jday
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 9,321
- Reaction score
- 13,284
I turn 40 this year and I have to say getting old is underrated. With age comes a lot of freedom; freedom to not give a rats rear what people think…freedom to wear clothes based on function and comforts over fashion and fitting in…freedom to let the world go crazy around you and not feel the need to go crazy trying to fix it. And it is awesome.
I got to say I honestly think the old guys in my life that painted the picture of getting old as dreadful, may have just been letting that fact do the heavy-lifting for their inherent age-induced laziness…which I can also now relate to. There was a time in my life that if you were to ask me on Monday what I did over the weekend and I said “Nothing,” it would have sounded like I just told you I found a lump of coal in my stocking on Christmas Morning. Now my Monday morning “Nothing” response sounds like I just told you I spent 10 days in the Bahama’s. There is absolutely nothing better than having nothing to do on the weekend….Nothing!
There was a time in my blogging life that I simply could not let ignorance, emotionally dictated platitudes and abject stupidity go...I just absolutely had to address it, often times leading down a conversational path that I would eventually learn to regret. If I read something I disagreed with, I for some odd reason felt the need to offer my opinion to the contrary. What I have learned is regardless of facts, logic, and the obvious cyclical trends of the NFL, people will believe whatever the heck they want to believe. And with the right narrative and the right collection of otherwise meaningless stats, you can prove anything to be true…to the right idiot. And once said idiots mind is made up, no amount of facts, logic, or trending analytics will change their mind…and as such any attempts on my part, in hindsight, was an absolute wasted effort.
Now don’t get me wrong…I still will throw out an opinion here and there, should I feel the necessity and rare motivation…and I will clown the occasional opinion I find to be misguided if for no other reason, my own enjoyment…and I absolutely will playfully bite back, should someone take a shot at my contributions…but for the most part, if at any point in a conversation I get the impression that the other party refuses to change their mind or see reason, I will in most cases abandon the conversation all together. It’s nothing personal…as a general rule, I just have things I’d rather be doing than spin my wheels in a conversational-hole.
That said, if there is anything I wish could change about my current blogging experience, it would be the general assumption that should a team add a new player, by default that means they are better whereas when a team does nothing, they by default have gotten worse….and nothing could be further from the truth. Not that I would advocate a team attempting this (I only point it out to make a point), but a team could very well skip both Free Agency and the Draft and still get better.
How?
Getting better through the addition of players in the draft and Free Agency are certainly the conventional methods to get better, but perhaps the most significant way teams get better is through their offseason program for the players already on the team. Very little talk gets devoted to this, but the best teams foster an environment where players can get better, and as a general rule, the majority of work towards getting better happens between seasons not during the season.
I point this out because it seems there is an overwhelming amount of fans who are operating under the false premise that teams win the Super Bowl through what they do in Free Agency and that just simply isn’t the case. For the most part, if a player was a true difference-maker, they wouldn’t be available in the first place. Granted, there are the occasional cap casualties, and in isolated circumstances, said Free Agent can be just the breath of life a team needed…but those instances are honestly rare.
In other words, big spending rarely if ever equals big winning in the following season. It just doesn’t. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Giants who reportedly won the Free Agency Super Bowl last year. I was one of the few who was saying before the year started that the Giants would be terrible.
Why did I think that?
Despite all of those expensive weapons they added around Eli, they did nothing to fix what really ailed them…and that was their offensive line. As an aside, that’s why I kinda hope they do draft Saquon Barkley this year, because his talent (like it was for Barry Sanders and the Detriot Lions) will largely be wasted on that team if they can’t block for him. I’d be more concerned if they made the smart move and picked Quenton Nelson. But I digress…
What we fans should be more concerned about is what it is the players still on the roster are doing to improve…not what the Front Office is not doing to improve….especially now.
Another way to represent this concept, would be with the following:
Offseason Program > Draft > Free Agency
In the above representation, in terms of how teams as a collective get better, the offseason program provides greater improvement than the draft and the draft, as a general rule, begets greater returns than Free Agency. Think about it: there are 53 players on the roster, 46 of which you can dress for a game. If you can find 3 starters in 7 rounds, that is a great draft…even if the other 4 drafted fail to survive final cuts in August. In Free Agency, you might add as much as 5 players (probably less, but for the sake of argument), and not all of those players would be instant starters either, but let’s just assume they are, so that I can be more than fair in making my point. So let’s look at the above formula one more time, represented by the numbers as opposed to what they represent:
38 > 3 > 5
Those 8 players represented by players acquired both in the draft and Free Agency respectively will certainly make a difference…but not near the difference the other 38 will make by simply doing what they are supposed to do in the offseason.
