(12-05-2019, 07:37 PM)TheO-LineMatters Wrote:

(12-05-2019, 02:20 PM)MikePete54 Wrote: - His wife suffered miscarriage 5 months ago.
- He suffers broken collarbone in and came back way too soon. Should have stay out the whole season.
- Maybe he was afraid to lose his job with the Minshew thing. He was forcing a lot of throws and you can say that his arm is not as strong as it was in Philly.

Just a whole bad year for him. Maybe with a new coaching staff and a better OL/weapons, he could come back as a starter for us.

That first and third reason are personal issues that should not effect the on the field psyche of an elite athlete. I don't mean to sound heartless, but I've seen players like Brett Favre who lost his father and Kwon Alexander who's brother was murdered, come back the next week, even the next day and have the game of their life. They used the pain as motivation. You either use tragedy as motivation to propel you forward or it will make you fold if you're not mentally strong. In order to succeed in football, you cannot let off the field issues effect your play or it will ruin you. With that said, from a more practical point of view, this team looks nothing like the team Foles had success with in Philadelphia. They had a very strong O-Line, that gave him tons of time to make his reads, they had RB's who were good receivers out of the backfield and set up screens well and they had not one, but two good TE's who were excellent receivers. We don't have any of those things. When we signed Foles, we tried to fit a square peg into a round hole. The system we have in place was not designed for him to succeed. To give him a shot to be anything close to what he was in Philadelphia, we're gonna have to make a lot of changes and I just don't see that happening in one year. 

On a somewhat brighter note, I was reading an article on ESPN.com today about where key QB's may end up next season and there was a write up on Foles. They suggested this, Foles $15.1 million base salary for 2020 is fully guaranteed. If he is on the roster 5 days after the start of free agency, a $5 million roster bonus is 2021 becomes guaranteed. That means we'd owe him more than $20 million in additional cash over the next 2 seasons. They suggested we could possibly get Foles to re-structure his contract. We could convert most of that $15.1 million salary into a roster bonus at the start of 2020 and then trade Foles. If Foles were willing to reduce his unguaranteed base salary in 2021, he could end up costing his new team somewhere around $10 million over 2 years. We'd likely have to send a mid round pick a long with him to get a deal done, since we'd essentially be saving $10 million off his contract and we'd still have to eat a substantial amount in dead money, but it would be significantly cheaper than cutting him outright. In any case, I believe what will happen is that he will still be here in 2020, riding the pine behind Minshew and making this team look just as foolish as we did when Bortles was stinking up the place, after signing his new deal.

Not making any excuses for the guy but believe it or not our favorite athletes are humans too. Everyone deals with emotional tragedy differently. There have been plenty of athletes across all sports who took time away from the game to deal with their issues. Mental health is real and oftentimes forgotten. Making such a broad generalization is quite unfair.

One thing I caught during one of Foles recent pressers is he mentioned his grandfather had just passed. He said he would call his grandfather after every game and he was one of his biggest cheerleaders. Imagine having a rough game (or 3) and not being able to talk about it with someone who used to call you after every outing.

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