Where was that intermediate and deep game all year when Thuney was at guard? They weren't getting it with other LTs.

It is a fact that the offense looked the best it had all year when he was moved outside. You want to credit it to a massive change in play calling? Fine, it's never black and white and is always a combination of many factors, but I'll take the offense the last few weeks over the mid-season offense.

I wish DJ was in shape and could play at an average level for an entire game. Unfortunately, he hasn't shown the ability to do it.

This is some of the absolute best football talk on the internet right now. Threads like this convince me of the left and right brain dominance. Some of us just see the game different and process cause and effect differently. Not to mention risk evaluation. I love all of it. Just kind of scared that I'm on the side with Uchieffy, but Staylor, Crow, Htis and several guys who are regularly right are on this island so cheers.

People trust their eyes on a live watch WAY too much, and then just ****ing dig in and won't listen to anything that contradicts their initial impression. People who know ball accept new information and are willing to change their minds.

I'm on an active group text with some KC friends, that includes an all-state high school running back (whose son is an excellent HS QB and future starter at a strong 6A school) , and a former All Big 12 middle linebacker who had a cup of coffee in the NFL. They both reacted to Humphries giving up that quick win sack on Sunday like going back to Thuney was a given.

And then we looked at the clip again after the game was over, and they both said (a) That's not all on Humphries (b) he didn't have a good rep, but clearly expected an outside shoulder chip from Perine (c) either Perine was wrong, or Humphries was wrong (d) if Wentz is paying attention like Mahomes would be, he sees that coming, steps up just a touch, and dumps it to Perine (e) in summary, it wasn't nearly as disastrous as it looked like.

Same thing on the sack where the DE was lined up on the slot corners hip, and Suamataia didn't keep an eye on the across-face move by the rusher, and the DE got home.

Just broke down the All 69 tape of Thuney's snaps at LT and he reminds me a bit of the drummer for Def Leppard meets Jim Abbott

Minter getting a HC job in the NFC or AFC East would be ideal. Haven't seen any buzz for that, really, but Jets, Jaguars, or Saints would be sweet.

I could see him taking the Jags. There's some stuff to work with there.

I think you're right about Brown. The offense looks crisp when it has guys out there who can win quickly underneath, and Brown adds that back. I think that, combined with Thuney stabilizing LT, combined with adjusting the playcalls, is the real key for things looking like they're clicking into place against Houston and Pittsburgh.

Hey, what has seven arms and sucks?

The only time I really trust what I see live is when it's in person.

And even that has problems all its own. But at least the well isn't poisoned by what you're told or shown and you see the full picture.

The problem is that we give the broadcast WAY too much weight. The announcers set a narrative, the replays, etc... are chosen to reinforce that narrative. And then we get beat over the head with it until we think "Well Jim Nantz says it so it must be true..."

And you often don't even SEE what led to the real problem on the field. It may not have even been caught by the camera.

It's why I get so frustrated by some of responses when I say "Hey, maybe PM ain't playing great..."

I mean look at the Vikings/Lions game. The OL got trucked a lot (despite being really solid all year). The WRs were struggling to find space and had several key drops.

Had PM had a game like that, we'd have said "Man, he had a 45% pressure rate and his WRs dropped several key plays that would've led to points while his coaches went Full Madden and left points all over the field. What more could he have done out there?"

We'd hand-waive the misses and focus on the shitty circumstances.

When Darnold has a game like that everyone says "Man, Darnold was a real piece of shit..." They lock in on the misses and disregard the circumstances.

It's the old "When you don't like the facts, argue the law. When you don't like the law, argue the facts. When you don't like either, pound on the table..."

Sometimes its ALL of those things. But when the broadcast or our preconceived notions decide otherwise, we just won't listen to anything other than what we heard on TV or what we'd kinda already decided was true.

Humphries ain't ready to go, 2 weeks before the game.

LMAO

You're such a coward.

They were attempting it with the other guys. They basically stopped when Thuney moved over.

