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scottyg · 02-21-2022, 10:47 AM

(02-20-2022, 04:39 PM)TheO-LineMatters Wrote:

(02-20-2022, 04:27 PM)TheDuke007 Wrote: I'm in agreement with keeping our good players, but I also think many have fuzzy memories regarding Ramsey and Ngakoue. It's not like the Jaguars set out to trade them for no reason. They were both holding out and the Jaguars felt their hands were tied. People also forget that we got a lot in return for them. In exchange for Ramsey and Ngakoue, the Jaguars got two first rounders, a second rounder, a fourth rounder and a fifth rounder. Justin Jefferson was available with one of those first round picks. We could have had Justin Jefferson, a first rounder, a second rounder, a fourth rounder and a fifth rounder. If you prefer quality over quantity, we could have used the second, fourth and fifth round picks to trade up in the first round. That should have gotten us a very quality starter to go along with Justin Jefferson. Yes, we lost two quality players, but we should have gained at least two quality players as a result and saved a bunch of salary cap space at the same time. This team wasn't destroyed because of those trades. The Jaguars suffered because of poor drafting after the trades.

So true. It tears my heart out just to re-live how badly we used those valuable draft picks. We got nothing in return, because of terrible selections. What made it worse was that almost this entire board was in agreement on who we should've taken and those players have become stars at their positions.

Hey, consensus works for me. I don't watch as much college football as I used to at all, so much of how I feel about our draft picks comes from opinions expressed on this board. If nobody is complaining about a particular pick, I'm quite good with it. If a lot of people are [BLEEP], chances are it was a crappy pick.

And yes, that was sarcasm. He did drop more catchable balls later in his career than I would have liked, probably due to coke-induced lack of focus. But he never failed to make the difficult catches.

Something that hasn't been mentioned enough, if at all on this board... How do players and a team manage to maintain focus to perform at their best when they are surrounded by so much dysfunction? The best players will manage under any circumstance, but we didn't have any of the best players.
Cullen did a remarkable job keeping the defense focused through the second half of the season in spite of all of the dysfunction, but the offense not so much. Shenault wasn't the only guy that dropped way too many balls last year, and lack of focus could have just as easily contributed as anything else.