Too early to get solid reporting on player intangibles, so the tie-breakers for me tend to be age, size, (estimated and recorded) athleticism, and being on Bruce Feldman’s “freaks” list. If players are rated roughly in the same block, I’m gonna take the youngest, biggest, freakiest athletes available.

(I’m also swayed by the potential of “value.” Finding a player late who was rated much higher, for instance.)

A good thing about Feldman’s list is he usually includes GPS data, plus stuff you really can’t “train” for at the last second, like strength metrics. It takes time and tenacity to build up to that. And we learned how important GPS is with Kupp a few years ago, and especially now with Nacua. He topped 21mph in NFL games, and that kind of playing speed is exceptional. Going by just his Combine 40 time is one of the reasons so many teams passed on him. Injuries, too.

Speaking of age: Nacua is listed as 23 on the official Rams site, but 22 elsewhere. Wiki has him with a 2001 DOB and 22. A few other sites do as well. Weird that they can’t get a consensus age for players.

https://www.turfshowtimes.com/2024/1/16/24040519/rams-cap-space-matthew-stafford-contract-cooper-kupp-aaron-donald

Should Rams restructure contracts of Stafford, Donald, or Kupp to save cap?

Rams have contract decisions to consider with Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp
By Kenneth Arthur

The Los Angeles Rams faced difficult contractual decisions in 2023 and not only did they manage to survive the fallout, Sean McVay coached them into the playoffs and a top-5 offense in the second half of the season. Now that the season is over, the Rams have more financial decisions to make and specifically with their big-3 stars:

Should the L.A. Rams restructure Matthew Stafford, Aaron Donald, and/or Cooper Kupp to save money now but pay these over-30 NFL stars more money later?
2024 salary cap

OvertheCap.com projects $41.3 million in cap space and $25.8 million in “effective” cap space for 2024. That ranks 12th in the NFL.

But with free agents like Kevin Dotson, Ahkello Witherspoon, Carson Wentz, Demarcus Robinson, Jordan Fuller, and John Johnson, the number could evaporate quickly, not to mention L.A.’s probable desire to add more marquee talent.

Les Snead must be itching to do that after he was hamstrung from making moves last year. If the Rams want to create between $10-$50 million in additional space there’s opportunities to do that…but not without impacting 2025 and beyond.

Matthew Stafford

Stafford has a $31 million base salary next season, but the Rams could turn that into a signing bonus and save up to $19.8 million in 2024 cap space by restructuring. Though Stafford reportedly rejected the Rams advances to change his contract last year, they do not have to get his permission to restructure his deal. They can do that any time they want to do that.

What it would do, however, is change Stafford’s 2025 cap hit from $50 million to $60 million. He will be 37 in 2025.

Aaron Donald

Donald has a $34.1 million cap hit next season, when he will be 33.

The Rams can convert his $10 million salary into a signing bonus and save up to $13.6 million against the cap, at least according to OvertheCap. However, Donald is entering the last year of his contract and only has void years left beyond 2024. That means he will be a free agent in 2025 and the Rams can’t give him the franchise tag. It’s hard to imagine that Donald will play anywhere else and we’re not sure yet what his plans for the future even are.

Donald says he didn’t contemplate retirement after last season, but where is his head for next season and beyond?

Cooper Kupp

Kupp has a $29.8 million cap hit in 2024, but the team can save up to $12.5 million with a restructure. However, did Kupp play well enough this past season—or was he healthy enough—for the team to risk tying themselves to the 31-year-old receiver for additional years? A restructure now would increase his 2025 cap hit to $36 million.

The Rams will not cut Kupp this year because it is financially impossible due to the restructure last year. It’s possible he says his body isn’t in it for another round of football, who knows? Trading him isn’t feasible because of his age and the wear and tear and his $20 million guaranteed salary.

But a restructure seems unwise and unlikely.

What will the Rams do?

