McBath waived

Pardon the agonistic tone. I definitely wasn’t assuming Klis’ comments represented your own thoughts on the subject. My primary intended audience was other readers.

I (quite admittedly) make disparaging comments about the DP’s writers, except for Lindsay Jones. My grievance is generally with their ‘disinformational’ style of journalism, for lack of a better term. This sometimes involves misstating the facts (as Klis did, and it’s somewhat astonishing that he would miss the part of the deal that delivered Seth Olsen), but it sometimes relates to simple honesty, and I’ve been moved on rare occasions to make the determination that Paige was lying. Lastly, there is a frequent problem with “yellow journalism” techniques, which is a larger issue and problem that I won’t try to explain thoroughly here.

I’ve been on the issue of yellow sports journalism since James “Bus” Cook successfully committed a disinformational PR campaign on the behalf of Cutler. My interest is in agnatology, and I’m coming out of Political Psychology on this.

The issue regarding the Klis column is how a metaphor contained in the headline was contradicted by the text of the column, in a type of mixed message delivery that hits fans at two levels. Fans respond to the information contained in the headline at a subconscious level. The Framing of the McBath draft selection issue is influenced by the use of metaphors such as “strike out” and many fans don’t consider that McBath’s selection wasn’t a poor choice but rather, his career was impacted by injuries, which involves a different metaphor. Few fans engage in critical thinking to the extent of questioning the accuracy of metaphors but it is these metaphors that are determinative in the formation of attitudes.

They’re long at UT but we expected help from others there, e.g., Ayers, Jarmon, etc., so it’s getting crowded. Using numbers to replace quality is a strategy I criticize, but there’s some sense to it if they rotate. My expectation was that we’d need fewer DTs if we could create more third down situations. Maybe they’ll make some adjustments once they see how things function and then Allen can start getting creative.

I can see this as the beginning, so they’re still vanilla, but I was hoping for something more outside-the-box. I’m still struggling to get a stronger sense of how Fox operates.

Teams like to minimize OL disruptions when there’s an injury instead of making several moves, so versatile backups are valuable. Hochstein can play anywhere but not necessarily well. Clark is backing up the most valuable position. They would probably leave him alone unless they upgrade. My hope is that they eventually find a quality swing tackle, which Ryan Harris could have been. Ramirez can play either OG or OC. And I think they like him and the RT, Taylor, the most of the all reserve OLs, but that’s a guess. They look like the two most dominant run blockers, besides Franklin. I tried to figure this question out previously and I’ve yet to come up with a good answer. Either Ramirez or Hochstein could be removed because they both cover the entire interior OL, so only one is necessary. The could also go with one less OT, especially if the remaining one can flip, but switching over is harder than people think.

Despite all the talk, I don’t think they’re that anxious to cut any of the reserve OLs right away. Criticism of them as a group playing together in preseason shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Some of them could play reasonably well alongside the starters. There primary role is to backup the starters for now.

Re: LBs. The LBs are a difficult group to pare. The depth at SAM and WILL is problem because of injuries, youth, and the high number at MIKE. Mohamed is expendable but he’s also very versatile and a STs type. I think a move here is going to have to wait till DJ returns, because Mohamed could be a backup WILL, too.

The likeliest cut is Unrein, when Thomas returns. The fact that D Thomas is practicing tells me that they go light at WR for a while. Some WRs would be inactive under normal circumstances. We’ll probably run less 3 WR sets and more 2 TE and 2 back sets. D Thomas appears to be far closer to returning than anyone thought, so they won’t have to hold out for long.

I have no ‘feel’ for any of it yet. Anticipating requires a sense of how Fox thinks and I’ve yet to get a tangible sense on that. Moves that emanate from Fox will be about injuries/inadequacies. Moves that come about because of opportunities will start with the FO. The FO may also start bringing players for tryouts and possible PS roles. Shortages due to injuries at RB and WR would be filled by our PS.

In ’93 we were 9-7…. in ’94 we were even worse 7-9. In his first year, they went 8-8 then finally blew up in ’96 (and lost to Jax.) That is far from inheriting a team like Gruden did in Tampa or like Dungy did in Indy.

He brought in Terrell, Mark Schlereth, eddy Mac, howard griffith, matt lepsis, Romo, John Mobley, Alfred williams…. then later on Neil Smith, Trevor Pryce….Didnt bring in Rod smith originally, but smith caught his first pass in ’95 under Shanny.

I’m sure that is not the whole list… but those seem like some significant additions post inheritence.

They were much more proficient at run defense than pass defense in 2005, and they allowed yards but not points.

They were slow to recognize the value of holding onto defensive players and missed on a few pass rushers, too. They really didn’t seem to be have been keeping up on trends. The mom and pop management techniques and failure to recognize their weakness in addressing free agency don’t speak well for how they were run during that period. And one really has to wonder what the relationship between Shanahan and the defensive coaches was like. The early 2000s defenses were often at least as good as the offenses so the repeated firings of DCs doesn’t make sense. There are signs of organizational problems that go way back.