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ZooeyModeratorWhy Biden didn’t negotiate seriously with Putin
The two themes that let the Blob carry the day
A couple of decades from now, someone reading an account of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war—if that’s what the Ukraine crisis turns into, as it seems to be doing—may have this thought:
Wait, let me get this straight. So the leaders of the big NATO countries didn’t especially want Ukraine to join NATO? And agreeing to not let Ukraine join NATO—agreeing to not do what they didn’t want to do anyway—might have kept Russia from invading Ukraine? But they didn’t do that? And doing that wasn’t even seriously discussed? Like, virtually no influential American commentators argued that doing this would make sense? How could that be?
Good question! Regular readers of this newsletter may expect me to answer it by launching immediately into an indictment of “the Blob” (the foreign policy establishment) and lamenting the Blob’s lack of “cognitive empathy” (understanding how your adversary, or anyone else, views the world).
Well, you’re wrong about the “immediately” part. Those themes will surface soon enough, but first I’d like to turn your attention to two other themes. These are themes whose promulgation (yes, by the Blob) has stifled serious discussion of how to prevent war in Ukraine (yes, in part by impeding cognitive empathy).
Both are hardy perennials—themes that, over the years, have done untold damage to peacemaking efforts. Maybe if we ponder how little sense they made this time around, we’ll be less likely to fall for them next time around.
1. The Munich theme.
Last week Ukrainian President Zelinsky delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he complained that NATO hadn’t set a firm timetable for admitting Ukraine. His talk generated this headline in the British tabloid the Daily Mail: “Ukraine’s president condemns Western ‘appeasement’ of Putin in blistering address in MUNICH…”
Yes, the headline had “Munich” in all caps: MUNICH. That was a helpful reminder that, in foreign policy circles, the word “appeasement” is almost always a reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous performance at his 1938 meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich. With Germany having massed troops along Czechoslovakia’s border, Chamberlain made concessions to prevent an invasion and then emerged from the meeting declaring that there would be “peace for our time.” Which was off by about six years and 60 million bodies.
Ever since then, people who advocate making concessions that could reduce the chances of war have been accused of favoring “appeasement” and have been sternly warned not to repeat the mistakes of MUNICH. No doubt President Biden was aware that he’d have been deluged with that word had he broached the possibility of granting Putin his main wish by ruling out the admission of Ukraine to NATO. (Commentators were sending Munich warnings as early as November and December in response to a different rumored concession.)
The Munich comparison shouldn’t be casually dismissed. For one thing, it’s always regrettable to make concessions to someone who is threatening to invade a country. You’d rather not reward that kind of behavior. Still, paying that price is, I think, the only important parallel between the Munich case and the Ukraine case. And there are at least two big differences between the two cases.
Munich-Ukraine Difference #1: At Munich, with Hitler threatening to invade and seize a chunk of territory, Chamberlain agreed to let him have the chunk of territory he was threatening to seize. Britain and France strongarmed Czechoslovakia into giving Hitler the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of the country. In contrast, the idea behind the NATO-Ukraine concession would have been to keep Putin from seizing the territory he was threatening to seize.
There’s been a lot of talk—from administration officials and others—about how excluding Ukraine from NATO would somehow violate Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to decide which alliances it joins. That’s nonsense. Ukraine has no more of a sovereign right to join NATO than I have to join the Council on Foreign Relations. International alliances, like organizations at the heart of the Blob, get to choose their members.
In short: Chamberlain replaced one kind of violation of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty—losing territory via invasion—with what was, in effect, another kind: losing territory without the invasion. No one was asking Biden to do that with Ukraine. We’ve been asking him to prevent a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty (losing territory via invasion) by doing something that violates no one’s sovereignty.
Munich-Ukraine Difference #2: At Munich, the guy on the other side of the table was Adolf Hitler. And here’s something to keep in mind about Hitler: He was crazy.
I don’t just mean he considered it totally OK to murder millions of people because of their ethnicity. That’s a kind of craziness, but the more relevant kind, for present purposes, is that he suffered from delusions that led him to repeatedly take existential risks. His declaring war on Russia in 1941, which sealed Germany’s fate, is the most famous example, but other examples had surfaced long before he was Germany’s leader. In 1923, he was lucky to get through his failed “Beer Hall Putsch” wounded and jailed rather than dead.
Putin has never—not in his ascent to Russia’s leadership and not in his subsequent foreign policy—shown the kind of casualness with risk that Hitler showed again and again. So there’s no reason to believe Putin would have followed a negotiated deal with the kind of expansionist rampage that ensued in the aftermath of Chamberlain’s deal—when Hitler, within a year, annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. (Hitler was surprised that the Poland invasion led France and Britain to declare war on Germany; risk assessment just wasn’t his strong suit.)
