Weeden Speaks

[Irvin88_4life]

Only thing to comprehend was what actually happened, which is 1-11 without Romo.

And no, your comment is not equally true because we won the Washington game because of one fluke play. In order to win the 6 or 7 games you mentioned, it would have required a fluke play in each game.............ergo, a total of 6 or 7 occurrences.

So the two are not equivalent, you are comparing one occurrence to the same occurrence happening 6 or 7 times.

Sure you keep telling yourself that

 

[iceberg]

Brandon Weeden: I thought Jerry Jones' comments about me were uncalled for; 'I wanted it to work out so bad'

By SportsDayDFW.com Contact SportsDayDFW.com on Twitter: @SportsDayDFW
Former Cowboys backup quarterback Brandon Weeden joined the Ben & Skin Show on 105.3 The Fan KRLD-FM on Monday. Here are some highlights.

On if the Cowboys offense is too Romo-friendly:

"I don't really think so. Obviously Tony has the ability to change plays, get into whatever play he's comfortable with, and he's got a great system that he goes by and he's great at it. I think more than anything is just putting the gameplan together. I hadn't really played many games with Scott Linehan. It's got to be hard for him, it's got to be hard for the offensive staff to put together a plan with a backup quarterback for one, but you haven't really called plays with. The things that Tony did, as a backup guy you can't really go out there and kind of emulate it and do the same things. He has full freedom at the line of scrimmage, those kind of things, and he's been in this system for a long time. As comfortable as I was in it, I just didn't really have those freedoms to freelance like he does."

http://sportsday.***BANNED-URL***/d...jerry-jones-comments-uncalled-wanted-work-bad

yea, I thought the comments of the prettiest spiral he's ever seen were uncalled for also.

 

[ConstantReboot]

I wasn't one who wanted Weeden here. But he speaks the truth. Sure he sucks. But whats worst is that the coaches expected him to play like Romo. Well if they want "Romo type of results" they would have been better off giving Weeden to create plays that suite him. This is another reason why its best we dump Garrett's playbook cause its not offense friendly. Besides, were no longer the team of the 90s. I don't know if Garrett realizes that yet.

 

[ConstantReboot]

But how much of this is on the coaching staff? Reports are out there that Linehan didn't care for Weeden, but Jones kept him. It seemed Garrett was doing everything in his power to keep Murray a part of the Cowboys as well, but in the end, Stephen and Jerry thought it was better to let him walk.

I'm unsure why we kept a backup QB our offensive coordinator seemed to be unhappy with. The last thing I will do is dog pile on a head coach, mainly because there have been a lot of positives since he has got here. Our drafts have been far better since he stepped in, and despite everything else, a bad call kept us from going to the NFC Championship game last year. I also never saw our players quitting on Garrett like they did with Wade. If we fail in 2016, I certainly agree it's time to start looking for a new HC, but I expect us to be right back in the playoff picture.

Garrett did not do anything in his power to try and keep Murray. In fact, I don't think he did much of anything in regards to Murray. Sad thing was Murray wanted to stay with the Cowboys and would probably would have taken less if the FO would have showed they wanted him. The people that wanted him was the players and Michael Irvin. Nor the coaches or the FO.

 

[SultanOfSix]

Like it or not, though, turnovers lose games, and takeaways win them. They aren't luxuries. Good teams protect the ball, bad teams pressure teams into turning it over. It's not a coincidence that TO differential correlates so highly with winning in the NFL.

No one said TO differential didn't correlate with winning. TOs are a result of two things 1) the defense forcing them 2) the offense being careless with the ball resulting defense taking it away. The point is, if the offense doesn't turn over the ball, there are no TOs to put the differential in the negative. TOs help the offense just as much as stopping a team from scoring does. They provide the additional benefit only in that they can result in points or they result in a shorter field for the offense so that they can put points on the board. If the offense is good enough, and the defense stops teams without turnovers, they don't matter. In that sense, they are luxuries. This focus on TO differential as not "helping" the offense is a shift of attention away from the primary issue and that is the abysmal offense. Generating TOs are not the primary purpose of a defense. They only serve in helping that purpose and they aren't as important as stopping teams on 3rd down. Converting and stopping teams on 3rd down probably have a higher correlation to winning percentage than TO differential.

