Just Me wrote: Sure, he looked pretty good against 3rd stringers, but I'm assuming he is third string for a reason.
Given how they're dealing with CP84, my money is on norv not liking something about him, which doesn't tell me much at all. In my opinion, Zimmer is putting way too much confidence in turner to make offensive decisions so he can focus on the defense. It's like a two headed head coach, except one of the heads is cancerous and needs to be removed for the other one to survive. It's that simple.
Here's a better explanation of my view on this subject. It's almost like the mcclown/manziel deal going on in Cleveland. You have a guy who has been on something like 9 teams in 11 years or so, can't remember exactly. Then you have the up and comer, who I'm convinced is despised by his head coach. You are literally gaining NOTHING by starting mccown. They decided to go with Austin davis on sunday because manziel lied about drinking, on his day off of all things. So today they had an empty stadium. They start him every three weeks against upper tier teams and it almost seems like they want him to fail. I don't get it. He is in a very bad situation.
Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Teddy on "paper" has the "guru" and his kid to bring him along. Last year he was thrown into the starting job in a trial by fire. But the facade covering all these shenanigans is that the media, talking heads, however you want to spin it, are basically clinging on to the notion that the Vikings were a perfect fit for teddy ever since he was drafted. That norv turner is the quarterback whisperer and teddy couldn't possibly have landed with a better organization. They might have a point with zimmer leading the show seeing as his players love him, but as I've said before, and many others have as well, our head coach is SEEMINGLY taking a hands off approach on offense and letting norv do his thing.
Big mistake.
Teddy finished strong last season. For 4 games. Kinda. It's pretty deceiving though. The one thing I can't stand is when people focus on one stat to basically try to justify whether or not a player is doing ok. Sure he had a nice completion percentage but the rest of his stats were lackluster. Lets take his first game vs new Orleans where he came in in the second qtr I believe. He was 12-20 for 150 yards. But take away that 41 yard check down to asiata and he's 11-19 for 109 yards in 3 quarters. Mind you that was his first game and his emotions were probably haywire, but the point is not to show anything other than the focus on his completion % has been disguising a lot of his shortcomings up until recently. Now people are starting to see that the completion % shield has a hole right in the center that makes the person behind it vulnerable.
Jets game later in the year. 19-27 for 309. Yeah that's cool. 70% completion! wow! Wait a minute, take away that bubble screen to Jwright and he's 18-26 for 222. That is rather pedestrian. Players make plays, I know, but lets be real here. You see a check engine light come on in your car. An old school mechanic will kick the tires, try to listen for things, use his prowess to try to come up with a solution without digging too much into it. He'll find something broken, assume that's what caused the light to trigger, and be ok with his work afterwards. This is the media. And to an even bigger extent, Turner. Here's the flip side though. Tech saavy kid comes along, plugs in a little device that can send codes to his smart phone with detailed information about what's really going on under that hood, and the old school dude doesn't want any part of it.
Teddy is in his second season. We are so used to .........cough....you get what I'm about to say, that his mediocrity was being put on a pedestal because we had all become accustomed to seeing failure wearing a #7. Its still mediocrity. That mediocrity has been slowly falling backwards and now it's becoming failure. I'm not in the camp of bailing out on a qb so fast, but I'm also not in the camp of just handing someone the job because they were a first rounder. Screw that. But NOTHING so far has had me believing that this kid is worth banking the franchise on. Nothing. You don't bank an nfl franchise on character. You don't bet all your rent money on a horse that has lost 12 straight races. And what is even WORSE is the notion, that to recover from a QB blunder, you need to draft another first rounder. Lets look at this sideways for a second....
Heineke played against third stringers in the preseason. He did pretty good against third stringers. Everyone focuses on that last part. Here's what I don't get. If someone is a third stringer on defense, that has nothing to do with the quarterbacks arm strength or decision making. It has nothing to do with how well he throws a deep ball. If the ball is on target it's on target, if he makes a bad decision he makes a bad decision. If he makes a bad pass, it's a bad pass. It doesn't matter if its ray lewis or joe schmoe on the other side defending it, whether or not its picked off, defended or it's caught, if he shouldn't have thrown it, he just flat out shouldn't have thrown it. The fact that he made a horrible throw into coverage and it got picked off is on HIM, on the surface. It's not like playing against third stringers makes his arm stronger or makes him more accurate. He's going to have the same skillset regardless who he's playing against, the
outcome is what is dependent on the competition.
Now I'm not talking about skills on the third string players. I don't want people to get it twisted. Of course the skills on third stringers are not up to par with starters, that's not what I mean. But if a quarterback is inaccurate on deep balls, he is going to be inaccurate on deep balls vs good or bad teams, that's my point. It really doesn't matter. So if he SEEMS accurate vs third stringers, even in tight coverage, which he was, he will be accurate vs starters. Now whether or not he can run an offense is a different question. But you won't find that out having him hold a clipboard in street clothes.
I would much rather play someone on my roster, to see if we have something there and avoid wasting a draft pick reaching on something that has been in front of my face the whole time, than to just discard it and not have even given it a chance.
If it just becomes another Bridgewater thread, I'll lock it or merge it or something.