Pass rusher is also a damned hard position to find, and they are about 30% more expensive than a corner, so FA presents a giant risk (i.e Frank Clark).

Denzel Ward had 2 career college INT’s. Two. On the most talented defense in the country? And Dorsey passed on him for a stud that had 25 sacks and 54.5 TFL’s playing for NC State?

C’mon now. You say this all the time. Draft the best players available. We all know that. Instead Dorsey committed the cardinal sin and drafted simply for need.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cle...outputType=amp

And he even mentioned that having Ogbah helped his decision to choose Ward, but yet he gave this guy away and looks all the more awful for doing so.

Yes I do believe that Ballard had a tremendous influence on drafting our best players before he left. He gave approval for Marcus Peters (which also deserves criticism).

Can you blame anyone for thinking that Ballard was the crux that helped us net our stars? Dorsey was given tons of high picks and more money than anyone, along with a draft with 2 highly thought of QB’s to choose from to start his job and he looks like a disaster.

His hand picked QB is a disaster that everyone outside of Cleveland hates. His corner picked top 5 has done nothing but get hurt all the time. His OL he choose with the first pick in the 2nd rd is a bust.

Meanwhile Ballard had the hardest start to a career for any GM ever with both a coach and elite QB bitching out on him at the last minute and he is flourishing.

Darius Leonard and Braden Smith were taken directly after Dorsey’s 2nd rd picks.

It’s clear that Ballard is awesome and Dorsey/Veach are both below par.

I don't have a problem concluding that Ballard is good - seems pretty damn likely that's the case.

My problem is the piecemeal dissection of Dorsey trying to conclude he's bad. He isn't - you look at what he brought in here and you're focusing solely on defense without giving credit at all for where he's hit the mark on elsewhere. Hill, Kelce and Jones were outstanding picks and you're just gonna call them Ballard picks? Based on what? And all 3 of those guys are easily on par with Leonard or Smith (I'm not convinced Smith's great anyway).

And you want to cite college stats for Ward and then say he's done nothing but get hurt while STILL ignoring that he made the Pro Bowl last year and was among the best coverage corners in the game. Seriously - that kid is GOOD. He has more potential than Chubb, IMO. Guy can easily be one of the 5 best CBs in football for the next 6-8 years. And let's just set aside the irony of Chubb being on the IR right now when you're blasting away at Ward's injury history.

Dorsey wasn't given 'tons of high picks' precisely because he WAS good. He immediately had this team in the playoffs after taking over a 3 win friggen squad. Oh, and his 'reward' for inheriting such a shit team was to get 1.1 in probably the worst draft in 25 years. And with that pick he took the only guy in the top 10 who's been a truly good player. Then he took an aging squad and flipped it into a team with a lot of exciting young players and positive momentum (that Veach is well on his way to squandering). He also executed the single most critical deal in franchise history to get up to EXACTLY where he needed to get to grab Patrick Mahomes. We really gonna handwaive that?

Mayfield...eh, is what it is. No, I don't like Mayfield at all. I think he's a monumental assbag. But did this board (myself and I'm sure you included) not spend a decade before Mahomes saying "FFS, at least TRY to get your quarterback!! If it fails, it fails - try again..."? By that very logic would he have been better served taking Rosen? Darnold? Allen? Darnold has a very low ceiling, Allen has among the lower floors you'll ever see. If you were looking for something of a mix of upside, floor and maybe a little bit of attitude, Mayfield was really the only guy out there. I can't kill him for that pick; why should I? He adhered to a logic that just about everyone on this board has adhered to for the entire duration of said board.

Is Ballard better than Dorsey? Yeah, probably. Then again, he might just be his mirror image (Dorsey's performance on O but applied to the D). In either event, that's not really where I take exception.

I simply think trying to lump Dorsey in with Veach is ridiculous. Dorsey's track record has been light years better than Veach's unless you simply want to give credit for anything he's done well to someone else. How is that remotely fair?

PEDs and painkillers are on the Seahawks training table

Great post.