 

[Stash]

Then don't believe it? I mean, the article had quotes from Linehan alluding to this thoughts. If you want to think otherwise, do so. I'd want you to counter it with something of substance though.

I did. I shot a huge hole in any speculation that Linehan was forced to keep a quarterback he didn't want. If anyone in this organization 'forced' him to do anything, he wouldn't have signed an extension afterwards.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/free-agents/quarterback/

There is your list (Wasn't hard to find), show me a QB that could have come in and been successful after only 2 weeks of being with the team? This should be funny.

Know what's even funnier? Watching someone who doesn't know what they're talking about trying to act smug.

Matt Cassel was acquired via trade, not a free agent. So if this team could have acquired him via trade, how is it possible to say who else they could or couldn't have acquired in the same manner? Next time, try comparing apples to apples instead of oranges.

Who said they weren't doing their job? You still need talent to produce. What the hell do you guys expect? We're getting to the point of where people have odd expectations and are surprised when they aren't met.

Competency. I expect a staff to be able to show in some way to be capable of winning a few games without an all-star cast ar every position. We don't have that. Unless we've got a Pro Bowl roster of player talent, this staff can't compete. Other staffs do it all the time, ours can't.

Please, show me these "bad decisions" throughout the year? Show me these "bad decisions" that were far greater problems than the injuries that plagued us? I keep reading "bad decisions" here with very little examples.

Firstly, I never made any claim that any decisions were "far greater" than the injuries. Don't try to attribute a comment to me that I never made.

The injuries were obviously a big factor, but other teams have injuries too, and they don't fall apart as a result. The Steelers suffered through a ton of injuries, and they still managed to somehow make the playoffs, all while fielding a rebuilding, work in progress defense. And there's a list of teams that somehow managed to win a game or two with their backup quarterback. Yet our staff couldn't. Even the one we do get was the result of a boneheaded gift from Desean Jackson.

This is not me saying our coaching staff is perfect and was flawless.

Then what exactly are you trying to argue about? The proper level of disappointment I'm allowed to have according to you?

Give me examples of a team that lost it's star players early in the year and recovered from it. Go!

Look above. And again, you want to try to make an argument while trying to hide in the grey area. What's the definition of "recovered"? I gave you examples of a team that had more injuries than this one and managed to make the playoffs.

I'll make you a deal, you give me whatever parameters on that I have to work with and then I'll give you my list.

When you can start doing that, I will too.

 

[Stash]

Yeah, it was really just a rhetorical question. The offense clearly sucked badly. But then, take away Murray, Romo, and Dez, and then even measly little Dunbar who was averaging 10 catches a game or whatever it was in his role of check-down king, and we probably should have expected the offense to suck.

And I think most fans think there were ways to coach our way to more points. I don't think that's a crazy argument, given how few points we scored and how rarely we were playing with a lead all season long. But I'm not sure it was possible. Instead, we tried to limit the mistakes we might get with the backups and to try to win playing high-percentage offense behind a good OL and keeping things tight defensively. And that failed, miserably. But it doesn't follow that airing it out like Cassel did in the NYFG game was a better option. Letting backup players take big risks against starters is a recipe for getting beat. Play calling isn't really the issue when a QB can't throw anything that's not line-of-sight, WRs don't hang onto balls or get OPI calls that take points of the board, and the defense can't give the admittedly bad offense any meaningful extra series to speak of because they're suddenly worse at that than every other team in the league.

You know what I think hurt them a good bit too? The 'keep it together, our guys will be back soon' mindset.

Instead of saying 'we need to change things and make this work', I think they simply kept status quo, or worse, went ultra conservative thinking that Romo and Bryant would be back soon to right the ship.

Now, obviously they had no way of knowing that Romo would break the collarbone again, but I can't help but wonder if they would have approached things differently and been more creative if they never expected him back at all?

 

[Stash]

This season completely exposed the myth that we were "building" something here. It's nothing but excuse after excuse, year after year.

It's comical. Some want to use the injury excuse for all four of the .500 or below seasons! This is the NFL folks! If you're going to give this staff a 'mulligan' every time someone gets injured, you may as well give them lifetime contracts right now and be done with it!

 

[ABQCOWBOY]

Pittsburgh is ALSO stacked. Deangelo Williams was one of the best running backs in this league this year when he was out there and they also have probably the best receiving core in the league. Would you rather have DWill/Wheaton/Antonio/Bryant or Terrence Williams/McFadden/Randle and Beasley? There's no comparison.

