Baseball

Stop Acquiescing To These Capitalist Pigs

By Sam Fels 3310 0

I’m gonna take a break from the Cubs offseason wishlist to address something I’ve seen far too much of the last week.

Every day I open Twitter or Facebook, which I recognize is the start of the problem right there but it’s pretty much unavoidable given what I do, and I see someone–and frequently people I know personally–say something like, “I’ve come to the conclusion/place/idea that I’m ok with the Cubs trading Kris Bryant if…”

What comes after the “if” doesn’t matter, because absolutely no one should ever be ok with the Cubs trading Kris Bryant. It should be the kind of thing that makes you consider trading in your fandom, although I guess if we’re all still here after the Addison Russell mishegas and Fredo Ricketts’s Trump fundraisers, we’re never going to go away.  Which is exactly why they bought the team and exactly what they’re counting on, so I realize I’m pissing into the wind here. Save your breath.

Still, it’s the kind of thing that should have a fanbase in complete revolt. The fact that you have basically been conditioned to shut up and take it a symptom of what’s wrong with baseball right now, and really the country as a whole (but we’ll leave the latter out of it for this).

Here’s a list of players that would be an acceptable return for Bryant:

Cody Bellinger

Walker Buehler

Mookie Betts

Juan Soto

Christian Yelich (and that’s not a gimme)

Ronald Acuna

Mike Trout

Maybe Alex Bregman

We’ll throw Jacob deGrom on there to be nice. And that’s it. And none of those names are coming back for Bryant.

And yet there’s a growing faction of Cubs fans that are somehow convinced that trading Bryant is some version of four-dimensional chess that only Theo can see but they don’t want to admit they can’t see it because that would just mean they’re merely a peon. It’s not. It’s not even close. The idea of trading Bryant is merely an acceptance that the uber-wealthy Ricketts family don’t want to pay a player what he’s earned in two years’ time.

This isn’t about some “schism” between Bryant or Scott Boras and the Cubs. There’s no such thing. Pay him the most money, and he’ll be a Cub for life. This isn’t hard, and yet everyone wants to code this into some sort of larger puzzle. Again, it’s simple greed. The Ricketts want to keep more and more of your money and they certainly don’t want to have to give it to “labor.” They’re the stars after all, not Bryant and Rizzo and Baez. After all, they’re the only owners to bring a World Series to the Northside. And don’t you forget it.

The idea of some “grand plan” or “advanced thinking” is merely what they use to poison your water. If they can convince you that moving Bryant is actually the “smart” thing to do, because they’ll never be able to afford everyone, then you might not notice what an utter travesty this would be. This isn’t the NHL or the NFL where there’s a hard cap and you do get punished for producing a bevy of good players. You can pay whatever you want.

And if you somehow believe that the luxury tax would cost the Cubs or the Red Sox or Yankees or Dodgers living in the black, and you’d have to be the most gullible doofus on the planet to believe that or the Ricketts kids would have to be the stupidest people on the planet and the worst business people in history (and they might be!), remember the luxury tax is just another instrument of greed imposed by other owners who simply want money for free. It’s the Bob Nuttings and Derek Jeters and descendants of Bud Selig of the world not wanting to have to put a good product on the field consistently, which they easily could, to turn massive profits. It’s about bleeding their cities and fellow owners dry for money they’ll never have to earn. And yet all the owners go along with it because they’re raking in the cash too, and as long as it’s not going to the players, they’re just fine with that.

There is simply no way the Cubs can trade Kris Bryan and be better next year. And it should be about next year. You already went through the rebuild. And you go through those things to get a player like Kris Bryant, because they come around once a generation. You hoard those prospects in trades and spins at the international pool and make all those draft picks in the hopes you find a Kris Bryant. You don’t find one and then just decide to cash in and find another one. That’s not how this works.

The idea that the Cubs have to look forward to the future in any way is wool being pulled over your eyes to justify the Ricketts not having to spend to keep this team together. I’m sure if you got Theo in a private conversation at a bar and pumped him full of two or three beers he’d tell you he’d hand Bryant $37M a year tomorrow and wouldn’t look back. He’s not being allowed to. Because the Ricketts, one of the more born on third broods in the world, think they know better because they’re in the Lucky Sperm Club. Or they just want to keep more money for themselves.

