(04-18-2024, 12:11 PM)cland Wrote:

(04-18-2024, 09:18 AM)Caldrac Wrote: Still keep circling back to Pederson and Baalke's comments in January. "Our best five didn't start until the season finale" and "We have to get better, stronger in the trenches". Guys can get stronger in the weight room, but, some guys are just naturally stronger than others and you have to accept that and come to terms with that. 

You're only improving this by adding fresh blood into the mix.

Those two quotes are both scary and opposing.  A. You lost your season finale and your chance to go to the playoffs to a 6-11 team in the season finale.  B. So if you need to get better and stronger, then your best five weren't good enough.

I always laugh at 'they'll get stronger in an NFL weight room' saying, indicating that colleges don't have the absolute best-of-the-best weight training facilities.  I maintain that 99.9% of fans with their only life goal of getting stronger, will never be able to press 225lbs 30 times.  As you said, the increase in strength for some line players is really the last bit of maturation of their bodies, and some players are simply built with natural strength.  The same goes with foot quickness, balance, and agility--those are innate talents and can't be trained up.

Exactly. You hear it all the time from scouts and the scouting community. The "intangibles" that everybody likes to throw around is just a word that sums up something that a particular player is just naturally better at. Whether it's God given speed, agility, strength, balance or power. 

Or, you'll get the other scouting note I like paying attention to. "Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane". There's a lot of that in multiple sports as well. You could be an absolute gym rat, built like a brick [BLEEP] house or have shoulders the size of mountains. It means absolutely [BLEEP] all if you can't understand your blocking assignment, don't understand leverage, how to read a secondary, identify a rushing lane, etc. 

And that's okay. There's a reason why guys are boom or bust in RD1 and why teams land gems in RD2 and down. It's a big game of crapshoot man. You either trust your evaluation process and your draft board or you don't. Most of these guys are physically capped out by the time they're drafted. They are who they are. 

If he's throwing 225 pounds up over 30 times and the film shows that he's throwing his blockers around like a bag of potatoes while also getting downfield to make the tackle or sack? And he's done it consistently year in and year out? He's probably got that damn "intangible" everybody is looking for. 

If he's throwing up 400 pounds on the bench, squatting over 500 pounds and has had one good season of football while laying dormant for the other two or three years?

You might want to be careful. There's a lot of variables in all of this. But, like you said, it's scary and opposing. Your best five didn't start until the season finale and that best five laid an egg a few times in a game where you win and you're in against a team that had nothing to gain at all. 

I think this coaching staff and front office knows they have to get better next week in the trenches or they're possibly out of a job. If Lawrence gets nicked up again this year like last year? Because they only added one new face to the starting line-up? [BLEEP] need to be kicked to the streets down there near that stadium before the season is over. 

There's just no excuses for it anymore.

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