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Billy_TParticipantIt’s probably a consensus among fans that the O-line is the issue. But I think Stafford is a problem, too. His passes lack zip. They flutter. And, yeah, Robinson is a bad fit. I thought he’d help them a lot more than he has. Wrong guy, wrong team. He’s a jump ball guy, and the Rams need someone who creates separation instead. Stafford isn’t accurate enough on his own to have it come down to just those jump balls. Even with the great gain by Kupp today, it was all Kupp, on a poorly thrown pass.
Akers, IMO, is not an NFL back any longer. He’s still not recovered, and may never be. Henderson is the much better player. Not that other teams would want them, but if the Rams could get something in trade for Akers and/or Robinson, I’d go for it before the deadline. Preferably O-line help this year, but picks, if not.
Rams do not look like a playoff team at all at this point. All of those trades have caught up with them. Counting far too much on late picks and UDFAs has caught up with them. Not enough depth to weather an injury storm. Cliches R Us, but their strategy of putting all of their eggs in a coupla baskets did yield a Super Bowl, but it may well lead to limbo for several years afterward.
Those of us who have followed the Rams for a long time . . . well, we may be in for a very rough stretch in the next few years. Been there, done that, etc.
Billy_TParticipantI can’t really decide if Akers isn’t recovered, or if the line is just really bad. It may be both. The Rams aren’t going to win against good teams if they can’t run the ball, for obvious reasons. And they’re going to kill Stafford without that part of the offense.
I guess it’s a part of being a Rams fan for so long, cuz I’m already thinking about offseason moves. The majors being they’ve GOT to sign the best LT possible, plus another guard and center, and draft early for the O-line too. Biggest area of concern, IMO.
13 (regular season) games to play, so they have time to work some magic this season. But they don’t look like a Super Bowl team thru 4 games. Injuries have been devastating. Can’t remember it being this bad so early.
Billy_TParticipantI’d highly recommend the following. Apologies if you’ve already read them, etc.
Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Modern classic. The movie is also excellent. One of the best adaptations of a novel I’ve ever seen.
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Among the first dystopian novels. Came out in English in the early 1920s. Really good.
Kallocain, by Karin Boye. Read it back in the early 1990s, so have forgotten most of it. Just remember loving the story and the writing.
The Handmaid’s Tale, and its recent sequel, The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood. Classics, both.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I liked the sequel too, Sea of Tranquility, but not as much. Have not seen the series of the former yet.
Zed, by Joanna Kavenna. One of my favorite novels of the past few years. A great read. Wish they’d do a series about it.
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Will add some more, later, when I recovered a bit from last night’s game.
;>)
Billy_TParticipantHorrible game. Rams need to draft early and often for offensive line. Creed Humpreys intead of Tutu, 8 days a week and twice on Sunday.
I know it’s sacrilegious to say this, after the Super Bowl win, etcetera . . . but, yeah, the Rams gave up waaaaay too much for Stafford. He’s not the essential difference. Goff could have won with last year’s team, IMO. And Stafford is not looking good this year. He’s not as good as Herbert, Mahomes, Allen, etc. If the Rams had mortgaged the future for Herbert, I’d be all in. But not a guy who’s been beaten to a pulp for more than a decade and is on the Back Nine of his career. And they’re stuck with him. Cap hell for at least three or four years.
Stafford is the What If QB par excellence. If drafted by a decent team, he’s All World from Day One. But far too many years in Detroit. Rams got him too late, except for One Year — which was, of course, an awesome One Year.
The Rams also need a powerhouse back. Akers is not the guy. I like Henderson more, but he can’t stay healthy. They need a 240 pounder, to hurt the defense. Beef up the O-line AND the running game.
Too many injuries for the Rams this year. I hope they prove me wrong. But I don’t see them getting back to the Big Dance right now.
Billy_TParticipantDidn’t see the game, just the highlights. Happy for the win, but really surprised that the Rams let the Falcons back into the game. And I still don’t get taking the safety on purpose.
Stafford’s got to find a way to stop throwing pics.
Not worried about Kupp’s fumble. It looked like the perfect play by the defense. Just doesn’t happen very often. Kinda like bowling a 300.
I think the Rams are suffering a bit from the lack of early picks, especially when it comes to their O-line. They can’t keep going with the “next man up” thing when most of those guys are very late picks or UDFAs. With plenty of exceptions, of course, the best players are chosen early. That’s just the way it works. I want them to start to rebuild the trenches with a full slate of picks.
