That was the closest the Dolphins came to losing a game that season.
Oh, and BTW. Art Modell. TRUE scumbag.
NFL Consensus: Slowest QB of All time? Kosar
Healthy Tommie Harris wins that.
Don’t bother disagreeing anyone, this is basically my only religious belief.
Mine is:
A playbook that was more than screen pass and hand off to Bensen wins the game.
Modell’s biggest problem was that he thought he was a much better businessman than he actually was and that led him to some disastrous decisions.
Cleveland sports has had some athletes who, by any objective measure were greater than Bernie, like Jim Brown and LeBron, but no athlete in any sport has ever been more beloved in that town.
Well he was still probably the best QB that team has had since Otto Graham. And I do not think his skills had diminished when Belichick cut him. 4 years later? Yes.
I think one of the biggest reasons Bernie is so beloved in Cleveland is that he’s a hometown boy who manipulated the supplemental draft so he could play for the Browns. In other words, he really, really wanted to play in Cleveland. That played directly into our well-hone inferiority complex.
Agree. Still the best QB as well since Otto. :) Maybe the new kid changes that.
Mike Lombardi in the Athletic spells out precisely how Sean McVay figured out the Viking’s D.
McVay is not getting to the office in the wee hours of the morning to design new plays. He is watching volumes and volumes of tape to understand the “how and why” the defense operates. Once McVay is finished with his film study he could easily teach the defense to his opponents. After he understands all their concepts and rules, he modifies his offensive play design to specifically attack his opponents. The Rams don’t run new plays; they run their same plays in different ways specific to their opponents. Because the Rams are not reinventing the wheel each week with new designs, their players significantly improve their fundamentals and techniques. Receiver Robert Woods is way better now than he ever was in Buffalo and Cooks looks better playing for the Rams than he ever looked in New Orleans or New England. When players play with confidence, they play fast, and Woods and Cooks look faster than before.
Funny aside for those who aren’t familiar with the story about his stance;
Kosar was ever-aware of his physical shortcomings, and he was creative in addressing them. When he came into the NFL, he prepared for passing plays by shifting his right foot back to get a head start on his drop-back. However, opposing scouting reports picked this up and defenses took notice. He then changed his stance yet again to a more consistent always-back-at-a-weird-angle from that point on so that way he wouldn’t tip the play.
Bernie Kosar: Hero of the young Navaronegun!
And the play that demonstrated why he was destined for Cleveland:
“Coach eats and/or grinds tape, teaches players” is the dog-bites-manniest story I’ve heard this year.
I mean, McVay us clearly a talented coach who set his team up perfectly to utterly embarrass the Vikings defense. But that excerpt is pretty breathless in reporting the massive scoop that McVay doesn’t just design plays, he tweaks existing ones.
Yeah, well it was Lombardi that wrote it. I’m still not sure how I feel about him. He’s been wrong as often as he’s been right and is also one of the many pieces of flotsam in Cleveland’s wake.
I think Lombardi is very entertaining to listen to on the Ringer NFL podcast. I agree that he does have a talent for making very basic things sound very deep (it’s almost like business-speak, in that he’s very good at creating rules that are actually fairly basic and obvious things, where the trick is not to remember the rule, but to be able to actually do it). But I do think he is interesting to listen to, and is also different and a bit more in depth than most publicly available sports guys.
As an example, one of the things he talks about frequently on the podcast, that is linked to the video and issues raised above, is that a lot of teams really are not very good at reacting/adapting to the opposing team. They kind of guess what plays to call. I think that is his point, is that McVay is simply better at learning the other team, and adapting to it, as opposed to just creating new plays in a vacuum and hoping they work.
Lombardi’s “expert” status is all due to his Simmons friendship (Grantland and now the Ringer). He’s entertaining (to some). He’s also usually wrong or a hindsight “MOTO” (Master Of The Obvious). Like the above stuff. Every team game plans. EVERY team. Some staffs are better than others. Tell me why. He doesn’t. That’s why he failed miserably.
MOTO.
NFL franchises sure won’t let him touch the controls anywhere again.