The most likely move, if the Rams need one, is to restructure Matthew Stafford for up to $20 million in cap savings. Though his $60 million cap hit in 2025 would be extraordinary, it’s not even quite the highest in the NFL anymore and a quarterback is the one position where it’s worth it.

The team might also look into extending Aaron Donald in order to bring down his cap hit.

As for Kupp, they might need to just sit on his deal this year and see what happens with him as the offseason progresses. Is his body in it or is he feeling like he’s given the NFL everything he can give?

The team has other cap savings opportunities, like with Joe Noteboom and Brian Allen, but these are the three contracts that matter the most. I wouldn’t expect all three to be exactly the same and intact when we get to training camp.

 

Rams game aside, I like the way the playoffs have gone so far. Tampa winning helped the Rams in the draft. Moved them up to 19 from 20. And I think Mayfield will make enough in bonuses now to move his comp pick from the 6th round to the 5th, but am not sure. Pittsburgh losing also kept the swap of picks from the Dotson trade closer.

No real preferences from this point on, but I’d like to see a Green Bay/Detroit NFC final, and a Buffalo/Baltimore AFC final. A Lions/Ravens Super Bowl would be unique. Lions/Bills, too.

It would be even better if the two conferences went back to CBS and NBC, like in ancient times.

My guess is that the league execs want SF versus KC. Might have the biggest audience, etc.

As Canadaram mentions, yeah. They need another wideout or two, and this looks like an exceptional draft along those lines. The Combine, interviews, Med evals, and Pro Days will shake up the order several more times before the draft hits, but a coupla tall, freakish wideouts are likely available for the Rams in the 3rd or 4th rounds: Jerry Rice’s son, Brenden Rice (USC), plus J.Michael Sturdivant (UCLA). Both guys are on Bruce Feldman’s Freak list. Sturdivant has a 23.2 GPS time, at nearly 6’4″.

Also: Not sure about this, but I think if Tampa wins, Baker Mayfield’s 6th round comp becomes a 5th rounder, and it may help Rams slotting in the draft, too. They might go from 22 to 19. Worse case is 20 now, if this site is correct:

https://www.turfshowtimes.com/2024/1/14/24038547/rams-draft-order-2024-first-round

And, of Morris is hired as HC this go-round, the Rams get a 3rd round comp in the upcoming draft, and in 2025. That would essentially take the place of their lost 4th rounder, and fill in the large gap between their third and fifth round picks (84 to 153 and 154).

As others have already mentioned, this is basically all gravy at this point. I didn’t think the Rams would have a winning record, much less get into the playoffs. So a win tonight is cherry-on-top stuff. Which also makes me think this is a toss-up game.

On paper, the Lions are better, and they’re playing at home, so they should win. But the Rams have been surprising everyone for most of the season, so anything can happen today.

Yep, it’s gonna come down to turnovers. Team with the most takeaways wins.

Oh, and one more thing: Just getting into the playoffs helps the Rams with free agents this off-season. They’re going to be more attractive to players cuz of what they accomplished in 2023 — win or lose tonight. As in, it’s all good.

I’d put George Allen in the top three, at least in my lifetime. He helped turn a basement-dweller program into a league powerhouse. They had just one winning season in the ten years prior to his tenure, and were 4-10 before he took over.

But Allen’s methods probably couldn’t work in one locale for long. He tended to tick off the FO. Kinda like Martz. Which makes me wonder how good that pairing might have been — if we could time-travel a bit: Allen as HC/Martz as his OC.

Another thing to consider: McVay’s route to HC basically skipped over the usual process of spending years and years moving up the coaching ladder. Unlike any previous Rams coach, he didn’t log umpteen years as assistant/position/unit coordinator, etc. So he’s done a hell of a lot of OJT. The vast majority of coaches his age are still climbing that ladder, etc. But McVay likely won’t be coaching beyond, say, 40. Allen was 48 or so before he got the Rams’ job.

Merlin was the man. A true gentle giant. But I’m really surprised that Lou Creekmur isn’t at the top of the list. I mean, who has ever been more revered in the history of the NFL than Lou “Muddy” Creekmur?

