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Originally Posted by Paintrain
At this point of the year in recent years who around the NFL knew:
-Ricky Williams would retire
-Michael Vick would break his leg
-What rookies would be in camp and who would still be holding out
-What veterans would be holding out well into the season
-How teams respond to new coaches/systems or new players fit in to existing systems
Just a few reasons why it's absurd to try to predict records until after training camp, too much can happen in the pre-season to alter a teams fortunes.
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(1) Guys like Ricky Williams (age/caliber) retire once every 15 years.
(2) Guys like Mike Vick can get injured at any point in the season - such injuries don't go away once the preseason ends (in fact they occur 10 times more often in the regular season).
(3) Of our rookies, only Rogers will have an impact this year and unlike many other teams, we likely won't use him a lot until well after the season has started (Williams has been known for not introducing rookie CBs into the starting lineup early in a season).
(4) It takes more than camp for new players to get used to new coaches/systems and so I guess we shouldn't make predictions until midway through the season since new players won't get adjusted to Gibbs and his system until about Week 10.
What exactly do camps and the preseason show us? I didn't hear many people on this board or elsewhere saying after camps and the pre-season last year..."Well, we're going 6-10 and Gibbs just hasn't got this offense thing down."
INSTEAD, all I heard was "It's only camp.....It's only the preseason.....It's only week 3....etc (you get the point)." So while many people here are saying it's way too early to make any predictions before camp or the pre-season, those very same people will disregard whatever happens in camp or the pre-season as just camp or the pre-season. And for good reason.
Camp and the pre-season are more about finding depth and getting a team's engine started. They RARELY reveal how a team will fare in the regular season. Most starters only play 1-3 series in Weeks 1, 2, and 4 of the preseason. Moreover, many of the starters are held out during even those few pre-season series due to minor injury concerns. If you think you can gleam something out of a dozen series where the playbook is dumbed down (so as not to reveal too much) and the regular starters are out of 85% of the snaps, then you've got a keener football eye than I do.
So, when exactly is it Kosher to make any predictions? It only makes sense to reserve judgment about how our team will fare in 2005 if you honestly think that camp or the pre-season will reveal something significant about our team's playbook and starters. For me, they don't.