Quote:Year one - a few were forgivable due to the roster purge and large, large number of "seat-fillers" taking up roster spots.  Scrap heap waiver wire guys and such that ideally have a hard time even seeing the field on special teams in year three.  Many of them are gone now -- which is telling. 

 

Year two it got tougher to forgive losses as some talent was acquired on defense, but even with a number of good showings by that unit, their production wasn't sustainable because they:

 - got no help from the offense

- got very little help from the FS position and young secondary

- had a rotating cast of back-ups at LB

 

Still you have to lay blame primarily at the offense's feet. If they could have mananged 20+ points more often they'd have won 3 or 4 more games. However - how much is too much to ask of 4, 5 and sometimes 6 rookies starting in the NFL? We found out.  

Then you must decide whether you blame Caldwell for fielding so many rookies?  Sure. At least some.  There were three vets that ended up sucking so bad or getting injured that the team had too much youth on the field. 

The only reason I forgive that (partially) is that I happen to really love the idea of building through the draft and saving the $$ for re-signing the youth that performs well and adding a few vets to fill in the ranks.  That's what Dave is doing and this year - I think it will produce about 7 wins with good momentum moving forward. 

 

I totally understand why many folks don't have the patience to wait around so long for a +.500 season. I do. I don't blame them (or you) for feeling that way.  I just like the concept of doing it right even if it takes longer. Gene left this roster in such a horrible place that a patch-job facelift in free agency wasn't gonna' do anything but have the team scraping around the .500 mark and then falling to waste again in a couple years. Starting over with an assembly of young drafted talent was the way to go, IMO.  Sucks to wait for results, but thankfully, I think we'll start to see them soon. 

 

Is it possible that Dave made too many bad choices? Yes. Is it possible that Gus wasn't the right hire for such a difficult re-build? Yes. 

But I'm giving them this year to show me the answers to those questions.  

 

One thing that I can't help coming back to is just how bad that 2013 Draft class was in comparison to other classes. While the players from that class are starters, they can be upgraded it would seem to me. This, more than anything, hurt the roster to the point that it was just a bleak landscape. When you look at the 2015 Offense, it essentially spent the entire season trying to get it's feet underneath it due to the fact that very few players were familiar with an NFL playing field. I really cannot think of another team that had to go through what that Offense did.

 

This situation was compounded by the point above where there really wasn't a lot of talent on the Offensive side of the ball available in 2013. So not only did you have to cut loose the dead weight - and my oh my, did Dave swing a heavy axe with those cuts - but you didn't have too many options to come in and fill the gaps.

 

One thing that I will staunchly adhere to is that you cannot expect lesser talent to achieve what greater talent can. It may overachieve a bit, but greater talent is what wins games; I'm convinced of that. Now when you add on the fact that it was hard to come by upper level talent for the first two years of the BradWell regime... I think the results speak for themselves.

---