Dam Our pass rush sucked last year Is it your take that Houston is capable of improvement with aging, because if he isn't and we had signed him our pass rush does not improve and we would be fucked. No guarantees with Paye but every player was just potential at some point. More fun to root for a young guy, watching the ones who succeed is special as a fan.

My take is Odeyingbo is going to likely be the better of the two drafted DEs, and that drafting Jenkins and Odeyingbo and signing Houston would've been better especially in the short term but also in the long term than drafting Paye and Odeyingbo and signing Fisher. Really, whatever other pieces you want to throw in there, for me it's basically Jenkins is IMO the better player than Paye.

Jared Allen was a 4th round pick.

You're right. I thought I'd heard him talked about as a 7th round pick before somewhere and didn't bother to check. Still, 4th round is a long way from where he should've been in the 2004 draft, which is Top 10-15. Side note: wow that class was loaded.

What Ballard has available is getting input from the scouts and the college coaches of these draft picks. I dont know what the coaches have done in the age of covid, in the past the coaches had interviews with the future picks at the combine. Its not all arm length and bench presses. I recall Polian was sold on Dallas Clark on the interview. Polian saw the talent, but was impress by Clark’s character. Same reason the Colts took Edge over Ricky Williams, it wasnt about talent as it was his character.

All the tape measures and video tape cant give you the character, desire, or drive of an individual. That comes from person to person interaction. Ballard knows Fisher. There is an added dimension to his decision to trust a known quantity rather than a rookie at LT. IF Fisher can recover, he is a better choice.

I understand the obsession with numbers, but football is all about players and how they go about their profession. Some one needs to see how many current Colts were captains on their college teams. Bet you there are a few

I really like Jenkins too, just not as a left tackle. Houston is getting too fucking old. Me and Spears like Paye, obviously you have doubts about him and that's ok. I've added a video of Spears talking about Paye. If I remember correctly, I ranked Sewell as my number one tackle, and you had him ranked a lot lower. Yet Sewell was the first LT taken in the draft. These fucking scouts know a hell of a lot more than you and me. I watch a lot of Pac 12 games due to the fact that I live in Commifornia and Sewell was a beast. I'm no fucking expert on these prospects coming out of the draft, I readily admit that. But that's ok, there is a lot more going on than either you or I know about. At the end of the day, we are just fans, we don't get paid for being right or wrong. You have takes that make you look like a smart MF if you are right. You liked Russel Wilson over RGIII, and after the first year you were right. RGIII was a hell of a talent until he got fucked up in his rookie year. Be happy we drafted two top DE's that have the potential to be game changers, Jenkins is not a game changer and never will be. Outside of Sewell and Slater, I wasn't very high on any of the other linemen doing jack shit at the left tackle position, including Darrisaw. Oh well, it's fun to debate this shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JptL7uUq3A

I am hoping we have drafted our Mathis and Freeney this year. That is one element that we have sorely missed.

I just don't get the idea that these scouts know so much more than us, especially if you can watch the same games (they do have the advantage of college All-22, which is the holy grail of scouting) and learn what makes a player good and what doesn't. Also, I'm obviously not the only person who thinks Jenkins is a LT, because the Bears released a perfectly solid starting caliber NFL LT to plug Jenkins in there. I know you disparaged the Bears front office before, and I'm inclined to agree with you on their overall incompetence, but they had one hell of a draft, and by your logic, they are an NFL scouting group that believes in Jenkins's ability to play LT. I think they're right, they got 2 of the top 15 players in this draft, and they filled 2 of the 3 most important positions in football with them.

Irsay is hoping for that too. I will say this: I hate Kwity Paye the draft pick because his floor is bust, but I love Kwity Paye the human, because he appears to have a great deal of internal motivation to succeed as well as such an amazing story, and I hope that that translates into Kwity Paye the player developing an arsenal of pass rush moves and becoming the devastating edge defender he could be at his ceiling.

Well, the Bears might be right about Jenkins, time will tell. Hell, I've been wrong more times than I care to talk about.

And that is the fatal flaw almost all of us have.

I play golf. I have played golf since my teenager years going on 35 years at this point. At one point in my late 20s, I held a 10 handicap on PGA rated courses which means I was a pretty good normal golfer but nowhere near good enough to try the pros.

I got to play one round with a pro at a pro-am (Brad Bryant) who in 1997 was the 81st ranked player on the PGA tour by money. That was the highest ranking he ever had on the tour. Sufficient to say, he was only a marginal PGA golfer.

As we played, we talked through his logic on each holes and the factors that he used to determine his landing zone. His understanding of the game was LIGHT YEARS better than mine. He considered factors that I did not even comprehend existed. The type of grass, how it was mowed, how the wind was folding the grass over, how the bunker was raked, his reading of the green was so much better than mine.

In 2012, I was a little league coach for my son's 5th/6th grade team. I coached the O-Line and the D-Line. I played both O-Line and D-Line through high school, attempted to walk onto a Big 10 football team and spent three weeks in summer practice with Purdue before being cut, have watched and studied O-Line and D-Line play for decades as a fan.

Before the season, I went to talk to the high school O-Line and D-Line coaches (two different folks) about how they wanted technique taught at our level to then filter up to the middle school and high school teams.

Again, night and day about their understanding of technique, footwork training drills and mindsets that mine. The depth of what they understood about what makes for a successful skillset and mindset was much deeper than mine.

I have been in my profession for 25 years. I get kids out of college all the time disagreeing with my logic and recommendations on how to do task completion only to come back a couple of weeks later asking for advice since their project is all messed up.

There is a light year difference in those who DO and those who WATCH.