I have to agree with this. The NFL is a QB driven league. The teams winning and competing for superbowls on a consistent basis have the best QB's. Go back and look at the last 20 superbowl winners and the teams that consistently won and competed for championships. Pennington would be a nice backup to have but that may not be a feasible solution, my opinion is that it's a highly unlikely situation. Pennington is a seasoned veteran who played marginally better this season than a guy who has 7 career starts now. He's not a top tier QB and never will be. If you want this franchise that you root for to be a consistent superbowl contender than to me it would only make sense that you would be interested in them doing everything they could to find that next great QB while building the trenches.
The one thing I'm learning about attending TCs is that I don't learn much and I'm not as smart as I think I am. I come back here and report what I see, then the regular season starts and I see the guy I was reporting positively on (especially the QB) and say to myself, "WTF?" So, I'll go to camp again this summer and report back here, but nobody should pay any attention to what I write, especially on the QB. Now, having said that, I don't see anyone starting next year except Clemens again. It will certainly NOT be Chad. We've already benched him and his era is done. The one thing you will NOT see is Mangini regressing back to starting Chad on Week One. We cannot go back to the Dink and Dunk, the Chinese Firedrills and the land of the 5-yard pass into the Crowded Box. I beieve this will be the case NO MATTER HOW IMPROVED OUR O-LINE BECOMES, Chad does not start in '08. The only exception to Clemens being The Man is if we were to acquire another veteran through F/A who has composure, really learns the system quickly and demonstrates hands down that he's the better choice over Clemens. I don't know if that guy exists out there but I suppose some of the aforementioned retreads might possibly pull that off (Culpepper, etc.). But barring anything we haven't figured to date, I think we have no choice but to beef the hell out of the line and start Clemens.
I hope your not using anything that you might have been wrong about last year as a reason not to post on what you see at training camp. Im sure there was no way anyone would have know that our offensive line would look this bad in the regular season. Not even the Coaching staff or Gm could account for this mess. Any jet news we can get is good so keep doing what you have been doing.
We all enjoy all the tc reports, and obviously none of us are experts- we're just fans. I saw your post the other day where you related things back to tc, and the one thing I said to myself after reading your post is that imo you over-evaluated KC in tc. I was not nearly as optimistic as you about him, although I did say that he had definitely shown a lot of improvement from the previous year, in terms of his comfort level and familiarity with the offense. As far as the OL and DL went, one thing that jumped out at me was that there was minimal contact and hitting during the TC scrimmage plays on the LOS. Looking back on it, I think one of the reasons they came into the season so soft was that they were soft in tc. But since they were playing against each other, and going about only 50%, there was no way anyone could predict how they would do when the hitting started for real.
The offensive line looked weak to terrible in the pre-season. By the time we got around to week one you had a lot of the knowledgeable posters backing off on their "step back" prognostications and wondering if the Jets could really compete at all.
I read your post also and think perhaps you're right, that I did overate him. But this was also before we had seen Clemens in real situations too. He had minor appearances in several preseason games in August of '06 and not much else to really evaluate him by. So, the only thing I could go on was what I had seen in Camp, and to me, he looked pretty good (his progress looked good). Of course, this was facing a DEF that was not about to use him and his Red Shirt as a human pinball machine in the pocket when our O-line collapsed. But I would still, after all that's been said... I would still say, based on that, that if we give him a really solid line which will give him that extra second he needs for now, I think we MIGHT have a chance of salvaging something our of this kid. As Champ pointed out, he does have that "flick" thing going on when he releases. I liked the way he comports himself when he has time and he does seem to take charge of the offense okay. But as Bill Parcells says about evaluating QBs: "Don't show me video of what the kid can do in his back yard and I don't want to see how good he is when everything is going right. Show me what he's made of when he's in a losing season and the lines are collapsing and he's down by 20 points and been knocked around all day. THAT'S when I want to watch him and see what he's made of." In other words, we don't know shit about Clemens by watching him at TC.
I just think the way this year turned out with our offense, you can't go crazy ripping down either QB. The same way we shouldn't run Chad out of town because of it, we can't give up on Clemens either. We couldn't block, run and in a lot of cases catch. The anti-Chad crowd is a lot more vocal and irrational, so I fight with them more, but you have to say the same thing for both guys. Not many, if any, QBs would have been successful here with the offense we had.
