Sounds like you really know your stuff, ---. What do you make of the Dolphins' moves this offseason?

You're not wrong on some of these points, but this is a hilariously bad take. If he's healthy he's gonna put up huge numbers. NE lost Solder and their defense is garbage, it's obvious they need to retool a bit and they're getting picks to do that. Are you forgetting NE was very comfortable trading a high pick for this guy as well? They obviously liked him as a player and he had a great season for them. This misinformation campaign is ridiculous.

watkins played 15 games last year and had...39 catches. they acquired cooks to fill watkins' role.

why do you think cooks becomes a better option in that offense than gurley, kupp, or woods? why would goff look for cooks before the others, particularly given their scheme and the relative strengths and weakness of goff, kupp, woods, and cooks?

why was NE comfortable dealing a first last year for cooks? because his cap hit was $1.5 million, which is well below the value his production provided. they treated it like an option contract; they got to see the strengths and weaknesses of the player within their scheme and could then determine if they wanted to keep him at a much higher number, knowing they also retained the option of acquiring something of value for him if they decided to move on. they tried to resign him before trading him, but the market priced him out of a number they were comfortable with. he's a good player - where did i say otherwise? - but not a gamechanger and definitely did not have a "great" season, and the combination of NE's cap structure and cooks' weaknesses (yeeees, he has some!) meant that he just wasn't worth his asking price. constraints are real, and you can't keep them all in a cap world.

yes, the defense is garbage, but that had no bearing on their evaluation of cooks as an asset.

put your money where your mouth is, if it's a "hilariously bad take" and "misinformation". quantify "he's gonna put up huge numbers" and let's put some money on it. loser gives $100 to the charity of the winner's choice. i'm in if you are. FYI his best season so far was 84 catches for about 1,100 yards, which is 20 more catches and about 400 yards than the most productive rams offensive player last year in either category, respectively. explain how he'll catch 85 as the fourth option in an offense when the first option last year (a RB!) only caught 64, and where the leader in targets (kupp) only had 94.

culture eats strategy for breakfast, so it's a positive that they're taking steps to change the culture. the issue is whether they've identified the right guys to get rid of, and whether they can identify guys that will contribute to a better culture moving forward. i don't know enough about their team to know whether they've done that.

I've wondered if one reason for that is how involved (meddling) owners are in these big decisions. Belichick for all the discussion last year about Brady and discord (I don't really believe it) seems to have pretty much all the say in personnel decisions and he's got a pretty established value vs production that they stick too, Parcells was similar in approach, it doesn't always work, they've been fairly lousy draft wise but much better than anyone picking up free agent vets or young players who lost favor with their drafted team.

He can build the front 7 in this draft and get an inexpensive young QB outside of that group of 5 no one can decide on at the top of the draft, and or take one at the back of the the 1st round to get the cheap 5th year.

It's really not that complicated of a system to understand or follow, I just think a lot of organizations without the same levels of success don't have the patience or the organizational will to follow it.

I've spent the last 7 or 8 offseasons wondering how the Dolphins can be in the same division as the Patriots and absolutely REFUSE to learn any lessons from them. They've been looking up at the best run organization in sports for two decades and apparently haven't learned a single useful thing.

My personal bias...might be yours too...is to ascribe his success to extraordinary application of the economic way of thinking to running an NFL franchise. I think he has an unparalleled understanding of relative value and opportunity cost. The only thing that's kept him from winning the Super Bowl every single year is the merciful fact that identifying talent is still not a fully developed skill.

You don't just replace player A with player B and assume they will do the exact same things, that's very silly. Sean McVay is obviously a smart guy who knows offense, I don't think he's making this trade to not give Cooks a chance to produce. Watkins has had a very inconsistent career, Cooks really has not. He's consistently produced everywhere he's gone. Watkins main role for the Rams last year was in the RZ; I assume Cooks wil be more involved between the 20s.

I understand all the things with the cap, etc. and what New Ebfkand was doing. I also understand that NE is in a position similar to what NO was facing last year, in that they need major retooling to a few position groups. They'll likely use these picks to bolster defense and o-line. I don't think they evaluated Cooks and decided to shed him so much as they saw a chance to get better at multiple positions in exchange for getting worse at one.

I'm not going to bet, because I'm very poor and I think gambling is stupid, but I'm 100% confident in what I've said here. I know you know a fair amount about football but I watch a ton of games and know the league fairly well. The Rams are simply trying to copy a model that has netted Super Bowls for the Seahawks and Eagles in recent years. You could argue the Broncos also won an "all-in" Super Bowl. What they're doing could very easily pay off. And if it doesn't they have 90 million in cap space for next year. Donald isn't going anywhere.

