2013 NFL Offseason and Draft

And Ortiz was supposed to be Hernandez's boy? Just another in a seemingly LONG list of mistakes he's made.

Elurin_sl said:

Yeah, but there are lots of teams throughout the history of the NFL where you could say they're just throwing it up all the time. But how many of them eclipse 4000 yards, much less 5000? You can't attribute that all to the rule changes or Megatron either.

Stafford's 2012 season wasn't great, with 20 TD's to 17 interceptions (and 6 fumbles), but he still threw for 4967 yards on 435 completions. And with Megatron having having 1964 yards, that leaves 3000 yards that he still threw for to other guys.
His 2011 season, though...41 TD's to 16 interceptions (+5 fumbles).

And isn't having no run game the same as his supporting cast letting him down?

In the end, it's the era of the QB. If you have one that's above average, you pay to keep them. The Lions probably overpaid a bit, but that's just the way the league is going.

Edit: Not to bring the Cowboys into it, but I just so happened to look up Romo's stats and then the team stats. Outside of having 100 extra attempts by Stafford, the two teams are eerily similar. Mid-ranked offense (17th, 15th) with high yardage (3rd, 6th), and crap defenses (27th, 24th) with mid-ranked yards against (13th, 19th). Lions also had much better success running the ball. But outside of that...the teams are almost fucking identical. The Lions just faced a fucking brutal 2nd half of the season.

Vikings (#6 seed)
Packers (#3 seed)
Texans (#3 seed)
Colts (#5 seed)
Packers (#3 seed)
Cardinals
Falcons (#1 seed)
Bears (10-6 team that missed wildcard)

They also faced the 49ers (#2 seed), Vikings and Bears the first time around, and the Seahawks (#5 seed). To be honest, after seeing that, I'd expect the Lions to bounce back this year strongly. That's a pretty rough schedule.

Click to expand...

Grantland did a piece on certain "lucky" stats of teams that really benefited or really didn't benefit from last season.http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...-get-feel-2013

Basically saying the Lions should bounce back very strongly, while a team expected to regress a lot is the Colts. Also I'll never forget Bill Simmons quote in a mailbag regarding the new "passing" league and guys like Stafford who chuck it a ton every year now. One day we're going to have a guy that looks like Knight from the Real World the all time leader in passing yards but with no Super Bowl titles or appearances.

Elurin_sl said:

The Lions just faced a fucking brutal 2nd half of the season... To be honest, after seeing that, I'd expect the Lions to bounce back this year strongly. That's a pretty rough schedule.

Click to expand...

Yeah, it's underappreciated, but schedule matters tremendously in a league with so few games per season. Sure, the strength of schedule balancing evens things out over thelong termof multiple years, but on aseasonalbasis, getting, say, the weak AFC division and the weak NFC division can lead to huge swings from year-to-year.

Merrith_sl said:

Grantland did a piece on certain "lucky" stats of teams that really benefited or really didn't benefit from last season.http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...-get-feel-2013

Basically saying the Lions should bounce back very strongly, while a team expected to regress a lot is the Colts.

Click to expand...

1) Iloveme some Bill Barnwell.
2) And as much as we love to shit on people who say "If my team had just a total of 7 more points between these three games, we would have been in the playoffs!", the truth is that, again, luck matters quite a bit in a league with so few games per season.

I expect the Lions to bounce back this year; then again, at only 4 wins this year, 4 more wins merely gets them back to .500. I can't imagine they become a playoff team.
I have and will continue to say that I expect the Colts to fall, hard.

The Panthers, I just have no good feel for. From a luck perspective, they should win more this year; from a scheduling perspective, they may be even worse off than last year, as the 2013 NFC West should be tougher than the 2012 NFC East (2013 AFC East vs 2012 AFC West is probably a wash), and the Saints should be improved. Assuming the coaches don't get sacked, is it too early to declare them my dark horse of the 2014season?

The Lions probablycouldimprove, but the NFC North is probably the 2nd best division right now after the NFC West (never thought I'd say that!). The Lions will probably end up competing for most of the season but I'd expect it to be similar to the NFC South several years ago where all the teams are still in playoff contention around week 13 or 14. Unfortunately for the Lions, I think the Packers and Bears have a much better shot at the playoffs. And I don't see any division getting 3 teams into the playoffs; 2 from the NFC West, 2 from either the NFC North/East, and 1 from the NFC South and the other North/East.

The Colts will fall, but I don't think it'll be much. They're still probably an 8-8 team playing in a god awful division. It's the Texans division right now. The Jaguars will be bottom feeders for the foreseeable future, and unless the Titans get their shit together (they have talent), they'll probably suck again. It's like I said all season, the Colts were a perennial playoff team before the 2011 season. The Suck for Luck season was the abberation, not Luck taking them back to being a decent team. Then again, if Luck makes significant progress this year (cuts down on the turnovers) and lives up to his potential they might be dangerous. The only reason Luck had so many 4th quarter comebacks last year was because he caused the team to fall behind late in so many games by stupid mistakes. But the fact that he could still get them to come back is "Peyton Manning scary."

And I'm with you there on the Panthers. Who the fuck knows with that team? I honestly think they're probably one of the more talented teams in the league, but I think they have shit for discipline. They had some exciting games last year against top teams (Hi Atlanta), that they probably should have won. I don't know that Ron Rivera is really head coach material.

In the NFC North's defense (as far as 3 teams going to the playoffs goes), they did have 3 teams with 10+ wins last year, the Bears were just a late blown lead against Seattle and the correct call on the Fail Mary from getting in. Personally I picked it last year, only I had the Vikings and the Lions in each other's spot basically. I agree it'll be really tough, but mainly only because of the NFC West. Pretty sure the East will beat up enough on each other and none of the teams will be that dominant in non division games to get more than 1 team in from there, and the South has been hard to tell what you're going to get out its' teams lately other than Atlanta.

I'm sure other people saw this already, but it made me laugh.

Elurin_sl said:

Yeah, but there are lots of teams throughout the history of the NFL where you could say they're just throwing it up all the time

Click to expand...

I thought we were beyond comparing passing numbers from today to passing numbers from when the sport was full contact...

edit: wrong thread popped up, whoa, i'm retarded

Nah, Raiders fans are in the right place.