Vikings trade for Bradford

So now Bradford has reached the point where he is switching offensive systems…in week 1. Used to be, he had to wait till the off-season to switch systems.

So that’s Shurmur’s WCO, McDaniels’s Erhardt Perkins, Schott’s Coryell hybrid, Kelly’s offense, back to Pederson’s WCO, and then in the same season on to Turner’s Coryell system. That’s 6 switches in 7 years. (I think that also exhausts all the NFL offensive systems. There aren’t any others.) Only once that whole time was he in the same system 2 years in a row–2012/2013. Then 2 knee injuries.

Wait until he gets into sync with that system though.

That will be Bradford with an OL and a running game playing for Norv Turner on a team with a defense.

wv wrote:

So does that mean teams dont think he’s that good, coz they keep trading him…
or does that mean teams do think he’s good, coz they keep trading For him ??

In the qb market as it is, which is short on players, I would say absolutely he is good…and considered good. You don’t trade away a #1 pick for someone you think is mediocre. PLUS think of who had the big input on that—the Vikes offensive coordinator, Norv Turner. If he is your OC you don’t trade for a qb if Norv doesn’t like him.

The problem with Bradford was the knee. So 2 teams in a row insured themselves against that knee…the Rams by trading him away, and the Eagles by drafting Wentz in spite of signing him.

But…players of that caliber are only around if they have been injured. It was the same with Palmer.

What I don’t like about this trade for the Vikes is that Bradford is a notorious slow learner. Not that he’s dumb, he just seems to be more methodical than intuitive.

What I DO like about this trade for the Vikes is that once he gets going, this will be Bradford level veteran skills (and I consider him to be in the “good qb” class with Flacco and Eli as a pure talent), plus Peterson, plus a good veteran OL, on a team with a defense…and Bradford will be playing for Norv Turner, who WILL know how to use him.

If it works (which to me is all a matter of SB getting up to speed), Minn. could be murder.

..

Sam Bradford trade shows Vikings won’t give in

By Marc Sessler

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000695031/article/sam-bradford-trade-shows-vikings-wont-give-in

The Vikings could have used Teddy Bridgewater’s ghastly knee injury as an airtight excuse against any ugliness Minnesota encountered during the season ahead.

If we’ve learned anything about coach Mike Zimmer and his team, though, the concept of lying down isn’t part of this regime’s operation manual.

Saturday’s surprising trade for Sam Bradford isn’t the equal of Denver bringing a peak-performance Peyton Manning to town in 2012 — not even close — but Minnesota aimed as high as this year’s shaky quarterback market would allow.

Instead of settling for an aging Shaun Hill or a warmed-over Mark Sanchez, the Vikings have landed a quarterback who many coaches around the league — if not the fans — still believe in.

The price is high and easily criticized — a first-rounder next year and a fourth in 2018 — but Minnesota wouldn’t make this trade if it didn’t see itself in the clear light of day as a legitimate Super Bowl contender.

Why they might be right

One reason the Vikings crept into public consciousness as a threat in the NFC, prior to Bridgewater’s injury, was the team’s layered roster surrounding the quarterback spot.

Minnesota boasts an attractive duo of young wideouts in Stefon Diggs and rookie Laquon Treadwell and a top-three running back in future Hall of Famer Adrian Peterson, Bradford’s former college teammate and still the centerpiece of this offense.

The defense is a layered beast at every level with pass-rusher Everson Griffen, young linebacker Anthony Barr and emergent safety Harrison Smith leading the way for a well-coached crew sprinkled with veteran anchors and up-and-coming talent.

This is the best NFL team Bradford has ever played for. His career has been underwhelming, frustrating and dotted with drab play, but he is capable of outshining Bridgewater’s totals from last season: 14 touchdowns to nine interceptions for an offense that rarely tested the field deep.

It’s easy to question the cost. Just ask the Rams, who also used a first-round pick on Bradford and paid for that decision in full. Jeff Fisher’s clubs in St. Louis, though, were a talent-poor dead-zone on offense. Bradford, of course, didn’t help by refusing to escape the trainer’s room.

Learning this offense in mere days won’t be an easy challenge for the team’s new signal-caller, but talented coordinator Norv Turner can do more with Bradford than he could have accomplished with Hill, whose arm strength hovers at the bottom of the league.

The Vikings were a playoff team with Teddy — with a chance for much more — and Bradford gives them an equal shot to win the NFC North.

Where this gets interesting

Bradford is more than just a one-year (hyper-expensive) patch: He’s security for what comes next with Bridgewater.

