Yeah, then really seems like a miss on coaching given how Polk posted the pic of his toes down.
Miami Game Goat (Mayo and who Else?)
- Thread starter Ed Hillel
- Start date
Absolutely this.
When is a player allowed to resetablish themselves in bounds? I had thought they never could.
It is wild, and it is stupid. And the point you make here is my objection to it.
I am just going to repost what I did in the expectations thread last week:
If you accept the fact that losing may be in the best interests of the Patriots franchise moving forward, it makes what we're watching slightly more bearable.
The best QB on the roster is on the bench (folks can tell me there is no evidence of that, but I've seen Drake Maye play football and I've seen Jacoby play football, it's not close). I suspect we'll see Maye sooner than later. 3 of the first 4 games of the season have been on the road, and I'm guessing when Kraft starts seeing 10,000 empty seats at Gillette at a couple home games, the noise for Maye will get loud, from every direction.
If you accept the fact that losing may be in the best interests of the Patriots franchise moving forward, it makes what we're watching slightly more bearable.
The best QB on the roster is on the bench (folks can tell me there is no evidence of that, but I've seen Drake Maye play football and I've seen Jacoby play football, it's not close). I suspect we'll see Maye sooner than later. 3 of the first 4 games of the season have been on the road, and I'm guessing when Kraft starts seeing 10,000 empty seats at Gillette at a couple home games, the noise for Maye will get loud, from every direction.
yeah, I maintain that this is over-lawyered. A rule of "first point of contact" for a foot determines its in-bounds status is simpler, doesn't involve defining terms-of-art like "natural step", requires no interpretation - and is also replay-friendly (very easy to see what touched first). Having exceptions for "toe-taps" is silly imo.
In the NBA, the player's in-bounds / out-of-bounds status is determined by "the position from which he last touched the floor" - it doesn't enter into gameplay that someone is trying to establish possession while falling out of bounds, but if it did, it would be based on whether he had possession while any part of his feet were touching in bounds, and no part was touching out of bounds. In lacrosse, it's out of bounds when "any part of the [ball-possessing] player’s body or crosse [i.e. stick] touches the ground" on or outside the boundary. In ultimate frisbee, the only other sport I can think of where the offense sometimes needs to establish possession on a catch while momentum is taking them out of bounds, the rule is "first point of contact with the ground" determines status (landing while straddling the line is out), so a toe-tap is sufficient.
Nothing shows this is over-lawyered and written poorly more than the decisive play yesterday. If Polk had tapped his toe in-bounds (As he did) and then picked up his foot and crashed ass-first to the ground, it would have been a TD. But because he put his heel down in the course of crashing to the ground, it's no catch. The rules somehow incentivize making the less-safe and less-natural motion. How much time must elapse between tapping his toe in-bounds and having his heel or any other part of him touch out of bounds for it to count as landing in bounds? Who knows! If he'd landed on his tip-toes and slowly fallen backward like a plank of wood, maybe they give it to him, right? God forbid the rules take the fastest path to establishing in-bounds status, and then give the player freedom to land in whatever manner is safest. And in college, of course, with a one-foot rule rather than the NFL's two-feet rule, Polk would have been in as well. Instead we have rules that eliminate spectacular offensive plays and rule them out, while adding gray-area interpretation, and reducing safety, all for no good reason.
Did anyone get enough of a look at Mapu to form an opinion? He played every defensive snap (78) and had the green dot. Last year, he only played 204 defensive snaps all season even though he was active for every game.
The middle of the Pats defense was pretty soft, which doesn't reflect well on him, but zone defense has been a big problem for the Pats this year and they were missing Dugger and Peppers (whose Pats career is now in doubt) and relying on the likes of Tavai in zone coverage.
The middle of the Pats defense was pretty soft, which doesn't reflect well on him, but zone defense has been a big problem for the Pats this year and they were missing Dugger and Peppers (whose Pats career is now in doubt) and relying on the likes of Tavai in zone coverage.
I just can't accept that losing ever helps a franchise. We've seen Detroit, the Raiders, the Bengals and the Browns get lost in the football wilderness for 20+ years apiece; the losing rots the entire sense of culture and identity and it becomes near impossible to break.
I don't see the regression from last year's horrible team as any sort of progress. It's not that they're playing well but losing. They're playing like garbage and losing.
