This is just me thinking about the people out there who say, well, Pace started out fast, why can’t GR. Actually there were several linemen from that draft (97), and from that era, that were playing pretty well from the get-go. You used to be able to count on it. Linemen went in the 1st round precisely because they were ready. Now, they go in the first round because they are somewhat readiER than others, and, also, because they represent longterm investments in a certain talent level.

Though….I am not sure why people think Pace was THAT good initially, since in fact, in a series of interviews, Hanifan made it absolutely clear that Pace needed to listen and to improve and that it took some doing. Hanifan likes to tell the story about how he had to work to get Pace’s attention. Pace needed work too, just like GR does now…just less of it.

That aside though, yeah Pace…and a lot of linemen…started off better than they tend to now. That includes in 97 Walter Jones. Tarik Glenn, and Ross Verba (all 1st round LOTs from that year’s draft).

But there’s a difference. Or, 2 differences. In 97 players came from more pro-oriented college offenses and had more real face-time and practice time with NFL coaches. Since then, the spread has messed up the transition for college linemen (there have been several articles about this in recent years) AND the new CBA limits practice time and contact with coaches.

That is why virtually NO LOT taken in the first round the last few years has started out well–the percentage is very low. The percentage does not improve much in their second years. I have done the numbers on this before, using the old PFF grades when they were still available.

The era when 4 1st round LOTs can play pretty well as rookies—as Pace, Jones, Glenn, and Verba ALL did in 97—was over a long time ago. Asking for that NOW (“that” being multiple 1st round LOTs performing at least pretty well as rookies) is just impossible.

IMO, if GR is still struggling in year 3, it’s an issue. Before then, any complaints are just coming from a place where people ignore too much (like the effect of the college spread on linemen developing as pros these days).

…

Connor Cook impressive at Michigan State pro day

Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press

http://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2016/03/16/connor-cook-msu-pro-day/81877426/

EAST LANSING — Connor Cook wasn’t perfect on his pro day. But he wasn’t too far off, either.

The former Michigan State quarterback showed off his impressive arm and plenty of accuracy in front of representatives all 32 NFL teams.

Also notable: the way Cook handled himself before and after the workout. He said hello to visitors, started conversations and moved easily around the practice facility. And when it was over, Cook handled the familiar questions about his leadership and character comfortably and without a hint of disdain.

“People can say whatever the heck they want to say about me and it’s not going to affect me one bit,” he said. “If they want to talk about the captain thing, if they want to say I’m a bad person, if they want to do anything like that, they can come meet me and talk to me and then get a better feel on that, because a lot of the people who are saying that stuff have never even met me before.

“They can come talk to my teammates, come talk to my coaches. But if they’re not going to do that and they’re going to continue to say that, I really don’t care.”

MSU coach Mark Dantonio admitted he was surprised by how much Cook’s non-captaincy has continued to gain momentum. But Dantonio has continued to be impressed with how well Cook has handled the scrutiny.

“Yeah, I think he’s been very transparent in how he’s handled things,” Dantonio said. “And I’ve tried to be the same in terms of what we try to do. I think it’s a position that’s highly regarded and highly evaluated and scrutinized. With that, I think he’s done a great job.”

Cook, one of 19 players who worked out Wednesday, took part only in throwing drills. He said his shoulder injury is 100% healed.

“Right now my arm’s stronger than it’s ever been,” he said. “Stronger than it was even before the injury.”

It certainly looked that way while Cook threw about 60 to 65 passes. While he was admittedly not perfect, Cook thought he answered some questions for scouts.

“Can he drive it?” Cook said. “Can he throw it deep? Can he bang out a 20-yard comeback down the field? And I showed that I can do that. There was things like that I wanted to prove and obviously why I’m one of the best QBs in the country.”

Cook may have answered some questions about his arm Wednesday. But he knows the questions about his head and heart will remain for one simple reason.

