trickblue
Not Old School...Old Testament...
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This guy made his first post... and it is long... but dead on... interesting read...
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My first post here and you guys aren’t going to like it. I’ve been a Commanders fan since I was old enough to watch football. I really had no choice, my father told me why I was a Commanders fan and that was that. How my week goes depends on if the Commanders win or lose that Sunday, and my family can’t stand being around me when we lose.
They haven’t liked being around me lately.
I’ve been reading here at Extremeskins for quite some time. I’ve made it my one-stop for Commanders news everyday for months. I get it all right here. I love it.
I feel the need to post now because I’m sickened by the direction our team has gone and I’m tired of everyone acting like everything’s going to be alright. It’s not.
I’m not the best writer and my grammar isn’t perfect, so please bear with me.
So many people are upset because most fans thought we were playoff bound, myself included. If our expectations would have been realistic then we would be taking the losses much more in stride.
We were excited. And why not? We had a hall of fame coach coming back to the sidelines after the tradgedy that was Spurrier, we traded for what was supposed to be one of the best backs in the NFL, we acquired a seasoned vet at QB to lead the team. We had plenty of talent, right? I mean our payroll is highest in the NFL, so that means were talented, huh?
Wrong.
Our coach turns out to be out manned, at least early on, and we look at least as inept as during Spurrier's time in DC. Before the salary cap, parity was only a vision in the commissioner’s head. What if back then Gibbs simply had more talent than most teams? The front office was great and undeniably, those past Gibbs teams had plenty of talent. What if Gibbs schemes *are* simply about execution, not innovation? What if he won because his guys couldn’t be whipped when they executed because they were just better?
If that’s the case, were in trouble, because he’s not going to have a roster full of guys who are superior to the men on the other team. He won’t be able to do it any more than any of the other teams in the NFL. Free agency screwed that up for teams, even if they make good personnel decisions… which we ain’t gonna do. Gibbs is going to have some good players, some average ones, and some who are lucky to stick on a roster… just like other teams. If he wants us to simply line up and out execute the other team, he’ll wish he never came back to coaching. And so will we.
But he should have the most talent out there now, right? We have the highest payroll in the NFL. Let me say that again: We have the highest payroll in the NFL. We are in trouble.
Look what we pay Brunell, Portis, Arrington, Taylor, Coles, Samuels, Morton, Springs, Thomas and others. Who in that group is earning their pay?
Brunell is already clearly a horrible decision. Can you believe what we paid that guy? Gawd almighty! And now we can’t get him out as QB (something 80% of the fans want) because we have so much money tied up in him. He’s washed up and we either are stuck with him or we take a large, unnecessary cap hit and move along. Couple that with all the other huge errors in personnel and it’ll be crippling.
Lavar? He’s a tremendous athlete but his play is only above average. 5.6 mil this year, 5.6 mil next year, and then 12.4 million!!! in 2006! I can’t even look beyond that… it makes me nauseated. All that for a LB in a 4-3 that makes the occasional sack, the occasional INT and the occasional monumental blunder. Someone should’ve told our front office that 4-3 linebackers don’t have that much of an impact. The money should be tied up on D in defensive linemen and CB’s. They’re the ones who have an impact in a 4-3 scheme… not the linebackers. 3-4 linebackers, maybe, but you don’t pay someone umpteen million to make tackles. Even of the sideline-to-sideline variety. That money would’ve been so much more well spent on Champ, or Kearse, or many other free agents.
Which leads me to Portis. We give up a second round pick and a player who is arguably the best CB in the NFL for a back that is too small, lacks patience as a runner, and who's reputation is clearly the result of a Denver system that helps *any* RB put up pro bowl stats. Heck, even without their old OL coach (who made that system work so well in Denver) they're still doing it with no name runners putting up huge numbers.
O. Gary? Yeah, he's done real well since leaving Denver. It'll be the same for Portis.
CB's are sooooo much more difficult to find in the NFL than RB's, and what do we do? We trade the best one in the league for an average RB and just to make it even... we throw in a second round pick!!! Please!! I’ve heard many ex-coaches and announcers talk about how much more difficult it is to find a CB. Good RB’s are a dime a dozen in the NFL and we’ll be lucky if Portis turns out to be good instead of amazingly average. We already had RB’s here that would be doing the same thing Portis is… if not better. What a colossal screw-up. What a colossal *long term ramifications* screw up.
