CAN ANDREW LUCK BECOME A TOP-5 QUARTERBACK NEXT SEASON?

The Colts are now set to pay QB Andrew Luck for what he could be—not what’s he’s shown thus far. Mike Renner explains.

https://www.profootballfocus.com/pro-can-andrew-luck-be-a-top-5-quarterback-next-season/

It was inevitable. Andrew Luck has re-signed with the Colts through the 2021 season. The only thing up for debate was whether or not Luck was going to get paid like the top quarterback in the NFL, even if he realistically hasn’t even been a top-five QB in any single season up to this point in his career. The answer was a resounding “Yes,” with Luck eclipsing the Aaron Rodgers’ cap ($22 million per year) that no one has yet to lay legitimate claim in surpassing.

With the deal done, the new debate is whether or not Luck will ever live up to those lofty expectations. As a rookie out of Stanford in 2012, Luck had more hype following him around than any quarterback this millennium. That season, he had a modicum of early success, but as the Colts had a worst-to-first turnaround, people were quick to crown him. Issues with inaccuracy, holding onto the ball, and decision-making were conveniently glossed over because Indianapolis was winning games. Those problems came to a head in 2015 in what can only be described as a disaster of a season for Indy. Luck managed only two positively-graded games in seven starts, earning below-average passing grades in the five other games. To make matters even worse, it was reported after the season that he may have come back too soon from his shoulder injury, and that the damage was worse than originally believed.

In the NFL, though, it’s important to remember that you don’t pay for past performance—only what you expect in the future. Luck’s sky-high potential hasn’t changed, and at 26 years old, he’s still mastering the nuances of the professional quarterback position. Tom Brady was 30 when he made his first All-Pro team. Rich Gannon made his first Pro Bowl at age 34, and then went to four straight, culminating in an MVP award. The same things Luck has struggled with—getting the ball out quickly and turnover-worthy throws—are two areas in which we’ve seen QBs consistently improve as they age. In Luck’s last full healthy season of 2014, he made turnover-worthy throws at the seventh-highest rate in the league; however, he made up for it by making big-time throws at the fourth-highest rate in the league. You can’t teach someone to throw as well downfield as he can (he was top-10 in deep-accuracy percentage in two of his first three years). With what figures to be an improved offensive line and a healthy stable of weapons on the outside, the Colts are hoping they can teach Luck to avoid the mistakes that have haunted him in the past.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

For better or for worse we are a country of wolves-at least in the economic sense. It is the price we pay for what we perceive as “freedom”

This is where we disagree. Like all countries our country is a country of policies. It is true that the wolf-friendly have control of the policies. But there are countries with very different or even opposite policies which have as much freedom as we do, if not more.

But I think the sheer size of our country, the huge divergence of interests, the number of people living here, the enormous assimilation of varying cultures and immigrants makes it difficult to compare the United States with other countries

W to be honest I don’t buy that. I think it;s an excuse to naturalize the status quo.

I especially don’t buy the idea that having ethnic diversity means have to be politically regressive in terms of policies.

…

For better or for worse we are a country of wolves-at least in the economic sense. It is the price we pay for what we perceive as “freedom”

This is where we disagree. Like all countries our country is a country of policies. It is true that the wolf-friendly have control of the policies. But there are countries with very different or even opposite policies which have as much freedom as we do, if not more.

Billy_T wrote:

ZN, or any other mods? Any way to shrink the youtube I just posted?

That’s a RamsMaineiac thing. I’m not much help with the tech stuff.

I do know that you’re not supposed to click on the “poster destruct” function because if you do (like this) you get zapped out of exis

I suppose when it comes to politics and religion we all become “dogmatic”. Nevertheless, I genuinely believe that those on the “left” and those on the “right” tend to follow what has been called a process of “group think”.

Whoa, you haven’t been around the left much. Arguing over everything is the one thing you can expect from a gathering of leftists. In fact it;s a running joke—expect constant debate about everything when 2 or more lefties get talkin. You even find some major differences HERE (for example, those who declare they will and those who declare they won’t compromise and vote for HC under the circumstances.)

PA Ram wrote:

There are big lapses in logic and certain things that the writers felt they could ignore as they pleased and pay attention when it was convenient.

So they should just call it The Shallow?

Yuck yuck.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

Why do you take criticism of Hillary so personally? You actually seem to get invested emotionally, as if critiques of HC were attacks on you. Or that’s the sense I get.

That’s a valid criticism . It’s a fault I have and wish I didn’t.

Okay fair enough.

Have some pie.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

You’re not, are you, being defensive about the criticism that Hillary is ruthlessly ambitious?

