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They are, but good God, if Hurts is going to play like that then you guys better get used to the idea of Kenny Pickett starting.
Why would they start Kenny Pickett? Hurts threw a third as many touchdown passes last night as Kenny Pickett threw in 12 games in last year. They would have no chance of getting anywhere in particular with Pickett, no matter how poorly Hurts plays there is no point in putting in Pickett if Hurts is healthy. They're at the point in the carousel where if Hurts plays poorly, Sirianni is next on the chopping block, and only then after another bad season will Hurts be cut loose, probably as part of a down-to-the-studs rebuild with no more than a half dozen players on this team seeing the next competitive Eagles season.
After the Donovan McNabb experience, if I were a black quarterback signing a big contract, I'd require a secret written agreement from the team that they will never, under any circumstances, sign a white backup QB. All my backups must be black. I've never seen any black QB other than Mahomes who didn't get talk radio "questions" about replacing him with the white backup after a mediocre game. It's inevitable.
I wasn't suggesting they'd ever consider benching Hurts for Pickett. The way he was playing made it look like he was eventually going to get injured.
Edit - If you think having a black QB is bad, try having a black coach. Tomlin haters not only call for his firing on an annual basis, regardless of what the team does, but also refuse to give him credit for his successes which include winning a Super Bowl. This is discounted because it was allegedly done "with Cowher's players", as though there's no GM or front office involved. Never mind that the team was 8–8 Cowher's last year. Never mind that literally every coach who won a Stanley Cup with the Penguins had less time with the team than Tomlin. This is logically contradictory with the other criticism they have, which is that the teams with Bell and AB should have done more. Isn't that admitting that the guy can put a team together? So either he's a bad team assembler or he's a bad game day coach. I could excuse this as just general sports fan stupidity but, in person, they always have to bring up that he was only hired so Dan Rooney could "walk the walk" when it came to his rule. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they think the Steelers would have been better had they hired the other leading candidate, Russ Grimm, who, as far as I know, was never considered for a head coaching position after that.
The other thing they like to bring up is that winning seasons don't matter if you don't go anywhere in the playoffs. They may have a point, but I suspect this is influenced by how long it's been since we've seen a truly dreadful season. If we were to start going 6–11 every year they'd long for the days when Tomlin was coach and there was at least a reason to watch. A couple years ago I actually did an analysis where I looked at every NFL head coach since Tomlin was hired and, giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt, graded every one as either better, the same, or clearly worse. 7 were arguably better, 10 were about the same, and 80 were unarguably worse. Some of those guys were obvious mistakes, but most of them were guys with good resumes who fans were excited about. Suggesting Tomlin should be fired after a winning season is one of the stupidest sports takes out there, and at least half of the people making the argument don't even pretend that it isn't because he's black.
One final dumb criticism that's always brought up is his lack of a coaching tree, as though this matters. The only one of his assistants this even applies to is Matt Canada — he inherited Bruce Arians and Dick LeBeau, Todd Haley had been a head coach previously, Keith Butler retired (and was in the organization longer than Tomlin), and Randy Fichtner would have stayed with the team if they hadn't been mesmerized by Canada. And if Arthur Smith coaches elsewhere he won't count as part of Tomlin's tree, either. It's a dumb argument anyway.
My fault for misunderstanding! Hurts is either going to make it or he isn't, injury and talent wise. Trying to play him at half his power level is mostly pointless, though the brotherly shove play might be gone after the shambles last night which might save him a few hits.
Tomlin is serially underrated across the game. I'm not sure why. No other coach comes close on steady Eddie record, there has never been an unwatchable Steelers season under Tomlin. Maybe this will be the year but I doubt it. In the NBA where the regular season itself is mostly unwatchable anyway, I understand the championship or bust mentality. But I'd sooner have an NFL team that plays good entertaining football 17 games a season every year than a rebuild, most of which completely fail anyway.
