rayzor

and regarding his deep ball throws...

looks like he can toss them without a lot of effort here and it looks like he's got the arm.

12 minutes ago, Shotgun said:

Having a dominant run game will be pretty hard with very little downfield passing ability though.

i think we'll see more down field passing if we have an OL that can give him a little time, WRS that can get open, and plays that don't take too long to develop. those contributed more to a lack of downfield throws than anything.

i know people don't like to refer back to this...but in his time in college he didn't have any problem making downfield throws and no, i don' think a yard gets longer in the pros. if he could throw a deep ball in college easily, he can throw it in the pros. 

i am anxious to see what he does with this new situation. i think the schedule is about as favorable as you could hope for the first half of the year. i don't expect a dramatic and quick  improvement, but i do expect improvement.

18 minutes ago, CRA said:

And I have been a big XL guy/fan.  He know doubt was drafted because he fits a role that is in all the Os Canales has been around. 

my concern is Bryce, and it’s probably not a talent issue on this aspect.  Just a QB DNA thing.  I really think Canales and XL pair best with a gunslinger/risk taker.   You want to limit gunslinger with the run but then need the QB to go downfield aggressively.  

Bryce needs to simply play and be more aggressive downfield.   Which is easier said than done if not wired that way

truthfully, when did he have time last year to throw it down field? plays took far too long to develop and the OL gave him no time. 

i think we are basing far too much of bryce's assessment on a situation that didn't work out in his favor at all. it was probably the worst situation a rookie QB could have found himself in. the only i can think of who had it worse was David Carr, who had an even worse rookie season than Bryce by a significant margin statistically. 

i think most would realize that carr was probably a better QB than his record would show, but he was shell shocked in his first few years because they did nothing to try to help him out. 3 of his 5 years in houston he led the league in sacks. i don't think he would ever have been an elite QB, but had he been in a better situation he probably would have had a better and longer career.

point is, i don't think we saw everything that bryce is capable of because he was limited by the situation. but i understand the pessimism most have, because all we really have to go on was what we saw last year. that's why i wait to see what happens with a better situation. i just don't think you can give an accurate assessment of him based on last year. it wouldn't be fair for any rookie, tbh, but for one whos situation was so fugged up i think it's even more unfair.

had nothing changed in the situation, you could probably expect more of the same. that's just not the case, though. a whole lot changed for the team and for his situation and i think for the better. it just makes sense that if we improved the situation that he will improve. 

Ok.....so I'm going to answer the question.

Yes, dammit. He'll be good

19 hours ago, t96 said:

I think 7 or 8 wins is possible

Not sure how or where, but I think we win at least 6.

3 minutes ago, MHS831 said:

He did not elevate the players around him, but they de-elevated their QB.  A QB like Bryce needs a system, a strong OL, a Running game, and WRs that can get open.  Call him a manager at best, but so is a point guard.  That is all we should need.  He is smart enough to grow into a very effective player. 

I once saw a Coach talking about the OL--i forget who it was Schottenheimer comes to mind--and he said, you can succeed if you have one weak link on the OL.  If you get 2 weak links, success comes 10x harder.  If you get three weak links, your season is over.  Your QB is injured, and you are unemployed (paraphrasing).  I would say that we had 4 weak links (Icky does not get a pass) and a RB who was not good at pass blocking.

I am not saying the Bryce is the answer at QB--but I am saying we don't know yet. I know QBs (college) and when the OL sucks, they collapse mentally over time.  That is what we saw--a QB who had never played without the advantage.

we may think we know, but we don't know. we won't know what effect upgrades on the OL, coaching staff, and WR room will have. we don't know what scheme canales is going to put together. we don't know a lot of things. 

that's why we play the games...to see what shakes out. plenty of reasons to think Bryce is limited this year...again. Plenty of reasons to see an improvement in his play. 

We should just have more threads for temper tantrums about Bryce in here. Should open up a new forum for it.