Also think they need a bell cow back. Gurley, in his prime, with Stafford? Sheesh. That would be unreal. No way to defend all of those weap0ns.
Of course, last year proved nearly all of my football theories wrong — in the best of ways — so there’s that. :>)
Billy_TParticipantThe Persians sent pressure around the flank and collapsed the pocket from behind.
But they had to cheat to do it. So it really doesn’t count.
Everyone knows the Persians had cameras inside wooden horses at all the Spartan practices, but the Pan-Hellenic League covered it up for years. And one of the Spartans gave the Persians the game plan. Kurtius Wagnericles and Leonidas Martzia really never had a chance.
Billy_TParticipantGood video of Gabe, given the limitations of media in that era. He really was fantastic.
WV gave more food for thought. It’s kinda nature/nurture, chicken and egg thing. How would the Rams skill guys have done with a Martz offense, or McVay’s, etc.? In the moment, I loved the entire team and didn’t see them as limited, anywhere. But looking back, and comparing this player and that . . . Jack Snow, for example, as excellent as he was, just wasn’t Holt or Bruce . . . but he likely would have gotten a lot closer to his potential with a more “creative” scheme than Allen’s. Same with their running backs. They lacked speed, overall, though Willie Ellison was a burner, with good size. Can’t remember why he didn’t last with the Rams longer. Then, of course, you have Billy Truax. He’s an Olympian in any era.
Anyway . . . yeah, comparing one era with the next is basically impossible. But it’s “fun” from time to time. Not so fun is the reality they lived in, financially. If memory serves, Rams starters back in the 1960s likely made in the 20-30K range, and often had to work summers. Merlin and Deacon, I think, worked at car dealerships to supplement their income. And, of course, sometimes starred in TV and movies. The Undefeated, with John Wayne, had Gabe and Merlin in it, and a coupla other players. It was a great movie for a Rams fan still wet behind the ears.
Has there ever been a player who seemed to age so . . . I don’t know . . . so unlike his football days as Gabriel? Olsen, OTOH, seemed to be who he was destined to be.
Billy_TParticipantI may have said this before: I despise exhibition games. Should be outlawed. If I were king, so it would be written, so it would be done. That and shaky cams.
The game is rough enough as it is. It beats the bejeesus out of players, day in, day out. But to lose an entire season over a completely meaningless game? Goddess I hate that. If you’re going to get hurt, let it at least count.
Blanton is a surprise. Thought he was a lock after last postseason.
Billy_TParticipantWV,
The rise and fall of Foles is strange. And then throw in Joe Flacco and Trent Dilfer winning Super Bowls for the Ravens. Neither QB is a tier one guy.
. . . .
Back to Gabriel. My memory of him is of defensive linemen and linebackers draped all over him as he still gets the pass off. Toughest QB evah. Cannon for an arm. And in those days, the defense could basically maul the QB. Yes, Warner took incredible punishment, especially because he tended to throw at the last split second — to optimize run after the catch, typically. But he also benefited from rules intended to protect that position. Gabriel had no such protections, aside from perhaps the most consistently good O-line in the NFL for a good decade.
Again, I think if he had had decent skill position weapons, the Rams would have won several Big Dances and he wouldn’t have been traded to the Eagles.
Billy_TParticipantMy old bias still stands. Gotta put Gabriel in the first tier. I think he had four great seasons, which (arguably) is one more than Warner, and he never had the skill position guys Warner had. Not even close. Plus, he played for the Rams for eleven years.
Checking his wiki page, I had forgotten he was drafted so early. First pick in the 1962 AFL draft (Raiders); second choice in same draft for the NFL (Rams).
IMO, you give Gabe players like Faulk, Bruce, Holt, and Hakim, and he would have bettered Warner’s production. He benefited from the stronger D, but he just didn’t have GSOT-level weapons.
Always thought Bulger was a lot better than he was given credit for by too many fans . . . caught up in the crazed football warz of that time. And Bradford was a real let down, cuz he was truly gifted with serious arm talent. IMNSHO, he just didn’t have much in the way of “drive.” May have been beaten out of him as a rook, etc. But he seemed to play flat nearly every week.
Goff? He’s an arm-kink away from being almost as good as Stafford, in my view. Best chance to have fixed that was McVay’s first season, but he soured on Goff all too soon and basically threw him under the bus. Which was hard to do, given that Bettis had retired and wasn’t in town.