Can reestablish if you are forced out by foul (illegal contact)
His point is wrong, though. Both examples would be completions.
You guys are, IMO, thinking about this play backwards. You are thinking “He got his foot inbounds, so it should be a catch”. But that has never been the requirement. The requirement is that, in the process of coming down, his foot must not touch out of bounds. It seems like the same thing but it isn’t.
On a toe drag, the foot is no longer coming down (it’s dragging). On a toe tap, the foot came down once, and then was picked up again and did not touch out of bounds when it first came down. On this play, his foot is very clearly still coming down and also very clearly touches out of bounds.
I agree with this too. Losing just flattens franchises. And it would be one thing if Maye was out there spinning it and making rookie mistakes along with plays that provided optimism. Pats are just rolling out a shitty boring team and losing. That's demoralizing for all involved.
I also think Mayo and Wolf are sacrificing some of the leeway they have as new hires/promotions in a way that will be detrimental to their own careers if they don't turn things around more quickly.
What if his left foot was in, his right toe was in, his heel never touched, but as he fell backward, his elbow or hand hits out of bounds while his toe is still touching the ground in bounds and his heel is off the ground? So it's not a "toe tap" - it's just that he managed to keep his heel off the ground so the only part of his right foot touching the ground is in bounds, but then his hand or elbow hits out of bounds?
I'm pretty sure that would be a completion, right?
I asked a similar question up thread, so I'm basically an expert now
Yes, based on what others said, its a catch as long as its not his foot that goes out of bounds first.
Like a lot of the defeniders of this rule, you are responding is a way that mischaracterizes the opposing view. For the most part, no one here is complaining that the refs made a bad call yesterday. Generally, critics here know what the rule is and think that the rule is bad. But the fact that the actual rule is X and not Y does not, in and of itself, say anything about whether X or Y would be the better rule. In your response, you are just reiterating what the rule is (but no one is disagreeing with you) and that the play was called correctly accrding to the rule (same), while not addressing the main point of criticism - that the rule is fucking dumb. The bolded is either an accurate statement of the rule, which no one questions, or special pleading (by those who wrote the rule).
The most thorough and understandable explanation of why the rule is dumb is this post by IK, which no one has attempted to rebut because it is a perfect explanation.
Except of course, until it gets broken, right?
Zac Taylor coached the Bengals to a 2-14 record his first season after replacing Marvin Lewis. They get the #1 pick and take Burrow. His rookie season, he started 10 games, and went 2-7-1 and the team finished 4-11-1. Then they drafted Chase at #5 overall and went to the Super Bowl the following year. So that Zac Taylor culture had a record of 6-25-1 in the two seasons before going on a playoff run.
These things don't happen overnight. I don't buy into the noise a lot of folks do around here. Losing begets losing, because shitty players and coaches lose. You get non-shitty players and coaches and you start winning. It's really that simple.
I'm not defending the refs because it's inarguable that they were correct. I'm defending the rule, because the rule IS simple. You can't touch out of bounds with your first step. Period. That's it. Can't get any simpler than that.
I also disagree strongly with IK that "first point of contact" would be easier for replay. It would in fact be MUCH harder and cause far more reviews.
Play the probabilities with me for a moment. Heel-toe rulings are relatively uncommon. What is very common is a player stepping with part of his foot on the line and part of the foot on the field near-simultaneously. Now, that needs to go to replay every single time. Does his foot brush against a green blade of grass before a white one? What if the on-field green grass is cut longer than the grass on the sideline, or the grass on the sideline is matted down from use? Does that matter?
Basketball IMO gets this wrong, where you have extremely technical replay reviews that result in outcomes that go against how any logically thinking person would ever view the game at live speed. Case in point, this play that helped decide a NCAA national championship:
View: https://streamable.com/de2zq
Yeah this is the problem currently isn’t it? Off-season #1 after the BB era and they got a bunch of shitty players and potentially shitty coaches.
Absolutely, but what I find strange is folks appear to be surprised by this and expecting big changes to occur five weeks in. When Vegas has your o/u on wins at a league worst of 4.5 pre-season, it's pretty straightforward evidence that you're going to be a shitty fucking team. I think the week one win got people a little jazzed about what could be, but as I wrote at the time
"I'm not going to get super excited about this one just yet. It's fun to win a game, but the Pats played with the lead, and were able to move the ball on the ground. If Cincy had jumped out to a 10-0 lead, I didn't see anything in this Pats offense that would lead me to believe they'd be able to come back. Cincy just couldn't do shit. Chase playing 80% of the snaps after getting food poisoning Friday, and Tee Higgins being unavailable killed them and Burrow was rusty as hell (not to mention letting Mixon and Tyler Boyd walk for a combined 10mil this season came back to bite them."