2 minutes ago, Jon Snow said:

I'm waiting for an example of a fancy high flying offense.

we might have to wait a minute.

i really don't think that we have seen enough in a competently managed offense to know what BY is capable of. i want to see what they can dial up with an upgraded OL, WR room, pass catching TE, and a coaching staff that is too preoccupied with hunger game crap to figure out what to do on offense. 

"highlights" from last year don't inspire me, but i'm hoping that within the first few games we'll see something working better. exactly what, i don't know. fortunately it's not my job to figure that poo out. my job is to sit back, watch...and then celebrate or bitch depending on what happens. 

i am excited to see what canales puts together, though. 

2 minutes ago, Khyber53 said:

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. 

same here. that's who we were. i know a lot of people want us to have one of those fancy new high flying air show offenses going on, but that's not who we were when we felt the best about the team. 

and maybe bryce isn't the big gunslinger jake was or the big play guy that cam was, but there's got to be something he can do...right? hopefully canales can figure something out.

45 minutes ago, Mother Grabber said:

seattle ran the ball a lot, except for the one time they really should have 

that was a horrible decision....but i loved that reaction.

53 minutes ago, CRA said:

maybe the plan was bad....because David Tepper moved up to draft a QB David Tepper wanted....and told his new HC he was going to have to play his new QB day 1.  I think so much of the #1 overall pick was PR/marketing for David Tepper.  Try to change the tide. Add some excitement.   I think Frank was given a plan that Frank didn't design or view as he would have come up with. 

I don't think Bryce fit Frank's brand of football.  And that was that.  Frank wasn't going to reinvent the wheel for Bryce because that isn't Frank.   It's not most NFL coaches.  They got to where they are doing what they do. 

agreed. reich and fox were kind of similar in that i think their comfort zone with QBs were established vets. 

any rookie QB would have been outside that. i do think that he might have been more comfortable with stroud than young, but i also still think that we would have been stuck in a bad place. there was more than went wrong than with the QB.

nothing worked and QB issues were one of many symptoms of the problem that we found ourselves in with reich. the whole thing was too much for him. not only did he get a QB outside of his comfort zone, he got unfamiliar assistants that came from unfamiliar schemes. he had no prior relationship with most coaches he had added to his staff. 

again, that staff was tepper's idea...get the dream staff with a billion years of experience and those who don't have a poo ton of experience were coaches that were considered up and comers for HC jobs. 

reich is a mild-mannered passive likeable kind of guy. he wasn't the big dominant personality that would be needed to handle that staff.

2 hours ago, CPcavedweller said:

Or that one play is all that Bryce was capable of? Bryce is an issue. 

To say that Frank fuging Reich, a longtime NFL back-up and coach, would not see a need to “develop” a Rookie QB is hilarious and wrong. 

now I wanted Steve Wilks to be retained, but this comment is pure garbage. 

he might have eventually realized that bryce wasn't as much like a vet QB as he thought r was sold on and that he needed to be developed, but i don't think he had a real plan how to accomplish that or the ability to. i don't see him as having the desire to, either. 

1 hour ago, mrcompletely11 said:

his scrambling ability, especially early in his career, was legendary.  The way he could get himself out of trouble and still make a play was poetic.  I dont see bryce having anything close to that type of skill set.

thin line between poetic and panic.

the difference is the end result.

guys caught wilson's throws thrown on a prayer while falling down. that's what made it looks so good. if he didn't have guys that could adjust to the ball and catch it, it would have looked a lot worse. he owes a lot to those receivers.

2 minutes ago, Bear Hands said:

So when his QB was inaccurate, he did the least with uncatchable balls.

Being more of a body catcher and his lack of short area quickness, and Reich/Brown’s awful play designs, it makes sense why.

yeah there's a good few things that come into play.

should BY have thrown better balls? yes, but he didn't.

should BY have been in a better situation so he could throw better balls? yes, but he wasn't (thank play design and crappy blocking)

should mingo have been able to make adjustments back to the ball and make things happen  when throws were (much) less than perfect? yes. 

again, i'm hoping that XL can be that guy and that Brooks shows to be a solid dump off target. JT should be a good target as well.