Bad luck for me. If Washington plays in the same time slot as the Rams, the Rams aren’t on. They usually don’t, so I sometimes get to see them for late games. Not this Sunday. Will have to wait until the playoffs.

I’m conflicted about Nacua. It’s great that he has a shot at the rookie record, but I think I’d rather they sit him for the entire game. He plays too hard, and with abandon, so it’s always risky for him to be on the field at all.

The Rams, IMO, have had too many misses on Draft Days through the years, but this last draft class is otherworldly. Don’t think they’ve ever done better, especially given the absence of a 1st . . . not to mention past years when the Rams have had multiple early picks. Throw in Dotson, Robinson, and Witherspoon, and one could argue it’s their best offseason, evah. Can they make it rain hidden gems in 2024?

Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

Ram fans know all about Ernest

And we understand the Importance of being that.

Pretty wilde that you chose now to say that.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Trying to boil this down into a Hack-sized post: Don’t want them to trade or cut Kupp, and I think he still holds a great deal of value for the Rams. They’re stronger with him than without him, and an off-season to regain health and focus may do wonders. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the FO decides to move on from a 31-year-old receiver, who’s taken his share of hits, all too many of them “cheap shots” in my book.

I would think it depends on what their expectations for next year. If they think they have a shot at another ring next year or the year after that — then they keep Kupp and Nakua and Higby together for a couple more years. Just looks like now, they only need to really work on the defense. Probly have a solid two year window on offense, I’d think. w v

Makes sense, WV. Two years sounds about right, especially for Stafford, Kupp, and Higbee meshing well with the youngins.

Find a granite-block LT, re-sign Dotson, keep Williams healthy, and — my own preference — find a battering Ram to join him, and they’ll be golden.

Agree about the D. They need a lot more speed, especially at DB. Obviously, an edge who scares OCs would be great, and Bobby Brown could use some help at the nose. You can usually find good run-stuffers late in the draft . . . So it’s doable.

In short, I was wrong about this team, going into the year. Thought they were several players (and years) away from contending again. After seeing them the last three games, especially, I think they’re really close. Should grab a Wild Card this year, and with the right decisions and player development, it’s not a stretch to think of them in the hunt for the Lombardi in 2024.

Hamburger, as in Hamburg, Germany. I knew that even before a refresher from Wikipedia. Lots more to it, of course, and all kinds of zigzags along the way. But that’s the gist of the name.

Too many people are easily fooled by the appearance of confidence and certainty. Those two things are the essence of successful sales in all fields — politics, media, sports, religions, the corporate world, etc. Project them, and move mountains. The stronger the projection, the bigger the audience, and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_hamburger

ZN,

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they should trade him, much less cut him outright. I’m saying I don’t think he’s a part of their “core” any longer, which he certainly was after the Super Bowl. I also think he holds more value for the Rams than they’d likely get for him in trade, but that hasn’t stopped the Rams in the past from trading away players. IMO, they’ve done that several times at fire-sales prices, and it’s frustrated me as a fan. I may be misreading the tea leaves, but Kupp’s body language on the field tells me he’s not happy, and that, along with his age and injuries, may well trigger a move by the Rams this off-season. They have (IMO) a bad habit of trying to please players when it comes to finding them new homes if they want them. It would have been unthinkable after the Super Bowl. It won’t surprise me if it happens in 2024.

This season has surpassed all fan expectations, and I’d bet McSnead’s, too. Have enjoyed watching their resurgence tremendously. It’s actually been a lot of fun and hope-filled. But I still think they’ve made some unforced errors along the way. Looking from the outside in, I wouldn’t have let Wagner go, for instance, nor would I have traded Ramsey for so little, or let Lewis and Burgess walk for nothing. So I’m in agreement with Invader regarding this FO. It’s really not alien for them to make a move like that. Ramsey, for instance, was a “core” guy too and they traded him for peanuts.

