2011 - 20?? Bears Offseason(s) Thread

[Internet Apex]

"What's encouraging for both Cutler and for Bears fans is that this year — with Trestman, with Marshall, with Forte, and with this line — is the first year he actually has a chance."

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/64475/92-day-nfl-warning-the-chicago-bears-finally-get-offensive

[J. Walter Weatherman]

"What's encouraging for both Cutler and for Bears fans is that this year — with Trestman, with Marshall, with Forte, and with this line — is the first year he actually has a chance."

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/64475/92-day-nfl-warning-the-chicago-bears-finally-get-offensive

Reading that put me at half-mast.

[Richard Chuggar]

Tebowner to Patriots.  Stupid Emstink missed the boat again.

[Quality Start Machine]

Tebowner to Patriots.  Stupid Emstink missed the boat again.

He's going to line up at TE. There is no way this won't be amazing.

[Saul Goodman]

Tebowner to Patriots.  Stupid Emstink missed the boat again.

He's going to line up at TE. There is no way this won't be amazing.

I hope he finds a way to humiliate the Jets when the two teams play each other.  Can't wait.

[Eli]

Tebowner to Patriots.  Stupid Emstink missed the boat again.

He's going to line up at TE. There is no way this won't be amazing.

Nope. Third-string QB.

[Tonker]

Okay, perhaps somebody (*cough*SKO*cough*) can explain this to me in terms that a Eurosimpleton can understand.

Tim Tebow was, by any measure, one of the greatest college quarterbacks ever.  I've heard criticism of his throwing mechanics, but they seemed to work just fine for the Gators.  How the fuck does this not translate to the NFL, and - more to the point - why not?  I know he's by no means the first star QB to fail miserably in the big leagues.  Are colleges so concerned with their own success that they're prepared to let the careers of their kids suffer by not teaching them properly?  Is that a rhetorical question?  Why don't colleges just play NFL-style football?  I can only assume it's because a college team playing NFL ball would get its arse handed to it by a college team playing college ball, but why?  And if that's the case, then why don't they play college-style ball in the NFL?  What's the difference?  What changes when these kids graduate?

You can understand my confusion, I think.

[Saul Goodman]

Okay, perhaps somebody (*cough*SKO*cough*) can explain this to me in terms that a Eurosimpleton can understand.

Tim Tebow was, by any measure, one of the greatest college quarterbacks ever.  I've heard criticism of his throwing mechanics, but they seemed to work just fine for the Gators.  How the fuck does this not translate to the NFL, and - more to the point - why not?  I know he's by no means the first star QB to fail miserably in the big leagues.  Are colleges so concerned with their own success that they're prepared to let the careers of their kids suffer by not teaching them properly?  Is that a rhetorical question?  Why don't colleges just play NFL-style football?  I can only assume it's because a college team playing NFL ball would get its arse handed to it by a college team playing college ball, but why?  And if that's the case, then why don't they play college-style ball in the NFL?  What's the difference?  What changes when these kids graduate?

You can understand my confusion, I think.

Could be wrong here, but I think it has something to do with the availability of opposing talent. Only the elite players reach the NFL. Tebow looks pretty great against the massive range of talent distribution in college but when you take the chumps out and force him to face elite athletes he's not so great without a heavily modified playbook like the one Denver installed for him. And then it's a matter of time until the league catches up to that. A slow decision maker with a slow throwing motion, as Tebow is alleged to be, can have college success but those are fatal flaws for an NFL QB. Asking why colleges don't play NFL football seems a little like asking why Double A teams don't play Major League Baseball.

Compare Tebow's flawed game to a hitter in Double A with a hole in his swing but Double A pitchers just aren't good enough to exploit it and are hopelessly overmatched against his raw talent and skill.  They just can't get him out. Then the hitter goes up to Triple A ball and there are pitchers and defenses who give him fits but he still does pretty well overall. But he hits his ceiling in MLB when almost every pitcher above replacement level can use that flaw to get him out at will. That's like Tebow going from high school, to college, to the pros. Peter Principle, and all that. Which is all just a long-winded way of saying I don't know what I'm talking about (TIME TO POST!) and now it's time for the smart people to blow everyone's nips off with their big brains.

