AKAChip

Or maybe that Nichols isn’t all that much better than Willy was. No one is suggesting that Lapo is great. Most reasonable people on here agree that he’s largely a mess, but your hatred of Lapo is making it so you think that bad players are bad because he makes them bad. There’s a lot of blame at the feet of both Lapo and Nichols. This is the guy Nichols was in Edmonton as well. He has one great season in his career. Mediocre to bad QBs have good or great stretches or seasons all the time. He’s resting on a season from two years ago and we’re going to pay the price for it.

The counter to this would be, with this core how many more years can we waste using the whole “time will tell” excuse? Nichols is who he is. It’s clear that even with this stacked offence, he frequently isn’t even adequate enough to beat a previously winless, mess of a team. How much more do we have to wait and see? This more or less happens every year.

Nichols requires a completely clean pocket to be even remotely effective. He’s the type of QB who makes his line look far worse than they are because essentially any pressure wrecks the play.

We will have to agree to disagree.

You saying this doesn’t make it true. Even when he says he didn’t play well, he has to add on an excuse to justify it. He can’t help himself.

I don’t need to see emotion. Saying “I was terrible” rather than “Receivers weren’t open” doesn’t require a guy with a fiery passion. But the better leaders almost exclusively say the former rather than the latter.

I would buy that more if Nichols wasn’t historically reluctant to take responsibility for poor performances. It’s his right to say what he wants, I am just responding to a comment referring to Nichols as a guy who owns his mistakes which is clearly not generally the case.

Of all the good things you can credit Nichols for, and those things do exist, the guy rarely owns his own poor performances. Even when he was getting credit for his comments after the Hamilton loss for seemingly owning up to a bad game, it felt an awful lot like he was blaming fluky circumstances for his bad throws. The whole “that doesn’t happen more than once in 10,000 throws” thing was clearly him trying to justify his backbreaking interceptions. Even if the actual comment is factual (and it clearly isn’t) it would be nice to hear him take sole responsibility. He often rushes to the “receivers weren’t open” excuse. And I find the sentiment that he deserves respect because he’s “our QB” and gives the team and the city his all on the field more than a little bit silly. He’s a professional football player. You’d like to think that every player, if not the distinct majority is giving it their all. It’s not for the city or the fans, this is his job. And if a person is doing their job poorly, I’m not going to give them a break because they tried their best. I’ll give him credit when he performs well, but he deserves to be derided when he’s poor. And unfortunately for us, that’s more often than not.

Other teams pay the premiums to get the players they let go because they have replacements just as good.

It’s far less drafting than them having the best U.S. scouting and personnel department in the league by far.

Nothing for nothing.

I like it.

There’s actually been a reasonable amount of positive turnover during this regime. Just not at QB where it counts most.

I agree completely but you were skeptical of him early on. He may not be lighting the league on fire but he’s legit. Looks better than Nichols with far less offensive talent around him.

Gotta say, it’s nice to see you coming around.

We beat Toronto 38-20 in Toronto last season.

I have to imagine that O’Shea is sick and tired of Lapo going into kill the clock mode after halftime. It’s like clockwork at this point. You have to wonder what’s being said in the room at half. And if the uneducated fans know it, you damn well better believe that the coaches in the league have figured out you can be aggressive and take chances against this team in the second half and they aren’t going to fight back. A lot of that is Nichols too. The guy is not a leader. Perhaps the INTs against Hamilton and the public beatings he took last season have made him petrified to make a big mistake but he can’t have it both ways. Being known as a game manager clearly rattles him and hurts his feelings, he’s made that clear countless times. But at this point, a game manager would be a massive upgrade. This team can win with a game manager who owns what he is and makes the plays that are available in front of him. Even game managers don’t throw for sub-170 yards against the worst defence in the league or an almost unbelievably bad 261 on 48(!) attempts. Yards can be meaningless in certain situations but here they tell the whole story.

Me too.

They try the deep ball to him far more often than anyone logically should but you’re right, why even put him in that position?

Feoli-Gudino is so, so bad.

But he apparently doesn’t know what irony means, either.

To the surprise of no one, Rod doesn’t know the difference between a read-option and play action.

Ward looks like Campbell’s long lost illegitimate son.

“A player is down, knees are down too!” He thinks he’s such a genius with this wordplay.