Playing DJ or not will not dictate whether we run the offense of the last few weeks. It's almost 100% play calling and scheme. They're covering for him. You could start DJ and still call those plays.

But there are plays you can call with a competent LT that you cannot call with Thuney at LT.

People are so scared of the floor that they refuse to look at the ceiling

Stop being scared.

It's rarely possible to clean real meaning from a live watch, especially for fans. When the game is live, the emotions are high and thinking analytically takes a back seat.

Always gotta watch the game again to get the analysis. And what I saw is the same as what a lot of the blue check mark guys saw.

All this BS about DJ getting manhandled and being so bad he will ruin the playoffs is ridiculous talk from people that fear change.

Not the best thread for this but since the value of Hollywood was brought up, and we are seeing it play out in real games now, I think there's two truths Veach has to contend with entering 2025

1) You need to try to bring Hollywood back. We'll see what Rice's impending suspension looks like, but it's very obvious that a starting WR trio of Rice, Worthy, and Brown could be special. If Kelce is back, that's just icing on the cake to fill that other underneath role.

2) We do NOT want to enter the season depending solely on two rather small WRs to stay healthy for 20 games, one with an injury history already (HB). We've seen the impact that missing just one of those guys can have on production. So you need improved depth. What's the answer?

I like bringing D-Hop back. He has much tangible and intangible value as WR4 and WR3 until Rice returns. But how do you answer the depth behind the fast guys? Hardman hasn't been dependable enough to be the answer.

Have you seen him play well yet?

I like Rimigio a an option over Hardman next year.
I also hold out hope of them getting Tyquan Thorn ready as a 5th or 6th WR

Rice
Brown
Worthy
Hopkins
Remigio
Thornton
??? Watson???

Waiting for someone to make a DJ humphries jersey bet

I'm trying to figure out how Calliendo got beat THAT badly THAT quickly.

You would just disagree if I said I had seen some positive play out of him, so I fail to see the point in you asking the question or my answering it.

Same way Morris was getting beat.

We can't see how the play started, but in the first frame there, it looks as simple as Caliendo lunging without having his base under him, Heyward caught/redirected the punch and Caliendo's momentum just took him right out of the play.

That's why it's fascinating to see the OL work on their feints and stuff. They're really like boxers in a lot of ways. When they telegraph that initial hand placement, it's really easy for a pass rusher to just throw those hands out of the way. But the good ones will throw some window dressing in there and mix up their hands and aim points. You see the real technicians throw a 'false' punch out there quite a bit to try to draw a swipe and then just slam into their defender to try to dissuade them from jumping the strike like that again.

When a DL loses really badly, it's almost as comical as when an OL does. And most of the time, it's for very similar reasons.

Caliendo looks like he's aggressively trying to sell an extended warranty of some kind to Heyward there.

So my guy tells me that the coaches DO want to be able to slide Joe back into guard, BUT this is all dependent on how well Humphries progresses the next two weeks in practice.

So there you go. It's all contingent on the next two weeks.

Pretty much what we've thought since Sunday.

Well yeah. Nobody dislikes DJ. You can clearly tell he’s getting back in shape

Yup. But if he doesn't progress over the two weeks they are comfortable with keeping Joe at LT.

So it appears, in this weird way, we are all correct in our assessments.

If DJ gets the nod we know he showed enough over these weeks in practice that they feel he is good to go.

He also told me that Mahomes already has a good rapport with DJ and is rooting for him to win that spot.

This is really all we can hope for at this point.

DJ playing is obviously the higher ceiling. It's just a question of whether or not DJ is ready.

So they just gonna have him running bear crawls until he can do the field and back without vomiting?

And not those pussy 'there and back' bear crawls either. Oh no, the ones where you crawl out 10 yards then backpedal back to the goal line, then crawl out 20 yards, then backpedal back, and then 30, 40, 50.....then 40, 30, 20, 10.

Because my football coach in HS was a damn psychopath...

Having to go all the way out to goalline to goalline and back was something I only saw him make someone do once and can't even remember why. Some school related shit; got in a fight or something. That's 1,100 yards of bear crawls (and of course the 1100 yards of backpedaling as well). Essentially a half mile of each.