33 minutes ago, Untouchable said:

I mean Seattle had to, it was all they could do with Wilson.

Young doesn't have as good of a deep ball and has show more willingness to go over the middle of the field but you can probably draw a lot of parallels here.

most of us watching wilson hated playing against him. he was good, but a lot of what he did was luck. he'd get into trouble, scramble around, and then just toss the ball and hope that there was a guy there who could get to it and that happened a lot. i think there are parallels there for sure. bryce scrambles and will probably just end up tossing up the ball and hoping that someone will be there. i think XL can be one of those guys who make those adjustments to the ball the way Wilson's WRs did. 

19 minutes ago, Khaki Lackey said:

Fox/Rivera/Wilks-ball yields you a .500 record. While an improvement over the current sh!tshow, I wish we would strive for better. The only time Foxball gets you to the playoffs is if your division sucks or you happen upon a worldbeater like Cam. We don't have that.

would you call Carroll's run first strategy foxball? seems like they had a lot more consistent success with it. Considering that it was Carroll's offense and Canales is a Carroll pupil, wouldn't it be considered Carollball?

we aren't a team run by fox, rivera, or wilks. different coaches. different personnel.

46 minutes ago, CRA said:

It's the Foxball mindset really.  Run the ball, take deep shots.  That's what Canales has always been around.  Problem remains, he doesn't have the gambling deep shot QB.  Which is key to every O he has been around.  Baker.  Took the deep shots.  Geno.  Took the deep shots.  Wilson.  Took the deep shots.   Without that element, those offenses don't work.   Chunk pass play offense the run sets up. 

deep ball or not, run game opens up passing game. works better with deep ball, but still can work.

Just now, pantherclaw said:

I love running plays.  Besides they set up the pass to be more dangerous. 

yes, the run game opens up the passing game. 

One of the things that we have heard is that Canales is going to be putting a heavy emphasis on the run and that has made more than a few frustrated because "it's a passing league" and "you don't draft a QB 1st overall to have a run heavy offense".

This isn't to argue either of those points, just pointing out something interesting i saw. I heard a comment yesterday someone made talking about how Canales' offense is going to look like what was seen in Seattle and what did Seattle do? Ran...a lot. This isn't something that i really noticed much at the time and, frankly, i'm kind of surprised by this. I mean they had Russ who was at the time a very good and very dangerous QB, and they still ran a lot (too much by Russ' opinion, which is why he wanted out). Yeah, Russ wasn't drafted first overall, or even in the first round. But looking at what he was able to do probably should have been.

I checked to see just how much they ran and, well...here it is. I looked at their rush vs pass attempts and where they were ranked within the league for each. 

For most of that time span i'd say they were pretty successful. after Russ got there they didn't have a losing season until 2021 and even then, that's been our ceiling for a while. During that whole time of their successes they were always in the bottom half in the league as far as passing attempts go. As a rushing team, i think their best seasons were when they were a rushing top heavy team. 

is this a strategy that most of us would choose? probably not, but it can work. it doesn't matter the reasoning for being rush heavy as long as they can make it work and i think with this OL and RB room i think we can. Will it be the most exciting style of play? i don't know. but if it can keep us in games and help us win, i'm all for it.

fantastic discussion up there with Eager. The guy is no doubt a stat nerd of the highest order, but he also understands the "it's just football" side of it. stats and analytics can help in making decisions, but he knows that there are moments of momentum that the coach just has to go with his gut and try to create or maintain momentum. 

i like that the guy isn't a BY bandwagoner. he wasn't hired because of that.

 i think that having him help prepare for games will help, but i think also having him as a resource for a new HC can really help in managing the game. Canales will have his football guys on the field and in his ear, but he will also have this other guy (assuming he's in the booth during games) feeding him some info that can help making crucial decisions throughout the game. 

not completely sure what his role will be, but i think the guy could be a huge asset for us, especially having a rookie HC. 

i hope we don't need one.