They’re obviously not alone. The Red Sox, a team that has had their own channel for a long time now and one of the biggest brands in North American sports and the most expensive ticket in baseball, don’t want to pay Mookie Betts what he’s earned even more than Bryant. It’s not because they can’t, they’ve just decided they don’t want to., And they’ll tell you whenever they hire their new GM that he’ll lead the way in modern baseball thinking and trading Betts will be a part of that. That a team can run more efficiently than just ponying up $30M or more to players, who again, have more than earned it. They’ll tell you they need to get under the luxury tax threshold. They won’t tell you why, and no one will ask. Because the Red Sox and every team like them would absolutely turn a profit with a $300M payroll. They just don’t want to.

(I should admit that if the Red Sox payroll trimming allows the transfer budget for Liverpool to sign Kylian Mbappe next summer, then I’m all for it).

The Cubs are built to win now, and easily could win again in 2020 with as simple as one or two moves. And that’s with Kris Bryant, who is comfortably a top five player in baseball. If you somehow believe he’s perma-crocked at age 27, then again I can’t help you. Maybe hiring a new medical team that doesn’t send him out there every day with a knee that sounds like a Crunch bar would be a start to making all the non-believers see again.

As baseball is intertwined with America, this is just another symptom of the sickness. A group of barely qualified, probably barely literate rich kids tell you they can run a business more “efficiently,” which only means they can do it more cheaply and skimp on the actual workforce. That’s all trading Kris Bryant would be. And I don’t give a flying fuck what prospects he could bring back. We did that in 2011 and 2012 and 2013. That was then. I don’t care about 2022 or 2023 or 2024. The Cubs are here and now and anything they tell you about restocking the system or looking toward the future is utter horseshit. It’s a smokescreen. It’s meant to blind you to what’s really going on, which is unadulterated greed.

Imagine the Cubs trading Ryne Sandberg in 1986. If you’ve been around here a while, remember when the Hawks struggled in 2012 and some floated the idea of trading Patrick Kane for Ryan Goddamn Miller? Remember how we laughed everyone out of existence on that one? Two Cups, one Conn Smythe (undeserved, but still), one Hart Trophy later and looks even dumber now, doesn’t it (if we ignore all the off-ice being a monster stuff for a second)?

Trading Bryant would be no less galactically stupid or destructive.

Don’t fall for it. Don’t talk yourself into it. Don’t convince yourself you can see the logic. None of it is there. They’re only pretending it’s there so you won’t see what’s actually there. Don’t let them think you’re that stupid. That’s what they’re literally banking on.

Hockey

Game #15 – Canucks vs. Hawks Preview: It’s Only Nostalgia Week For Us

By Sam Fels 1497 0

vs.

RECORDS: Canucks 9-3-3   Hawks 4-7-3

PUCK DROP: 7:30

TV: NBCSN Chicago

THEY FILMED DEADPOOL THERE: Canucks Army

We’ve had to do this the past couple years now. Whenever the Hawks meet up with the Kings or Canucks, we have to do something of a “Remember when these mattered?” comment. This used to be the the fiercest rivalry in the league. That stopped some seven years ago. With the Kings and Hawks, there just isn’t much more to discuss because both teams are lying face down in the muck. Sadly, that might not be the case for the Canucks anymore.

The Canucks find themselves one point out of the lead for the Pacific Division, behind the Oilers and one ahead of the Coyotes, just to let you know how backwards everything is and how many different teams seem to have better ideas than the Hawks right now.

Is it real? The numbers suggest it might be. The schedule does not. The Canucks have seven regulation wins, and they’re over the Sharks at home (some teams can do that, in fact a lot of them have), the Kings twice (some teams do that), the Red Wings twice, the Rangers, and over the Panthers at home. Only the last one is a team that’s probably good and playing well at the moment. But hey, you can only play whom the schedule says you do, and the Canucks have made hay against that.

And they haven’t just squeaked by, as their metrics are pretty glowing. They’re one of the best teams in the league in terms of Corsi and expected-goals, and they’re doing some explosive work in the offensive end. Most of that comes from the top line of WHO WANTS TO WALK WITH ELIAS?-JT Miller-Brock Boeser. They’ve combined for 52 points in 15 games, with Elias Pettersson on track for a 109-point season. That’ll play.