The Dolphins are basically the federal government of sports franchises. Overspending today to correct for yesterday's overspending mistakes that were trying to correct for the overspending mistakes before that. Worse still, they insist on restructuring already excessively big contracts and making them an even bigger burden in the future so that they can spend right to the cap during a rebuilding season. There can't be more than 2 or 3 franchises that have made consistently worse financial decisions during the Tannenbaum era than Miami.

Not to mention the Rams get a seasoned player for at least a year instead of depending on a Rookie to come in and get something done, in the Rams system they have Woods and Cup and I'll assume a TE for the Red Zone in addition to Todd Gurley, so now they get another dangerous screen option. He's cheaper than Beckham and will have a Ted Ginn type role deep which should help get more space for Gurley. I get it, it's a good fit for the Rams they don't necessarily have to sign him long term so loading up a bunch of guys for this year without really killing the cap long term isn't necessarily terrible.

Suh is probably a one and done player for the rest of his career.

The Rams can only do this while their QB is cheap so it's not necessarily a bad strategy for next year.

Washington is up there.

In fairness, no matter what they do at least they aren't going to have their home games transformed into road games via fans of the Broncos, Raiders, and whatever other high volume fanbases visit Carson.

Then there's also this, which was highly relevant when he regularly exploited the likes of Al Davis a decade ago:

it really isn't. from the best i've managed to understand, here's how i think they think:

1) no team is perfect - every team will have strengths and weaknesses, and as long as the the critical positions (QB, OL, DL) are not weaknesses, you can scheme away a large part of a roster's deficiencies

2) there is always another player - because no team is perfect, positional strengths and weaknesses will change year to year. this is perfectly fine. understand that more often than not it does not pay to retain expensive free agents, and that while letting a guy walk necessarily creates a weakness where perhaps one didn't exist before, the tradeoff is additional financial flexibility that enables the team to turn a previous weakness into a strength. there is always another linebacker or tight end, and you can often acquire them at a fraction of the cost of what an outgoing FA receives.

3) value, value, value - in order to compete at a high level consistently, you have to have as many players playing at levels where performance exceeds cap number as possible. this typically occurs at the middle and bottom of rosters, which is why it pays to develop a business model that consistently identifies and develops players in this portion of the roster. the nfl is a game of attrition, and investing in the 20th through 50th roster spots pays real dividends in january. the benefit of foregoing expensive FAs is the ability to find and develop the ninkoviches and van noys of the world.

4) prioritize financial flexibility - there will always be dumb teams, teams that change schemes and look to move players for twenty cents on the dollar, and unexpected personnel developments. smart teams understand this. the other 31 teams will always make moves you didn't expect, so be prepared to take advantage of these opportunities by not spending all the way to the cap and building in to your timeline and decision-making process the payroll cushion to snag randy moss.

i'm sure there's more, but this is some of what i've gleaned

yes, absolutely

he was an economics major, and ernie adams - "director of football research" - was a former wall street guy who made a lot of money in options markets. they also employ people in my industrial niche, which is particularly instructive for me in understanding how they think.

yes, there's something to this. but if there is so much stupidity in the NFL - a position i agree with, actually - why does it seem like belichick is the only one able to consistently take advantage of this?

there have been some moves this offseason that give me hope that maybe a few more intelligent life forms now exist in the NFL, but by and large most of the franchises are run by big dumb humps

i'll get back to orpheus later

Doks, I don't really disagree with anything you've written, and obviously teams are wise to be prudent with cap space, draft picks, etc. But I have to disagree that the strategy the Rams are pursuing is necessarily dumb or reckless, because we've seen these focused, all-in strategies work, as recently as a few months ago.

And while Belichik is obviously a genius and likely the best coach of all time, he's also fallible. The Butler benching seems like a case of him over-thinking something, and that decision seems to have contributed to them losing out on another title.

I think we can all agree that these teams are in very different places in their structure. Meaning what works for the Pats will not work for the rams just yet. That’s also meant to point out the elephant in the room that is the NFC field compared to the AFC playoff picture.

Belichick is obviously the most consistently good, but I think there's a handful of other teams--PIT, BAL, DEN, GB, SEA off the top of my head--that are consistent enough. But yes, I do agree that on balance more teams lie on the below average side.

Belichick is the best at everything

coaching

GM-ing

cheating

you name it, he is #1