[Tonker]

Okay, I get some of that.  But:

A slow decision maker with a slow throwing motion, as Tebow is alleged to be, can have college success but those are fatal flaws for an NFL QB.

If that's the case, then surely there would be fast decision-makers with fast throwing motions who would have been more successful than Tebow both in the NFL and (and here's the rub) in college ball, too.  But there weren't: in college, he was the absolute top of the tree.  The issue can't just be down to the relative level of his talents.  In college ball he had to be have been doing something far, far better than anybody else - and that something, whatever it was, obviously doesn't count for much in the NFL.  There must be some fundamental difference in the kind of football being played.  I think it might have something to do with rushing vs. playing out of the pocket/shotgun, but I'm really, really scraping the bottom of my football knowledge-barrel here.

Asking why colleges don't play NFL football seems a little like asking why Double A teams don't play Major League Baseball.

I see what you're getting at, but this is kind of my point, too.  Double A teams do play major league baseball, just at a less talented level.  The fundamentals are exactly the same.  Indeed, Theo put a book together precisely to make sure that the entire Cubs organisation is playing exactly the same game, from top to bottom.  A player at double A who is a superstar on the Tebow level - say Mike Trout, or Bryce Harper - can reasonably be expected, with perhaps a year or two of seasoning, to become a superstar at the Major League level.  Tebow never will, and it's not because he flamed out, it's because he never had the right stuff in the first place.  See what I mean?

[Saul Goodman]

Okay, I get some of that.  But:

A slow decision maker with a slow throwing motion, as Tebow is alleged to be, can have college success but those are fatal flaws for an NFL QB.

If that's the case, then surely there would be fast decision-makers with fast throwing motions who would have been more successful than Tebow both in the NFL and (and here's the rub) in college ball, too.  But there weren't: in college, he was the absolute top of the tree.  The issue can't just be down to the relative level of his talents.  In college ball he had to be have been doing something far, far better than anybody else - and that something, whatever it was, obviously doesn't count for much in the NFL.  There must be some fundamental difference in the kind of football being played.  I think it might have something to do with rushing vs. playing out of the pocket/shotgun, but I'm really, really scraping the bottom of my football knowledge-barrel here.

Asking why colleges don't play NFL football seems a little like asking why Double A teams don't play Major League Baseball.

I see what you're getting at, but this is kind of my point, too.  Double A teams do play major league baseball, just at a less talented level.  The fundamentals are exactly the same.  Indeed, Theo put a book together precisely to make sure that the entire Cubs organisation is playing exactly the same game, from top to bottom.  A player at double A who is a superstar on the Tebow level - say Mike Trout, or Bryce Harper - can reasonably be expected, with perhaps a year or two of seasoning, to become a superstar at the Major League level.  Tebow never will, and it's not because he flamed out, it's because he never had the right stuff in the first place.  See what I mean?

Obviously it's TWTW. I'm interested to see how others answer this. That Cubs Way manual is more of a manual on how to play baseball though, not how to play MLB. Double A just isn't MLB. Not even Triple A is. It's a very different level of competition that's partly influenced by the venues and coaches and other peripheries but primarily by the caliber of players on the field. Trout and Harper RAKED at double A just like Tebow was probably unstoppable in HS. Maybe Tebow was unstoppable in college too, but for some reason I'm remembering there were colleges that knew how to handle him. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. I don't quite know how to address the converse of the slow/slow QB, maybe someone with a better football memory can refute or confirm, but there are other ways to fail as an NFL QB too.

[Internet Apex]

Okay, perhaps somebody (*cough*SKO*cough*) can explain this to me in terms that a Eurosimpleton can understand.

Tim Tebow was, by any measure, one of the greatest college quarterbacks ever.