“Because I wasn’t voted captain,” he said. “When you have a quarterback that’s that successful and a team that’s that good and he’s not voted captain, there’s going to be some issues. So people immediately jump to conclusions: ‘Oh, he must have done something to not be voted captain. Did he break a team rule? Did he get arrested?’ No. ‘Well, he must not get along with his teammates.’ That’s not true, either. ‘He must have a really bad attitude or a bad personality.’ And that’s not true, either.”

Cincinnati Bengals cornerback Darqueze Dennard attended the workout and called himself a “huge Connor Cook fan.” Dennard noted that one reason Cook probably was not voted captain was because of the depth of leadership on the team last season.

“It’s a very deep group of seniors that played a lot of ball for Michigan State and won a lot of big games for them,” Dennard said. “So I think they’re just trying to pick and nag about things, and I don’t think it’s right. But like always, I think he’ll prove them wrong. I truly believe that and we’ll see.”

Donald Trump’s rise is the financial crisis of politics

Lee Drutman

http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/3/15/11236378/trump-financial-crisis

In 2008-’09, a major financial meltdown shook the economy and caused a significant recession. This crisis came as a surprise. No models predicted it. Initially, the only people who picked up on the warning signs were dismissed as crazy. But looking back, it should have been clear all along.

We now know that the system was shot through with perverse incentives that privileged short-term gains over long-term stability. Actors operated on faulty assumptions about how existing arrangements were infinitely sustainable (they weren’t). Eventually it took a massive government intervention to bail out the banks and allow the “toxic assets” to recover.

Obviously, financial markets and political systems are not exactly the same, and there is a danger in stretching any analogy too far. But there are important similarities in that both are big, complex, interdependent systems that are never truly stable. Both systems get into trouble when they become overwhelmed with perverse incentives, and when actors assume they can maintain increasingly illogical arrangements and ignore warning signs.

One benefit of such a comparison is that thinking in this way allows us to see Trump’s rise as the result of the incentives and structure of the existing political system, in the same way that we came to think about the financial crisis as the result of the incentives and structures of the financial system. This has consequences for the reform conversations that this crisis will hopefully bring about.

A second benefit of this comparison is that the analogy to toxic assets seems particularly useful. The anger turned violence that has emerged in the 2016 campaign is similar to the toxic assets that came out of the financial crisis. And to push the analogy further, those who think Trump can be simply marginalized by responsible Republican leaders are deluding themselves, somewhat like investors who argued that the collapse of Bear Stearns in May 2008 could be safely contained and we could then move back to endlessly increase housing prices.

While some might prefer to wish away the toxic elements of our politics that are emerging, this would be unwise. We need to find a way to rescue them.

A system full of perverse incentives

One reason the financial crisis was so bad was that the financial system was full of perverse incentives. For example, mortgage brokers and investment banks got rich by making and securitizing loans that should never have been made. But because they got rich doing so, they financed and securitized riskier and riskier loans, until the system was so flooded with junk that it of course collapsed.

In a similar way, it seems that Republicans received short-term electoral rewards for poisoning our political system with increasingly hateful and nihilistic rhetoric. As Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote: “Republicans have worked for years to radicalize their base against Obama, to persuade them that something truly different and terrifying is going on, and in that project they have enjoyed a catastrophic success.”

In 2009, Republicans faced a choice. They could have looked at the disastrous second term of George W. Bush’s presidency as the logical end of the Reagan coalition and seen the Democrats’ sweeping 2008 victory as heralding a new political order, and then worked constructively to pass a climate bill and a health care bill and end an era of increasingly bitter partisanship. Instead, Republicans decided that the problem was that they had not been conservative enough. Their congressional leaders opted for pure obstructionism. And their messaging rediscovered regions of negativity and hatred that had been ignored in America for decades.

The benefit was clear: As long as they directed fire at a common enemy, they could continue to maintain the fiction that their coalition was unified, papering over the growing contradictions and disappointments. Republicans could continue to placate their wealthy donors with fiscally conservative policies because they could misdirect blame onto Washington Democrats and their big-government agenda for any stagnating wages.