If the Vikings learn that Bridgewater’s gruesome knee injury is something he can’t overcome by next season, Minnesota has Bradford through 2017. Instead of having to toil through this year with Hill and a cast of no-namers, the Vikings have a quarterback they can lean on well into next season if they must.

As much as Zimmer and the Vikings believe in Bridgewater, the injury renders him a burning question mark at the most important position in sports. You don’t give up a first-round pick for Bradford unless there are concerns about what the future holds under center.

If the Vikings surge deep into January — as Zimmer believes they can — will this trade have been worth it? Absolutely.

What this tells us about Zimmer

Minnesota’s coach was crushed by Bridgewater’s injury, but Zimmer’s overriding message to reporters last week was clear: The Vikings are much more than just their quarterback.

Zimmer preached on the overall strength of his roster and the locker room’s innate desire to press on. He vowed, almost tearfully, that Minnesota wouldn’t view the setback as a final and fatal blow.

Zimmer also noted that he called up longtime mentor and friend Bill Parcells, the Hall of Fame coach who always hammered home the importance of riding into the fray with a signal-caller you can trust.

As colleague and pained Jets fan Dan Hanzus pointed out this week, Parcells saw his own 1999 Jets team — a stacked club — crash and burn when veteran Vinny Testaverde was lost one game into the campaign. Stuck with the inglorious combination of Ray Lucas and Rick Mirer, Gang Green quickly spiraled to earth.

Zimmer was also in Dallas for many up-and-down seasons under Parcells, watching his mentor deftly transition the team from veteran passer Drew Bledsoe to an undrafted fellow by the name of Tony Romo.

There’s no young Romo in this scenario, but Parcells — who famously crafted his own list of 11 quarterback commandments — certainly has pointed takes on the position.

His first commandment? “Ignore other opinions — Press or TV, agents or advisors, family or wives, friends or relatives, fans or hangers on — ignore them on matters of football, they don’t know what’s happening here.”

Zimmer must agree, because plenty of people will criticize shipping a first-round pick to an NFC rival for Bradford. The Vikings, though, don’t care what you think about this trade. Zimmer, especially, isn’t interested in mass-market opinions on Bradford.

Like Parcells before him, Zimmer is proving to be an instinctive, risk-taking coach who refuses to sit around and wait for “next season.”

Minnesota’s window to do damage in the NFC is wide open — and Saturday’s trade tells us that swapping a few picks in exchange for January dreams is entirely worth it to this long-suffering franchise and their no-nonsense leader.

Inside the Trade that Could Reshape the 2016 Season
The two general managers recount all the action that led to the Eagles sending Sam Bradford to the Vikings for two draft picks the week before the season starts. Plus 10 takeaways from cutdown weekend and more

Peter King

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/09/04/sam-bradford-trade-minnesota-vikings-philadelphia-eagles-nfl

Saturday, 6:30 a.m., two NFL general managers and good friends on the phone, trying to finish a trade. The subject of sleep comes up. Neither Philadelphia’s Howie Roseman nor Minnesota’s Rick Spielman has had any of significance during the night, not since they’d last been on the phone five-and-a-half hours earlier.

“I’m staring at the ceiling, wide awake, at 2:30,” Roseman said to Spielman, “and [wife] Mindy says, ‘You okay?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not okay. We’re about to change a lot of lives here.’ ”

“Same thing with me,” Spielman said in return. “Couldn’t sleep. I was out at 4 a.m. walking the dogs.”

How long did it take to make the stunning deal of the year in pro football? Forty-eight hours. That’s the time from the first phone call from Spielman, in his office in Eden Prairie, Minn., to Roseman, about to engage his three boys in some baseball pitch-and-catch in his yard in Pennsylvania, just before dinner at home Wednesday evening, and the time it got very real and Spielman offered Minnesota’s first-round pick Friday evening. It was so surprising to Roseman that he said “it wasn’t even on my brain” Thursday night during the Eagles’ fourth preseason game.

A brief oral history of the Trade That Might Change This Season, from the two general managers:

Tuesday

Spielman, 1:20 p.m. CT: I stand on the defensive side of the field, way in the back. I saw Teddy go down. He must have tripped, I thought. I walked over to where he was down, and I see players turning their heads away, shocked. Players were in shock. By the time I got there, maybe 15 seconds after he went down, our trainer, Eric Sugarman, and other trainers had his leg up and were getting it braced.

They were tremendous. It might have been a dislocation, and from what they tell me, the first thing you’ve got to be concerned with is the nerve and the artery there, so you’ve got to get right on it. I didn’t know what to think. We got dealt a shocking blow. You try to digest it, but you think, ‘Ten, 11 days out from the season, and we lose our franchise quarterback. What do we do?’