Besides, since any deal with Putin would have made continued adherence to the NATO-Ukraine concession contingent on Russia’s continued compliance with the deal, this “concession” could be easily reclaimed if Putin violated the deal. A promise not to expand NATO is easy to revoke; letting Hitler’s troops occupy part of Czechoslovakia wasn’t.
2. The ‘Putin can’t be reasoned with’ theme.
Depicting Putin as crazy or irrational or unfathomably strange is a common theme in the Blobosphere (and it of course works in synergy with the Munich theme, since it locates Putin’s tactical psychology in the general vicinity of Hitler’s tactical psychology).
For example, in January influential Blobster Michael McFaul, the former US Ambassador to Russia who is MSNBC’s go-to Russia expert, explained in the Washington Post why there was no point in offering Putin things like a freeze on NATO expansion: “If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology—only some of which comport with Western rational realism.”
Also in January, international relations scholar Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic that Putin “simply does not share a common frame of reference about the world with his opponents in the West.” Rather, “deep in the dark recesses of Putin’s psyche,” there are such things as an “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” so strong as to give the West “limited sway in the situation that is now unfolding.” Hence the title and subtitle of Nichols’s piece: “Only Putin Knows What Happens Next: He alone can make the choice to bring Europe back from the brink of a major war.” And hence Nichols’s take on why Putin was massing more and more troops on Ukraine’s border: “No one really knows why Putin is doing this.”
Not everyone would see the Ukraine crisis as a perplexing product of Putin’s eccentricities. Consider the current CIA director, William Burns. Back in 2008, the year George W. Bush fatefully badgered reluctant European leaders into pledging future NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns sent a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that included this warning:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Burns added that it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering Ukraine NATO membership—a move that, he predicted, would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
So Burns predicted 12 years ago that pretty much the entire Russian national security establishment would be inclined to make trouble in Ukraine if we offered NATO membership to Ukraine—yet now that we’ve promised NATO membership to Ukraine and Putin is indeed making trouble in Ukraine, people like McFaul and Nichols say the explanation must lie somewhere in the murky depths of Putin’s peculiar psychology.
I’m not saying Putin’s calculations are purely about Russian national security. Obviously, Putin is a politician, and he responds to domestic political forces as well as geopolitical ones. But in the domestic realm, too, his pattern of responses is intelligible as the product of a rational mind.
For example: If enough Russians feel their country is being disrespected by the West, Putin can win points by standing up to the West. And, to put a finer point on it: If Russians hear that the pro-Western Ukrainian government is shrinking the Russian language’s role in public schools and closing Russian-language media outlets—both of which the Ukrainian government has done—then standing up to Ukraine could become an especially popular way to stand up to the West. A recent New York Times piece about Putin noted “the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.”
None of this is rocket science! It’s not that hard to get at least a rough idea of the political and geopolitical factors shaping the thinking and actions of world leaders, and to then engage them accordingly. Yet our finest Blobsters, writing in our most esteemed Blob outlets—McFaul in the Washington Post, Nichols in the Atlantic—sit around scratching their heads in abject befuddlement: This Putin character is so weird that there’s no real point in seriously negotiating with him.
In defense of McFaul and Nichols—and other Blobsters who also suffer from cognitive empathy deficit—they may be victims of the cognitive bias known as attribution error. Attribution error can distort our perception of both allies and enemies. The way it works with enemies is that if they do something we consider bad, we’re inclined to attribute this behavior to their internal disposition, their basic character—not to external circumstances.
So if, say, we’re trying to explain why an enemy is threatening to invade Ukraine, we discount explanations involving political and geopolitical circumstance and embrace explanations that locate the problem in the enemy’s fundamental disposition—in his “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” or, more vaguely, in a peculiar “analytical framework” that’s hard for us rational westerners to grok.
In any event, whatever the roots of cognitive empathy deficit and other unfortunate Blob-typical tendencies that have surfaced lately, the damage is done: Once again, it seems, the Blob has prevailed. Thanks to people like McFaul and Nichols, there was, so far as we can tell, no serious attempt to negotiate with Putin—to offer the kinds of concessions that lay discernibly at the core of his motivation. And now that Putin has recognized Ukraine’s breakaway republics and ordered troops into them—an act of aggression and a plain violation of international law—the political costs for Biden of making concessions will be even higher. (And the real costs of making concessions—in terms of the magnitude of wrongdoing that would now be rewarded—is higher.)