Coach Travis Green has taken the training wheels off this line, starting them in any zone against any opponent, and pretty much doing the same with his second line centered by Bo Horvat. This has freed him up to put his plugs in more advantageous spots, which is maybe why you’ve seen scoring spikes from the likes of Brandon Sutter and Tim Schaller. What a time to be alive…to cut yourself.

That doesn’t mean Lady Luck isn’t waving her ass a bit at the Canucks, too. Again, the soft schedule helps, and they’ve ground up the chuck they’ve been served (is that how that works? Let’s just go with it). But this is a team with a 102 PDO that’s getting a .918 from Jacob Markstrom and a .938 from Thatcher Demko. The latter has been the hope for the future for what feels like 17 years now, but he’s not a .938 goalie. The Nucks are also shooting at a team-rate of 9.4% at evens, and while Pettersson and Boeser are most certainly top-level scorers, the rest of this outfit most certainly is not.

That said, they’re a top-10 specials teams outfit on both sides, with an excellent penalty kill, and with the possession they’ve gotten at evens and what they’ve done with it, you can’t really ask for any more.

And they have hope on the blue line. Somehow, and this for sure won’t last, Tyler Myers has been a possession-driving monster, with a Corsi of 56.5% while just shading most of his zone starts in the defensive zone. Should you expect that to continue? Cue Russell Westbrook:

Still, nice to have for now. That has freed up Quinn Hughes, who is going to be a thing, to take easier assignments, and he’s dinging opponents upside the head to the tune of a 57 xG% while getting third-pairing minutes and 67% of his shifts in the offensive zone. Must be nice to be able to bed in a young, dynamic d-man like that so easily. We’re looking longingly at Vancouver, folks. Eat Arby’s, puke it up, and then eat that.

Right, the to Hawks. Corey Crawford will rotate back in to the starter’s net after Lehner once again did enough to keep the Hawks from getting utterly embarrassed. This is starting to be like the end of “Little Miss Sunshine,” where Paul Dano is trying to convince Toni Collette that she has to keep Abigail Breslin from getting embarrassed by the actual pageant girls. I think Lehner is Collette in this metaphor, but I’m not entirely sure as the Hawks have basically broken my brain.

Coach Kelvin Gemstone, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to scratch one of the Hawks’ best two-way and fastest forwards tonight in Dominik Kubalik to give us more Zack Smith. Because all the kids out here with their skateboards and backwards hats have been demanding more Zack Smith. The world needs more Zack Smith. Zack Smith is the key to salvation…

…

…

…I’ve just had a brain bubble.

Everything is fucked.

Anyway, the Canucks can do pretty much whatever they want here. They can try and out-skate the Hawks, which they can. They probably have the defensive structure to use the “advanced trap,” that the Sharks used to strangle the Hawks into paste, which is just a trap but ahead of the red line. Or anything in between. And the Hawks will probably still try and dump the puck in and get it back with their not-fast-enough and not-strong-enough forwards.

I’m going to go look for a strong tree branch. You folks enjoy the game.

 

 

Hockey

Game #15 – Canucks vs. Hawks Spotlight: Come On Without…Come On Within…

By Sam Fels 1378 0

Imagine a world where a team could bring up a very promising rookie, one that was worth a top-ten pick, and play him on the third pairing, shelter him as far as zone-starts and the competition he sees, and let him hang loose on the power play where his generational skill can really shine. Imagine getting 11 points out of him in his first fourteen games, as his mistakes don’t kill you because they come against third and fourth lines.

That world exists, people. It’s just in Vancouver and not in Chicago.

Whereas Adam Boqvist essentially was tossed into the deep end full of ornery badgers (and they tend to get that way when you toss them into a pool where they don’t belong) due to his organization’s incompetence, the Canucks have allowed Quinn Hughes to land softly in the NHL and already showcase what the Canucks think will be a franchise-turning skill-set on the blue line. Oh for a different way.

Hughes has started his NHL career skating with steady-as-a-rock vet Chris Tanev in a third-pairing role. Tanev is still capable of much more, but is also the perfect centerfielder for the freelancing Hughes. As the Canucks didn’t have too many aspirations when the season started (that could be changing), they can keep Tanev in a more reserved role to develop a future star. It also helps having Edler, Myers, Benn, and Stetcher who are, at worst, representative NHL d-men. Tanev and Hughes have started 63% of their shifts in the offensive zone, keeping Hughes where he is best and letting him learn the defensive side of the game at a slower pace.