For all his faults Dorsey is not as bad as Veach. Does anyone here think Dorsey have given up a 1st and a 2nd for Frank Clark and then given him $105 million contract? No way in hell Dorsey would do that.. That trade looks beyond bad right now and may have set the Chiefs D back a year or two.

Dorsey traded away his best offensive lineman for a DE that has one sack.

Dorsey has a pretty shitty deal of his own on his ledger for a DE this off-season, though. And one that flat out floored me when it was made.

Why ANYONE bailed out the Giants on that Olivier Vernon guaranteed money is beyond me. And to give up a quality G in Zeitler to do so is pretty !@#$ing bad.

But if we're talking degrees here, the Clark deal is significantly more damaging than the Vernon deal, even if the Vernon deal had significantly less upside. If you squint you can see why Veach spun the wheel on the Clark trade - bad idea, but there's a 'damn the torpedoes' logic to it. The Zeilter/Vernon swap, OTOH, was a bizarre one that I couldn't figure out from the word go.

I don't think Dorsey is perfect by any means. He does make mistakes - but most of those mistakes have been overblown by people who felt the need to justify the Chiefs decision to move on from him. Writ large, Dorsey did an awfully good job here and put Veach in a great position to succeed (Veach assumed a FAR better situation than Dorsey did). Veach simply hasn't done anything with that momentum.

Dorsey got excoriated for his 'terrible cap management' (without acknowledging the bare cupboard he inherited or the mandate to be competitive immediately) but it was EASY to get out from under what he did. This team's had a ton a flexibility the past 2 seasons. The problem is that Veach has taken all that wiggle room and pissed it away.

Veach is the youngest GM in the NFL. Our only hope is that he can grow and learn from his mistakes...doesn't look promising.

What’s the penalty for practicing in pads and tackling? I’m willing to chip in for the fine

Bingo. Plenty to bitch about regarding Clark, the Watson TD isn't one of them.

Watson beats damn near every LB one on one there not named Kuechly.

I would trade our next 10 first round draft picks for Keuchly!!

Speaks did more than Clark

Dude is a missle. The exact kind of LB we are missing.

Dorsey paid Tamba when he was old and busted. He gave him a 3 year contract extension and Tamba made 1 tackle for that contract. That was our return LMAO

I don’t think we need to discuss Eric Berry and his paralyzing contract that we will still be paying to this day. Pretty sure we owe that guy $8 million alone next season.

It’s about as bad as Frank Clark if you consider that both Tamba and Berry were only on the field (off and on) for about 10 of a projected 144 games for the life of those two contracts combined.

He’s was taken one spot ahead of us. Instead we took Poe because Chiefs

Hali was a mistake; a panic move born of Houston's injury. Ultimately the biggest problem with that one was the weird timing of it, but it's also probably its most obvious explanation. They set a few million dollars in cap space on fire by allowing those 'voidable years' to lapse just a few days prior to reaching an extension. There was no reason not to roll those in and push that cap space out a bit. It would've made little difference long-term (would've washed by year 3) but if they'd have had any intention of re-signing him, they'd have never let that happen. But the lack of progress on Houston's knee screwed them up.

The Hali deal is admittedly not great - hate seeing a panic move like that - but nothing approaching Clark. At least the Hali deal was a result of injury; the Clark deal was hubris. In fact, the Hali deal doesn't even get to Hitchens level and Hitchens is like 4th on Veach's hit list in two seasons. All told it was a 2 year, $14 million extension that they got a mediocre season out of (2016) and a lost season in 2017. I mean....is that any worse than Okafor's deal? And most seem to think that Okafor's deal is a GOOD one for Veach.

You're REALLY gonna put Berry on Dorsey? Most folks seem to think that Dorsey holding the line on Berry and refusing to capitulate to Berry's representatives ridiculous demands ended up pissing Clark off and contributed to Dorsey's firing. Absolutely not - there is no way you hold Eric Berry against John Dorsey. Dorsey desperately tried to avoid that trainwreck until Clark got himself involved and ****ed everything up. That's pretty much a matter of public record at this point. No way - that was 100% Clark Hunt.