Quote:
Originally Posted by rm1369
That hits squarely on my main complaint with Ballard and his most loyal followers. Nothing the team did besides signing Rivers indicates that the team thought they had a window. Nothing. Besides signing Rivers it was business as usual for Ballard - focus on the draft and future development. When I point this out to his most vocal supporters I’m typically told they wanted to wait and see what they had with Rivers before going all in and then Rivers retired. A similar argument happens when I point out the lack of “going for it” with Ryan. Same with Wentz. Hell, I started my criticism of Ballard because I felt he was content wasting prime Luck years with his stated slow steady build approach. The reality is that it doesn’t matter where the team is with QB, Ballard’s method is Ballard’s method. He is not looking at and pushing for windows. That’s my main criticism of him - he has never tailed his approach to the state of the roster. That goes for winning or bottoming out. Ballard selected AR, but without Irsay’s intervention AR likely isn’t on this team. Every off season for Ballard is the same as the one before and the one after. I think that’s a losing approach. So far I’ve mostly been right.
To me AR is the guy at this point regardless. There is no reason to wait and see. If he proves to be the guy this season then you’ve wasted a season of your short window trying to verify. If he isn’t then what’s it matter? We’ve already saw how many years it takes to find even a possible guy at QB so the roster is going to look significantly different by the time they get back to the next window. You might as well support AR to the max during the next 3 years and help him become the guy before the coming huge cap hit for his extension. Then you start a new window with a different looking team.
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You think Ballard traded a 1 for Carson Wentz for funsies? No, he did it with the hope that Reich could turn him into a franchise QB, which was a reasonable assumption at the time since Wentz had had an MVP caliber season under Reich. So many people talk about Ballard "not taking swings", and they completely forget his swings, like Wentz and Buckner, both of which were trades that involved significant draft capital going to other teams.