Just losing Bailey and a second (still can’t believe we did that!) for Portis would be bad enough, but to pay Clinton what we did borders on insane. It sent a team already in a precarious salary cap situation into a much, much worse financial spot.
Champ didn't want to be here you say? C'mon... we coulda paid him and he would've been completely happy in DC. (We still would've been in cap trouble, but we'd have Champ instead of Portis.) Bailey just wanted to be paid like he felt he deserved and he’d have remained a Commander for life. Springs isn’t a tenth of the player Bailey is. Imagine what Champ would’ve done with Williams as his coordinator. Gawd!
Samuels. His cap numbers are 8.8 mil this year, 9.6 mil next year, and 11.3 million in 2006!!??! What’s he doing to earn a quarter of that? Playing solid? Okay? Sorry? What we do know is that he isn’t playing well and even if he were playing well, he wouldn’t be worth anywhere near that money. Nothing against Samuels. It’s that the Commanders continue to pay huge dollars for players who pay small dividends.
Highest payroll in the NFL? 1-4?
Taylor? He’s all ability and no brains. He seriously may never make much of an impact in the NFL because his ability to process information is painfully lacking. At Miami they let him play on instincts alone. He wasn’t particularly part of a secondary or defensive scheme… he just played backyard football. That won’t work in this league. He may never be more than a solid player. Maybe I’m wrong here… I hope so.
That leads me to this though: Safety isn’t a position that you should spend your money at either. They can impact the game but it’s much more difficult to do so at safety than at CB, DE, or DT. Why spend not only that kind of money for a safety, but that high of a pick. I’ll say it again… our money on D should be tied up at CB and DL with solid role players at safety and LB.
Wynn, Salave’a, Griffin, Warner. Those players are listed on the official site depth chart as our starting DL. 5.4 Million. That’s how much they count against our cap this year. Arrington counts 5.6 million this season. Someone just wasn’t thinking. Yes our D has played well, but imagine how it could be doing with pressure from the DL. Sacks, hurries, interceptions… those things help you win games, not just rank high in the defensive ratings. We give up few yards. Big deal, we need game changing plays on defense and with our DL, were not going to get very many. Having to blitz to get pressure on the QB leaves us vulnerable to big plays and makes us likely losers.
Morton, don’t get me started. Thomas, sheesh.
We have the highest payroll in the NFL. Most of them appear to be underachievers, getting by on reputation from one good year in the pro’s or no good NFL years but they were stars in college. Just brimming with athletic ability, but unable to turn the tide of a game. They lack something. Brains? The ability to be part of a team? Heart?
They try hard. I haven’t seen any quit in this team. I wish I had. At least then you could say, “Gibbs is going to whip them in shape as the year goes on.” No, these guys work hard and try… they just can’t do it. And this is our roster guys. They’re not a young team full of guys trying to make a name for themselves. Blue collar guys who could turn into a blue chipper and surprise everyone. Nope, they’re already big name players who’ve been there and done that. What you see is pretty much what you get.
So Gibbs is going to go get new guys then, you say. If you start trying to bring in new guys… we just don’t have the cap room. We’ll have to start letting some of our present big players go, and that’s going to wreck our cap. We’ll have so much dead money that Gibbs will be way retired before it’s ever straightened out.
I read on a prominent Commander website where one of the writers was being a typical Commander fan and trying to show how we’ll be fine with the cap. He wrote (if memory serves) that if we only got rid of Samuels, Morton and Gardner we would be able to sign all of our own free agents and draft picks for 2005 and 2006. That’s fine… but that’s also assuming we don’t sign one single free agent from another team. Not one!
First off, can you see Snyder not signing one free agent from another team for the next two years? Uh, me neither. But let’s assume he doesn’t. That means that we would have the exact same roster we have now except for the three players I mentioned above and our draft picks. Great. That’s some group we have now. And with our recent history with draft picks and considering how few we have, that paints a rather bleak outlook for our team the next few years.
Think about it. No new blood coming in except for our draft picks! God help. All the while, the rest of the league is going around signing players left and right. Dallas, Philly, New York, they’re all in great cap shape and they’ll be swiping up all the good free agents while we only watch so we can retain the schmucks we have now. And if one of our players sign elsewhere, it will only be one of the players that we now think is one of our better players. Then we’ll only be able to go into free agency to acquire a player to take his place and he probably won’t be as good as the player we lost. At best it’ll be an even swap.
But you know Snyder will sign free agents. That means were going to lose a lot of the guys we now have. Who goes? Coles, Arrington, who?