As the aggression unfolds—and possibly expands well beyond the Donbass region that comprises these two republics—expect to hear people like McFaul and Nichols claim vindication: Putin’s as bad and irrational as they said he was! You may even hear some Hitler analogies.
But remember: What we’re seeing from here on out is what Putin did after we followed the advice of McFaul and Nichols and refused to negotiate seriously with him. What we’re seeing is what happens when you don’t try “appeasement.”
Note: Obviously, we don’t know for sure what concessions might have forestalled Russian invasion. But in late January Foreign Minister Lavrov signaled that the NATO-Ukraine concession, along with concessions about missile placement in Europe, would have done the trick. Also obviously, I don’t know what the Biden administration may have offered Putin in private. It’s conceivable that they offered more than we know about. (But beware: Now that negotiations have failed, the administration may try to make its private offers to Putin sound more accommodating than they were.) In any event, this piece is only partly about what seems to have been Biden’s failure to seriously negotiate. It is also about the undeniable fact that mainstream media devoted virtually no time or space to people who were advocating serious negotiation.
ZooeyModeratorBy Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>Iwas in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.</p>
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.</p>
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.
The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.</p>
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
ZooeyModeratorI am reading around, and from what I am learning, I have to say I really don’t understand the reactions I’m seeing all over the place.
I mean…invading is bad, and killing people is bad, and I’m opposed to that.
But to see the reactions of people on Fb and T, it’s as if everyone thinks Putin has done something incomprehensibly crazy and uncalled for, and they’re SHOCKED! Weirdly, on the same day, Israel bombed the shit out of Syria, and the US bombed Somalia, and I don’t see the same sense of outrage. There was a very short piece in the NYT about the Somalia strike that contained this fun sentence:
The command said it was still trying to determine how many Shabab insurgents had been killed in the strike, but it said no civilians were believed to have been harmed.
They can’t tell how many dead people there are, but they know for sure none of them were civilians. Anyway…
So as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control. The US seems to have taken advantage of the situation since the Nazis are pro-EU, so they’ve been assisted financially by the US, presumably for the usual Empire reasons. Meanwhile, the US has broken its promises not to expand NATO, squashed a pipeline deal between Russia and Germany, and I can’t think of one good reason why Russia should be content with these developments.
So…world powers doing what world powers do. None of this is surprising or novel, as far as I can tell, so I don’t know why people are all changing their profiles to show solidarity with Ukraine while calling Putin an unstable madman when none of this seems very different from countless US military actions and CIA interference in sovereign countries that aren’t even right smack on our border.
Also, this new forum eats many of my posts for some reason.
ZooeyModeratorZooeyModeratorOdell Beckham Jr. underwent successful knee surgery Tuesday, vowing to come back "better than ever before."
"U better believe imma be back" https://t.co/HdY65cu46R
— Cameron DaSilva (@camdasilva) February 23, 2022
February 23, 2022 at 2:03 am in reply to: the really big articles & longer vids on the super bowl #136873ZooeyModeratorThat Dilfer thing is a MUST listen.
ZooeyModeratorThe 1978 Rams were first in fewest yards allowed and their coverage was top-flight, the best in the NFL with a 50.4 defensive passer rating and allowing 15 touchdown passes and picking off 28 and returning five of them for touchdowns.
Defensive stats 1973-1980
Man, I sure did love the 70s Rams. Watching that team play defense was something else. And they had an OL and running game. If they had had a better QB, they would have been the team of the decade, and the Steelers would have been the 90s Bills. (Maybe).
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This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by
Zooey.
ZooeyModeratorMy son, whom I brought up lovingly and with great care, gave me Covid DURING the Super Bowl.
He came over to my house to watch the game with me, and then Monday morning he texted me to tell me he had a fever. So I drove a home test over to him, and he tested positive. I tested positive on Thursday.
That’s the kind of son I have. I bring him up right, instilling him with proper Rams fandom, and on the day the Rams win the Super Bowl, he returns the favor by giving me Covid.
The upshot of which is that I am enjoying a paid break from work while I putter around the garden and catch up on some grading.
ZooeyModeratorI like that bit, Z. I don’t find it embarassing. We just see it differently. So in honor of diversity, your fines for this offense will not be as draconian as usual.
A voyeur.
And a dictator.
February 21, 2022 at 11:21 am in reply to: annual coaches leave, coaches replaced thread…2022 #136841ZooeyModeratorSource: The Rams are hiring Kentucky OC Liam Coen as their new offensive coordinator, bringing Greg Olson back to the staff, and giving assistant head coach Thomas Brown more responsibility within the offense and team.