Just good enough is a dangerous trap in the NFL. For the record I love Tomlin, but you can see why people might be upset when you have teams like the Eagles that do repeated tear down and rebuilds, especially given how hard it is to land a good QB in general but when you are mildly above average in particular.
Many fans (maybe foolishly) would choose ups and downs instead of consistency.
I guess the shame of it is that you don't get to pick which team you root for, for the most part, so you're stuck with the style of whatever team you like.
In the NFL I actually watch a lot of regular season games with my family, and I'd sooner pick a competitive if unspectacular team every year over unwatchable year after year while hoping for the future. MLB I understand tanking because it takes years of playing lots of young players for some of them to hit and start to build a core, there's value in playing the kids live. The star centric nature of basketball makes it, for most teams, an unfortunate necessity in the NBA.
But in the NFL, there's a confluence of short careers, limited and uneven development of players in the league, complicated salary cap rules, and the randomness inherent in player selection. Yes, you need to tank if you want to draft a Joe Burrow. But sometimes you go all in to get #1 overall and you get nothing. The Jets have spent the last six seasons starting a second overall and a third overall pick, they've never had a winning record in that time.
Good teams with good coaches and GMs and systems might have missed picks, down years, and problems, but they're able to reset quickly without years of losing by making good selections in later rounds and developing players well. Glancing over the QB rankings at TheRinger for a quick reference, out of the top 20: Hurts, Purdy, Love, Smith, Prescott could all have been drafted by basically any team in their draft year. I'd sooner bet on a good organization developing a fresh player than I'd bet on a bad organization turning things around. For every CJ Stroud there's a Bryce Young. And sometimes you tank for the top pick and end up with a Baker Mayfield or a Trevor Lawrence, whose best seasons have looked like the ones Tomlin's detractors are complaining about.
I don't disagree, especially given how often we see "what ifs" in the NFL. Andy Reid is probably going to end his career a top 5, maybe even a top 3 coach. Would that have happened if they hadn't gotten lucky with Mahomes? Is it still deserved anyway? What about Baker, what would have happened if he ended up on say, the Patriots during Bill's era?
Football is a weird sport sometimes.
Although taking a serviceable QB with a good team ala Purdy seems like a good idea......but look at how much Kirk is making, I'm not sure how much that works either.
League needs more talent.
It's a bizarre combination of an individual sport for the QB and a sport that requires a very large team. Getting a good QB is probably the hardest job in any sport when it comes to roster construction. Getting access to a top talent QB is going to cost either a lot of draft capital, which you normally acquire by having a bad team, or it costs a lot of cap space which makes it hard to build a good team around the QB. Then in a few years they have to give the rookie QB a massive contract anyway. It's a weird game of windows.
That feels like a market failure. It shouldnt be that hard, in a country of 350 million people, to turn up a few good QBs each year. I suspect the problem is that most non-pro teams are focused on a weird combination of "good sportsmanship" and "we need to win right now, so lets just run it every play." There's no youth development systen like the big pro Soccer clubs have in Europe.
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Trevor Lawrence’s best season saw his team making it all the way to the AFC Divisional Round and giving the Chiefs a hard-fought game which the Jags could have won if only a couple of moments (Christian Kirk’s costly drop, a bungled red-zone interception on what should have been an easily scooped tipped pass) had gone differently. I would submit that this is a good bit better than mediocrity.
Trevor Lawrence's best season (SO FAR) saw the team go 9-8 in the regular season. Which is the kind of season that Tomlin gets criticized for, being mediocre-good but not good enough to win a championship and remaining trapped in purgatory because playing like that they will never accumulate the draft capital to go get a really talented QB like Trevor Lawrence.
I like Lawrence and the Jaguars, they were fun to watch when they came to the Linc. (Has to be the only time in history an opposing coach came to a stadium with a statue of him outside, right?) I'd like to see them find their way to a great team. But Lawrence is definitely an example of how tanking for picks is a fraught strategy, already they're through Lawrence's cheap years.
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