Quote:I find it strange how often fans feel like they need to see some extroverted expression or body language from players or coaches on gameday to trust their head is on straight.


These are individual humans with personalities and they won't alwAys react the way you think they should. That doesn't mean you know what they are thinking.


Blake's coaches and teammates harped on his ultra-competitiveness quite frequently in 2014 and 2015. Not sure how you missed that.


Last year it didn't come up much because he was clearly in a major slump and couldn't find his way out. He "looked" defeated at times - but I find little reason to doubt his resolve.


I'm more concerned about his ability to actually ingrain proper technique until it's second nature.

 

When the results are what they are, the scrutiny increases.  I don't need an overly emotive Ray Lewis type of response from a player. People read other people on more than just their words though, that's just part of life and not specific to football.  He doesn't often try to sell people on anything regarding his game and maybe that's just him.  The one thing he did try to sell was that his 2016 performance was on his coaches.  I don't think he did himself any favors by doing that.  In fact, he compounded the mistake he made by originally not doing this last off-season.  

 

Also, I think the 2016 regression had as much to do with Robinson not bailing him out like he was in 2015.  Robinson was the 80/20 jumpball guy in 2015.  He didn't play poorly in 2016, but clearly wasn't the same 80/20 guy he was the year before.  Bortles made the same mistakes in 2015 that he did in 2016 at about the same pace.  He just didn't have the same production he had the year before which made it easier to overlook and/or forget in 2015.

 

His body language by itself isn't a big problem.  It's just the accent piece in a picture of the situation I've drawn in my mind based on the information available.  I understand we're not all going to draw the same picture even if we're all dealing with the same set of information.

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