T-Dub

He was gay, he and his husband had been harassed by neighbors & repeatedly reported it to police. House burned down, they claim it was arson. He was unarmed. Neighbor that killed him released without charges. Circumstances are disputed but it doesn't sound good.

Not to mention the team could shred that contract whenever it suits them and not pay another cent. When your narrative makes some multimillionaire nepo baby, whose sole accomplishment with their inheritance is losing a Super Bowl, out as if they are somehow a victim... you should probably check yourself.

I'm not convinced. What did Lou change last year vs the previous ones that left the players too confused to even tackle? Seems like a convenient scapegoat. I don't think he suddenly introduced calculus to his scheme. I think they spent the offseason with everyone glazing them like a Super Bowl favorite and got soft, collectively. That & letting their best players leave in FA caught up to them. Lou may not have adjusted very well but he was also at the mercy of higher-ups making poor decisions.

Ossai's made some big plays as a Bengal. He may be average at best overall, but he's proven he belongs. Stewart barely made plays in college. I expect him to take some time to develop, best case. That's why he was still on the board. An athlete of that caliber that looks NFL ready doesn't make it out of the top 10. The more practices he misses while the team argues "no take-backs" the further behind he's going to fall.

Then we draft a DB and try to lowball him

Not to get into it here but the circumstances being reported are really fucked up. RIP.

Yeah I don't think he's a lost cause or anything like that yet. I wouldn't expect him to be the day one starter at LDE, though.

Similar circumstances as I see it: DC in love with the "raw athleticism" they're sure they can mold. Any coach worth their whistle loves a project. That's one reason most teams don't rely on them as a scouting department. I fear they got giddy over his measurables and ignored the total lack of production on the field. The fuckery trying to write a refund into his contract is not reassuring.

What's being sold as AI is just a refined search engine making a collage from uncredited content scraped from the web. There's nothing particularly intelligent about it, it's purely plagiarism. If you asked someone to paint you flowers and they dug through a stack of old National Geographic magazines cutting out anything resembling a plant and gluing it to a piece of cardboard you wouldn't call that painting. That is essentially what so-called AI is doing: stealing shit and sewing it together without much discretion. It's not capable of actual thought, as in creating something on its own, at all. It's stealing and passing the work of as its own. That's all it is besides preprogrammed responses to prompts. No thinking is taking place anywhere in the process.

Stewart seems like more of a Margus Hunt.

They don't have to choose between the two, though. Neither of those things are dependent on the other. In fact, paying Hendrickson is by far the easier problem to solve. They have the money. If they were going to reinvest it somewhere else I might feel differently but with the choice being between pay Trey or coast at cap minimum sitting on $30M for the sake of the Brown/burn Family's bottom line, well....

I think they may have gotten caught up in Stewart's combine numbers. He's incredibly athletic but I'm not sure he knows how to play football yet. Can't just flail around and cause chaos in the NFL, lesser athletes that have actually developed technique will lock a guy like that up 9 times out of 10 and make them a nonfactor. The rest of the draft was fairly solid but expecting these rookie guards and rookie linebackers to step in as immediate difference makers is overly optimistic. When plan B is Cordell Volson that's a big gamble. I like the picks. I don't like that the team will be caught ass-out again if things don't go perfectly for them.

Guess I'll say corners, they should be pretty good if they can stay on the field. The Ossai/Murphy/Stewart combo does not inspire confidence. Stone looked completely lost so no bets there. LB, no clue, midround rookies and a special teams guy? Maybe. DT, possibly my 2nd choice but haven't seen enough of any of them to feel certain.

Not a fan of radio country but I do like some of this folksy bluegrass/roots stuff. Big fan of Tyler Childers. Sturgill, that sort of thing.

How about tackling? That doesn't require any big scheme changes or shiny new players. Just attack the ball & put people on the ground. It's football fundamentals and they sucked at it. Let's start there. If Golden can't get them back to doing that reliably then none of the other shit is going to matter.

Has to be a reason, I doubt they suddenly decided to fight the CBA standard rookie contract structure on a whim. Sounds like something came out after the draft that has them scared about a possible long-term suspension or even Stewart being expelled permanently. That or they're still mad about Chase & Higgins colluding & are trying to fight against signing anyone else to guaranteed money as a way of "getting even" with, IDK, players or the universe in general. Just seems odd to potentially derail the whole rookie process for a 1st round project pick, particularly when they're in the midst of another contract dispute. Is this all about the owners getting butthurt over being outmaneuvered? Buyer's remorse on a questionable draft pick?

So if she were just some random person that somehow had all the same opportunities, she would have any chance of being President of an NFL team her Dad didn't own? I think we both know the answer.

That's just Marsha, was the same shit every week.

Oh, wow. So what did Stewart do that's got them suddenly worried about getting their money back in case of a suspension? Allegedly?

I think "AI" is a grift right now. I doubt our energy grid could support the scale of implementation that's currently being pitched to investors. Not saying it'll never happen but for the moment it's the new cool buzzword, like Virtual/Augmented Reality a few years ago. Unscrupulous people are way, way overselling it.

Rookies already got "guaranteed money", called a signing bonus. Anything beyond that on a 4 year contract before they even step on the field is a bad precedent.

That applies to every facet of the team though. All we can do is bitch or cheer about it, as the case may be. Be a pretty boring forum if we only talk about the aspects we can control. What's that leave us? Arguing about where to park? 😆

Ah yes, that brilliant plan. Turn America into a 3rd world country so we can reclaim the honor of manufacturing Nike sneakers in sweatshops full of toddlers earning $3 a day. Makes total sense, I mean our unemployment rate post-COVID was the lowest its been in decades so obviously we need to tank the economy for the sake of more shit-paying, dangerous, unskilled manual labor jobs. Republican policy is all about braindead solutions for imaginary problems that also happen to make billionaires richer.

Dollar Index is down about 10% since January if I'm not mistaken? The President of the United States is shilling for wankpanzers and trashcoin crypto, I think it's safe to assume faith in the US economy will continue to suffer for as long as he's tolerated.