This Is Rival Talk v1.0

[Fl0nkerton]

5 hours ago, thrILL! said:

Urlacher... Yikes. 

lol who's shocked

[Joe]

4 hours ago, Fl0nkerton said:

lol who's shocked

Not me...

[vegas492]

May we never forget what may have been the most important tackle in the last 14 or 15 years of our franchise.

[PACKRULE]

30 minutes ago, vegas492 said:

May we never forget what may have been the most important tackle in the last 14 or 15 years of our franchise.

Quality play.

[incognito_man]

The Vikings look bad. Even the 19 point 4th quarter lead didn't reflect the real domination. We were like 4 TDs better than them.

[packfanfb]

2 minutes ago, incognito_man said:

The Vikings look bad. Even the 19 point 4th quarter lead didn't reflect the real domination. We were like 4 TDs better than them.

Just one game, but I have been puzzled by the Vikings hype all off-season. Lost a ton of talent and they still have major issues at OL, WR (outside of AT), CB and DT. They scream 8-8 to me. 

[incognito_man]

5 minutes ago, packfanfb said:

Just one game, but I have been puzzled by the Vikings hype all off-season. Lost a ton of talent and they still have major issues at OL, WR (outside of AT), CB and DT. They scream 8-8 to me. 

i think they'll struggle to win 6 games with that roster. Where's the talent on that team? LB? S? You won't beat them with TEs I guess ha

[packfanfb]

1 minute ago, incognito_man said:

i think they'll struggle to win 6 games with that roster. Where's the talent on that team? LB? S? You won't beat them with TEs I guess ha

Hunter and Yannick (once he gets more acclimated) will probably make the difference in a few games. We definitely caught a break there. 

[CWood21]

On 9/14/2020 at 11:39 AM, incognito_man said:

i think they'll struggle to win 6 games with that roster. Where's the talent on that team? LB? S? You won't beat them with TEs I guess ha

They're good enough to hang around.  I mean, the NFCN as a whole is wobbly at best.

[MacReady]

The Vikings are a master class on building a roster the exact opposite way for winning a Super Bowl.  I said the SECOND they lost that Championship game with what's his face at QB that their best decision is to be patient on a QB, roll with that guy, keep building that defense and let the rest fall into place. 

Now they have no defense, their QB isn't good enough in spite of all the additions they made to the offense so they don't have either an elite offense or an elite defense anymore.

And STILL nobody listens to me. 

Get to the Championship game by having an elite defense, paying your QB pennies.  Like every team that's won the Super Bowl has done.  What do you do from there? 

Completely stop adding to that defense and instead invest everything into offense.

QB - Free agent over 13% of the cap.
RB - 2nd, 3rd round picks
WR - 1st round pick
TE - 2nd round pick, 2nd round pick
OT - 2nd, 2nd, free agent
IOL - 1st, 3rd.

You are paying your QB 30 million dollars a year and he needs more than Thielen, Rudolph, Smith and 5 1st-3rd round or free agent additions on the offensive line?

 

[Krauser]

16 hours ago, Outpost31 said:

Completely stop adding to that defense and instead invest everything into offense.

QB - Free agent over 13% of the cap.
RB - 2nd, 3rd round picks
WR - 1st round pick
TE - 2nd round pick, 2nd round pick
OT - 2nd, 2nd, free agent
IOL - 1st, 3rd.

Cook, Rudolph, Reiff and Elflein were all added before the 2017 NFCCG and before Cousins. 

The additions since 2018 on offense were a mid-1st OL (Bradbury) and later-1st WR (Jefferson), three mid to late 2nds at OL and TE (O’Neill, Smith Jr, Cleveland) and the last pick of the 2019 3rd round on RB, Mattison (who went outside the top 100 picks, not exactly a premium investment).

That’s not much draft capital in 3 offseasons especially since they had an extra first round pick from trading Diggs. Aside from swapping in a new WR for Diggs, the big project had been trying (and so far mostly failing) to rebuild the OL, which has been mostly terrible since injuries hit in 2015-16. I don’t think the OL picks were a dumb investment for a team trying to build a contender, or one that has much of anything to do with Cousins specifically.

They didn’t invest in any outside FAs on offense since signing Cousins, whose cap number was under 13% in 2018 (12.6%) and 2020 (10.6%). This season Cousins takes up the same percentage of the cap as Bradford got in 2017 when you seem to think the Vikings were spending “pennies” at QB.

In those 3 years, Rudolph got extended, Diggs got extended and traded, Reiff took a pay cut, Remmers was released, and Cook got extended for 2021 onwards, though that so far has had minimal cap effect.