;>)
Billy_TParticipantThanks, again, for doing the tweets. I’ve noticed a recent change in Twitter policy, for people like me who don’t have an account. They don’t let us browse more than a few seconds now. It used to be I could scroll through most of what I wanted to read, click on the X to opt out of the sign-in screen, and keep going with the scrolling. Now, however, there is no X to click on to remove that sign-in prompt. It basically just blocks further reading for non-Twitter folks.
(Appears to be the same on desktops and phones)
It’s the same progression we’ve seen on most newspaper sites. From unlimited viewing, to a couple posts before you needed an account, to no posts without the account. Some exceptions, of course. But that’s pretty much where everything is heading. And the old workarounds — like clearing your cookies/data/etc. — no longer help.
Oh, well. We did okay before it existed. We’ll survive now too.
July 5, 2022 at 11:39 am in reply to: Environmental News (Supreme Court just signed our death warrant) #139545Billy_TParticipantWhat else is there to know, to say… Gonna read some nature stuff. Some sci-fi, some fantasy, some literature, whatever seems fun, from week to week. I finished a book on Punk music the other day. Enjoyed it. Couldnt find a single solitary decent person in the whole book 🙂 w v
;>)
Sounds like a good plan.
I mostly do that too. Recently finished a good short read, Three Rings, by Daniel Mendelsohn. It’s a pretty cool mashup of different styles, memoir, essay, literary criticism, a dash of history, etc. Focusing primarily on Homer’s Odyssey, Francois Fenelon’s 17th century novelistic update, Proust’s writings, and W.G. Sebald’s. A wandering, meandering book about meandering wanderers. Digressions about digressions. Structured with rings and loops and some autobiography, pointing to earlier narratives using rings and loops, etc.
I think I’ll start a literature thread later this week. Hope you’ll add to it.
July 5, 2022 at 10:57 am in reply to: Environmental News (Supreme Court just signed our death warrant) #139543Billy_TParticipantWas wondering when this would post. Tried a coupla days ago and it went into moderation.
Maybe all the smog choked up the software.
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WV, I think capitalism in any form is going to necessarily lead to ecocide. Its internal mechanics of Grow or Die, its laws of competitive motion, basically guarantee that. It has to continuously expand, geographically, geologically, and into the future, or it collapses.
Not saying anything new here, obviously, but there is just no money to be made in conserving resources this or that industry requires. Fossil fuel companies, for instance, can’t make money by leaving gas and oil in the ground, and if they don’t leave roughly 80% of known reserves alone . . . . we’re screwed — along with most living things on this planet. Some estimates point to an even higher percentage.
Jason Hickel’s books, The Divide, and Less is More, are great at spelling all of this out. You’ve quoted him in the past, if memory serves. He’s excellent at presenting the facts in a logical, coherent manner that makes it easy for the reader to connect the dots. He doesn’t need to editorialize, etc.
Billy_TParticipantInteresting that Jesus never, ever mentions abortion, contraception, or gay people. Not once. So these right-wing evangelicals who say they’re just following their lord’s words . . . aren’t. They’re getting it from somewhere else. They’re also not getting “life begins at conception” from the Bible, cuz the Jews of that time believed life begins with first breath. That’s still the orthodox view.
Etc. etc.
In general, I think some people are drawing the wrong lesson from Trump’s rise, and the effectiveness of propaganda overall. And, to me, this has always been incredibly obvious, but it’s forever missed:
If a Trump can sell a shit sandwich, and make people love it, that means a skillful salesperson can also sell really great stuff, like the Green New Deal, guaranteed jobs at a living wage, free public schools, cradle to grave, and M4A, for starters. It’s always frustrated the hell out of me that far too many Americans think the horrific success of the right means the Dems need to go further to the right to win.
No. They just need to find their own charismatic leaders, movers, shakers, etc. etc. . . . and at least match the right’s all too effective messaging, sales, and marketing. If they do that, America can have really nice things. If they continue with the Republican Lite, it can’t, and people will just vote for the real thing, not the knock-off anyway.
Billy_TParticipantI think Robinson gives the Rams nearly everything OBJ can bring, except for the elite deep speed and overall quicks. He’s bigger (6’2.5″, 220), and actually better going up for the 50/50 contested stuff. OBJ is really good with those, of course, proving himself among the best hands-catchers ever. But if I’m Stafford, I’m looking for Robinson in the End Zone first. His relative lack of deep speed no longer matters at that point, etc. etc.
It would be an embarrassment of riches to have Kupp, Robinson, and OBJ flying around at the same time, with Higbee in the mix as well. That’s almost unfair to opposing defenses. Henderson, when healthy, is another really good option out of the backfield.
