I'm with you on this. Most curious thing about the game for me... Clemens getting relatively no time. There's something going on here. Ratliff has been having a great camp. Ainge has looked good too, but is definitely a rookie. But for Mangini to not want his supposedly #2 QB to get a lot of snaps with your 1st team and against the other 1st team is curious beyond words. It's not like Clemens had far and away distinguished himself. In fact, we still hardly know WTF he's capable of. Something is definitely up there.
Yeah, Revis was on him pretty good but both the throw and the catch were freakish. You could run that play a dozen times again and every one of them would be an incompletion. It did bother me that Revis didn't turn around until it was too late, but that's going to happen to the best of them once in awhile. I'm not worried about Revis... he's been defending dozens of good throws really well in camp right along.
Maybe. Or maybe his plan for that game was thrown all out of whack when Favre came in and Pennington was released. I don't know, I wont really read too much into that unless we continue to see Clemens getting limited attempts in the preseason.
true. Remember it was supposed to be Clemens and Pennington battling it out for the starting job, and the loser becomes #2 by default. It's a possibility that Clemens got so few snaps because he's the automatic #2. Ratliff got this game, Ainge could get the next, they're competing for #3
It's kind of a good idea to keep the only QB on the roster that knows the offense healthy. just a thought.
This is all so, but at TC, both times that I was there, both Ratliff and Ainge were running a pretty close second to the #2 position. In other words, there was Penny (who always looks good in camp) clearly distinguishing himself as the #1 (while not throwing any INTs) and then there was Clemens (with his 6-0 INT start to camp) and then a close #3 and #4 in Ratliff and Ainge right behind him. This is all my personal opinion, mind you. And there could be more behind the scenes that we don't even know about. Could it be possible that Clemens is just slow to pick up on things? Maybe he's "lumberjack dumb," not to sound demeaning... and perhaps Ratliff is picking it up in leaps and bounds. Whatever the reason, it mystifies me that Clemens got such little playing time and they wanted a real good look at Ratliff. Either Clemens is solidly in the #2 spot or his job is in jeopardy, one of the two. Speculating... mind you....
I would bet that in next weeks game, Ainge gets free reign in the second half. I have a feeling that a lot of this has to do with them deciding on whether or not to go with 4 QBs on the roster, and deciding whether or not that's an option. If not, it's probably going to come down to who played better in these games between Ainge and Ratliff. As metioned above, Clemens is now the QB with the most knowledge of the system and I doubt he is let loose....yet, at least. It's definitely an interesting theory though. I'm a fan of what I've seen of Ratliff so far and I was a big fan of the Ainge pick so I'd definitely like to see both of them stick, without having to worry about someone signing either away from the PS.
