I´m not worried about RT, Hunter did great last year. I hope Vlad can take Slauson´s Job, thou. Fat Al is gonna get that job done all by himself.
If I had to guess, I'd say Wayne Hunter made the decision to be the starter over Vlad Ducasse. That's certainly what I would have told Rex and Tanny during contract negotiations if I were him. "If I come back, I want to start. I don't want to be King Ugly's understudy."
The Jets are trying to win a championship, and when you're doing that, you don't go with an unproven second year player(with no offseason). Guys like that establish themselves by stepping up when they're called upon, in the event of an injury. A good example is the Saints tackle, Bushrod. Hunter got a lot better as the season wore on. He didn't allow a single sack or commit a penalty in the playoffs. Moreover, he's going into his fifth year in the system. If I recall, he had one or two bad games as a starter, and then he looked solid down the stretch. I am fine with this. The key to winning is developing quality offensive line depth, and if Ducasse ends up being a swing type guy who can play both tackle and guard, that might prove invaluable down the road. -X-
Nobody knows if/how he is developing. He was raw and hasn't gotten coached in months. Hunter would have won that competition. The key is grooming Vlad to play in case of injury or to start maybe next year. Sent from my DROID2 GLOBAL using Tapatalk
Thats been the golden rule for all time. But since Tanny started drafting super studs that were great right out of the gate, the fans perspective has been incredibly skewed. Last year was the first draft of tannys that did not have at least 2 immediate impact players in it. 06' Brick and Mangold, 07' Revis and Harris, 08' Dustin Keller and Dwight Lowery, 09' Sanchez and Greene. If people were pissed about last year... I can't wait to see what happens this year, if our rookie class performs at all, it will have outperformed my expectations. This lockout, and lack of minicamps to get guys up to speed is really going to hurt these guys abilities to contribute this year (not just here but NFL wide). It might even be enough to cause this class to need 4 years to be truly judged as opposed to the standard 3. That said, we have heard very good things about MoWilk and Jeri-Kerl. So maybe we got lucky and snagged two of the few rooks who will be making significant contributions to the NFL this year.