I'm not sure the kid even made it goalline to goalline before he pretty much collapsed and vomited everywhere. Which was, I'm pretty sure, the point. Had he managed to get that done, Coach would've had some other god-awful idea in store until he just broke the kid's will.

He’s a professional athlete who will have had 3 weeks of practice and conditioning plus actual game reps this past week… I would expect him to be ready to go for the divisional.

This is why I hedge the shit out of everything and just do so cagey enough that y'all barely notice.

No matter what happened, I was gonna claim victory.

I feel like conditioning for a 300 lb guy is just a different beast than it would be for the rest of us.

I mean wouldn't it stand to reason that he'd have been doing cardio BEFORE he signed? And over the last several weeks?

I almost wonder if it has nothing to do with stamina. If he ain't there now, when's he gonna get there?

Football shape is football shape and it just seems that the only way you can do it is by playing. That's not gonna happen riding a cardio bike.

It's just wild to me to think that after two weeks of the best offense we've seen all year with Thuney at LT suddenly him having short arms and the passing game undergoing this mythical truncating (completely unsupported by video evidence) is going to lead to teams 85 Bearing us in the postseason LMAO

All because we MUST start DJ Humphries to um, I dunno, be Willie Roaf and THEN we can run this offense as god intended. 11-step drops and 7 seconds of pass protection.

Like, WHAT?

Yes Clay -- you're right and now it's Andy Reid that simply doesn't understand how obvious it is...

It isn't about his weight but more than ACL and now the hamstring.

How the body works is that, when there's an injury or "pain", that works as afferent feedback to the sensory part of the brain. And then there's a reduction in motor unit recruitment and thus, his ability to be explosive is very diminished .

So my guess is part of why he got beat on that speed rush is that the hammy and knee still aren't quite 100%.

If he can get through these next two weeks and show progress they will slide him out there.

I do think if he's getting his ass handed to him we can slide Joe out to LT.

At least we have options.

Poor Thuney :(

https://media4.giphy.com/media/4ufcx...giphy.gif&ct=g

You've completely mischaracterized the argument.

There is ample video evidence that they adjusted play calling to suit Thuney and protect him. You'd have to be blind not to see it.

And no, we don't need Willie Roaf. Literally nobody has said that. We just want Joe Thuney to play the position he's earned a gold jacket playing. It's pretty ****ing simple.

Andy Reid obviously has no idea what he's doing. Thuney is the best LT ever.

LMAO

Well sure, practice is definitely going to be the most important part of the process for getting into game shape. I am just assuming that work outs will be ongoing as well.

Same page man.

The best 3 offensive games we had this season IMO were with Thuney at LT.

I said this before. It's like the Gannon/Grbac thing.

You don't stop using what is working. For the "potential" that this other thing is better. Not right now.

But we shall see. I'm not confident that DJ will be ready in two weeks and that at best he serves as a backup

No there isn't ROFL

Like, did you think Wanya was featured in an offense full of Vermeil-esque seven step drops for the previous 3 months?

ROFL

The Chiefs depth of target has been low ALL SEASON.

The Chiefs didn't change their offense.

Mahomes got the ball out faster because he felt comfortable in the pocket. Why is this even being debated?

My impression just watching the games has been htismaqe is correct. It isn't really about depth of target, it's how fast the ball gets out. Much of the season it was like "holy crap this play is taking forever to develop". Seen a lot less of that recently.

A training camp and preseason is over for him now.. Time to get ready for the real season..

The quick hitters don’t require Mahomes to be comfortable in the pocket. Suddenly we saw more of those when Hollywood made his appearance. We also saw Thuney getting help that the other two guys hadn’t been receiving on a regular basis.

The offensive scheme did go through an adjustment and it’s silly to argue otherwise.

Because Pat felt comfortable to get through his reads. He was seeing ghosts because he was getting hit so much.

Once he stopped getting hit so much he was able to quickly go through his reads and that's when the offense took off again

Our worst offensive game was also against Cleveland or are we just hand-waving away that game? We had our best two offensive games against teams that are collapsing worse than Joe Biden stepping off Air Force One.