Sure, they were playing with fire. But like the investment bankers who kept shoveling toxic assets into the system even as the thin logic that had once rationalized them vanished, all the incentives pushed toward maintaining the existing fiction.

What investment banker would have benefited in 2007 from telling clients that all these securitized mortgages were really junk and it was time to stop investing in them? Everybody had an incentive to perpetuate the status quo just a little longer, deluding themselves that it could go on and on.

Similarly, what Republican politician would have turned his back on the fight, accepting minority status for the price of peace? All the incentives pushed to maintaining the existing fights. And especially when the Republican strategy worked in 2010, the rewards became clear.

The false assumption that the present trends will last forever

The 1999 book Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market is now a joke, a book published at the height of the tech stock bubble. (The Dow peaked at just below 12,000 in January 2000 and is now at about 17,000, 17 years later.) But this kind of thing always happens in financial bubbles: Investors look at the recent trends and make the common mistake of thinking that whatever has been happening recently will probably continue indefinitely into the future.

A year ago at this time, I was confidently predicting Jeb Bush would be the Republican Party nominee — because of course that was how things worked. He had the money and was poised to get the endorsements, and that was what had mattered for decades. Like most, I was convinced by the “party decides” thesis, because the recent data largely supported it. And so when Bush faltered, I followed the conventional wisdom that Rubio would take his place. Because of course.

Financial bubbles are pretty much impossible to time. We all know they happen, but no theory can perfectly predict them. Market highs are only clear from the hindsight purview of the trough.

In a similar way, all party coalitions in American politics are of limited duration.

We’ve arguably had six party systems in the United States. By “party system,” I mean relatively stable coalitions that fight predictable ideological battles. But because losing parties are always looking to expand their coalitions by picking off groups from the winning party, and because issues shift and demographics change, no party coalition is ever permanently stable. Realignments always happen.

Here’s a classic summation of this point by political scientists Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson:

Thus, by their very nature, all party alignments contain the seeds of their own destruction, the various groups that make up the party may be united on some issues, particularly on those that gave rise to the alignment in the first place. But lurking just below the surface a myriad of potential issues divides the party faithful and can lead to a dissolution of the existing equilibrium. In politics, as Riker notes, because of the inevitability of internal contradictions, disequilibrium may only be one issue away.

Arguably, the current party system emerged out of the period following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when Lyndon Johnson allegedly acknowledged that the Democrats “have lost the South for a generation.” For about four elections, the parties were thoroughly scrambled, producing a time of low polarization and high legislative productivity.

But by 1980, the Republicans solidified around the Reagan vision for the Republican Party — strong on defense, traditional values, and free market economics. Most significantly, this offered a new and permanent home for the conservative Southerners who were now at odds with the increasingly effete libertine Democratic Party.

And once this party system was in place, polarization took off.

But beneath this increasingly partisan voting was an electorate that was always much more ideologically diverse than the increasingly bipolar two-party system. And the more this underlying ideological diversity was hemmed in by party orthodoxy on both sides, the more adherents of unrepresented views felt disenfranchised and the more both parties had to turn up negative partisanship to keep their coalition together.

In retrospect, we can see the fissures in the Republican Party in the rise of the Tea Party and perhaps more clearly in the intraparty Republican fights over the House leadership in 2015. As with most financial crises, the first warning signs are often dismissed: It’s just a slight deviation; things will return to normal.

We can also now see how the Republican coalition was prolonged beyond its shelf life. We can now see how Republican voters were becoming more secular, making the social conservative piece of the Reagan coalition less important. We can see how support for the strong-on-defense piece of the Reagan coalition fell apart after the failed Iraq War.

And, most significantly, we can now see how the tension between the fiscal conservatism of the increasingly powerful Republican donor class came into increasing tension with the growing numbers of working-class Republican voters suffering from increasing insecurity and inequality, and how the pro-immigration views of the donor class conflicted with the anxieties voters felt as the percentage of US residents born elsewhere reached levels not seen since the 1920s.