As I mentioned just the other day, when I saw how the Vikes manhandled the Jets starters on both sides of the LOS in that pre-season game, that was a real eye-opener.
It's hard to have a normal conversation about the QB position with posters who are either diehard Chad lovers or diehard chad haters. And for myself, who i consider to be middle of the road impartial on the issue, i will catch flak from one side or the other when I post an opinion that doesnt mesh with their one-sided thinking. Something about getting caught in the crossfire. :wink:
Among the ugliest displays of football ever. That really scared the shit out of me for the season. Turns out, it was completely indicative of how the season was going to go. I remember driving down from Orlando all excited to see the game on a Friday night. I should have detoured into a tree as that would have been much less painful.
Bradshaw is the one who does not belong. He's the one who was not accurate. Favre is an accurate passer. He led the league in comp. percentage in 1998 and he led the NFC in 2003.
Yes, I felt you overrated him, based on what you said the other day, and then I looked up a couple of your posts from tc and skimmed them for KC coments. i said "over-evaluated" but I meant overrated. Interestingly, on the day that T-Bird and I met at camp, Ratliff got to play some, and we both liked him from that day. It's a longshot, but man, i'd like to see if he can develop next year. he ran a pro type O at Utah, and throws a nice ball. Good size, iirc, and wasnt rattled when he got in there that day. But like you said, what do i know- i thought Danny Ware looked good in camp, too. :rofl2:
Danny Ware DID look good in Camp... so did "Joe The Pollock" Kowalewski. One didn't make it and the other did. Go figure as far as "camp evaluations...."
The effects of a poor season are far reaching indeed. Even our training camp 'scouts' are getting down on themselves. Will Section 227 be able to regain his confidence going into next years camp? Does Jetcane settle in to a nice rythym - or does he 'over-evaluate'? These are some tough issues that need to be addressed in the oddseason :grin:
Tanny on Evulating Players in 07 From Todays Star Ledger Tannenbaum said he learned from the Pete Kendall debacle that perhaps he should've been more "proactive." Asked if he overrated the team's talent, Tannenbaum said, "I think about that quite a bit. It (evaluating talent) needs to be better in 2008
I think the 10-6 playoff season the year before kinda tripped them up and gave them a false sense of potential in themselves and the team. Rookie mistakes by the CS and FO. We'll see if they learn from it or not.
Saying the Jets talent evaluation needs to be better in 2008 isn't saying much, since it couldn't possibly be worse than it was in 2007 in my opinion. I'll give Tannenbaum some credit for admitting that they screwed up last year on that side of the equation though. I've been wondering how they were going to address the relatively injury free rotten-ness of the Jets last year and it sounds like they're just going to own up to not doing their jobs very well. I'd like to hear Mangini weigh in also on how things got so out of kilter so quickly.
I saw Bradshaw from 1974 on, when they had the great WRs Swann and Stallworth, along with Benny Cunningham at TE and of course Franco Harris at RB, so he was a lot better in the years I saw him play. As we've discussed many times, give a good NFL QB time and weapons and they can do great things, give him shit to work with and he can't. To me Favre has been up and down. Early in his career he was terribly inaccurate until Holmgren got there. And it's hard to erase the memory of him throwing a season away in OT of a playoff game against the Eagles with a horrible, unneccessary pass. Any other QB would have been crucified for that, had Pennington done it I'm pretty sure FOURTHANDLONG wouldn't be citing him as one of the great all-time QBs.
I think it's two very specific things acting in concert.... The most important, is whoever on the staff, is supposed to evaluate OL talent, doesn't really know what the hell they are looking for. I can understand taking on Bender as a project, but the fact is, every guard they've brought in has been nothing but a turnstile, and tht leads directly to the second item. QB's getting hurt. There is no way anyone can convince me, that NE players are not coached specifically to do anything they can to get a QB's feet moving, and this is what results in QB's getting hit low, and or rolled up on. Pennington getting rolled up on, in week one, and the subsequent mishandling of the njury by allowing him back on the field, in less than a month, is why the season ended upm in the toilet. If Clemens plays through the bye week, we probably pick up a couple games that Pennington lost, and possibly if Pennington comes back healthy, we get a couple more late. Instead we go with an already physically weak QB nursing a painful ankle injury until he HAS to be benched, and then Clemens gets tossed in..... 1986 all over again.