Of course I am ! IMO a good President must be ruthless when it counts and ambitious. I see those qualities in Clinton and I respect them. Others see the same and hate her for them.
These things won’t change-your right.

BTW: Of all the 44-or 45 depending on how to count Grover Cleveland-Presidents we have had which one(s) could you support if they were running today?

Then what’s really happening is that this is a classic miscommunication getting further gummed up by personal emotions.

The people who are criticizing HC for being ambitious mean that it’s hollow ambition, ambition in the name of nothing other than her own self-aggrandizement. Now you don’t have to agree with that view, but it is what they are saying.

You then turn that into dedication to taking decisive action (as if that’s what the critics were criticizing) and come up with examples of how decisive action is good. Though it is noteworthy that the actions you defend WERE in the name of principles greater than simple self-aggrandizement. Eisenhower acted in the name of allied policy to defeat nazi germany in time of war and to liberate western europe from its control. In fact he had little if any choice in the matter—it wasn’t in his power to call the invasion off. If he even tried he would simply have been replaced. So D-day is not an example of mere empty self-aggrandizement. It has nothing to do with what the others here were saying about Clinton.

So all I see is people talking past one another. You’re not even using the same words to mean the same things.

I could care less either way if you like her ruthlessness. What’s happening, though, is that you are taking the criticism out of context, and misreading it. Therefore you’re not really responding to the actual criticism. Not that you have to or should even care. But it is just miscommunication.

..

waterfield wrote:

bnw wrote:

So for you that means none?

Exactly/

No it does not mean that.

I would have supported (in the 20th century) FDR and to a lesser extent T.R.

Here;s what the question neglects. If you are a leftist, then you support leftist policies. Historically, unlike other advanced democracies, the USA has marginalized leftist policies, to the point where many who claim to not accept those policies can’t even name them adequately. (I have never in my life seen a non-leftist accurately describe what a leftist viewpoint is. That’s because they don’t know what it is. They think they do but they never actually do know. Their heads as too deep into the mainstream, and the american mainstream filters out that kind of thinking.)

If however there were a series of leftist presidents, and I asked you W if you supported them, your answer would tend more toward no then toward yes. I assume you would not want to compromise on your own political beliefs.

However, I think that (or get the impression that) you seem to be fine with Clinton, being the right-center type you are, and are trying to argue with the leftists here who say they will not vote for Clinton.

But that has you over generalizing. Not every self-identified leftist here has said they would not vote for Clinton. You;re just chasing the ones who said they wouldn’t.

Zooey wrote:

Yeah, of course, but isn’t it strange that NOBODY ever said this with a mic turned on? Nobody offered a feminist critique of Hillary?

Yeah it’s said. Just not in places we’re used to looking.

Remember, marginalization of left discourse.

Well the dominant sources of left discourse tend not to let people in on socialist feminism. That’s a marginalized thing WITHIN a marginalized thing. But it’s out there. Just harder to find. You have to specifically look for it.

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Why This Socialist Feminist Is Not Voting for Hillary

Socialist feminism assumes that redistribution is the best way to improve life for women. Clinton has demonstrated contempt for turning this project into policy.

This article draws on material included in the collection, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone, which is forthcoming from Verso Books this spring and can be pre-ordered here.

Liza Featherstone

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-this-socialist-feminist-is-not-voting-for-hillary/

Socialism, it turns out, can be a form of identity politics. Some feminists, including Suzanna Danuta Walters, brandish a “red-diaper baby” heritage or some other cultural or sentimental affinity to hint that supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy doesn’t just represent some corporate gloss on feminism; it’s a genuinely radical position.

But no one who makes this argument can articulate what, beyond her identity as a woman, qualifies Clinton as a passable candidate for socialist feminists. That’s understandable because, in a primary against an independent socialist who has been attracting an astonishing level of grassroots support, there are no socialist-feminist reasons to support Hillary Clinton.

Socialist feminism assumes that redistribution is the best way to begin improving life for the vast majority of women, both materially and socially. To take a none-too-radical example, in countries like Denmark and 
Sweden—which offer a broad range of social benefits provided through the state rather than acquired in desperation, as they so often are here, through marriage or a job—women can live more comfortably; raise healthier, more secure children; and sleep with whomever they please. Throughout her long career, Clinton has demonstrated contempt for turning this project into policy.