I’m going to stop now. It’s making me sick. I’m sure ya’ll are glad I’m stopping. I know you guys don’t want to hear the things I’m saying.
I hope I get more positive about the Commanders so I can write something on here that isn’t so depressing.
They haven’t liked being around me lately.
I’ve been reading here at Extremeskins for quite some time. I’ve made it my one-stop for Commanders news everyday for months. I get it all right here. I love it.
I feel the need to post now because I’m sickened by the direction our team has gone and I’m tired of everyone acting like everything’s going to be alright. It’s not.
I’m not the best writer and my grammar isn’t perfect, so please bear with me.
So many people are upset because most fans thought we were playoff bound, myself included. If our expectations would have been realistic then we would be taking the losses much more in stride.
We were excited. And why not? We had a hall of fame coach coming back to the sidelines after the tradgedy that was Spurrier, we traded for what was supposed to be one of the best backs in the NFL, we acquired a seasoned vet at QB to lead the team. We had plenty of talent, right? I mean our payroll is highest in the NFL, so that means were talented, huh?
Wrong.
Our coach turns out to be out manned, at least early on, and we look at least as inept as during Spurrier's time in DC. Before the salary cap, parity was only a vision in the commissioner’s head. What if back then Gibbs simply had more talent than most teams? The front office was great and undeniably, those past Gibbs teams had plenty of talent. What if Gibbs schemes *are* simply about execution, not innovation? What if he won because his guys couldn’t be whipped when they executed because they were just better?
If that’s the case, were in trouble, because he’s not going to have a roster full of guys who are superior to the men on the other team. He won’t be able to do it any more than any of the other teams in the NFL. Free agency screwed that up for teams, even if they make good personnel decisions… which we ain’t gonna do. Gibbs is going to have some good players, some average ones, and some who are lucky to stick on a roster… just like other teams. If he wants us to simply line up and out execute the other team, he’ll wish he never came back to coaching. And so will we.
But he should have the most talent out there now, right? We have the highest payroll in the NFL. Let me say that again: We have the highest payroll in the NFL. We are in trouble.
Look what we pay Brunell, Portis, Arrington, Taylor, Coles, Samuels, Morton, Springs, Thomas and others. Who in that group is earning their pay?
Brunell is already clearly a horrible decision. Can you believe what we paid that guy? Gawd almighty! And now we can’t get him out as QB (something 80% of the fans want) because we have so much money tied up in him. He’s washed up and we either are stuck with him or we take a large, unnecessary cap hit and move along. Couple that with all the other huge errors in personnel and it’ll be crippling.
Lavar? He’s a tremendous athlete but his play is only above average. 5.6 mil this year, 5.6 mil next year, and then 12.4 million!!! in 2006! I can’t even look beyond that… it makes me nauseated. All that for a LB in a 4-3 that makes the occasional sack, the occasional INT and the occasional monumental blunder. Someone should’ve told our front office that 4-3 linebackers don’t have that much of an impact. The money should be tied up on D in defensive linemen and CB’s. They’re the ones who have an impact in a 4-3 scheme… not the linebackers. 3-4 linebackers, maybe, but you don’t pay someone umpteen million to make tackles. Even of the sideline-to-sideline variety. That money would’ve been so much more well spent on Champ, or Kearse, or many other free agents.
Which leads me to Portis. We give up a second round pick and a player who is arguably the best CB in the NFL for a back that is too small, lacks patience as a runner, and who's reputation is clearly the result of a Denver system that helps *any* RB put up pro bowl stats. Heck, even without their old OL coach (who made that system work so well in Denver) they're still doing it with no name runners putting up huge numbers.
O. Gary? Yeah, he's done real well since leaving Denver. It'll be the same for Portis.
CB's are sooooo much more difficult to find in the NFL than RB's, and what do we do? We trade the best one in the league for an average RB and just to make it even... we throw in a second round pick!!! Please!! I’ve heard many ex-coaches and announcers talk about how much more difficult it is to find a CB. Good RB’s are a dime a dozen in the NFL and we’ll be lucky if Portis turns out to be good instead of amazingly average. We already had RB’s here that would be doing the same thing Portis is… if not better. What a colossal screw-up. What a colossal *long term ramifications* screw up.
Just losing Bailey and a second (still can’t believe we did that!) for Portis would be bad enough, but to pay Clinton what we did borders on insane. It sent a team already in a precarious salary cap situation into a much, much worse financial spot.