I don’t want them to move on from Kupp, and I’d hate for them to do a fire-sale or cut him. But if a team offered them a 1st — not gonna happen now — I’d have to take it.

Jourdan was right, in my view: The time to have made major moves was after the Super Bowl, while they were flying high and their players held serious value. It’s kinda too late now, unless some team just blows them away with crazy offers, including taking on salary, etc. Better to keep this rebuild going via strong drafts and smart FA pickups, etc.

Williams is a keeper. Great vision and contact balance, as ZN is wont to say. Makes a ton of good decisions on the fly, and tacklers miss him going through the whole. Lacks home run speed, but the Rams don’t really need him to do that. That’s just a bonus when it’s there. But I do think he can continue to give the Rams a lot of chunk plays . . . six, eight, twelve yards and a cloud of dust.

Gurley was a legit track guy, like Dickerson. They had it all. Like Sayers, Bo Jackson, Jim Brown, Sanders, Faulk, etc. Sometimes, though, the truly elite backs don’t always work on the little stuff, and backs with fewer athletic gifts, like Williams, do. Strikes me as “natural” that the naturally gifted rely more on those gifts, and the players without them, if they have serious want-to, compensate enough to almost make up for it.

Unicorns are the guys with relentless want-to plus those elite natural gifts. They’re not satisfied with playing up to their naturals. They want to set a new paradigm. Hoping I get to see some more unicorns playing for the Rams before I hang up the old cleats.

I think if teams were able to do a redraft today, many would pick Nacua in the 1st or 2nd round. If they’re receiver-needy, it’s a 1st.

He does need to work on his hands, especially when it comes to “easier” catches. But given his obvious intangibles, he’ll work like a madman to get better and better each year. He’s basically the Rams’ missing 1st rounder in 2023.

Now, they just need to do a better job with their actual early round picks to go with those late round gems. If they can put all of that together in the 2024 draft, and hit on a coupla free agent pickups, they’re back in the hunt.

Bumped into this article today on AI, focusing on schools:

(Did a copy and paste from reader’s mode, using Notepad++. It looks better with regular formatting. Broke into two parts:)

AI is forcing teachers to confront an existential question
Molly Roberts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/12/ai-chatgpt-universities-learning/

“Remember what I told you last week? Forget it.”

This is how Marc Watkins starts many a faculty meeting in the University of Mississippi’s department of writing and rhetoric. The self-fashioned AI guru has been tracking the capabilities of the large language models, such as ChatGPT, that are already transforming how his students write and read — in some cases, by doing both for them.

There is no better place to see the promise and the peril of generative artificial intelligence playing out than in academia. And there’s no better place to see how academia is handling the explosion in ChatGPT and its ilk than at Ole Miss.

In the spring, after students went back to campus eager to enlist robots in their essay-writing, Watkins and his colleagues created the Mississippi AI Institute (not to be confused with the Mississippi AI School, a Mississippi State University venture focused on the artificial insemination of cattle).

The hope is that the institute’s work can eventually be used by campuses across the country. For now, a two-day program this past June at Ole Miss might be the only one of its kind to pay teachers a stipend to educate themselves on artificial intelligence: how students are probably using it today, how they could be using it better and what all of that means for their brains.

The only way to describe what these tools have done to the teaching of writing is to borrow a phrase any professor would mark down as a cliché. They have changed everything.

AI is forcing educators to rethink plagiarism guidelines, grading and even lesson plans. But above all, it is demanding that they decide what education is really about — that teachers ask, in short, “What are we here for, anyway?”

ChatGPT has become to generative AI what Kleenex is to tissues. This most mentioned of tools, however, might be the least of teachers’ worries. Boutique services geared toward composing college essays, the very task Watkins and his colleagues are trying to teach, abound.

Some of their names jangle with techno-jargon, while others strive for the poetic, or at least the academic: Wordtune, Elicit, Fermat.