And it’s actually Tanev who has been lost without Hughes, as he has sported a sub-40% Corsi in the 40 or so minutes on the season he’s played with someone else. So clearly, Hughes is special.

And he’s shown that on the power play, where he already has eight points and one of his two goals. The top unit is being QB’d by Hughes with Pettersson, Boeser, Miller, and Horvat as the four forwards, which can be a scary one for a long time. You can see where this thing would become self-aware like the Sharks one did a couple years ago, with talented players playing together on it for season upon season until they just knew where each other was.

If you want hope for Boqvist through Hughes, keep in mind they’re just about the same size. Hughes is listed at 5-10 and 170, which is generous to the hilt. And as the years roll on, the Canucks will expect him to displace Alex Edler on the top pairing. But they don’t need him to now, as things are going well and expectations within the organization–except for ownership which is kind of a problem–are tempered.

The future looks bright in Vancouver, if they can keep owner Aquilini out of hockey side of the business too much. Something they’ve failed to do for a while now. Acquilini has never given in on doing a full rebuild, trying to do half of one while also trying to compete for playoff spots, which has handcuffed the Canucks for half a decade now. It’s why they have some unconscionable contracts on their books to the likes of Eriksson, Sutter, Roussel, and now Myers while actually producing a promising young core of Pettersson, Boeser, and Hughes. It feels like it could keep them from going in any direction.

Still, within the next two seasons they could probably free themselves up from Tanev, Edler, Eriksson, Pearson, and Sutter’s revival might make him marketable as well. Then the Canucks would really have room to boost their future. A future in which Hughes looks like he’ll be driving.

Hockey

Game #15 – Canucks vs. Hawks: Hedley Lamarr’s Muggers, Buggerers, Bushwhackers

By Sam Fels 1282 0

Alex Edler – We’re really stretching here (not Troy Stetcher-ing…we’ll show ourselves out), but the Canucks just aren’t the grouping of fuckwits you used to know and…well, know. So we’ll go with Captain Elbows here, who never met a hit he couldn’t leap into like Quinn the Eskimo just got here. Edler has been getting away with this crap for years, and perhaps one day he’ll miss and turn into shards on the boards and we’ll finally be vindicated. Probably not, though.

Tyler Myers – At least the Canucks have kept up tradition in having a big, doofus defenseman on their roster whom they will massively overpay for years. Sure, Myers is playing well now. It started well in Buffalo and Winnipeg, too. Then he gets bored with his defensive responsibilities, convinces himself he’s the big blond dork version of Paul Coffey and goes cowboy-ing his way all over the ice while the opponents gleefully and perhaps disbelievingly gallop into the spaces he’s supposed to be in but is ignoring. You’ll see, garbage-throwers and shit-ass rioters. You’ll see.

Jordie Benn – If he ever shaves, he’ll be out of the league within seven minutes.

Hockey

Game #15 – Canucks vs. Hawks: Lineups & How They Were Built

By Sam Fels 1197 0

Canucks

Notes: Pettersson started nearly 70% of his shifts in the o-zone last year but that has dipped of late, despite what that number says. Still, they’ve been one of the most dominant lines in hockey…Horvat’s production has mostly been on the power play but expect him to do damage at evens before too long…Adam Gaudette is good enough for their second line but his main running buddy in college isn’t good enough to beat out Zack Smith or Andrew Shaw right now and is in Rockford. Life is grand…Sutter is having a revival season now that they’re no longer using him as some kind of Jordan Staal/checking type and just support scoring…

Notes: Yep, Kubalik is scratched for Zack Smith. Just let that marinate…we’ve got nothing else to say….

Baseball

We Can Plant A House, Or We Can Build A Tree – No, Screw You AJ, We’ll Take Zack Wheeler

By Sam Fels 1309 0

Earlier today, our comrade and Sox correspondent AJ wrote up why and how the Pale Hose should be interested in Zack Wheeler to boost the Sox rotation that needs it. But here’s the thing: no one cares about the White Sox, and really everyone’s energy should be put into putting the Cubs back among the elite of MLB (THE! ELITE! THE THE ELITE!). And I don’t mean just us here. I mean everyone in the world. Do you really want to live through another season of the Cardinals boasting about their geniusness when they were essentially a mediocre team that had everything fall into its lap? Of course you don’t. No one wants that. And the only person who minds the Twins winning the AL Central again is Fifth Feather, and he’s a miserable little man living in his hovel and laughing at all of you constantly. He doesn’t like you, never will, so why should you do anything for him? Exactly.