I don't know. Williams has less then 8 thousand yards in a 10 year career. If you watched the Steelers, they dropped a lot of balls but they did have the ability to go deep and they could score in the red zone. We could do neither.

 

[CowboyRoy]

That is ssssoooo pathetic. You have three backups and they could only manage to win ONE game - and the one game we won was gift-wrapped to us via DeSean Jackson being DeSean Jackson.

And the Giants game first game of the year was gift wrapped to us by Eli Manning. If you recall all they had to do was kneel on the ball and run down the clock to like 30 seconds left in the game and kick a FG.

 

[tyke1doe]

And the Giants game first game of the year was gift wrapped to us by Eli Manning. If you recall all they had to do was kneel on the ball and run down the clock to like 30 seconds left in the game and kick a FG.

Oh, I recall.

 

[Stash]

And the Giants game first game of the year was gift wrapped to us by Eli Manning. If you recall all they had to do was kneel on the ball and run down the clock to like 30 seconds left in the game and kick a FG.

Oh I recall, only too well. But in circumstances like that, you'll just get the 'win is a win!' line from them.

They only want to acknowledge the bounces or circumstances that didn't go our way.

 

[Idgit]

No one said TO differential didn't correlate with winning. TOs are a result of two things 1) the defense forcing them 2) the offense being careless with the ball resulting defense taking it away. The point is, if the offense doesn't turn over the ball, there are no TOs to put the differential in the negative. TOs help the offense just as much as stopping a team from scoring does. They provide the additional benefit only in that they can result in points or they result in a shorter field for the offense so that they can put points on the board. If the offense is good enough, and the defense stops teams without turnovers, they don't matter. In that sense, they are luxuries. This focus on TO differential as not "helping" the offense is a shift of attention away from the primary issue and that is the abysmal offense. Generating TOs are not the primary purpose of a defense. They only serve in helping that purpose and they aren't as important as stopping teams on 3rd down. Converting and stopping teams on 3rd down probably have a higher correlation to winning percentage than TO differential.

No matter how many times I say that bringing up takeaways isn't in any way an excuse for how poorly the offense performed, or that I completely agree that more takeaways would have come had we ever been putting teams in positions where they had to score, it's going to not get credited, but I'll keep saying it, for the principle of it.

But takeaways matter no matter how you look at it. They stop drives, which is the primary purpose of a defense, as you point out, and the put the offense in advantageous positions to score, in turn putting the other team in position to take more offensive risks as a result. In short, they're important, and we were worst in the league at getting them last season on the way to losing 8-9 fairly close games.

 

[LocimusPrime]

I dont like this romo friendly, sandlot, parking lot, back yard, intramural flag football offense. Its annoying. And yes its annoying even when romo is playing and winning. It just seems too frantic and lucky

 

[CowboyRoy]

No matter how many times I say that bringing up takeaways isn't in any way an excuse for how poorly the offense performed, or that I completely agree that more takeaways would have come had we ever been putting teams in positions where they had to score, it's going to not get credited, but I'll keep saying it, for the principle of it.

But takeaways matter no matter how you look at it. They stop drives, which is the primary purpose of a defense, as you point out, and the put the offense in advantageous positions to score, in turn putting the other team in position to take more offensive risks as a result. In short, they're important, and we were worst in the league at getting them last season on the way to losing 8-9 fairly close games.

100%............the turnovers was a big reason why we went from 12-4 to 4-12. Im not sure anyone is debating that. But regardless, as you pointed out, we were in many games anyway. Better coaching certainly could have gotten us over the hump in a few games don't you think?

Were you impressed with the coaching this year? I certainly wasnt. Were you impressed with how they coached or didnt coach up the backup QB's? How about their choices of who was our backup QB?

