mansquatch wrote: ↑Tue Oct 01, 2019 9:07 amI think the QB thing is way too harsh. Ponder was a bad pick. Most of the QBs in that class were. Bridgewater was drafted as the future. That pick was starting to pan out when his knee buckled. Not sure how you put that on the GM? Since Teddy's knee buckled a week before the season started, they needed a QB, so they gambled on Bradford. Again, defensible, not really any starting QBs on the waiver wire in early September. After Bradford's knees also fell apart we were faced with needing a new QB and the options were Keenum and Cousins. I get it, they over paid for Cousins but when you look at the circumstances coming out of 2017 are you really going to say we should have taken Keenum instead? Have you watched him the last two seasons? He has been appreciably worse than Cousins.
I agree that the QB situation hasn't worked out how we fans would like. That isn't debatable. But past Ponder, are you really going excoriate Spielman for 2 instances of bad luck with career ending injuries (in back to back seasons no less) and then gambling on the best option available with a SB window open? I think if Spielman had gone with Keenum over Cousins he'd probably already be fired.
Yes, I'm going to excoriate him for his mishandling of the QB position. Look, that Super Bowl window wasn't open, that's part of the problem. He expended resources as if it was and as GM, he needs to have a better handle on where the team is in it's development at any given time.
He went into the 2011 offseason with Webb as the only QB on the roster, drafted Ponder and then thought a washed-up McNabb would serve as a reasonable bridge to the rookie. That didn't come close to working out so Ponder was thrown under fire too early and then pummeled by both fans and opposing defenses for not living up to upper-half-of-the-first-round expectations. He might have had a chance to be better if there had been a reasonable plan to bring him along more slowly and allow him to develop. Maybe he was as good as he would ever get but we'll never know so in the end, yes, he was a bad pick.
Bridgewater's injury was bad luck but he was a bad pick too, not much more effective or productive as a pro than Ponder when you get right down to it, although precious few Vikings fans are willing to admit it. I don't put his injury on the GM. I fault Spielman, Zimmer and Turner for the first round investment in a QB who was a terrible fit for the system they wanted to run. I further fault them for not having a Plan B in place behind him (a lesson this GM has
never learned) and for believing the Vikes were so Super Bowl-ready it justified investing a first round pick in Sam Bradford. They clearly weren't ready and any reasonable look at Bradford's injury history makes it impossible to just let Spielman off the hook by calling another injury bad luck. Bradford was a high risk investment.
This is just classic post loss saber rattling. All the old crap about the GM is coming out of the woodwork. We didn't lose to Bears because of Rick Spielman. We lost because Mike Zimmer didn't do his job. It is as simple as that.
Hogwash. It's not just post-loss saber rattling. If they lost because Zimmer didn't do his job I think it's reasonable to question why Zimmer still has that job, especially because I questioned it already. I'm not saying he should be canned for losing @Chicago in week 4. I'm saying he's in year 6 and losing games like that is pretty much his signature move at this point. Years of similarly flat performances combined with his team's unprepared performance in the 2017 championship game and the home loss to Chicago at the end of last season (when the playoffs were on the line and Chicago had already clinched) all sent a clear signal at the end of 5 years: Zimmer's not the guy to guide the team to a Championship. Yet, he's still the head coach and here we are, 4 games into the season with 2 road losses in the division in which the team looked (surprise!) poorly prepared.
How many failed attempts to solidify the QB position should Spielman get? How many bad offensive lines does he need to put together while people refer to his rosters as "SB-ready" and the team never fulfills that potential, in no small part because the o-lines are terrible? I'm not just sore because they lost to the Bears. I'm tired of this merry-go-round of mediocrity and it's architect. What we saw on Sunday was a
Spielman team, Mansquatch. He put it all together. Zimmer's there because Spielman hired him. Cousins is there and taking up a substantial percentage of the cap because Spielman signed him. The OL that was dominated is there because Spielman assembled it. How many years of this kind of football do fans like yourself need to see before the reality sinks in that this is Rick Spielman football? This is what his approach to team-building yields.
From 2012 on, we heard that Spielman needed to have free reign to hire
his coach and implement
his vision for the team. Well, this is it, vision implemented. How many Vikings fans are satisfied with the results?
I'm not exactly making these points for the first time, my friend. The concerns I've expressed for years about Spielman's judgment and Zimmer's coaching ability remain front and center as issues on the field and 5+ seasons of results speak to the validity of those concerns.