So let’s get Wheeler to the Northside instead.

Why A Spoon, Sire?: AJ laid it out, but basically Wheeler is the youngest available and realistic starting pitcher on the market. Stephen Strasburg is not walking through that door (and the Cubs might and probably should be gunshy about signing any pitcher out of a World Series team who has gone longer on innings than ever before, given how their Brandon Morrow and first year of Darvish experiences worked out). Gerrit Cole is not walking through that door. I’d love it if one of them did, but it’s not going to happen. Funny how Cubs and Sox fans are dealing with the same thing in that sense, no?

That doesn’t mean Wheeler is exactly young, as he’ll turn 30 in May of next season. But the rest of the Cubs rotation is old, as so will Kyle Hendricks and Lester, Q, and Darvish are over 30. Adbert Alzolay won’t be ready for the rotation this year, if ever, and the Cubs just have to get younger there.

While Wheeler doesn’t have the strikeout numbers of some, he’s been pretty solid in that category. And while the injuries are a worry, more encouragingly is that Wheeler’s stuff seems to be getting better the farther he’s gotten away from his TJ surgery. Look at his four-seam velocity:

Or the vertical drop on his curve:

Or the sweep of his slider:

So that’s all very encouraging. If you want to go by spin-rate, both his curve and slider have picked up spin-rate from 2018 to this past one. So while he did miss two and a half seasons thanks to injury, that’s also wear and tear he hasn’t piled up. So the fear of his stuff drying up in his early 30s isn’t as high as it might be, and he appears to be on the upswing you might have expected at ages 26-28, had he a clean bill of health.

Ein minuten bitte, vous einen kleinen problemo avec de religione (he was from everywhere): As AJ said, the injury worries are still there. But he made 29 starts in 2018 and 31 this year, and really just being around 30 is basically what you expect of any starters but the top echelon these days. With the presence of Chatwood and hopefully Azolay in the pen and both being stretched out enough to go multiple innings now, the Cubs can absorb a pitcher or two that don’t make the post 33-35 times per year. And Alec Mills and Colin Rea are lying around as well.

There’s another slight worry, and that’s his ERA-. That’s league-adjusted, and it didn’t love Wheeler last year, giving him only a 98 where 100 is average. It was much more kind to him in ’18 with an 87. The reason probably is that Wheeler gave up a lot more hits in 2019, 46 more in just 13 more innings. Some of that is pure luck, as Wheeler’s BABIP rose to .311 from .279. But the latter number is more the outlier as Wheeler has a career BABIP of .300 on the nose. Wheeler’s hard-contact rate against and his exti velocity both saw a tick up this year. But as we keep saying, whose didn’t? Among starting pitchers, Wheeler was in the top-10 in average exit-velocity against. And as I’ve pointed out, the stuff seems to be getting better.

Little Silver? Little Gold?: MLBTR has Wheeler getting $20M for five years from the Phillies, because the Arrieta signing has gone so well, Nick Pivetta turned into Grover, Aaron Nola really struggled in the season’s last month. You don’t think of Wheeler as a $20M pitcher, but given his last two years that’s probably what he is. If you go by the last two years cumulative, he’s got the same WAR as Patrick Corbin had. He’s the same age as Nathan Eovaldi was last year, with some of the same injury concerns, and Eovaldi got $17M a year to sit on a trainer’s table in Boston.

MLBTR lists half the league as possible suitors, because again, why wouldn’t you want a plus pitcher on your team. That’s only going to drive his price up. But still, he’s going to get a salary a class below Strasburg and Cole. And the Cubs will have some $30M coming off the books when Lester’s and Quintana’s deals are up. Because of the bargain they’ll still be getting Hendricks at, they can splurge a bit in another spot.

And the Cubs could use another pitcher with really good stuff. That’s the kind of thing that matters in October, and this is still a team that should keep in mind how to negotiate 11 bonus wins after the 162.

Fetch. And AJ smells anyway. You don’t want to play in front of him, Zack.

