at Tyreke Hill. Fitterer has been half adding stuff and as soon as he turned down the game changing rebuild offer, he lost his leverage with a lack of extension in place and forced himself to say no to every trade that now makes him like a fool for getting way less.

Good point, although the coaches need to see that and make sure he is. He’s the 6th pick in the draft. If the team needs to get him more outside help or make him do extra reps before and after, then they should. It’s not the first time that teams got involved. I mean we hired multiple coaches and brought in Dalton for Young’s development so we can’t just say Iky’s on his own and he’ll need to fix his technique on his own. Coaches can’t spend extra time with all players but they damn well better put in extra time or get extra help if there are obvious issues for top 10 picks. This also points to preseason and how it was handled. If we truly weren’t thinking playoffs, the starters, especially rookies/2nd year guys, should have played more. Maybe Iky’s footwork gets better. Maybe Young sees another defender do what Bates did. We sure didn’t need to hide the new playbook.

It is. Pickett is not good but they are 5-3. It’s like smoke and mirrors but they always keep games close and always seem to have a good enough D. Roethlisberger became a shell of himself and Pickett has not been a top QB but he still hasn’t gone below .500. He’s pretty impressive. The only knock right now is that he doesn’t have the offensive talent, which is why they only have one “good” season in the last 6 years. They did sneak a second time into the playoffs but that was more due to Lamar getting hurt. They haven’t won a playoff game since 2016. They’ve been competitive but that drop at the QB spot (and WR) has kept them from being contenders. It’ll be interesting how long the keep with Pickett.

Trying to do this the nice way, but this is what I hinted at before. Wahle is a former NFL OL and you are disagreeing with him saying the scheme change is overstated because we know you love the coaching staff. This is only believing articles/tweets when it suits you. Our young OL have not exceeded expectations and technique is an issue, which points to needing to improve the coaching unless Iky is uncoachable.

Seeing as how Bozeman, Moton and Corbett have been in the league for years as starters, I’d think the only guys who would need technique work are LG and LT and those are our trouble spots. As of right now, it does seem a problem with the non-vets.

SMH. I post the exact text of the article and it’s wrong. Do you actually think Brown created brand new plays for every page of the playbook? This is not some new story as you put it. If you want an analogy that actually fits, this is more like a movie or TV adaptation of a book. Brown isn’t creating the West Coast offense decades ago using only philosophies. He’s creating a playbook “from the ground up” using plays from his time with McVay, plays from Reich and then, they decided on the language of the common plays. It literally states how they melded the common plays where only the language differed. You can act like you are someone who’s objective but you aren’t. I gave you text from an article that you choose to ignore because it doesn’t fit your argument that we are running a brand new, never seen before offense which helps make Frank’s slow start make more sense. Also, I’m pretty sure those of us who were worried about the start of the season due to how we looked in preseason were correct. It’s funny that you are still stubborn when we start 0-6 and things like the OL protection are still an issue that was highlighted as one of the biggest concerns. Was that part of a plan? It’s funny how playoff contention was talked about all offseason and then during the preseason, which didn’t matter of course, all the same talk became of course we aren’t going to contend when every off-season move sure indicated that plan. Oh well, I think I gave a fairly straightforward reasoning for why both of you could easily be right, but it’s hard to have discussions with you. Your objective posting of news was always appreciated but it’s changed.

Scot, this is also where you get tripped up. I’ve seen it before multiple times where you’ve jumped through hoops to defend your guys and did ignore articles to take the blame off of your guys. You were a huge Fitterer fan, we’ve argued about that before and sorry, he’s been terrible so far, draft, trades and FAs. You are also a huge Reich fan and dude, he said playoffs and we are a worse team than Wilk’s version. We treated preseason terrible as if not showing our offense was more important than getting the team actually ready, leading to an 0-6 start. I have no doubt that Brown was charged with building the playbook as the OC. It’s funny that you linked an article about that but missed in @ForJimmy’s link that they laid out exactly what happened: Brown said he and Reich broke their offensive identities down to their roots when designing the Panthers' playbook, building it back together with unique ideas peppered throughout. Brown once called the playbook split between his philosophy and Reich's "60-40." Reich saw some overlap in how he and Brown wanted to plan the offense from the start. He estimated anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of their systems were already "similar" and that the melding process involved picking from new and old language and bringing it together. You and @CRA might both right. Seems like the playbook is likely 35% Brown/McVay, 25% Reich and 40% overlap. Does it really surprise anyone that while Reich called plays that he likely used more calls from the 65% of the playbook that was what he’s run before? It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the offense still looked like Reich in Indy while he called plays. Doesn’t mean Brown wasn’t in charge of building the playbook either and it wouldn’t surprise me if the offense looks and feels more like watching McVay/Brown while he calls plays.