Looks to me like the Rams are trying to thread the needle here, contract-wise, hoping they can sign him when they need him, not before. But that might be too clever by half, cuz some other team, likely with a lot more cap space, may roll the dice months before he’s ready to play. I hope the Rams work this out.
Billy_TParticipantWaterfield,
Looks like there’s been some pushback to the pushback. Hutchinson relayed, under oath, what she had been told by Tony Ornato, a Trump loyalist with a rather sketchy background. He’s the person who now says the incident didn’t happen as described. Apparently, Trump broke with all protocol by hiring Ornato away from the Secret Service as a political appointee, while he somehow remained with the Secret Service. A couple of people who worked with Ornato have recently come out saying he lied about what they said too.
From Olivia Troye’s twitter page. She quotes another Trump admin person who says Ornato lied about her.
I think Hutchinson told the truth. All of it.
Billy_TParticipantThat’s Orlando Pace, all 6’7 325 lbs of never giving up on the play to chase down 22 year old Champ Bailey, preventing a TD. This is what football is about! @OrlandoPace_HOF had wheels for a big man! Check the tape! pic.twitter.com/0pdOkMLHgg — RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) June 28, 2022</p>
That’s nutz. I had forgotten that play. Bailey was a track guy too. From his Wiki page:
Track and field
Bailey was also a standout track and field athlete at Georgia; he ran the 55 meters and 60 meters, recording personal bests of 6.35 seconds and 6.85 seconds, respectively. He also competed in long jump and triple jump.
Bailey set a school indoor long jump record in 1998 of 7.89 meters (25 ft 11 in) to finish third at the SEC Indoor Track and Field Championships.
Billy_TParticipantI think the security guys will testify differently than reported by Hutchinson.
Only on minor details, Waterfield. Hutchinson relayed what she had been told about Trump in the car, lunging at the driver’s throat, after being told they would not take him to the Capitol to lead his rioters. The spokesman for the Secret Service did not dispute that Trump was irate when told he couldn’t go. They just dispute the allegation that Trump lunged for the driver, etc. That he was irate isn’t in question.
But, again, that’s a minor detail. What matters is the siting of heavily armed men near the Capitol, some in the trees, with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags above them. What matters is many of the “protesters” had to give up their weaponry at checkpoints with the magnetometers, but not everyone went through them. Trump’s anger at the existence of those checkpoints with “mags” is key too. He was pissed that his mob was disarmed to an extent, and that the Secret Service would not take him to the Capitol to lead that mob.
Billy_TParticipantThat’s Orlando Pace, all 6’7 325 lbs of never giving up on the play to chase down 22 year old Champ Bailey, preventing a TD. This is what football is about! @OrlandoPace_HOF had wheels for a big man! Check the tape! pic.twitter.com/0pdOkMLHgg — RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) June 28, 2022
That’s crazy. I had forgotten that. Bailey was a track guy too. From his Wiki page:
Track and field
Bailey was also a standout track and field athlete at Georgia; he ran the 55 meters and 60 meters, recording personal bests of 6.35 seconds and 6.85 seconds, respectively. He also competed in long jump and triple jump.[6]
Bailey set a school indoor long jump record in 1998 of 7.89 meters (25 ft 11 in) to finish third at the SEC Indoor Track and Field Championships.[7]
Billy_TParticipantI could have linked to all kinds of different sources, but found one that wasn’t behind a pay-wall. As you guys know, fewer and fewer newspapers are open-access these days.
Billy_TParticipantWV,
I didn’t watch the entire video below, but this gives you a pretty good idea (early on) about the shot and Hardin’s innovation:
I was taught you get two steps. That’s it. Not four. It’s traveling even if you take 2 and a half steps.
Oh, well. Young people today!
Billy_TParticipantWV,
Have you seen current players shoot the “step back three”? James Hardin made it famous, but it pisses me off no matter who does it. Curry sometimes will.
It’s obviously traveling, IMO, and refs never should have allowed it, but it’s now a part of the game. To me, it’s basically taking four steps and then shooting.
The above may sound like “get off my lawn” stuff. But I can’t help it. Cuz, well, back in my day, players didn’t even have feet, so they couldn’t shoot threes, much less step-back threes.
;>)
Billy_TParticipantZooey,
I’m a long-time Lakers fan too. Goes back to 1967 for me. Chose them when I was a kid, mostly cuz of Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, and then Wilt Chamberlain came on board the next year, if memory serves.
It was a rotten break for me that their arch rival soon became the Celtics, me being a proud Celt and a lover of all things Irish!