Look, when your all-world LG is playing LT just good enough to prevent diaster, that's the definition of broken.

And Andy obviously agrees or he wouldn't even be entertaining putting DJ in. If Thuney at left tackle is that good, Andy would put him out there instead of DJ.

The goon squad is right. Everyone else just doesn’t know ball. Tune into shaggy Shane and co at 8 on YouTube to learn more.

JFC

It has nothing to do with protection.

AGAIN:

Texans - fastest time to release since week 4, 2021
Steelers - fastest time to release ever, in his entire career

You can say the play calling didn't change but you and Meatpeeker are the only ones that believe that. None of the talking heads out there from Keysor to Verdarame agree with you.

It truly is ENTIRELY that.

Some folks want to see this as some indictment of Thuney and it just isn't.

Nobody - NOBODY - is shitting on Thuney here. It's amazing he's been as credible at LT as he's been.

What we want is the dude who's probably the best LG of the last 20 years - or at least the best for this team and how they want to play - to play LG again.

And nobody is saying it's VITAL to anything that he does so. Only that it would be one hell of a luxury to have and that it's absolutely worth spinning the wheel and taking your chances to see if you have it.

Again, the hyperbole AIN'T from this side of the argument. At all.

how would getting the ball out FASTER be a result of being comfortable in a pocket that never even truly formed.

And again, it's all a question of degrees. It's not that he's being quick, it's that he has been quicker than he has ever been in his entire career.

That's GOTTA mean something. Because he's been extremely comfortable in that pocket many many times throughout the course of an 8 year career and he wasn't ripping the ball out like it was on fire then.

Except that Clay posted tons of highlights from those games where Pat hit plenty of 5 and 7 step drops..........

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

And then threw the ball instead of waiting for guys to get open. I've watched the All 22. You can't always see the WR routes on the live broadcast. They adjusted a lot of their play calls to have more guys working underneath to get the ball out quicker.

And again, the player we're trying to get off the field is Caliendo. If we could have Thuney at LT and Thuney at LG, I'm all in.

He got hit plenty vs. Cleveland. And as I've said since about week 4, oftentimes he gets hit BECAUSE he's holding the ball too long. And there's just no way he doesn't know this - dudes as intuitive a QB as the league has seen. He studies his ass off.

He had to know some of that was happening. Which is again why I get to how massive Brown and not Thuney has been to this change because that's the addition that saw the offense go from the horror show it was against Cleveland to the unit that looked good against Houston/Pitt. (Seriously, you can't have watched that game if you think Cleveland was one of the 3 best games our offense has had this year -- it's one of the 5 worst this offense has had in the entirety of the Reid/Mahomes era).

Am I supposed to believe he mentally changed overnight when they played Houston? I just can't get there.

The simplest explanation is a change in the progressions - short to long. With the longer being 'see me' plays on those corner routes that Hollywood can excel at or at least draw attention away from. All of which are extremely easy to install and would show immediate dividends.

As well as last year. Rashee had one of the lowest WR aDOT’s in the league.

He showed like 8 clips and again the stats don't like.

Fastest pop time of his entire career.

No, you don't have 'tons of 5 and 7 step drops' and get that. Because it's all relative to him and he's not had an entire career full of poor protection.

It CAN'T be comfort in the pocket because he's BEEN comfortable in the pocket and wasn't getting the ball out in under 2.4 seconds.

The math is what the math is.

Rashee is built for that. I mean like lab designed YAC monster. When he went out no one took that quick hitter role and it was getting Mahomes killed.

You and Coogs and your obsession with only watching the highlights...

Highlight plays are, by definition, plays where things went well. The issues appear on plays when they don't go well.

We have a former pro bowl LT on the roster. We have a once-in-a-generation LG.

I can't believe anybody would rather have Thuney at LT and Caliendo at LG. That's an inferior lineup, period.

The ONLY reason people have a problem with this is because deep down, they don't trust the team.