Sean McVay moving quick to put together his '22 staff.
— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) February 21, 2022
ZooeyModeratorThey need to stop those interviews on the field. They are embarrassing. They’re embarrassing to the audience, to the player, AND to the interviewer.
Just wait until after the orgasm is over.
ZooeyModeratorThere was also a narrative, which I think is true, that earlier in the seaon McV relied more on MS just slinging it and cut back on the jet sweeps, motion, and play action. Teams adjusted to that and the ones that could tee off on the Rams usually solid but sometimes physically manhandled OL took advantage of that. As a response McV put back in more of the play action and so on and relied less on MS just slinging it from start to finish.
A flaw I thought I saw with MS may relate to this. Underneath passes were not always as effective with him because he would wait a beat too long before checking down and that set up the underneath receivers to be stopped for fewer yards. That comes from him pressing and trying to look downfield for something to break. I would prefer it if he had a top inner clock and saw immediately that he should throw underneath before giving the defense time to spot it.
I recall reading Stafford stating that he doesn’t like pre-snap motion, and iirc, he was not a big fan of play action, either, although he was far from bad at it. The play action I am less sure about, but I am sure I read he doesn’t like motion.
I also recall reading that QBs who get traded don’t far all that well, historically, in their first season with the new team, and do better in following seasons.
Okay, that said…I also believe Stafford improved as the season wore on, and that the Rams used more motion and PA as the season wore on. So what we have here is a QB on a new team who is adjusting to a new system, and a coach that is figuring that out, and a new WR added mid-stream as another WR the QB was just getting used to goes out. And all that got better and better as the season progressed, and it peaked at the right time. That’s just what happened, as far as I can tell.
All of which should excite Rams fans for what could be in store for this team next year. Stafford is going to get better with both the system, and his WRs (and TEs and RBs). He was already hitting Henderson. Give him time with Akers, and a second season with Kupp, Woods, and Higbee, with OBJ hitting the fold later, and a second year working with McVay, and we could see some nonsense happen on the field.
And to restate my opinion on McVay, I saw growth this year. Real growth. He has learned from his mistakes, and he is a wiser coach right now. That jet sweep you referenced…that call was made precisely at the moment it helped most. There was no better call he could have made on 4th and 1 at that moment. Cincy hadn’t seen it; they weren’t ready for it. And it kept a 15-play drive alive with everything at stake.
I am bullish on the Rams’ offense. I think Matthew not Matt Stafford and Cooper Kupp are a very big problem for the rest of the NFL, and a full year with Akers, Woods, and a late-arriving OBJ? Goodness. I want to see that. Please, Lord, let us watch that.
ZooeyModeratorRams in solid salary cap shape to make a run at a repeat in 2022. https://t.co/jUrIpyYN7M
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) February 15, 2022
ZooeyModeratorI wouldn’t think Powell would cost more than the vet minimum. The Rams picked him up after he had bounced around, right? And it’s not like he was great; he just didn’t screw things up. I’m happy to have him, but he’s kind of the bare minimum in production, isn’t he?
February 19, 2022 at 10:47 pm in reply to: when you have 40 min of time, watch this… NFL Films Mic’d Up Super Bowl LVI #136768ZooeyModeratorThat made me all fuzzy inside.
That was great.
ZooeyModeratorInterestingly enough though they get real value out of the lower rounds.
Yeah, I know.
And with the Lombardi safely residing in Los Angeles, there is no reason to complain about their strategy. It’s working. I think quantity of late round picks is important. The conventional wisdom forever has been to build the team with 1st and 2nd rounders, and you can throw away a bunch of “useless” 4-7 rounders to move up.
Well…the Rams are stockpiling quantities in the late rounds, and turning up the guys you pointed out, and more.
Heck, Kupp was a 3rd round pick.
I think the Rams have shown that it’s better to have 8 guys in rounds 5-7 than a high pick.
Oh…and one other thing that crossed my mind and totally doesn’t belong here, or anywhere else, but I gotta say it: A’Shawn Robinson is better than Brockers. There. I said it.
ZooeyModeratorYeah, Josh Reynolds would have made the postseason run a little easier.
February 19, 2022 at 12:14 pm in reply to: annual coaches leave, coaches replaced thread…2022 #136732ZooeyModeratorI’m guessing they’re keeping Morris.
