Well, for me "in the mix" means the team doesn't have to be completely blown up. If the missing ingredient is a special QB, and it's likely to take a few years of seasoning for said QB to be ready to lead the Vikings to the promised land, then it might be best if the Vikings did bet the farm for someone to just let him sit and learn behind Cousins while trying to remain competitive. There shouldn't be a need to regress to a 5+ win season for that to happen even if Spielman trades every pick to get Burrow.Mothman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 5:29 pm To touch on what Pondering and Kapp were discussing: I don't know if the team needs to rebuild, reload or regroup. Those terms mean different things to different people. However, they clearly need to level-up. That's going to take more game-changing players, including at QB. It might take more than that.
PS.) I seized on "in the mix" to make my point, not to nitpick. I realize you may not have meant it quite the way I used it.
But my main point is, and you seem to allude to it as well, that finding the special QB in a draft is a tall order. If it were obvious who those players would be, then every consensus #1 player selected over the years would have become first team all pros for whoever selected them. Guys like Mahomes and Wilson would have gone #1 in the years they came out, as would Rodgers.
I question the home run swing because I think time has proven it doesn't work, or, at least if it does, the effect is short term for the most part. People criticize Spielman for going out and signing Cousins to a huge guaranteed deal all the time. If that isn't the definition of a home run swing, I don't know what is. Has it worked out?
When it comes to the draft, taking that big swing when your first pick in the first round is the 25th pick is even more risky, because the guy you're banking on has no pro track record on which to base the move. Maybe he lit the college game on fire. Great. Doesn't mean he will or even can do the same in the pros. At least with the Cousins move there was a pro track record on which to base things, and, for that move in particular, I think it's turned out exactly as could have been predicted. That being Cousins is capable of winning games when the supporting pieces do their part, while he fails to get them over the hump when the supporting pieces fail.
If you really believe the Vikings need to take the swing and potentially sacrifice improvement in other areas to do so, that's fine, but I can't go down that road. It just doesn't work, at least not without an obvious can't-miss prospect. Even then I think the tradeoffs likely don't make it work, because it is a team game and in the end its rare for a single player to be able to impact the game enough to overcome objective deficiencies in other areas of a team. The pro game especially is far too sophisticated for that approach to be successful for very long for 99% of the players out there. Even Tom Brady needs help to get to and win Superbowls.