Roseman: I was leaving our draft room and looked up at the TV and see on the crawl that Teddy Bridgewater got hurt. I didn’t know anything. I just felt for him, and for Rick. We’re pretty close.

Spielman: Zim [head coach Mike Zimmer] called off practice and had a team meeting, and then I called all our scouts together, and [assistant GM] George Paton, into a meeting. I told them what happened. Besides all their jaws dropping to the floor and being sick to your stomach, absolutely sick to your stomach … we had a job to do. I said to them: ‘This is what we’re getting paid to do, finding the best solution out of the worst-case scenario.

And that’s what we’re going to do here.’ I got up on the white board and we sorted out the scenarios—guys on the street we might want, guys who might get cut, guys on teams that might have enough depth that they’d consider dealing one. Names and options. Then we all got to work watching tape and I started making calls. To be honest, there was no solution. No good solution.

Wednesday

Spielman: I made a bunch of calls. I am not gonna mention teams. But there was blood in the water, and teams knew it. The price was too high. I didn’t want to mortgage our future. Some teams asked for a first-round pick and a core young player. I can understand the pick.

But we worked too hard over the past three years to put all that time and energy into drafting and developing a solid core of this team. I was taken aback who they were asking for. Players who’d been in the Pro Bowl. I mean, in the off-season, you’ve got time. There’s not blood in the water in the off-season. But now there was.

Roseman: We had a home preseason game Thursday, so Wednesday was a good night at home, and my boys were waiting for me to get home so we could play catch in the yard. Right then, I look at my phone and it’s Rick, and of course I am on the phone again, and they’re following me around the yard. I think they wanted to throw the ball at my head.

But Rick and I talked for 10 minutes and I said we’d have to talk Thursday. We’d seen each other in New York in the spring at a leadership conference at the Brooklyn Nets, with a couple of other GMs. He asked me then if we’d be open to trading one of our quarterbacks, and I said it’d be very hard to do anything with any of them.

Thursday

Spielman: When we talked about this as a staff, we knew we had [backup] Shaun Hill, and we really like Shaun. But the worst-case scenario is Shaun comes in and runs the offense well and then Shaun gets hurt? Then what? And we could wait and see what comes off the waiver wire, but how significant is that player going to be? We were working a couple of things, but when I asked [tight ends coach] Pat Shurmur, who’d coached Sam twice, he knew how smart he was and what a great addition he would be to our team and our locker room.

I watched every game Sam played last year, and the last three games, I thought he was playing as well as anyone I saw last year. I don’t think he’s ever been on a team with a top 10 rushing offense. With 28 [Adrian Peterson] in our backfield, playing at a high level, with the defense we have, Sam’s not gonna have to throw it 35 or 40 times every game. I know our coaches wanted him.

Before we played our last preseason game, Zim wasn’t too worried about the game. He was worried about the quarterback. I talked to our ownership, and they said: ‘Be as aggressive as you have to be. Do what you have to do.’

Roseman, 8 p.m.: I’m not even thinking about it at the game. When we talked [earlier Thursday], I said to Rick, ‘Rick, this is going to be a premium.’ It had to include their first-round pick in 2017 [Philly had traded its 2017 in a package to be able to draft rookie quarterback Carson Wentz], plus something else. I didn’t think they’d consider that. We talked about it, but I wasn’t thinking it was very serious.

Friday

Roseman, 8 a.m.: I told Rick we were in the same place. I told him he’d have to knock us over.

Eagles coach Doug Pederson has left the team to be at the bedside of his gravely ill father.

Roseman: With all the roster decisions we’re having to make, and with Doug’s family situation, I just told Rick that unless we’re talking the one in ’17 and another first high pick, it’s useless to talk.

Late in the afternoon, Spielman offers the 2017 first-round pick.

Spielman: That’s when I got more aggressive with Howie. I knew it would be a significant compensation, asking a team to give their starting quarterback eight days before the start of the season. I will do everything in my power to always give us the best chance to win, and it came down to—this is what we’re dealing with. I can’t change that. We have a good football team, a young football team.

Parting with the one, I knew I still had eight picks next year, including two threes and two fours. What really was significant for us was the second year of the contract with Sam. No one knows how long it’s going to take Teddy to recover. I had one other thing going with another team on Friday, but we liked Sam a lot.

Roseman, 7 p.m.: We were settled on the one, but we wanted better than a four in 2018. We were giving up our starting quarterback, who we didn’t want to give up. So there was some negotiation that needed to be done that night.