Thoughts?
I got to say I honestly think the old guys in my life that painted the picture of getting old as dreadful, may have just been letting that fact do the heavy-lifting for their inherent age-induced laziness…which I can also now relate to. There was a time in my life that if you were to ask me on Monday what I did over the weekend and I said “Nothing,” it would have sounded like I just told you I found a lump of coal in my stocking on Christmas Morning. Now my Monday morning “Nothing” response sounds like I just told you I spent 10 days in the Bahama’s. There is absolutely nothing better than having nothing to do on the weekend….Nothing!
There was a time in my blogging life that I simply could not let ignorance, emotionally dictated platitudes and abject stupidity go...I just absolutely had to address it, often times leading down a conversational path that I would eventually learn to regret. If I read something I disagreed with, I for some odd reason felt the need to offer my opinion to the contrary. What I have learned is regardless of facts, logic, and the obvious cyclical trends of the NFL, people will believe whatever the heck they want to believe. And with the right narrative and the right collection of otherwise meaningless stats, you can prove anything to be true…to the right idiot. And once said idiots mind is made up, no amount of facts, logic, or trending analytics will change their mind…and as such any attempts on my part, in hindsight, was an absolute wasted effort.
Now don’t get me wrong…I still will throw out an opinion here and there, should I feel the necessity and rare motivation…and I will clown the occasional opinion I find to be misguided if for no other reason, my own enjoyment…and I absolutely will playfully bite back, should someone take a shot at my contributions…but for the most part, if at any point in a conversation I get the impression that the other party refuses to change their mind or see reason, I will in most cases abandon the conversation all together. It’s nothing personal…as a general rule, I just have things I’d rather be doing than spin my wheels in a conversational-hole.
That said, if there is anything I wish could change about my current blogging experience, it would be the general assumption that should a team add a new player, by default that means they are better whereas when a team does nothing, they by default have gotten worse….and nothing could be further from the truth. Not that I would advocate a team attempting this (I only point it out to make a point), but a team could very well skip both Free Agency and the Draft and still get better.
How?
Getting better through the addition of players in the draft and Free Agency are certainly the conventional methods to get better, but perhaps the most significant way teams get better is through their offseason program for the players already on the team. Very little talk gets devoted to this, but the best teams foster an environment where players can get better, and as a general rule, the majority of work towards getting better happens between seasons not during the season.
I point this out because it seems there is an overwhelming amount of fans who are operating under the false premise that teams win the Super Bowl through what they do in Free Agency and that just simply isn’t the case. For the most part, if a player was a true difference-maker, they wouldn’t be available in the first place. Granted, there are the occasional cap casualties, and in isolated circumstances, said Free Agent can be just the breath of life a team needed…but those instances are honestly rare.
In other words, big spending rarely if ever equals big winning in the following season. It just doesn’t. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Giants who reportedly won the Free Agency Super Bowl last year. I was one of the few who was saying before the year started that the Giants would be terrible.
Why did I think that?
Despite all of those expensive weapons they added around Eli, they did nothing to fix what really ailed them…and that was their offensive line. As an aside, that’s why I kinda hope they do draft Saquon Barkley this year, because his talent (like it was for Barry Sanders and the Detriot Lions) will largely be wasted on that team if they can’t block for him. I’d be more concerned if they made the smart move and picked Quenton Nelson. But I digress…
What we fans should be more concerned about is what it is the players still on the roster are doing to improve…not what the Front Office is not doing to improve….especially now.
Another way to represent this concept, would be with the following:
Offseason Program > Draft > Free Agency
In the above representation, in terms of how teams as a collective get better, the offseason program provides greater improvement than the draft and the draft, as a general rule, begets greater returns than Free Agency. Think about it: there are 53 players on the roster, 46 of which you can dress for a game. If you can find 3 starters in 7 rounds, that is a great draft…even if the other 4 drafted fail to survive final cuts in August. In Free Agency, you might add as much as 5 players (probably less, but for the sake of argument), and not all of those players would be instant starters either, but let’s just assume they are, so that I can be more than fair in making my point. So let’s look at the above formula one more time, represented by the numbers as opposed to what they represent:
38 > 3 > 5
Those 8 players represented by players acquired both in the draft and Free Agency respectively will certainly make a difference…but not near the difference the other 38 will make by simply doing what they are supposed to do in the offseason.
Thoughts?