There's nothing there with these Pats, but I'm still convinced it's by design. They have a metric fuckton of money sitting around for next season, they're going to end up with a top 5 pick (more likely top 3), and they believe they have their QB of the future. I realize some folks want to see wins and improvement now, but that improvement is going to happen on the margins. I think we're going to slowly see more young guys getting more snaps consistently week in and week out, we'll see Maye sooner than later, and we should all be hoping that a few QB prospects in college pan out to be studs during the lead up to the draft. Having a top 3 pick where there might be 3 QB's that people want raises the value of that pick to ludicrous heights and could lead to the Pats walking away with 3-4 first rounders over the next couple seasons if handled the right way.
Be patient. It's going to be a long season. Right now, I have no idea how to judge Mayo or his staff, and anyone who thinks they can must know more than I do. Like I said, Zac Taylor was 6-25-1 in his first two seasons in Cincy, and frankly, I think he inherited a roster that was more talented than this current iteration of the Patriots.
This was unfathomably bad, and I'm surprised more is not being made of it.
Having to punt not just once but twice, after initially getting the ball back with 1:50 on the clock, while not forcing Miami to burn a single time out, is some serious coaching malpractice. That is not complimentary football.
I dont know what the NFL equivalent of a "bench coach" is, but they need one. Badly.
Depends what you mean by lower. I don't think the 5th overall pick gets them much. I don't think trading their FRP for a couple of 2nds is going to help. This team needs two FRPs as a start.
Yeah, the idea that losing this season will hurt the team 2 years from now is ludicrous. The San Francisco 49'ers had 2 back-to-back 2-14 seasons, which were preceded by four losing seasons in the prior 5. The following year they went 6-10, with their 2nd year backup QB going 2-5 after he replaced Steve DeBerg. The following season Joe Montana won his first Super Bowl.
Get good players, and the team will win, regardless of how many games the team won a couple of years before. Nobody expected the team to win this season.
A 5th overall isn't bringing back 2 second rounders in trade.
In 2023, the Texans traded the #12 overall pick, the 33rd overall pick, their 2024 first round pick and their 2024 3rd round pick to get the #3 overall pick and a 4th rounder.
The Bears traded the #1 overall pick, and got back DJ Moore, the 9th overall pick, the 61st overall pick, a 2024 1st round pick (ended up being #1 overall) and a 2025 second rounder.
The Vikings got the 23rd overall pick in 2024 for a second rounder in 2024 (61 overall) and a 2nd rounder in 2025
First round picks have massive value in the NFL. Top 5 picks, or even top 3 picks, depending on the class of players in the draft and a team's needs, are arguably the most valuable assets teams have besides franchise QB's.
Amen brother. I know this team is tough to watch, but I would not enjoy a 5-7 win team more. Bottom out. Get picks. Let Brisket absorb all the hits and get paid well for his sacrifice.
Watching BB try not to rebuild was sad. This is better.
Absorbing Brisket makes me feel better one hundred percent of the time.
To be fair, Wolf didn’t do anything to rebuild in year 1 of his tenure. Not sure what we should expect in year 2.
A full tear down and rebuild would have been interesting. This is more like a reboot. Change the QB and hope the rest of the roster is good enough.
Yeah, it's his whole thing, Wolf didn't do anything, he didn't draft or sign O-line (he did), he didn't spend money (he did, he just didn't do a 2021 style splurge on mid vets) and as such the whole thing is a failure, he should have just signed everyone good or traded everyone because that works in Madden
I mean he drafted some lineman who kind of stink. He spent money on some JAGish guys like Hooper and Gibson who look like solid signings. He seems to have whiffed on Osborne. Other guys were all low money signings so I don't expect much anyway. He also spent a good amount bringing guys back off a 4-13 team and we're now looking at a 2-15 or 3-14 team so...nice work?
Jury is still out on Wolf, but not sure we want to be highlighting his first offseason as a success.
We aren't, the point was the idea that he isn't willing to spend money or that he isn't trying to improve the team is stupid.