These were the big reasons why we went from 12-4 to 4-12. In order of importance IMHO:

1. Injury to Tony Romo
2. Fall off in the run game (definitely affected by #1)(But also affected by no Murray and no equal replacement)
3. Ineffectiveness of the back up QB's
4. Defenses inability to duplicate the high turnovers from 2014
5. Injury to Dez and others

Notice I didnt put anything about Jason Garrett in there. Just like I wouldnt put him in any of the reasons why we went 12-4 last year. But I would tell you that if we did have better coaching, our record would have been better in both years. Obviously with Tony Romo at the helm as the leader of this team and the offense in particular, there is less of a need for high end coaching. But when you have a season where you lose that one big guy, you need the coaches to step in and make a difference. We saw the lack of that ability more than ever with Romo gone. The coaches simply couldnt get the job done on any level. The backup QB and offensive ineptitude standing out the most. Which is supposed to be Garretts strength is it not?

 

[mattjames2010]

I did. I shot a huge hole in any speculation that Linehan was forced to keep a quarterback he didn't want. If anyone in this organization 'forced' him to do anything, he wouldn't have signed an extension afterwards.



Know what's even funnier? Watching someone who doesn't know what they're talking about trying to act smug.

Matt Cassel was acquired via trade, not a free agent. So if this team could have acquired him via trade, how is it possible to say who else they could or couldn't have acquired in the same manner? Next time, try comparing apples to apples instead of oranges.



Competency. I expect a staff to be able to show in some way to be capable of winning a few games without an all-star cast ar every position. We don't have that. Unless we've got a Pro Bowl roster of player talent, this staff can't compete. Other staffs do it all the time, ours can't.




Firstly, I never made any claim that any decisions were "far greater" than the injuries. Don't try to attribute a comment to me that I never made.

The injuries were obviously a big factor, but other teams have injuries too, and they don't fall apart as a result. The Steelers suffered through a ton of injuries, and they still managed to somehow make the playoffs, all while fielding a rebuilding, work in progress defense. And there's a list of teams that somehow managed to win a game or two with their backup quarterback. Yet our staff couldn't. Even the one we do get was the result of a boneheaded gift from Desean Jackson.



Then what exactly are you trying to argue about? The proper level of disappointment I'm allowed to have according to you?





Look above. And again, you want to try to make an argument while trying to hide in the grey area. What's the definition of "recovered"? I gave you examples of a team that had more injuries than this one and managed to make the playoffs.



When you can start doing that, I will too.

Matt Cassel was acquired via trade, not a free agent. So if this team could have acquired him via trade, how is it possible to say who else they could or couldn't have acquired in the same manner? Next time, try comparing apples to apples instead of oranges.

Haha, what a cop out. Okay, easily change this up; show me a QB that we could have traded a late round pick for that would have came in and got the job done? Let's see your list. I will wait.

Competency. I expect a staff to be able to show in some way to be capable of winning a few games without an all-star cast ar every position. We don't have that. Unless we've got a Pro Bowl roster of player talent, this staff can't compete. Other staffs do it all the time, ours can't.

At every position? No, it was just the most vital positions. It's funny that we have multiple posters on this board going on and on about how you can't win football games without a franchise QB, we lose our franchise QB, and suddenly everyone is surprised we didn't have a successful season?

The Steelers suffered through a ton of injuries, and they still managed to somehow make the playoffs

The Steelers lost Big Ben for 4 games, they went 2-2. They still had Leveon Bell, Brown, and Bryant returned for the Arizona game. Not comparable, try again.

Even the one we do get was the result of a boneheaded gift from Desean Jackson.

I love how our team made a play that put us in position to win, and this is just a "gift" from the opposing team. No, a player knocked the ball loose from Jackson. That's the end of it.

Then what exactly are you trying to argue about? The proper level of disappointment I'm allowed to have according to you?

You can be as disappointed as you like. However, I will criticize your stance until you start to give me logical reasons for your level of disappointment. Even you have stated you believe we will be in playoffs again next season, so again, I will just assume you believe there was a little too much for this coaching staff to overcome this year. But I'm expecting some mental gymnastics from you.

Look above. And again, you want to try to make an argument while trying to hide in the grey area. What's the definition of "recovered"? I gave you examples of a team that had more injuries than this one and managed to make the playoffs.

No, you gave me the Steelers. They lost Big Ben for 4 games, went .500. It's not comparable to losing your QB for more than half the season, having a banged up #1 WR, your leading rusher moved on and his replacement was a bonehead that was cut halfway through the year, and your third down receiving back that our offense had plays built around went down in the 4th game. That's a lot of offensive power to replace mid-season.

You complained about my comparisons earlier (Even though you went on to use a cop out), but your comparison is worse.