2021 NFL Offseason: QB Carousel Imminent -- Retirement Boogaloo

BrutulTM said:

Yeah and if he was a little ahead of the game with the gloves it's more than made up for by the fact that you can't tee off on receivers OR quarterbacks the way you could in Jerry's day.

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Exactly. If the rules for covering WR and hitting QB's had existed for them, Montana doesn't stop at 4 rings and Rice doesn't stop at 5. I think it's crazy that people forget just how far ahead of the rest of the NFL Walsh was with his West Coast Offense when it came to spreading the field with WR sets. In today's NFL these are the absolute basics of any playbook. In the '80's they were revolutionary.

Old people resist change

DickTrickle said:

Old people resist change

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True.

And young people are dumber than rocks. Another truth.

It all balances out.

Grim1 said:

True.

And young people are dumber than rocks. Another truth.

It all balances out.

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And some older people are both because they refuse to accept change even when it's so much smarter to do so.

I deal with it at work all the time.

Chanur said:

My niece never grew out of it. By his age he probably won't either. Unusually if you are going to grow out of it, you do it in your teens. He should not be playing football probably. If the epilepsy is severe in the sense of the amount of seizures he has, my niece has dozens of tiny ones a day. It can make learning very difficult as your brain is literally firing chaoticly all the time.

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Trauma can also trigger an episode. So, if he gets hit hard he could have a seizure on the field.

BrutulTM said:

Yeah and if he was a little ahead of the game with the gloves it's more than made up for by the fact that you can't tee off on receivers OR quarterbacks the way you could in Jerry's day.

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He had plenty of advantages outside of that -- let's start with the all-star fantasy team he was on.

The 49ers of the 80s and later the Cowboys of the early 90's are *the* reason the NFL put an end to the 2 team arms race of super powers every year where Deion, Charles Haley etc just traded uniforms between those 2 teams and implemented the salary cap. Those franchises could never come close to existing in today's NFL, and to the league's credit they understood the shit show MLB was becoming and saw the correlation between its declining numbers and lack of competitiveness and didn't want the NFL to follow suit. Best decision the NFL ever made.

I mean, kudos to the Debartolo's and Jone's families for leveraging every advantage they had at their disposal, but they were calling the NFC Championship game in those days the Super Bowl since it was those teams and to a lesser degree the Giants. If you were alive then you had to watch/listen to Pat Sumerall dodge huge loads of Madden jizz every time those two teams played and had to listen for 3 hours how nobody was close to them as the two best teams -- yea no shit.

You also have to give Bill Walsh a fuckton, a metric fuckton of credit. Dude was a visionary and doing the 5d chess shit way back when everyone had 3 hulking linebackers (or 4) to stop the run and he realized you could make it a liability for them and just use the West Coast offense as a run game -- teams had no idea how to defend it. I mean, Dick Lebeau had to design an entirely new defensive scheme in the zone blitz to stop it (to his credit as well). That 49ers coaching tree under Walsh is unreal.

Rice is the GOAT, but nobody playing in the NFL as a WR could have asked for a better set of circumstances to be a part of. That's why Barry Sanders is my personal GOAT player, the Lions were basically like "well we suck donkey dick just give #20 the ball and hope he can do something, otherwise fuck it". Dude somehow performed feats of magic on Sundays against stacked boxes that knew the trick ahead of time.

As a thing also Rice played 20 seasons which is pretty insane.

BrutulTM said:

Tom must really be pissed off. He's not exactly known for airing his opinions.

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Plausible explanation I read - the numbers made it easy to know what position groups were on the field, so you can tell really easily if they were in nickel, base formation, etc. This is especially useful when coverages are disguised as well as where people line up pre-snap. In addition, it'll be harder to call out the Mike; is it the LB there standing in the normal LB position or is that a CB with a LB's number.

I get the argument, and likely some teams will get a little worse in terms of blitz pickup and coverage reading. Personally I'm ok with it; the offensive side of the ball has gotten a lot of buffs over the last 18+ years. A small (arguably nominal) nerf to offense isn't a big deal

Oh one other scenario I read about - if the Safety and the WR have the same number (not a big deal) but if the teams have similar colors? Not saying this will happen to Tom - but like the Bucs playing against the Falcons (their base colors are red + black + white), I can see in the heat of the moment throwing to the guy with your team colors and numbers, only to find out its the other team.

Now maybe these guys are pros and that won't happen; but I lived through the Vinny Testeverde times on the Bucs - that dude was colorblind