Whoah, whoah, whoah, whoah.....

Whoah. There are plenty of measures that evaluate quarterback play. Everybody except for Josh McDaniels had access to them before the draft.

And while SKO is cleaning up his exploded brain so he can post, I'll say in layman's terms, that Tebow had success running the football in college. The speed, power and agility of NFL defenses simply won't abide that unless a player can keep them honest with his throwing arm. It's as simple as all that really. Tebow was not winning games with his arm at Florida. They had the top defense in the country's best conference and Tebow scored just enough to become a mouthbreather icon.

[Quality Start Machine]

Tebowner to Patriots.  Stupid Emstink missed the boat again.

He's going to line up at TE. There is no way this won't be amazing.

I hope he finds a way to humiliate the Jets when the two teams play each other.  Can't wait.

There is no way the Jets can be humiliated any worse than they already are by seeing Jets uniforms in their lockers.

[SKO]

Oh man. There's a lot here.

Couple of things- Tebow was fucking amazing in college, Apex's natural pexhurt aside. They struggled a bit in conference his last year when Steve Addazio took over as OC when Dan Mullen left, but the 2007-2008 Gators had the best offenses I've ever seen in college football, period.

The problem, Tonk, is that Tebow's throwing motion is abysmal, and he holds the ball really low and then brings it all of the way up before releasing. It gives defenses time to figure out where he is throwing the ball and to key on it. In college this was less of a big deal for various reasons: defenders are slower, he was playing in a spread offense that mostly left him throwing to wide open receivers, teams were so busy keying on his threat as a runner that they Let him have open guys to throw to, because it seemed the lesser evil. 

If he tries to rush his throwing motion to fix this issue, the result is the hilarious airmailed throws that we've laughed at for years. He's not an accurate NFL passer because of this, and I know people keep saying shit like "let him learn," but I have my doubts that it's really fixable. He's thrown this way since he was a kid, and his muscle memory is built on it. Completely changing his throwing motion, if possible, isn't necessarily going to improve his accuracy so much as it might make him just completely unable to throw a ball. Bruce Arians compared it to coaching a golfer...you can fix accuracy issues that start with footwork and the lower body and tighten up their mechanics, but you can't just change the way a guy moves his arm.

Add into all of this that I think he's fairly stupid and can't read advanced NFL coverages, and he's a curiosity and nothing more. As for why don't college coaches run the NFL offense? It's because the NFL basically runs two or three schemes, period, all of which are similar. They require lots of practice time, tons of film study, hundreds of reps, they're basically offenses designed for football players who can be at the practice facility every day, all day. Which you can't do in college, so they try to use more exotic and yet simpler offenses that can get more out of players with less time to practice. 

All of this is a gross over-simplification, but I hope I helped.

[SKO]

It should also be noted that Tebow played on an offense at Florida with, I believe, three different linemen who are currently NFL starters, Aaron Hernandez at tight end, Percy Harvin at WR, and three different runningbacks who ran 4.3 40s. The disparity in talent betwee Florida and even other SEC teams at the time was tremendous, and it made him look like a much better player than he was, but the jig was up once Saban had recruited enough talent at Bama that their defensive schemes against Tebow were no longer foiled by Tim simply plowing over some hapless Shula recruit at linebacker.

And the Double A-MLB comparison is not applicable. College football offenses and defenses are often very, very different schematically. Usually the only teams in college that run schemes that are very close to what NFL teams run are those teams that are typically so talented they don't need to outscheme or confuse people. USC during the golden days of Pete Caroll basically ran a pretty vanilla NFL offense, and Bama's defense is pretty much the same as Bill Parcell's. Neither of them needed to try and deceive people because they're players were so much better than everyone elses that they just need to be fundamentally sound to kick your ass. 

[SKO]

Furthermore: http://smartfootball.com/quarterbacking/tim-tebows-last-chance, http://startkyleorton.blogspot.com/2013/04/can-tim-tebow-be-fixed-what-about-jay.html.