As first lady of Arkansas, she led the efforts by her husband’s administration to weaken teachers’ unions and scapegoat teachers—most of them women, large numbers of them black—for problems in the education system, implementing performance measures and firings that set a punitive tone for education reform nationwide. Rather than trying to walk this back, Clinton recently said that as president, she would close any public school “that wasn’t doing a better than average job.” Fuzzy math aside, this suggests a regime of pressure on America’s mostly female teaching force—81 percent of elementary- and middle-school teachers are women—that would make her predecessors look like presidents of a giant homeschooling hippie collective. Hillary’s socialist-feminist boosters might want to ask themselves: What kind of socialist feminism supports undermining black women on the job while imposing austerity on the public sector? And lest you think Clinton’s financial hawkishness is reserved for K–12, she also opposes free college tuition, though the United States is the only country where students—57 percent of them women—are saddled with decades of debt as the price of attaining higher education. Defending this position, Clinton recently said that it was important for people seeking a college degree to have “skin in this game.”

* * *

It would be hard to imagine a bigger blow to the
 material well-being of poor women in America than President Bill Clinton’s move in 1996 to “end welfare as we know it” by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. As first lady, Hillary wasn’t a mere spectator to this; within the White House, she advocated harsher policies like ending traditional welfare, even as others in the administration, like Labor Secretary Robert Reich, proposed alternatives. Clinton defended her preferred policies by demonizing mothers struggling to get by as “deadbeats” who were “sitting around the house doing nothing.” Rush Limbaugh couldn’t have said it better. Asked recently to comment on this legacy, Hillary declined. And while the last Clinton administration claimed that it would offset welfare reductions with pressure to raise wages (the majority of low-wage workers in this country are women), and while a growing movement is demanding a $15 minimum wage, Clinton has made it clear that $12 is just fine with her.

Abroad, socialist feminists oppose imperial adventures because war makes life hell for the majority of women, tending to exacerbate whatever material inequalities already existed. Yet Clinton, as secretary of state, went so far as to claim that wars could help liberate women—for example, by making the Taliban respect human rights in Afghanistan. During her tenure as secretary of state, rape and femicide increased in Honduras, Iraq, and Libya, due to the interventionist policies that she nurtured and executed. In Honduras, she provided cover and backdoor encouragement to a coup against a democratically elected leader, which allowed reactionary forces to come to power and begin a phenomenally violent chapter in that country’s history, during which, according to Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the murder of women has “skyrocketed.” Clinton has always supported the war in Iraq, both as New York senator and as secretary of state. She was, in the Obama administration, the most vocal advocate for intervention in Libya. Not only have many women died in the US attacks on civilians in those countries; the US presence has nourished the rise of religious extremists like ISIS, for whom femicide is a way of life.

This year, there is an actually existing socialist-feminist candidate in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders.
But surely, if nothing else, Clinton can be counted on as a staunch ally against the war on women at home? Not so. She has said that abortion should be safe, legal, and “rare”—a qualifier that contributes to the stigma against the procedure. Last summer, during the right-wing attacks on Planned Parenthood that would later inspire a deadly shooting at a Colorado Springs clinic, Clinton tried to split the difference, saying one week that she found the videos about Planned Parenthood’s supposed practices “disturbing,” and the following week clarifying that she supported the organization—a bold stance from someone who once said that “women’s rights are human rights.”

In a normal election season, all of this would be reason to agitate, but not necessarily to work or vote against the candidate—after all, what’s the alternative? This year, however, there is an inspiring reason to vote against Hillary: an actually existing socialist-feminist candidate in the Democratic primary. I’m talking, of course, about Bernie Sanders. He’s no Marxist revolutionary—if you’re waiting for someone who will expropriate the expropriators, you’ll have to wait a little longer—but he has spent his life fighting, consistently and without apology, for social-democratic policies that would improve the lives of a majority of American women. In contrast to Clinton’s devotion to imposing shame and austerity on poor women and their kids, Sanders helped lead the Senate opposition to Republican efforts to cut the WIC program, which provides nutrition assistance for mothers, babies, and pregnant women—and he has said that, as president, he would expand it. Other prominent planks in his platform that should be of interest to feminists include free college tuition, single-payer healthcare, high-quality childcare for all Americans, and a $15 minimum wage. In contrast to Clinton’s waffling on Planned Parenthood, Sanders has said that he would increase federal funding to the organization; and as part of his single-payer plan, he would expand support for women’s reproductive-health services.

Of course I’d like to see little girls—still besieged by the pressure to be pretty at the expense of being powerful—to be inspired by the image of a woman president, as they have been by the rise of the US Women’s World Cup team. But unless those girls are part of a small elite, most will never grow up to enjoy equality with men absent the kind of reforms that Sanders is advocating. A Clinton presidency would be symbolically uplifting, even as it slammed the door on the possibility of genuinely improving the lives of most of the world’s women.

Clinton was honest about how deeply at odds with any democratic-socialist movement she is. “We’re not Denmark,” she said, praising the “opportunity” and “freedom” of American capitalism. With this bit of frankness, Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist—indeed, no non-millionaire—should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark—yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way.