PossibleCabbage

I mean, it's an interesting question if a good coach with poor talent should be expected to produce good results or not. If the problem was Hackett and not Bortles, we should find out pretty quickly.

So about the presser, it's telling that Coach Flower was much more excited and capable of talking football than he was "about himself." Whereas Mark Murphy will make any time he steps in front of a microphone about him, even if it's not (c.f. earlier in the press conference) LaFleur just doesn't seem all that comfortable talking about himself in front of cameras and microphones; which is fine.

So I figure the risk with the Mack trade is that it occupies a significant quantity of the Bears resources to improve their team (premium draft picks and salary cap dollars) during 2/3 of the remaining years in which their QB is cheap. Absolutely the best way to win a championship in the NFL these days is to hit on a young QB and build the team while his salary is kept down by the rookie wage scale. So if the Bears weren't a championship calibre team this year (which, they probably were not), how are they going to be significantly better next year or two years from now? Not only are they losing Fangio, they are also liable to lose more than they gain in free agency this year. (Massie and Amos are free agents, and someone will pay Lynch). Plus if it turns out their QB isn't the guy, they are unlikely to be in position in the near term to get a new one.

And yet Denver fans can tell you at great length about McDaniels failures as a head coach, and whichever team he ends up head coaching for (if that happens) will hope that sort of thing does not repeat itself. Fans of the new team would convince themselves "it's gonna be different this time" but no one knows until it happens. On some level, it's better to have the guy who will show right away if he's not ready for prime time, than the slow motion trainwreck.

I mean, fundamentally if you're hiring a coach who has head coaching experience,, well that guy got fired before so you're hoping whatever predicated that termination won't happen again. If you're hiring a guy with no head coaching experience, you're projecting whatever positive qualities you see in him will work well in a leadership position. It's not entirely dissimilar to "signing a free agent for whom things didn't go well at the last stop" versus "drafting a guy and handing a 20-year old a million dollars and hoping it goes well." On face, both those plans seem ridiculous but it's the fine details that make the difference between, say signing Charles Woodson and Albert Haynesworth as FAs or "drafting Gabe Carimi or Danny Watkins" versus "Drafting Kevin Zeitler or Kyle Long." Stuff we don't know makes all the difference.

No salary cap for coaches, so hire a defensive coordinator for the sidelines, one for the booth, one for the locker room, one for the secret tunnels under the stadium, and one for the parking lot.

It genuinely feels like 99.5% of people don't know enough about football to meaningfully comment on whether a guy is going to do well or not, honestly. I do not care for Mark Murphy very much though.

I wonder if the "McDaniels is the top HC get" talk in the media was motivated primarily by McDaniels or his agent feeding stuff to their sources in the media. I mean, teams generally aren't likely to spill the beans on who they want to hire, since this benefits them not at all.

I think you're confusing "millennial" as a shorthand for "kids these days" and "millennial" as "the generation which comes after Generation X in demographics research." As far as I can see it, the gulf between the two has been widening for a while. College kids these days are Gen Z, not Millennials.

It was pretty funny last year when Big Draft was talking about Josh Rosen as the "quintessential snake person" when he barely squeaks in (Feb 1997) depending on who you ask (some people put the cutoff at 1994 or 1996.) But we're only a couple drafts away from having to rely on stereotypes of Gen Z (or whatever) players, whatever those are.

Wanting to switch to the 4-3 seems like a "change for the sake of changing" move. It's not like we're full up on 43DE types, which are historically the hardest piece to find for that defense.

I am pleased they hired someone who was not a former Patriots assistant.

At a guess "any excuse to get out of Green Bay in January" is one they will take.

Now do "former New England Patriots assistant coaches".

It's early yet but Matt Campbell has turned Iowa State from what was most likely NCAA division I/FBS's single worst program into a credible team. I figure he's got NFL upside,