 

Hockey

Angry At Numbers – The First Month

By Sam Fels 1673 0

I guess it’s the first month. We’re through the first week of November now really and the season started in the first week of October, so let’s just go with that. Anyway, time for us to look at some numbers, and then beyond that to the meaning of the numbers, and then decide the numbers have no meaning.

60.3/2.66

That’s the Hawks Corsi-against per 60 minutes at even-strength, and their expected-goals-against per 60 this season. The first is the third-worst mark in the league. The second is the second-worst. And both are either worse or exactly the same as last season. I’m going to get more heavily into this when we record the podcast tonight (so tune in! promotion!), but clearly this is not what’s supposed to happen. The acquisitions of Calvin de Haan and Olli Maatta were specifically to keep this from happening. And it hasn’t happened. There are reasons for this, and again, podcast tonight we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of it. But this isn’t the sign of a team moving forward. And this isn’t a team adapting to a new style again, because as we all know at this point…MAGIC TRAINING CAMP. This is just who they are, which is a team that essentially never has the puck and is giving up not just a lot of attempts but a lot of good ones as well.

Now, these numbers will calm down shortly because October hockey is very open while everyone establishes position and then it calms down when everyone gets bored. But still, fresh out of camp this is not what anyone thought we would see, at least inside the building.

52.8/2.15

And these are the “for” numbers in the same category, which are both down from last year. And again, this is October when things are more open and offense should be easier to find. You can find all sorts of mitigating factors here, but I would pin this on Jonathan Toews being a ghost most of the season, mismatched lines every game, and the lack of any puck-moving d-men now that Erik Gustafsson isn’t sort of pretending to be one anymore (more on him in a second). We accepted long ago that the Hawks wouldn’t be good defensively, but we thought it might be ok, or at least entertaining, because they would create a lot, too. But they don’t. They’re a middling offense in these terms. And I guess we’re starting to see that last year’s offense was more the product of individual brilliance from Kane, Top Cat, and Toews, than anything structural. Which we already kind of knew but tried to be in denial about. Well, Toews and DeBrincat haven’t been at that level, and here’s what you get.

+4.3/+3.95

Those are Duncan Keith’s relative marks in Corsi-percentage and expected-goals percentage, which are miles above what he’s been the past four seasons. The first mark would be the best of his career in fact, though a large part of that is due to the Hawks being a so much worse even-strength and possession team now. It’s hard to be that far above the mark when your team is at 55%-58% as the Hawks were once upon a time. Same with the xG% as well.

Still, Keith has done this with a variety of partners as we’ve seen, and it was fair to question if he still could or if he still even wanted to.

The problem is that Keith is averaging more than a minute at even-strength more of time than he has since 2012 (!) and overall is averaging more than two minutes per game than last year. Yes, we all know about Keith’s freakish physical endurance but he’s still 36. This can’t really continue.

46.1/41.7

This is where I really get frustrated with the analytic community. There was some cry from them when Jeremy Colliton scratched Erik Gustafsson in Los Angeles. Garbage like this:

The above numbers are Erik Gustaffson’s CF% and xG% this year, which are terrible. And yes, if you were to blend them with all 82 games from last year, his numbers would still look good compared to the rest of the defense. Because that was 82 games of sample and this was 11. And yet anyone who has actually watched Gus this year knows he’s looked a lot like that campsite after the Pikers leave in Snatch.

Secondly, you have to take all of these numbers with a grain of salt, because hockey analytics has yet to weight these things with zone starts. Or they haven’t in a way I’ve seen, and feel free to show me on Twitter. Gustafsson started 60% of his shifts in the offensive zone last year. Same as this year. It’s actually harder to give up more chances and attempts against that way, because of the distance you’d have to travel.

Sure, winning faceoffs and the type of forechecking forwards who are there play into it as well, but the numbers on Gus don’t tell the whole story. Watching him, you know he doesn’t get you from one zone to the other, at least the right way. He’s too slow. He’s a decent passer, but rarely can open the space up for himself to do that. His skill, at least from dim memory, is making things happen when you’re already in the offensive zone. And that has value, but it’s not the same as being a puck-mover.

This is not a “WATCH THE GAME, NERDS” decree, but it becomes rather obvious when you’re not watching the games at all. Yes, their arguments would be that 11 games this year shouldn’t outweigh the 82 from last year because one suggests more what the player Gustafsson is. But how many games does a coach need to wait before officially confirming his player is playing like horseshit? 15? 20? To me, Gus was that bad and his scratching totally justified.

