(11-02-2021, 05:04 PM)Mikey Wrote:

(11-02-2021, 03:48 PM)jaguarmvp Wrote: It seems all of our GM's since the very early days have gone from Mediocre to Bad at drafting players.   The draft is a pure crap shoot but the jags constantly are crapping out with the picks.   The Rams over the last several years have traded almost all of their draft capital for guaranteed NFL talent.  Including Ramsey and Fowler from us.  I keep hearing the same old cliche of building through the draft but with all the draft captial we have had the past decade it's not working for us.  It is an out of the box idea but the Rams have been contenders for years now using this method.  

I for one am tired of seeing first round talent under perform here.  I would much rather trade that pick for proven NFL talent. Lets take our draft captial and do some shopping .  Just a thought..

It's an interesting model. They focus on late picks, and fill specific roles with them. So, you still have the task of hitting on the picks (and FA), but the risk is a lot lower when most of your work is being done on day 3 picks or leftover FA. Nobody else is doing that, and it's worked for them thusfar.

The Rams approach is far from novel or original.  If you are focusing on the acquiring veteran aspect of it, Washington did that a lot in the 70s and 1980s.

But I think focusing on veterans alone misses a huge part of the analysis.

The Rams, like many other successful teams dating back to the 1980s, took chances on insanely talented guys lesser teams deemed too cancerous to retain.

The last year the Rams went to the Super Bowl, they traded for Dante Fowler, whom the Jaguars traded away after he got into the training camp fight with Ngakoue.  Now, the Rams are considered one of the leading contenders in the NFC in part because they traded for Jalen Ramsey, another guy deemed too cancerous to keep.  But the Rams were on the opposite end of this dynamic decades earlier.  The Rams thought Kevin Greene and Jerome Bettis were not worth the hassle they represented and let them walk.  Both wound up in Pittsburgh, where they went on to Super bowls and Hall of Fame careers,while the Rams languished in mediocrity for years after jettisoning those guys, wastign draft capital trying to replace them.

Last year's Super Bowl champion, Tampa Bay, got key contributons from two guys deemed too much of a headache for their original teams.  Those guys were Antonio Brown and Leonard Fournette.  Both remain key contributors to the Bucs current success.  While the Steelers have sustained their success after Brown's departure, the Jaguars have fallen off after they cut Fournette.

Marshawn Lynch was jettisoned by the Buffalo Bills for numerous off field transgressions.  They felt they couldn't win with him.  But Lynch wound up in Seattle, where he wound up a key contributor to their back to  back Super Bowl seasons and is probably one of the most beloved players in Seahawks history.  Meanwhile, the Bills languished for several more seasons after allowing Lynch to walk.

The Patriots have sustained their success over the past two decades in part by taking chances on guys like Corey Dillon, Randy Moss, Bryan Cox that were deemed malcontents by their original teams.

People in the Jets organization found Keyshawn Johnson to be obnoxious and divisive.  Yet Tampa added him to their roster and he added 106 receptions to Tampa's first Super bowl winning team.

In 1996, the Jaguars thought Andre Rison was too much of a problem on and off the field, but the Packers added the former first round pick after the Jaguars released him and won the Super Bowl that same year, with Rison catching a TD pass in that very game.

Charles Haley was a superior pass rusher who had made several Pro Bowls and helped the 49ers reach two Super Bowls in the late 1980s.  But the 49ers got tired of his antics and traded him to Dallas.  Dallas wound up winning three Super bowls with him as the leading pass rusher.

There are nyriad other examples I could cite but I have omitted them for time.

Why is it these so called cancers and malcontents were incompatible with their original teams winning but were able to help subsequent teams to championships?  If they were that caustic, that damaging to a team's psyche, why didn't they derail these teams from winning championships?  Why do these lesser teams who purge their rosters of these talented cancers almost never in a position to prosper after these guys leave?

The fact is, the lesser teams almost always make a mistake getting rid of talented players who have no substance abuse issues but who are otherwise deemed nuisances or cancers.  The better teams almost always exploit these teams and thier mistakes to their benefit.

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