I had doubts the first half of the season, but I think he’s a keeper now. I appreciate the way he adjusted at halftime in a few games – notably the Super Bowl where he changed the defensive front and poured a record-tying onslaught onto Burrow.
These guys in the college ranks are interesting.
ZooeyModeratorI would think Noteboom would be their best option. His price tag is not going to be unreasonable. But he will draw interest from other teams, almost certainly. Alaric Jackson played well when he played, but who knows. They need another OT no matter what.
The Rams are going to need reinforcements in the secondary. They have been very successful over the years drafting, but they’ve also been losing guys to FA. They obviously ran so thin this year that they had to bring in a dude from a retirement home and torn pec to play. Long seemed to improve a bit down the stretch, though I’m not sold. Rapp has another year on his contract, I believe, but that guy is strictly depth, imo.
They should be able to re-sign the KR, whatshisname, because nobody else seemed to want him. He didn’t fumble which is my #1 criteria for a returner. Remember what a disaster the KR game was until they picked him up.
My hope is they can develop what they have. Jefferson is on probation, in my book. He doesn’t fight for the ball. He’s the anti-OBJ on that part of the game. Stafford can put the ball into tight coverage with OBJ, and the guy will come down with the ball. Jefferson becomes a spectator. We saw that multiple times this year. I hope somebody gets to him. If not, they need to find a replacement soon, and I don’t know if Ironhands Skowronek is the answer. There’s Tutu, of course. Tutu Atwell has more Super Bowl rings than Dan Marino, btw.
I think they’re okay at TE, actually. Higbee, Mundt, Blanton, Perkins, and Harris.
The Rams obviously have no shot at any blue chip draftees, and maybe no red chippers, either. I don’t know when they first pick, or how many picks they have. They will be looking to add a lot of bodies, and sift through them in camp. That strategy made them champions, so I’m on board with the McSnead train.
ZooeyModeratorthat robert rochell can grab the starting corner spot opposite ramsey.
Yeah, I think he’s gonna hafta. Williams is a FA, and that seems like one of the more likely guys to let walk.
ZooeyModeratorWell, here’s a little treasure.
Before the start of his senior season in high school, @CooperKupp was asked about his career coming to an end.
Fast forward to today and he’s a Super Bowl MVP 🙌
(via @WaSports) pic.twitter.com/aCl1oPTrrN
— ESPN (@espn) February 17, 2022
ZooeyModeratorIt’s not a good look, and people will be bringing it up forever, so he will never live it down.
But…the guy was blitzed, and in a state of euphoria, and in no condition to respond to that like he would have if it was an ordinary day.
To say nothing of the fact that he’s not qualified to handle an injury. He’s a quarterback, not an EMT, and I’m sure she had appropriate medical help very quickly, and there is literally nothing Stafford could have done medically. But it would have been a better look if he had walked over there and peered down, I guess.
ZooeyModeratorHoly shit!
Pissed off Matthew Stafford 😳😳😳 pic.twitter.com/yLHl0wPG5l
— 𝚂𝚌𝚘𝚘𝚝 𝚂𝚄𝙿𝙴𝚁 𝙱𝙾𝚆𝙻 𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙼𝙿𝚂 🐏🏠 (@_SC00T) February 17, 2022
ZooeyModeratorI was just coming to post that Donald/Corden bit.
It’s fun to see that guy so happy.
ZooeyModeratorYep. He is tugging on the jersey, and then spins Kupp deeper so he has a lane to cut in front and deflect the ball.
It was a good call.
ZooeyModerator#Rams will make a concerted effort in resigning Von Miller – knowing full well his market will be robust – source says. I’m told the team is open to both a one-year and multi-year extension for the future Hall of Famer. Key bonus: Aaron Donald and Miller are great friends.
— Jordan Schultz (@Schultz_Report) February 16, 2022
ZooeyModeratorRams in solid salary cap shape to make a run at a repeat in 2022. https://t.co/jUrIpyYN7M
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) February 15, 2022
ZooeyModerator"Alright Matthew, you ready for this? This is gonna be your game-winner right here buddy"
Sean McVay knew exactly what to call to win the Super Bowl 🙌 #RamsHouse pic.twitter.com/zbsZLkPviY
— NFL Total Access (@NFLTotalAccess) February 17, 2022
ZooeyModeratorCooper Kupp in a Kobe jersey, squeezing the Lombardi in a confetti storm is all I needed today.
ZooeyModeratorWell, all those guys are lubed up to the gills, and giddy about their victory.
But even after the euphoria wears off, I think they are going to want to try to repeat.
I don’t know about you guys, but personally, I’m in favor of a repeat.
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