We can also now see that Europe has also been experiencing a rise of right-wing populism, suggesting that there is something in the changing dynamics of the global economy and culture that also made the existing political coalitions outdated.

Bubbles do happen, because all momentum in the system works to perpetuate them. But the more a bubble is allowed to persist beyond its logical limits, the worse the eventual fallout.

Now what?

Donald Trump represents the consequence of a political system in which the contradictions have been expanding for probably two decades now: a system in which economically struggling and less well-educated voters have been marginalized, in which both parties (but especially Republicans) have sided with their donor classes against their voters, and in which both parties (again, especially Republicans) have attempted to paper over their internal contradictions by spewing negative partisanship into the system. More than ever, voters support their party not because they like their party but because they absolutely hate the other party.

The political system that created this moment was also a system that centralized leadership in both parties in a way that minimized internal party diversity, fueling a reinforcing feedback loop of hyperpartisanship that left many voters unrepresented because they didn’t fit into the narrow lines of partisan conflict.

Republicans distressed by the rise of Trump currently now seem split between denial, despair, and desperation. Some seem to think that Trump’s rise is a temporary fever, one that will break after this election, and things will return to normal in 2018 or 2020. Others are ready to write the obituary for the GOP. Still others seem inclined to take increasingly desperate and drastic measures to try to deny Trump the party’s nomination.

None of these seem especially productive. At some point, Republicans in the #NeverTrump wing of the party are going to have to come to terms with the fact that a significant portion of self-identified Republicans support and believe in Donald Trump, and that their views and attitudes, long marginalized in the American political system, have now discovered a voice that is not going to fade away.

Because these views were marginalized for a long time, and because Republicans fostered anger to maintain their coalition’s unity against the Democrats, the political system now faces a potentially toxic asset. Denying this reality and hoping it will go away is the equivalent of the Treasury deciding it wasn’t going to backstop large financial institutions and just letting the chips fall where they may because, on principle, government shouldn’t get involved.

Trump voters now have a leader who is comfortable inciting violence and who craves the spotlight in unhealthy ways. This is not good. And it will be even worse if Trump is denied the nomination.

The political system needs to find a responsible way to make these voters feel like they are being heard and represented, and we are going to need to do it soon. Honestly, I’m not sure how this happens absent Trump becoming the Republican nominee. But that has its own problems, which have to be carefully managed. Leaders in the media and the Democratic Party are going to need to treat this situation carefully.

Longer term, we need to identify some of the pathologies of the political order that led us to this point so we can do better going forward.

For one, we need to move to a campaign finance system that doesn’t create strong incentives for party leaders to support policies that make their donors happy but piss off their voters and then use the money to channel their voters’ anger at the other party. That’s not sustainable. We also need to make sure we have a political system that fosters more internal diversity within the party, so large groups of voters don’t feel that they are unrepresented for extended periods of time.

The American political system always works better when the parties are more internally diverse, because a second dimension of political conflict creates much more space for dealmaking. I’ve outlined these ideas (and others) for fixing our political system a New America policy paper, Political Dynamism.

This is a frightening moment in American politics. But the most dangerous thing to do in a potential crisis is just continue to do the same things that led to the current moment, thinking somehow you can just ride past it and everything will be back to normal next election. It won’t.

from off the net

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merlin

What type of QB do the Rams want? I’m guessing they want a big guy who can play action and hit receivers down field for big plays. Good leadership, and a guy who carries himself well with the media. Lastly, I think boldness in the pocket is gonna matter too, they don’t want a guy who is a checkdown machine with a rush or perceived expectations of the rush, and if there is mobility that’s a big plus.