If DJ is ready, they will play him. If he's not, they won't. It's as simple as that. Take the emotion out of it, look at the two scenarios, and realize that objectively, DJ and Thuney are the best lineup possible.

It remains to be seen if DJ can make that happen but that's the coaches' call. Have a little ****ing faith.

Ok but you didn’t see the 16 play Netflix High light package!

And I'm telling y'all, that's spamming 2, maybe 3, really simple concepts that the Steelers/Texans didn't get figured out.

The reason it looked so easy was because Andy was willing to spam 'em. That's also WHY we were able to get the ball out so quickly. We knew what we wanted to use with the looks we got and immediately knew where the ball was going to go.

And Andy will absolutely do that in the post-season. But I don't think the smarter DCs will allow us to get away with it as much. We'll need plan Bs and I'd be floored, Thuney or no, if we stay that efficient with a pop time that low in the post-season.

I just don't think its a realistic expectation.

I'm certain I can find more plays where it wasn't a "quick pass" and Mahomes held the ball, because the protection held up, and then threw it short due to coverage. LMAO

To what end? Are you really trying to argue that a lineup of Thuney and Caliendo is ideal?

Have at it.

The numbers won't change.

The 'spam' theory also makes sense in the context of the quick turnaround.

When you don't have the time to install more advanced concepts, you fall back on executing the simple ones.

A lot.

Ok but you understand that averages are averages. It doesn’t mean every play happened that fast. You could just pull up a passing chart and see a lot of what you want to see. There’s a lot of outs, screens and slants. And it was beautifull. Exactly what you want to see with a battered line to build on.



Also unrelated to mama said alligators so angry argument..

DJ has been sidelined a few weeks where he hasnt been conditioning. The next two weeks should help him get back to a fair baseline.

I'm arguing this notion that we took out all the intermediate and deep routes in our offense is complete garbage. ROFL

I don't really care. The GIFS I posted are plenty of evidence. Those two long completions to Brown ALONE are evidence. Those aren't three step drops.

And the plays that were quick hitters helped set up those longer developing plays by keeping the defense honest.

Literally nobody said we took all the intermediate and deep routes out. Nobody said anything about 3-step vs 5 and 7-step drops.
You're speaking in absolute hyperbole again.

Oh? ROFL

Strange that somehow we were still hitting receivers intermediate and deep in those two games!

Oops. Didn't realize I did that. See? Never speak in absolutes. You will always fail.

Well, brownie points for fessin' up.

I try pretty hard to avoid speaking absolutes.

I don't try nearly hard enough to stay off CP when I'm baked.

So then you were wrong about them changing the offense.

Cool.

Not at all.

I was wrong about them removing ALL routes as opposed to just some of them. I spoke in absolutes and got bit by my own hyperbole.

You can't say that either. You don't know what the playcalling is like or what they changed if anything at all.

It could simply be that as the season went on that Worthy developed and got on the same page with Pat more, same for Dhop.

I am enjoying hyperbole is as the "word of the day" in this thread.


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I watch the games. You can see what they were doing differently.

You watch so well that you said they removed all the deep passing plays.

You don't know what was changed. If anything. Neither do I.

I misspoke. I did not misunderstand what I was watching.

Anybody that watches the All 22 has seen it. You're literally the only person making this argument.

Hey!

I just asked a question based off of the premises that everyone was saying we were helping Thuney. I admitted that during the games my eyes follow the ball and I don't watch line play. I tried to find the game to re-watch and focus on just how much help Thuney was actually getting. (And I guess I am defining help as an extra blocker helping him on a play.) All I could find was 16 plays. My bad.

In my defense, at least the 16 plays I watched is a couple of more plays than we got to see of pass play package for Humphries against the Broncos several pages back. ;)

I’m just giving you shit. Your effort watching that greatly exceeds the average around here. Now clay that doesn’t mean some people don’t watch a lot more than 16.

It's all good!

All I want is a W in 2 weeks. Another W a week after that. And one more W two weeks after that. I could really give a shit less who plays, and how we get those W's.