Quote:
Originally Posted by Kray007
When you draft a Quarterback with less than a dozen starts in college and hand him the reins of your team, you don’t expect excellence. You expect to go through some tough times. I don’t understand why people want to blame Ballard for that.
When Bill Polian drafted Peyton, the first year under the new Quarterback was brutal. The Colts went 3-13. Josh Allen took his first Bills team to a 5-11 record. Joe Burrow went 2-7. Jim Kelly went 4-12. John Elway 4-6.
When I look at the job that Ballard’s done, I ask myself how Andrew Luck with a couple of seasons under his belt would have done with the same talent? How many games would he have won playing behind a great Offensive Line, handing the ball off to Jonathan Taylor, throwing to the likes of Pittman, Downs and Pierce?
The answer I get brightens my day. The answer is that they go toe to toe with any team in the league. The answer is that the odds are pretty good Jim Irsay has another Lombardi Trophy for his man den come the first of February.
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I don’t blame Ballard for AR and in fact if he busts I won’t necessarily blame him for that. I blame him for having 7 straight fucking years or “maybe we’ll try next year” then not trying. I blame him for the erosion of fan support, both mine and everyone else’s. I seriously debated on letting my season tickets go. Why? Because I don’t believe in this team or what it is doing. Why would I? Their GM has routinely shown he doesn’t believe in them. He’s not once said this is our year, we are going to make some noise. Not fucking once. It’s always maybe next year, exactly what you wrote. It won’t be next year though. I mean will the team be better? Maybe, probably. But he’s not going to plug holes with anything other than rookies. We’ve seen it - position by position, year after year. It’s great that I feel good about the WR position now, 5 years later. But this team would have a playoff win if he didn’t sign Rivers AND still not believe in the team. It’s constant. That season of signing Rivers and then doing jack shit with the rest of the roster is Ballard. It’s fundamentally who he is. And it will constantly lead to less than great results. Less than the sum of the parts.
The man is a decent to pretty good talent evaluator, but he doesn’t know how to build a winning team. His philosophy sucks and this isn’t hindsight, I was saying it back when he had Luck. His philosophy is from a different era of football. Shit changes too quickly now. Hell his best ever draft pick is already retired.
And your idea about putting Luck under center for this team doesn’t work. With Luck he never gets the high draft picks to be able to assemble the current mediocre team. Even evaluating his drafting ability is somewhat skewed because most GMs wouldn’t get by with his year after year record. Not to mention he doesn’t even get the chance to draft AR if it wasn’t for Irsay tanking the season. He is the person that has kept the team from attempting to solve the QB situation permanently for several years while benefiting from his failure to do so. He’s had plenty enough opportunity to put his plan into action and we’ve seen the results. He is who his record says he his.