Laram on Greg Robinson

WV: Personally, I’m not ‘thrilled’ that GR is not ready
for prime-time yet, but I assume
he’ll be worked in gradually and will still
be what all the experts said he would be.

I think both of your statements are absolutely true. There’s no “assume” about it for me…to me, you just described the reality.

I don’t find anything about this “troubling” in the least. This is one of those issues, again, that’s just poster mindset…some guys see bad stuff in things like this, some guys don’t. It’s more how you see things than any other factor. And after a thousand words are spent analyzing and proposing and claiming and debating and counter-arguing and comparing creds, right now, till we know more, at the end of the day, it’s STILL just about mindsets.

And right now, where things stand, not only could it turn out one side is right and the other wrong, but, it’s equally possible that neither could be right, neither could be wrong, and possibly even both at once.

Herzog wrote:

I don’t know the logic behind having him learn more than one position as a freaking rookie. This completely goes against what they were doing in mini camp. I thought they were wise in mini camp….afterwords…..not so much

I have a theory on that. Everything about Robinson was longterm. If they wanted to go short term and just have a player week 1, then, they should have taken Matthews. But they like longterm thinking.

Longterm, every OL coach in the league has to contend with one thing–old-fashioned year in and year out OL continuity is dead. Free agency and the cap killed it. I posted an article a while back that analyzed this and concluded that on average, every OL in the league will have 3.5 new starters every 2 years. So how do you cope with that? The Rams approach is flexibility. Jones was playing all 3 inside positions. Saffold can play everything but center. They added GR to the mix–he can play both OG and OT, or will be able to when he’s ready.

Short term, that wasn’t good for GR…in the sense that he won’t be an early starter. Cause on top of having a lot to learn ANYWAY, they gave him more to learn.

But LONG TERM it’s good for the OL.

In fact these guys make a lot of longterm v. short term decisions. Quick is an example. Brockers is an example. And so on. Interestingly, they act like guys who really believe they have a 5 year deal and are not on the traditional 3-year death watch.

I don;t know if it will always work out or not, but then short term approaches don’t always work out either.

But if you look at it this way, it’s not that they made a huge mistake so obvious that even we fans can see through it–it’s that they were approaching this whole thing differently than some of us would like (it being understood that they could be right about their approach and we could be wrong about the value of our preferred approaches.) And that’s really 2 different things. They didn’t screw up…they just have a different approach than the one we’re looking for.

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Agamemnon wrote:

The Rams can have continuity. They resigned Saffold. They drafted an OT. Now they need to resign Barksdale. Draft another OT and find a Center. If Jones is the center they need they can do it with one more move on draft day. imo

By continuity I specifically mean the whole OL. In the old days, you could field all 5 of your OL or most of them year to year. That’s dead. As the numbers show, teams will change up to 3.5 starters ever 2 years. I really doubt that 2 years from now the Rams OL will have the same 5 starters they do now. In fact, it’s possible that only 1 of the present starters will be a Rams OL starter in 2016.

So that’s what I meant by continuity. Keeping the same 5. Or even 4 of them. Like when it was Pankey/Bain Harrah Smith Hill Slater for consecutive seasons.

One way to do that is to keep 2-3 players on your OL. But that gets problematical with the cap. How many high-paid 2nd contract linemen can you afford? I doubt it can be more than 2-3.

The Rams solution to this constant flux is to have flexible players who can back up multiple positions. That way when you lose a guy you just plug in your next good player.

I’ll bet you flexibility with G.Rob got more important once they saw Long in action.

There’s just not enough time to develop these guys in so many positions. They don’t get as much practice time as they used to.

To reinforce this point, let’s not forget that Fisher’s NORM is to NOT play rookies. He has a history of sitting even highly touted rookies. He had several years where no rookies started for his teams in Tennessee. At least not at first. He really prefers to “learn ’em up”

Now that the Roster is more laden with talent, I’m not surprised that he’s reticent to start a more raw rookie like Robinson. He’s going to be a beast. Why hamper his ceiling development by early play?