I cannot disagree with you more regarding Broaddus and his acumen.
when he talks about OL, he will talk about specific technique like footwork, bend, hand placement, and the like.
When he talks about skill position players he talks about generalities like how he feels a guy is running or that a guy can run with him. He doesn't talk about the technical things like number of steps, route depth, or the particular techniques that the skill position players use.
I trust Broaddus to know what he is talking about regarding linemen much more than I do the rest of the roster.
OK, I was just trying to be nice when I said his group was good at something else.
I will give him props for often admitting that he was wrong in his previous reports.
IMO, Broaddus is like Nick Hayden. Hayden would have been a good contributor last season if he played about 30% of the snaps; however, he ended up playing about 90% of the snaps and he was overwhelmed. If Broaddus really takes his time to evaluate players I think he has the ability to do it well; however, I think he has too much going and throws out a lot of thoughts that are just his emotions at the time, but not something he has really analyzed completely. He's even said that he likes to just get his thoughts out to people ASAP and is not too worried about accuracy.
I actually like Broaddus and don't intend to be too critical of him; however, his style of reporting is easy to misconstrue. It's all amplified by the fact that his minions basically repeat his thoughts over and over. Even the Blogger type reporters show a strong evidence that they are parroting him. He's really the only local reporter with any football background which causes a long list of people to repeat and parrot what he says. Unfortunately, they don't give him credit when they do it. They like to word it as if it's their own thoughts. This concept is more obvious in the off-season before training camp when you know that the bloggers don't have access to see anything that is going on themselves.
The process is amplified with each of the following steps:
1. Broaddus says something. It could be a an article, tweet, radio report or just something he tells his minions (the dc. com guys as well as Bob Sturm and Mike Fisher all discuss the Cowboys with him).
2. His minions repeat what he said.
3. Bloggers repeat what he said and/or what his minions said.
4. Message board posters repeat what he said and/or what his minions said and/or what some bloggers that were parroting him said.
5. Other message board posters repeat what previous message board posters said that originated with something that Broaddus originally said.
In electronic amplifiers, you don't want to amplify the noise (error); however, in the situation described above, the least error (noise) by Broaddus get drastically amplified due to how things proliferate through the internet. He can say a player had one terrible snap and it ends up at the message board level that the player is having a terrible camp and might as well be cut before the 1st preseason game.
I prefer to just see the preseason games myself on both the broadcast and the All-22. That prevents any amplification from getting into the process.
The other issue is that some players might be better in games than in practice and vise versa. There have been many top level talented players over the years that are known to not perform well in practice but that are terrific in games. Add to that that people report things from training camp without always knowing or referencing the specifics of the drills. Some drills are going to favor OL and some will favor DL. Many practice reps are done with exaggerated technique changes while a player is in the process of developing better techniques. An OL coach might instruct an player to do step a certain way in order to demonstrate that it does not work. Then somebody reports that the OLineman was dominated by the DL but in reality they were just working on technique. It's like a golfer at the driving range that tries things that they wouldn't try on the course.
