silverbear;1958585 said:
It was actually fairly widely reported at the time...
It was pretty obvious that we didn't end up wanting Davis or we didn't see eye to eye on his contract because he left the same day he arrived. For whatever reason, we decided not to go that direction. Pity, because with all the injuries, we could have used him.
silverbear;1958585 said:
Yeah, in the NFL, it does... if the Skins stumbled onto a good approach, that nobody else had ever thought of trying, other teams would line up to take advantage of that approach... the fact that no other team has adopted that approach tells us that it's a flawed approach...
Not completely true. First off, the Pats did trade a bunch of picks for players. They did it better and stole Randy Moss (though, it was a gamble) but who would have thought Wes Welker would be the beast he was? Stallworth ended out sucking though. Regardless, they played big in free agency and almost paid off. Same thing with San Fran. Big players in free agency. Didn't pay off. Either way, we aren't the only big spenders around.
silverbear;1958585 said:
Unless you'd have us believe that Danny Boy is just smarter than all those other owners, at which point I'd note that if that was true, why aren't the Skins WINNING??
Well, we did lose 6 starters to injuries for the season. Dallas lost how many? One? And we still did make the playoffs, despite mourning the loss of our team's best player. You guys folded and the worst distraction you had to deal with was a meddlesome girlfriend. So you take your team of whiny (but talented) pretty boys who falter as the stakes get higher and I'll keep my team of guys who come up biggest when the most money is on the table.
silverbear;1958585 said:
Back in the Jimmuh and Jerruh days, fans of other teams just like you were telling us that we'd eventually have to pay the piper, and I blew them off... I thought that Jerry had it all figured out, and really was smarter than all those other owners...
Then reality set in... so you're talking to the voice of experience here, but of course you're not gonna believe you've got problems until you're smack in the middle of them...
No, Jerruh pissed off one of the best talent evaluators in NFL history and drove him away, replacing him with yes men. That was the problem.
silverbear;1958585 said:
OK, that argument is borderline dishonest, and I really expected more from you... paying signing bonuses is just one aspect of the Skins' approach to capology, another is trading away draft picks... and no other team uses the roster bonus, as opposed to the signing bonus, the same way the Skins do...
I run a bit different from other people. My feet move out to the side more so than up but I've run a sub-5 minute mile. Do I win races, more often than not, no I don't. That's not because the way I run is wrong or bad, it's just that I don't have the same lung capacity and endurance that those that win the race do. I'm not elite. But that's okay, because I've beat more than I've lost against.
silverbear;1958585 said:
Bottom line, you KNOW no other team in the league approaches cap management in NEARLY the same way the Skins do... this is not a legitimate subject for debate...
No, you're right, it's not. But the subject of the debate is will it work? Can it possibly work? The answer, irrefutably, is yes, it can. Provided we scout and recruit better. Until we make better personnel decisions though, we're going to have this stupid debate every year.
In that same vein, Vinny said something interesting I heard yesterday. Somebody asked him if he changed the way he approached FA and he said, one thing we learned was to not pick up players that one of our coaches don't already know. There's too much we don't know about their personality, work habits or "fire" to make an accurate judgment. He said the guys we've brought here that have been successful, they already knew (Fletcher for example) and the busts have been guys they didn't know (Lloyd and Arch).
So it sounds like he did at least learn something, so maybe we see a scaled down FA from now on (slowly rebuilding our cap situation as dead money comes off). We'll see...
silverbear;1958585 said:
No, they're not... their approach doesn't WORK... until and unless they have a championship or two to show for that approach, it stands discredited...
A lot of teams approaches don't work. The Cowboys approach hasn't worked either. The Chargers approach of having the generation's best RB and TE, with good, young talented players on both sides of the ball hasn't worked yet either.