Using that as criteria the guys who fit are Wentz (total package), Goff (accurate throws in face of pressure), and Lynch (downfield accuracy is outstanding) in the round 1 real estate. Lynch projects as a guy who will need more time, and from that respect the other two will be more desired, but I don’t think he gets by the Rams at 15 because he checks so many blocks. I mean, put in his tape and there’s just no way this guy lasts until round 2 in the current QB starved climate in the NFL.

It really gets interesting as you look at the guys lower down the draft board, too. Prescott fits in every way but size, and while he took a hit with that DUI I do not think NFL types see him as a risk. Gil Brandt covered this the other day on Sirius and went on and on about how well liked he is as a person off the field by himself and the teams, and that perception is going to buy Prescott some draft day stock I think. The impact of that DUI is that now he should be there at our round 2 picks but that is not a certainty with teams like the Broncos and Jets being potentially more desperate than the Rams.

I don’t think the Rams even consider Hackenburg prior to round 4ish. He’s a scared rabbit with any kind of rush, major reclamation project. Jones is all raw arm talent and couldn’t keep his job. Cook has a weak back foot and some team is going to gamble they can fix his terrible accuracy with mechanics, I pray it’s not the Rams.

Guys who I think can fit mid to late rounds are Doughty, whose arm isn’t the strongest but is exceptionally accurate and competitive. Hogan, who also doesn’t have a cannon but who meets a lot of the criteria too. And Allen, who defies all his measurables with perhaps the best tape out of most of these QBs.

Rams play it safe in free agency by re-signing their own

Nick Wagoner

http://espn.go.com/blog/st-louis-rams/post/_/id/27646/rams-playing-it-safe-in-free-agency-by-re-signing-their-own

Though it was expensive to keep Trumaine Johnson, he gives the Rams some security at cornerback.
A breakdown of the first week of free agency for the Los Angeles Rams.

Most significant signing: CB Trumaine Johnson — The Rams simply couldn’t afford to lose both of their starting cornerbacks in free agency, especially after spending the past four years developing them. They opted for Johnson in part because he’s a bit younger and brings more size. It took the franchise tag and a nearly $14 million price tag to make it happen, but the Rams would have faced a major dilemma and plenty of competition had both starters hit the open market.

Most significant loss: CB Janoris Jenkins — Yes, keeping Johnson softens the blow of losing Jenkins to the New York Giants, but that doesn’t mean losing Jenkins doesn’t hurt. The Rams wanted to keep both cornerbacks, but Jenkins’ price soared to a place the Rams weren’t willing to go. Although he has had his warts, Jenkins has been one of the defense’s top playmakers for the past four years and is coming off his best season in 2015. The Rams have some depth, and if E.J. Gaines returns to full strength, they should be able to get by — but think of how well-stocked they would have been at cornerback had they been able to keep Jenkins.

Player they should have signed: S Rodney McLeod — Though the Rams were equipped to deal with the loss of one of their cornerbacks, the same can’t be said of free safety. They signed McLeod as an undrafted free agent and molded him into a solid NFL starter at a position where those are hard to find. By the time McLeod hit the open market, his price went above what the Rams were comfortable paying. But this is one instance when the Rams should have been willing to extend themselves a bit to keep a solid player who still has upside. Instead, free safety can now be added to the list of team needs heading toward the draft.

What’s next: The first wave of free agency is over and teams are now bargain-hunting for players who can help, but certainly won’t transform the franchise. The Rams aren’t going to find the substantial offensive help they need, but locating cheaper, short-term options for depth at all levels of the defense and at tight end would be a good place to start. It would also allow them to mostly focus their draft efforts on bolstering an offense in serious need of help.

Overall grade: C — It’s hard to blame the Rams for staying out of the fray on overpriced free agents who might have been marginal upgrades over what they have in place, at best. Keeping key pieces like Johnson, Mark Barron and William Hayes was important, but losing Jenkins and McLeod balances out those re-signings. After losing that duo, it would have made sense for the Rams to reallocate some of those funds to someone like tight end Ladarius Green, a young player with upside who didn’t break the bank.