strato

Technically. What you figure the chances of that are? We may be the toughest team left on their schedule lol.

Yeah. Especially when you consider that in November, even sub .500 teams still aren’t out of it, but we have been.

I don’t know about that. He had 130 yards in the first half. And I am giving him 4 quarters. It is okay to give him some credit when he doesn’t totally suck. now, is that who he is? History says no. History says he is mostly bad, and unable to sustain a higher level of play when he manages to achieve it.

I would say in a sense he is better because he has extended his good outings to 60 minutes a couple of times. It was a half, or even a quarter most other times. But at the same time he looks like he did in 2023 so much of the time still that it is hard to say he is better from that perspective.

I’ve never believed in him, to be clear. Was against the trade up on principle and once it was done and a two horse race it was CJ for me. No real competition in my mind. But I wanted nothing to do with that strategy to begin with. I really feel the need for us to be shown one way or the other this year, on what Bryce is or can be. His floor is way too low. His level of play is way too inconsistent and predominantly (taking the entire schedule and results into account) is not acceptable. Just sitting here watching the world go by hoping he gives us some clarity because I am really not enjoying the state of existence we have been mired in. I just really don’t want to consider life with paying him 50 damn million dollars to beat Atlanta and a couple of other bottom feeders.

This whole thing just illustrates how wildly inconsistent he has been, and highlights the need for some kind of relative certainty as to what his future is likely to look like.

If you win the division you probably have your Bryce answer built in. So no argument with that. You could not win it and still get a positive answer, or a negative one. In the big picture that is the most important thing to me. Talking about a bunch of years not just this one.

Talking about ‘should be’ you have to give Green Bay that game. Yes we should have handled the Saints. I won’t say Arizona because any more in this league the first two weeks are a total crap shoot and not a great indicator of your team’s future. The shortened preseason has most teams playing catch up the first couple of weeks. IMO. I guess trading the Saints for GB puts us right where we are. which is better than we probably expected.

Also, your big post was about the QB pipeline being broken. Which is the context of my reply. It is broken. I was using Bryce as an example of it, relative to us. But the general idea of it being broken is bigger than just him. Now would people have taken a QB if they knew it would take him 5 years to develop? I might have have but lower in the draft and not had him thrown into the fire. But honestly I would have looked for a more suitable sized guy with better tools, and yeah that is Bryce specific.

Okay. I didn’t say it was Bryce specific. But he is in that group and our issue. CJ, oddly, did not have that issue. Hmm. Again. Also you don’t sift through the rejects and pick one that couldn’t learn to play from under center. Unless you are stupid. I mean that would be a reason they would be rejects. But not all of them are that limited.

Yeah they obviously do. I wonder if the extra day helps us make that trip a little less taxing. We have been so routined into 1pm EST that an extra 8 hours before kickoff is a wild card too.

It is better to pick through the rejects that have at least been trained to take a snap from under center. People acted like Bryce’s first year was everyone else, and fail to consider that if he were able to operate efficiently from under center that you get the benefit of play action and a running game. Which we proved the previous season we could operate pretty well using that. But no he couldn’t do that. So the adage that a young QB’s best friend is a good running game couldn’t be true for us. Off the table. He still doesn’t do play action very well.

And it probably won’t be either. It all goes to the QB question and our future, long term, for me. Over whether we get the honor of being Cinderella one and done.

I think in light of the timing of that OL upgrade I must overlook it. It wasn’t like the situation allowed a better planned upgrade that would involve developing players, at least according to ownership’s priority on making Bryce work NOW. They didn’t have time to build it the right way, and you have to overpay to get top guys on a 2-15 team. It wasn’t ideal, no. The Moton thing I look at in a vacuum. Apart from the interior guys. I have a vague notion of a ridiculous cap situation leading to the ridiculous extension. Got my speed throttled on the phone here and over the cap.com didn’t want to load so I didn’t look it up. Bit after watching Nijman in some games last year I would not (have) felt good at all about no Moton. This is all resulting from the urgency or impatience or whatever you call it around removing the excuses for Bryce. You would hope that with a more settled situation there the building and maintaining of the roster could be addressed using a less extreme approach.

I agree it is more about the OL. If you happen to have a world beater with a great OL then that’s better obviously but you don’t need to have that. Capable and durable guys that can get to the second level with good blocking can be plenty.

Depends what week it is. On very rare occasions it is maybe 7 or 8 tops but most weeks it is 20 to 25 ans some weeks it is about 30.

You have to restock somehow. And you can’t pay everybody. By the time the WRs and QB are due for the big money you need to have a way figured that the OL can have some rookie contracts to offset that.

To me it isn’t even about the playoffs. If things go well, maybe the playoffs happen but it isn’t the primary goal for me. Getting proof one way or the other on this QB is the biggest prize we could win. If we don’t get that, we have a bad offseason coming up.

I don’t think no one was asking that, maybe you weren’t and it seemed that way to you. Plenty of people have pointed out that his good games are followed by bad ones, multiples. And how the team has been a week to week yo yo tbis year. Up down up down. In any event that is certainly the challenge this week. And is a challenge over these last 6 games for the QB in particular to show he can not go right back down to the bottom after a game where he looked like a real player. His track record to date is pretty much reverting to crap after delivering a game that would be worth the investment made in him and this offense. Can he break his pattern? We have sure been asking that. All that is what we are hoping gets answered definitively, this year. It desperately needs to be.

What this suggests to me is how dumb it is to spend that much to draft a kid not ready for the league. If the rookie contract does nothing but make their learning years cheaper you aren’t getting the advantage you think you are there either.

Poor ownership decisions dating to around 2019 Then the trade for Bryce Young was very costly and he so underperformed (IMO) that they were compelled to pump even more assets into putting players around him. OL to RB to WR - FA money and high draft picks, you name it. But offense was king and defense was an afterthought. For most of three years. Until we picked Scourton in the second this year there was nothing over a single 3rd round pick spent on tne defense since Jaycee Horn was taken in the first round - and he is on his second contract. Defense has been a black hole. That is the Cliff Notes version, or at least it is my Cliff Notes version.

Well the reason for the tight playbook is heavily debated. Without going into that I will just say we haven’t beat up on any top defenses so far, offensively. Atlanta looked mediocre at best. Being kind. They are our big victim. SF is supposed to be weak on defense, I think it will be interesting.

In a majority of the games if you take out the scripted drive - which the first few weeks didn’t amount to much at all half the time, there wasn’t a lot of meat on the bone. Even Sunday he had 130 and a TD in the first half, in his probably best game ever. His bad games were bad. This week will really be interesting. If he plays.

BTW Brooks made his NFL debut November 24 last year. Very nearly 4 months later than the start of camp. If not 4 months - I didn’t look up camp dates but it is late July right?

Plus Zavala will be playing, right? Two sacks right there.