Over the same time frame, the Vikings investments on defense were two late-1sts (Hughes and Gladney) and a mid-3rd (Dantzler) at corner, a comparable investment to GB drafting King, Alexander and Jackson within a couple of years. They paid homegrown players in Hunter, Kendricks and Barr — all in their prime and at or near the top of their positions — and kept Harris for his RFA year, then on the franchise tag. They paid solid contracts to Richardson for a year and Pierce for 3 years, though Pierce’s opt out means he won’t see the field for the Vikings until next year. And they traded a future 2nd and 5th for Ngakoue, who’s making $12M this year and will likely command a blue chip salary going forward. 

Despite (over)paying for Cousins, MIN has devoted more cap space to the defense than the offense every year since 2018: $93M vs $84M in ‘18, $92M vs $86M in ‘19, and $87M vs $77M this year.

You might want to wait a month or two, or even a year or so, before writing off the Vikings completely. The defense was terrible in week one, but they were expected to struggle early, and they probably do have enough talent and coaching to develop into a decent unit before long. The main reason the game was a blowout was that Rodgers was back to his god-level best — a mere mortal QB wouldn’t have made a bunch of those throws so perfectly, and the game would’ve been much closer.

Not sure you’ll ever appreciate what you’ve got in Rodgers until he’s gone, but he’s still the main reason GB wins so many games, and by far the biggest difference between our two otherwise fairly similarly constructed teams. 
 

 

Edited September 18, 2020 by Krauser

[Packerraymond]

7 hours ago, Krauser said:

Cook, Rudolph, Reiff and Elflein were all added before the 2017 NFCCG and before Cousins. 

The additions since 2018 on offense were a mid-1st OL (Bradbury) and later-1st WR (Jefferson), three mid to late 2nds at OL and TE (O’Neill, Smith Jr, Cleveland) and the last pick of the 2019 3rd round on RB, Mattison (who went outside the top 100 picks, not exactly a premium investment).

That’s not much draft capital in 3 offseasons especially since they had an extra first round pick from trading Diggs. Aside from swapping in a new WR for Diggs, the big project had been trying (and so far mostly failing) to rebuild the OL, which has been mostly terrible since injuries hit in 2015-16. I don’t think the OL picks were a dumb investment for a team trying to build a contender, or one that has much of anything to do with Cousins specifically.

They didn’t invest in any outside FAs on offense since signing Cousins, whose cap number was under 13% in 2018 (12.6%) and 2020 (10.6%). This season Cousins takes up the same percentage of the cap as Bradford got in 2017 when you seem to think the Vikings were spending “pennies” at QB.

In those 3 years, Rudolph got extended, Diggs got extended and traded, Reiff took a pay cut, Remmers was released, and Cook got extended for 2021 onwards, though that so far has had minimal cap effect.

Over the same time frame, the Vikings investments on defense were two late-1sts (Hughes and Gladney) and a mid-3rd (Dantzler) at corner, a comparable investment to GB drafting King, Alexander and Jackson within a couple of years. They paid homegrown players in Hunter, Kendricks and Barr — all in their prime and at or near the top of their positions — and kept Harris for his RFA year, then on the franchise tag. They paid solid contracts to Richardson for a year and Pierce for 3 years, though Pierce’s opt out means he won’t see the field for the Vikings until next year. And they traded a future 2nd and 5th for Ngakoue, who’s making $12M this year and will likely command a blue chip salary going forward. 

Despite (over)paying for Cousins, MIN has devoted more cap space to the defense than the offense every year since 2018: $93M vs $84M in ‘18, $92M vs $86M in ‘19, and $87M vs $77M this year.

You might want to wait a month or two, or even a year or so, before writing off the Vikings completely. The defense was terrible in week one, but they were expected to struggle early, and they probably do have enough talent and coaching to develop into a decent unit before long. The main reason the game was a blowout was that Rodgers was back to his god-level best — a mere mortal QB wouldn’t have made a bunch of those throws so perfectly, and the game would’ve been much closer.

Not sure you’ll ever appreciate what you’ve got in Rodgers until he’s gone, but he’s still the main reason GB wins so many games, and by far the biggest difference between our two otherwise fairly similarly constructed teams. 
 

 

Plain and simple what holds you back is your FO can't draft OL, and the ones you sign in FA aren't that good either. The Vikings in the Zimmer era, or the years you had Favre, with a top 10 OL would've been deadly. 

Last week was the best I've seen them look in years, but last year, other than one beastly run by Cook at Lambeau, we straight up dominated the LOS in both those games.

[Krauser]

1 hour ago, Packerraymond said:

Plain and simple what holds you back is your FO can't draft OL, and the ones you sign in FA aren't that good either.

