Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
How confident are you that Karlaftis is an immediate 10+ sack guy and Uzi 6-8.
Because without those 15 sacks and more critically, without the pressures and the double-teams, this DL is in trouble.
Y'all really don't remember how many games were nip/tuck right until the 4th quarter last year? Again, we don't beat Cincy without him. We don't beat Philly without him.
How's that not 'a game changer' if we don't have him?
This isn't just some swinging dick linebacker. This was probably the 3rd most impactful defensive player in football last season. He was THAT ****ing good.
It's really REALLY weird to me that folks are going to hand-waive that. Because as 'only one piece of the puzzle' but playing at an insanely high level, this defense was still only okay most of the season in 2022. Take him out of that equation and 'only okay' may be a pleasant memory.
Take him out and you're back to trying to outscore teams and hoping they make a mistake or you win a coin toss. That didn't work in '18 and wouldn't have worked even in '19 had the AFC not been a bucket of dicks that year.
We need the D to complement the O and Jones is the most critical component we have to that.
So I'm not gonna pretend like he doesn't matter. He does - in a big way.
But he's evidently lost his mind.
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It actually
did work in '18, without the offsides, but I get it.
I think this place makes people pretty numb to predicting bad things, probably so much so that we tend to ignore things that maybe we should think...
uh, this might actually be bad.
And a large part for me is 1) number of scenarios, and 2) time.
And right now it's August and out of many different scenarios, CJ not playing for the Chiefs this year or even a large chunk of it seems like an outlier (I'm also assuming he's trolling on Twitter, so who knows, I could be wrong and maybe he is an idiot).
In the 'time' department, there's stuff like the Tyreek trade, regular season losses predicting playoff doom, etc. And with the Tyreek trade, we basically said the same thing.... they'd probably still be really good, but we may need him for that one Wasp play.
In the 'scenario' department, it's things like ending up playing the Titans in the AFCCG, not playing in Atlanta last postseason, not playing both the Bengals and Bills last postseason, etc.
Then we have stuff like 3 & 15 Wasp, :13, Mahomes being unable to walk against Jax, 1-leg Mahomes vs the Bengals.... shit that's staring you in the face with very little in terms of possible ways out, and they still somehow figure it out.
I'm personally pretty much dismissing the notion he won't be on the field this season until it plays out, and I'll start to question it if nothing happens soon after the final preseason game. Right now, meh.
And while I'm not personally dismissing his impact and the thought that
yeah, maybe this time I really should be worried.... even if he got traded tomorrow and it's suddenly staring us in the face, it's still only August and a lot of shit could happen. And we obviously don't WANT to rely on maybe the Bills take a step back or maybe they luck out in several scenarios in the playoffs, etc; etc.... but, that's kind of where my mind goes.
Worry about what's staring you in the face and could destroy you within 13 seconds, that's the current precedent they've set.