Spielman, midnight: We were a little punch drunk by then. We got it done, basically, but we had to button it up in the morning.

The fourth-round pick in 2018 can rise to as high as a second-round pick depending on the Vikings‘ playoff performance in 2016.

Saturday

Roseman, 8 a.m.: (Owner) Jeffrey Lurie is always supportive when we’re trying to improve our team, and he signed off on the deal. Give him credit, for doing something with his team a week before the season that changes the team like this. Now I spoke with coach Pederson, who was in Louisiana with his family, and we had a deal. I called Rick. Coach Pederson called Sam. I was thinking, ‘We’ve changed two teams today. We’ve changed a lot of lives.’

Spielman, 4 p.m.: Sam came in the building, and he seemed very happy. I told him, ‘Congratulations,’ and he said, ‘I’ve got to get to work.’ And he went and got going right away with [quarterbacks coach] Scott Turner.

Sunday
Neither Roseman nor Spielman sounded elated Sunday on the phone. They sounded more tired than happy.

Spielman, 1:30 p.m.: We are a better team today than we were yesterday. Mentally, I am completely drained. Not only dealing with this, but making decisions on the 53-man roster, watching tape on potential claims till 2 this morning, getting our practice squad lined up …

[On Bradford:] I just know how he played the second half of last season, and I know he’s completely healthy, and I know this is the best running game by far that he’ll ever play with. At the end, this is what it comes down to: Did you do the best you possibly could do for your team? And we did the best we possibly could do. I think we put our team in the best possible position we can. Now we just see how it works out.

Roseman, 3:15 p.m.: Hopefully it works out great for the Vikings and great for us. But where it’s such a different scenario for us is it’s so different from the blueprint we established for our season. We’re getting powerful resources back, plus a lot of money in cap space to go out and get good players we didn’t have to help build a really good team. I believe our players will rally around our quarterbacks.

If Carson [Wentz] plays, experience is a great teacher. Some guys played well right away—the Joe Flaccos, the Ben Roethlisbergers. But Peyton Manning, Troy Aikman, John Elway had their struggles. Eli [Manning] started his rookie year [and went 2-7]. There’s no one way. Whenever you play, you’re going to be learning on the job. But whatever happens, this will be a couple days we all remember when we look back on our careers.

The Norv Turner factor

In 1993, Troy Aikman tweaked a hamstring in a November game for Dallas. The next day, Cleveland coach Bill Belichick fired quarterback Bernie Kosar. Two days later, the Cowboys signed Kosar and, with Jason Garrett as the backup to Aikman, Dallas coaches got Kosar ready to play against the Cardinals. Kosar got ready, all right. Ten minutes into a 20-15 win over the Cards, Kosar relieved Garrett, and went on to complete 13 of 21 with one touchdown pass and no turnovers.

The Dallas offensive coordinator then? Norv Turner.

The Minnesota offensive coordinator now, 23 years later? Norv Turner.

I covered that story, and that game, for Sports Illustrated. I looked back at what I wrote Sunday. Kosar was programmed with 67 plays, all of which were typed neatly on his wristband. Turner would call down the play he wanted to tight ends coach Robert Ford, and Ford would signal the number to Kosar—for instance, holding up two fingers, then six, for play number 26 on the wristband—and Kosar would translate the number to a play, and make the call.

Worked pretty well. Is that how Turner will do it with Sam Bradford? And will the Vikings rush Bradford into the opener against Tennessee? I don’t know. But Turner has a road map to do it. He’s done it before, with a shorter turnaround. Kosar was signed five days before he played 50 minutes. Bradford was acquired eight days before the game in Nashville.

After the game, sitting having a celebratory beer with head coach Jimmy Johnson, Turner was pretty matter-of-fact about getting the job done with Kosar. “I’m a fan just like anybody, and I loved working with Bernie this week,” Turner said that day. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. How often do you pick up a championship quarterback in mid-week and get him ready to play the next game?”

Maybe it’s twice in a lifetime. We’ll see.

Shaun Hill Expected to Start Against Titans https://t.co/RMPX1UBUsW pic.twitter.com/ymNxi9R9ZU

— Arif Hasan (@ArifHasanNFL) September 9, 2016

Zooey wrote:

Just read that Shaun Hill has a higher career completion %, higher ypa, higher qb rating, and a better TD/INT ratio than Bradford.

Well they shoulda just asked a Rams fan.

We’ve seen them both. Of the 2, if we had to choose, which one would we want.

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