Champ didn't want to be here you say? C'mon... we coulda paid him and he would've been completely happy in DC. (We still would've been in cap trouble, but we'd have Champ instead of Portis.) Bailey just wanted to be paid like he felt he deserved and he’d have remained a Commander for life. Springs isn’t a tenth of the player Bailey is. Imagine what Champ would’ve done with Williams as his coordinator. Gawd!
Samuels. His cap numbers are 8.8 mil this year, 9.6 mil next year, and 11.3 million in 2006!!??! What’s he doing to earn a quarter of that? Playing solid? Okay? Sorry? What we do know is that he isn’t playing well and even if he were playing well, he wouldn’t be worth anywhere near that money. Nothing against Samuels. It’s that the Commanders continue to pay huge dollars for players who pay small dividends.
Highest payroll in the NFL? 1-4?
Taylor? He’s all ability and no brains. He seriously may never make much of an impact in the NFL because his ability to process information is painfully lacking. At Miami they let him play on instincts alone. He wasn’t particularly part of a secondary or defensive scheme… he just played backyard football. That won’t work in this league. He may never be more than a solid player. Maybe I’m wrong here… I hope so.
That leads me to this though: Safety isn’t a position that you should spend your money at either. They can impact the game but it’s much more difficult to do so at safety than at CB, DE, or DT. Why spend not only that kind of money for a safety, but that high of a pick. I’ll say it again… our money on D should be tied up at CB and DL with solid role players at safety and LB.
Wynn, Salave’a, Griffin, Warner. Those players are listed on the official site depth chart as our starting DL. 5.4 Million. That’s how much they count against our cap this year. Arrington counts 5.6 million this season. Someone just wasn’t thinking. Yes our D has played well, but imagine how it could be doing with pressure from the DL. Sacks, hurries, interceptions… those things help you win games, not just rank high in the defensive ratings. We give up few yards. Big deal, we need game changing plays on defense and with our DL, were not going to get very many. Having to blitz to get pressure on the QB leaves us vulnerable to big plays and makes us likely losers.
Morton, don’t get me started. Thomas, sheesh.
We have the highest payroll in the NFL. Most of them appear to be underachievers, getting by on reputation from one good year in the pro’s or no good NFL years but they were stars in college. Just brimming with athletic ability, but unable to turn the tide of a game. They lack something. Brains? The ability to be part of a team? Heart?
They try hard. I haven’t seen any quit in this team. I wish I had. At least then you could say, “Gibbs is going to whip them in shape as the year goes on.” No, these guys work hard and try… they just can’t do it. And this is our roster guys. They’re not a young team full of guys trying to make a name for themselves. Blue collar guys who could turn into a blue chipper and surprise everyone. Nope, they’re already big name players who’ve been there and done that. What you see is pretty much what you get.
So Gibbs is going to go get new guys then, you say. If you start trying to bring in new guys… we just don’t have the cap room. We’ll have to start letting some of our present big players go, and that’s going to wreck our cap. We’ll have so much dead money that Gibbs will be way retired before it’s ever straightened out.
I read on a prominent Commander website where one of the writers was being a typical Commander fan and trying to show how we’ll be fine with the cap. He wrote (if memory serves) that if we only got rid of Samuels, Morton and Gardner we would be able to sign all of our own free agents and draft picks for 2005 and 2006. That’s fine… but that’s also assuming we don’t sign one single free agent from another team. Not one!
First off, can you see Snyder not signing one free agent from another team for the next two years? Uh, me neither. But let’s assume he doesn’t. That means that we would have the exact same roster we have now except for the three players I mentioned above and our draft picks. Great. That’s some group we have now. And with our recent history with draft picks and considering how few we have, that paints a rather bleak outlook for our team the next few years.
Think about it. No new blood coming in except for our draft picks! God help. All the while, the rest of the league is going around signing players left and right. Dallas, Philly, New York, they’re all in great cap shape and they’ll be swiping up all the good free agents while we only watch so we can retain the schmucks we have now. And if one of our players sign elsewhere, it will only be one of the players that we now think is one of our better players. Then we’ll only be able to go into free agency to acquire a player to take his place and he probably won’t be as good as the player we lost. At best it’ll be an even swap.
But you know Snyder will sign free agents. That means were going to lose a lot of the guys we now have. Who goes? Coles, Arrington, who?
I’m going to stop now. It’s making me sick. I’m sure ya’ll are glad I’m stopping. I know you guys don’t want to hear the things I’m saying.
I hope I get more positive about the Commanders so I can write something on here that isn’t so depressing.