The terrible twists of fate!
Another ting. Do you share my frustrations with the Lakers’ fanbase and ownership? They seem to refuse all attempts at rebuilding the team, and will only accept yearly championships, which means constantly trading away the future, etc. etc. Their kinda in a trap right now cuz of all of that.
It may be blasphemous to suggest, but I wish the Lakers would trade LeBron and Davis for the most picks possible, and take the necessary years to build the franchise back from scratch. Home-grow it, etc.
Billy_TParticipantI think I would have seen Deacon, Merlin, Jack Youngblood, and Aaron Donald on the same line, getting 12 sacks in the game, and Roman Gabriel throwing touchdowns to Faulk, Kupp, Woods, Bruce, Holt, Dickerson, and Truax. Josephson, Ellison, Jackson, and Gurley would all have rushing touchdowns, and Fred Dryer would get three safeties. Stafford would get another TD subbing for Gabe. That one would go to Flipper. All of the above would happen at least three years in a row. Threepeat!!
Not sure what you describe is actually possible.
I’m guessing the ayahuasca would prove you wrong.
;>)
Billy_TParticipantAging exponentially.
== Things do fall apart, dont they. But we managed to see another Super Bowl win. Wasnt sure we’d ever see another one. I’ve seen two now. Two in one lifetime 🙂 w v
Are you saying you didn’t see several more after the ayahuasca? I think I would have seen Deacon, Merlin, Jack Youngblood, and Aaron Donald on the same line, getting 12 sacks in the game, and Roman Gabriel throwing touchdowns to Faulk, Kupp, Woods, Bruce, Holt, Dickerson, and Truax. Josephson, Ellison, Jackson, and Gurley would all have rushing touchdowns, and Fred Dryer would get three safeties. Stafford would get another TD subbing for Gabe. That one would go to Flipper.
All of the above would happen at least three years in a row. Threepeat!!
Billy_TParticipantWhat do you guys think should happen to Trump, regarding his (ongoing) coup attempt?
Billy_TParticipantBilly_TParticipantGood article by Woodward and Bernstein, comparing Nixon and Trump. It’s long, so I won’t post the entire thing. But you can view it by copying and pasting the link on https colon slash slash www dot printfriendly dot com.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/05/woodward-bernstein-nixon-trump/
Excerpt:
As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.
And then along came Trump.
The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.
With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.
AdvertisementNixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.
Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.
These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.
Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.
Donald Trump and Richard Nixon shake hands at a gala in Houston in 1989. After the 2020 election Trump would embrace, with shattering consequences, one of Nixon’s adages: “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.” (Richard Carson/Houston Chronicle/AP)Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.
This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.
In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.
We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.
On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.
Billy_TParticipantThe real question I have is how do people fall into such hate and anger? Whatever the reason is why haven’t seen this behavior in past close elections ALA Bush v Gore? What has happened that so many of us believe in unfounded conspiracies. Maybe we just have too much internet.
We’ve always had quacks and tin-foil hat types, obviously. But, yeah, the Internet has helped them find each other, brainstorm, organize. But the real difference this time, IMO, is Trump.
No other politician has ever lied so often, so brazenly, or with so little concern for how those lies harm others. But more important than anything else: Trump is the first human being I can remember who just kept rising from the dead, with a ton of help, scandal after scandal. He’s the first who didn’t just quit when faced with the exposure of his lies and all the rest. So he’s set a deadly template for others who follow. Instead of bowing out when lies, corruption, scandals come to light, just claim it’s all “fake news,” or “the deep state did it.” Lie about the lies, endlessly. Never stop. Never back down.
Largely because of Trump’s psychotic behavior, America no longer seems to agree about a blue sky being blue now, and that’s the recipe for fascism on a silver platter.
Billy_TParticipantThe case that is the strongest against him is not the break in but the many efforts he made to invalidate the election results. This is the face of overwhelming evidence provided to him that there was “no there,there”.
The 7-point plan. Or, as Navarro bragged about on the TV, the Green Bay sweep. It was extensive, and included pulling the levers of power at Homeland Security, the DoJ, and the Military, with 11th hour personnel changes, strong-arming, legal-quackery, etc. Martial Law was on the table. Seizing voting machines. Declaring the election null and void, and so on. State, local, Federal officials involved. Fake electors and so on. America came very close to an actual fascist coup being successful here. We also came very close to dozens of reps and senators being assassinated.
What would the conversation be today if they hadn’t removed congress, the VP, and staff in time?
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