We can blend our stats and our eyes, people.

Football

Sons Of Wilber Marshall – Week 9: Ride The Spiral

By Sam Fels 1184 0

And farther down we go…is there anything to be gleaned by the brief spasm of competence in the second half? Or should all focus be on the Wannstedt Era like first half?

Brian Schmitz (@_BrianSchmitz): I really liked seeing Mitch move around, that seemed to make a difference and resembled 2018 Mitch, which was my favorite Mitch. I have no idea why, but I’m not convinced this team is done. I don’t like this team or organization so it’s not that I am being bias, I just think there is too much talent on defense for this team to roll over and die.

Wes French (@WFrenchman): The first half was worse than any Dowell Loggins era half in recorded history. Mitch had an expected completion percentage around 68%, but was actually only accurate on 47% of his throws. The defense has given up an average of 2.4 10+ play drives/gm after only giving them up at a 1.6/gm clip last year.

The offense can’t really move the ball, the defense can’t get off the field on third down. the couldn’t even field the final kickoff cleanly to give us what was sure to be a game ending sack or turnover from Mitch.  I am convinced this team is done. We saw nothing new, we heard the same excuses, we got the same results we’ve been getting all year. This team is not bad, but it’s poorly coached and the QB is regressing. The schedule only gets tougher from here, and this upcoming week against the Lions could be a masterclass in awful coaching.
Can’t wait.
The Bears actually had me thinking they might fuck around and come all the way back to claim the kind of win that can help turn an uneven season around. Then they stalled at midfield, punting the ball back to the Eagles with just under 9 minutes to play, pinning them at their own 11. What happened next was a lesson in how to grind a game to the end, as Philadelphia went SIXTEEN PLAYS and 69 yards while eating up all but 29 seconds of game time and kicking the FG that would put them on top with the 22-14 final.

That drive killed me. I hate the Bears.
What do we make of this defense? Yes, probably overworked, but had a chance the past couple weeks to make definitive stops and didn’t do it? Is it simply Hicks not being there or something more?
Brian: I still feel like they are one of the premiere units in the league; but the results are saying otherwise. The shitty part of this entire equation is that the secondary continues to improve and is playing at a very high level. Once Hicks returns, they will be as good as ever; but I’m just not sure it matters how great they are. Chuck Pagano is fine. He simply oversees the operation. Nothing he has or hasn’t done has effected the way this unit plays.
Tony Martin (@MrMartinBruh): They haven’t forced turnovers this year to the extent that gave the offense short fields and as a result gave them the lead with which they could take more risks which results in more turnovers. It’s a huge ugly cycle.
Wes: I’m not sure I’m ready to give Pagano a pass. A recurring thing is NOT being able to get off the field to either close out a game or get the ball back to have a chance to win or tie. The personnel seems fine, but the QB pressures have been down since week 2-3, starting with the London game. The same game where a bad penalty led to a 4th down conversion and ultimately the game winning TD for Oakland. Even the Week 2 win in Denver saw the defense unable to make a stop, setting up the dramatic walk-off FG.  Getting off the field to end the game has been a major problem all season, and that has to fall at someone’s feet…
Looking forward, they do have the Lions twice and the Giants in the next month. Any hope?
Wes: I don’t think it’s a matter of WHO they play. They should definitely beat both teams and come away with three wins, but is anyone really that optimistic after that first half we all just saw? Mitch is STILL routinely missing wide open throws from clean pockets. Maybe the defense can’t get off the field because they’re so gassed from playing 40 minutes a week. Nagy needs to take more responsibility, but at this point I’m finally handing in my Mitch hype team membership. I decided to jump in feet first after the pick was made because why the hell not, but this has been a disaster. Whatever they’re working on week to week, it’s not helping. He’s not a starting calibur QB in the NFL, and that right there has a lot to do with why this team is 3-5 and not 5-3 or 6-2.

Call me jaded or whatever, but I just don’t believe this team is capable of doing enough well, on a consistent basis, to say “yea, the upcoming schedule puts them back into it.” They should’ve beaten Oak/LAC, and without those wins the games against Det/NYG can only get them to .500 before the final stretch of Dal/GB/KC/Min.
Brian: The Lions and Giants are looking at the Bears on the schedule and thinking they have a chance.