Why do you keep ignoring that this team scored TWENTY-ONE POINTS PER GAME once Charles took over?

That's good for a 14-16 ranking most years, and plenty enough to win games, provided you can STOP THE ****ING RUN.

You keep talking around something you know you can't dispute:

That with even an average run defense last year, this team wins 6 games minimum, and potentially 8.

Guess I should of actually completed my thought in that last post. What I was trying to get to was that vital positions in the 3-4 (NT is one of them!) will and actually is starting to (with Wilfork) to get a lot more expensive to retain. There are a lot of teams jumping on the latest defensive fad and the quality talent pool to run it isn't that deep.

Is Cassel the QB?

Which is part of the point.

You can put all the playmakers you want on the offense, as long as the franchise hitches it's wagon to Cassel, you're not getting as much out of them as you should.

Doing something to fix a run defense that allowed close to 170 per game, while doing NOTHING to the offense is good enough for 8 wins with this schedule, and possibly more - in spite of the QB.

Christ, we're talking about the most fundamental principle in football - you won't win if you can't stop the run.

(unless you have a Peyton Manning-type that can put an entire team on his back)

If Cassel's his QB, probably one

What is Jones as the scape-goat for Cassel's failings, Alex?

Class is about to start, I gotta leave this to Deez and Dane.

Later.

Remains to be seen. Wilfork is the exception, not the rule. Apart from Wilfork, rarely are NTs paid a whole lot more than about $30M. Even the best ones.

how cute


they will miss you XoXoXo

Because you're acting like a better offense wouldn't have won those games either. How many of our first 8 games would we have won if we didn't completely shit our pants on pass offense? Dallas, Oakland, arguably Baltimore. Given that 5 out of our last 8 games, we scored 14 points or less, you don't think offensive improvement was a priority?

If you improve our run defense, our defense still has major issues and our offense is just as bad as last year. Jamaal Charles is a hell of a back, but he's a 15-carry a game guy and without McCluster, he's the only damn guy on the field anybody on defense will pay attention to.

The idea that we could have improved this team to better than 8-8 based on 2 moves? That's ****ing insane.

If Cassel is the QB, we're not going anywhere anyway. Regardless of how amazing our defense is.

Just because Cassel is on this team today doesn't mean you completely ignore the offense.

I'd rather a balanced team than to be dominant on only one side of the ball. If McCluster is everything he's cracked up to be, he's more than worth the pick even if it comes at the expense of run D... (for one season where we weren't going to compete anyway).

What was the other move, zilla? NT and QB?

Honestly, this doesn't even strike me as arguable if these are the positions, since we're talking about, hands-down, the two most essential positions on their respective sides of the ball.

To use a baseball analogy, it's somewhat like talking about adding a #1 SP and 3-hole hitter and claiming that you won't win significantly more games. Uh, yeah...you will.

He's talking about an ILB and a NT.

You won't get any argument out of me that we need to improve our QB play and it's probably not Cassel. At the same time, we talk a lot about getting first round QBs, and much as I hyped up Clausen before the draft, 32 teams say he aien't.

I said it then and I'll say it now, when your a team that lacks foundation pieces, like you know an entire front 7, using 2nd round picks to take role players is extremely shortsighted.

It's like putting a really nice stereo in your car that's worth 300 dollars that needs a new axle and engine.

ROFLROFL Don't discount the picks, fumbles and sacks :)

I'm hoping for 8-8 at best, probably will be 6-10