“Help me write,” read the words atop a Google doc equipped with its AI assistant tool, presumably in the voice of whoever is staring at a blank document waiting for words to come. Watkins finds this disturbing in its vagueness. Help me how?

Other technologies are more explicit about what they’re providing. Wordtune offers the opportunity to select a “spice” to add to your paper.

The “rewrite” option can polish a sloppy sentence; the “explain” option can elaborate on a vague one. There’s also “make a joke” (groan-inducing at best) and “statistical fact” (somewhat more useful, if you’re not worried about AI’s documented propensity to hallucinate). “Counterargument” can — well, you get the picture.

Do you write ad copy? White papers? Plain old emails — or dissertations? Lex, another tool, wants to know. Answer that you write op-eds, and it informs you that “with that type of writing, it can be hard to maintain objectivity while presenting a poignant argument, amidst the pressure of constant deadlines.” (Tell me about it.)

Or you can plug in what you’ve got so far and tell the tool to critique it. Dominic Tovar, an Ole Miss freshman pursuing an engineering degree, likes feeding text into the tool and having it tell him what needs fixing: This sentence is incoherent. This paragraph is too wordy. When things get really rough, he can always type “+++,” a command that prompts Lex to generate the next paragraph — but he thinks students should consider that degree of assistance a last resort.

Other services aim narrower.

Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.

Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part-time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.

Speaking of bibliographies, many students have found themselves filled with despair upon realizing they aren’t actually finished with a paper until they have compiled several pages of APA-style citations complete with annotations. No more! Now, a service called Sutori will handle the pesky copy-pasting and formatting for you.

ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be as long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.

“Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.

Larry Wilson, an Air Force veteran back in school at 43, says ChatGPT and image generators such as Dall-E even aid him in creative pursuits. He crafts comic strips and graphic novels. Sometimes, it’s “difficult getting things in your head out.” But with generative AI, he can explain his vision to a system, and it turns that vision into a tangible image or video. If he sketches out a character to the AI, it returns what he calls an “abundance” of actions, utterances and more that he can insert into the opus of the hour.

Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography probably doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.

Here’s the bottom line: It’s likely impossible to catch kids using AI to cheat. The detection tools lauded at first as universities’ last bulwark against a horde of scribbling machines have fallen out of favor. They do a poor job identifying cheaters where they do exist — and yet somehow often seem to identify them where they don’t.

See, most notoriously, a professor at Texas A&M University at Commerce who threatened to fail his entire class after using ChatGPT to detect whether it had written their essays. Turns out, it didn’t work.

Or look at Vanderbilt University. The college, in announcing its disabling of one such tool, points out that detectors are more likely to flag material written by non-native English speakers. Its bulletin notes that other companies that pounced on the demand for detectors in the spring have given up. Anyway, none of them was ever able to explain how they could distinguish man from machine — perhaps because, when it came down to it, they couldn’t.

At the Ole Miss summer institute, faculty members see for themselves. “My mother is a fish,” one professor plugs into a service called Turnitin. This is the famous five-word chapter of “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner, son of Oxford, Miss. — an ingenious shift into the consciousness of a young boy. The result? Ninety-three percent AI generated. (Probably because the sentence is suspiciously simple, but it goes to show that these detection tools don’t yet appreciate modernism.)

Of course, if the machines can’t detect other machines, that doesn’t mean humans can’t try to. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit of a “know it when you see it” phenomenon with AI-written work in classes taught by teachers who’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of papers by human students. The trouble for these teachers is figuring out how to react when they do believe they see it.

Sarah Campbell, presenting at the summer institute, described a student essay that appeared, as she put it, “written by an alien.” Or written in the year 1950. Or perhaps written in 1950 by an alien. She responded by asking the student to coffee, where she told the student that she had obviously let them down: “You didn’t know how desperate I am to hear your voice.”

This practically trademarkable Good Teaching Moment cuts to the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed, they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.

Figuring out exactly which ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.

“AI is not meant to avoid opportunities to learn through structured assignments and activities.”