I think it’s as much of a coaching / development problem as purely to do with player selection. They’ve drafted a variety of athletic profiles with different levels of college success, including a number of prospects who graded very well in college and/or won awards, but most of them have disappointed, some of them dramatically so compared to expectations (Elflein most recently, Clemmings was another one).

Packers fans may not realize how bad the OL play has gotten across the league in recent years, and how rare it is for a team these days to be able to plug in late round or UDFA talent and get solid performances in pass blocking. Packers OL development is mostly a string of unbroken successes except for Spriggs and weird outliers like Madison. I think that has a lot more to do with coaching than the idea that say Jon Runyon is a particularly elite prospect that no one happened to notice until round 6.

Next to Rodgers being able to elevate his game to elite when it matters, the OL (itself helped by Rodgers being the best pocket managing QB I’ve ever seen) is the next best reason the Packers have been so consistently good. 

1 hour ago, Packerraymond said:

The Vikings in the Zimmer era, or the years you had Favre, with a top 10 OL would've been deadly. 

They were OK in 2009, and pretty good in 2017 at least at pass blocking, until late in the year when injuries started to pile up. 

They had a good OL around 2012-13 with some homegrown talent in its prime (Kalil, Loadholt, Sullivan, Fusco) but that was wasted on Ponder. Of course with the Vikings luck, all of those players had career altering injuries or chronic problems (Kalil’s knees) and were either out of the league well before 30 (Loadholt was 28 in his last year) or only played well again years later (Sullivan had one last good year with the Rams). That talent drain led to the fiasco of 2015-16, from which they’re still trying to rebuild. They do have some decent young talent now, the question is just whether Bradbury, Cleveland etc will turn into busts like Elflein or better players like O’Neill.

 

[Arthur Penske]

1 hour ago, Krauser said:

I think it’s as much of a coaching / development problem as purely to do with player selection. They’ve drafted a variety of athletic profiles with different levels of college success, including a number of prospects who graded very well in college and/or won awards, but most of them have disappointed, some of them dramatically so compared to expectations (Elflein most recently, Clemmings was another one).

Packers fans may not realize how bad the OL play has gotten across the league in recent years, and how rare it is for a team these days to be able to plug in late round or UDFA talent and get solid performances in pass blocking. Packers OL development is mostly a string of unbroken successes except for Spriggs and weird outliers like Madison. I think that has a lot more to do with coaching than the idea that say Jon Runyon is a particularly elite prospect that no one happened to notice until round 6.

Next to Rodgers being able to elevate his game to elite when it matters, the OL (itself helped by Rodgers being the best pocket managing QB I’ve ever seen) is the next best reason the Packers have been so consistently good. 

They were OK in 2009, and pretty good in 2017 at least at pass blocking, until late in the year when injuries started to pile up. 

You may be right, but the Packers Oline coaching also recently underwent a change  under Stenavich is off to a good start too with some younger players.  I think its a combination of good O line drafting and coaching not just Campen, et al's coaching in the past. It's hard to place the success of picks like Sitton, Lang, Bak, Jenkins, Linsley in recent years on just good coaching and development.

 

10 hours ago, Krauser said:

You might want to wait a month or two, or even a year or so, before writing off the Vikings completely. The defense was terrible in week one, but they were expected to struggle early, and they probably do have enough talent and coaching to develop into a decent unit before long. The main reason the game was a blowout was that Rodgers was back to his god-level best — a mere mortal QB wouldn’t have made a bunch of those throws so perfectly, and the game would’ve been much closer.

Not sure you’ll ever appreciate what you’ve got in Rodgers until he’s gone, but he’s still the main reason GB wins so many games, and by far the biggest difference between our two otherwise fairly similarly constructed teams. 
 

 

I think the vikings are in a position where the young talent could come along and help them out eventually too. And I think they were right to have some roster turnover due to age/salaries at some positions. But man, if the young players from the past year or two don't come along the vikes could really be in some long term trouble due to who they're paying and the investments they've made. They need those picks to hit bad die to some other personnel moves they have made.

[Krauser]

28 minutes ago, Arthur Penske said:

if the young players from the past year or two don't come along the vikes could really be in some long term trouble due to who they're paying and the investments they've made.

You could literally say that about every team in the league. What does the Packers roster look like in a few years if Gary, Savage and Sternberger don't develop, or Jordan Love doesn't turn into a franchise QB?

The Vikings are paying fair contracts to a bunch of blue chip players, most of them in their primes. Barr is the only one who's arguably overpaid, plus Cook if you don't believe in paying running backs.  Smith is 31 but his game is aging well so he may have a few years left. Rudolph and Thielen will age out before long but they already have Smith and Jefferson on board. 

The question with the roster is whether the young CBs will be any good (so far: no), and whether they can finally build a decent OL.