Jaybirds

With the pick after the ???th pick, the Squad of Pop select Eric Ebron, TE

Acknowledging I'm on the clock. Also admitting I'm ill-prepared, so this might take a few minutes. Nevermind, pick is in. If I'm going to miss the run on proven tight ends, I'm fine taking the upside guy.

Oh okay, I thought we just started round 17. But yeah, this is round sixteen. So yeah, just completely wipe out as many positions as you can. I don't know who you already have, but your secondary/receivers/o-line/d-line won't be any worse than this, with a few picks to spare. That's not nothing.

Well, not literally from scratch. If you have 7 picks to make up then you already have around 9 guys already, right? I mean, it's a bad situation for you to inherit. You didn't put yourself into this mess. But you could draft every offensive skill position right now, no dropoff in talent, to go with the guys you already have. Maybe not a star-studded team, but it'd be deep.

Like I said, early in the draft that seems obvious. But the talent levels off after a while. At this point The guys who went two rounds before aren't THAT much better than the guys going two rounds later... in general, at least. I pick at the opposite end of the draft. The difference between having 58 guys going off the board between my picks and 64 or 65 is not nothing.

It's really tough to plan a draft board when some teams are taking 1/4 of their team in one round. I see how it could matter in the early rounds. But this far into the draft skipping so they can pick whenever they want seems like an advantage. I'm curious to see if it actually harmed their rosters in the end.

I had him on my fantasy team his rookie year, and I noticed the same thing: lots of volume, good blocking. The next year not so much. I'm also really skeptical on whether he has the awareness for a zone blocking system. He doesn't always make the best decisions.

It would be nice if we could move Yanda or Wagner over to the left side; stagger the newer guys with the vets. I feel like Jensen became our super-utility player on the line. He was good enough to cover any of the spots, at least temporarily. I'm hoping Alex Lewis shows enough that we can use him in that role. Guard or tackle, I'd rather Jensen started mastering one role before we turn him into Eric Fisher. If I had to guess, I'd say it'll be Stanley at LT and Jensen at LG. For some reason I'm already comfortable with that.

With the 451st pick, the Squad of Pop selects Jeremy Not Giovanni Hill, RB

Okay, I just ran a search on each page of the Draft thread. "Arik" does not appear until my pick. So I think he was available.

Honestly it was going to be Baker, and then Odrick. But I'll take the upside here.

With the 445th pick, the Squad of Pop select..... 69! 69! um... I mean... Arik Armstead, Interior defensive line.

This wasn't our first one though. Dixon hasn't practiced, and Kaufusi got hurt (coincidence that all three are fairly new?). So I'd be curious to see what the data looks like for teams with more than 1, like 2 or 3. Probably a lot less than half.

Considering the youth and talent we have at those spots, I think it'd be a great value. Even better if the nickels can listen in.

Well I can't "conveniently ignore" a trend I didn't know about. So thank you for sharing that. I do disagree with the small sample size. Two full season of 32 teams is 64 separate season. 53-man rosters means over 3,392 opening day players. That's enough to get a pretty good feel for the mean if the data was available. And I agree with starting back in 2008. Let's see how we're trending overall, let's see if there was a change at the CBA, let's see how the past two unlucky years compare to our luck and the league's luck overall. But I'm disappointed to hear you don't know whether we're above or below average. Your previous posts sounded (to me) like you did know already. That would have been really helpful. I guess I misunderstood.

You're sure we're not consistently falling above the mean? In the franchise's history, that seems likely. Since 2014? I'm less sure. No idea if a site has that kind of data. But yeah, I'd love to know if we're a historically healthy team. Or if franchises trend towards healthy/not healthy the same way they tend to be winning franchises or losing ones.

The You're Going to Lose Them motto doesn't apply to the other 18 teams with less injuries though. I've already said (elsewhere in this thread) that there are other factors to look at: age, schedule, field conditions. We even got pretty far to explaining how it could be an issue with our trainers. Similar issues could help describe the teams that were higher than us by October. Or perhaps all 14 teams were below the expected curve; we spiked, they didn't. It doesn't really say enough by itself. It's interesting, but inconclusive without more info on those other teams.

Well, actually, that does make a case for repetitive motion injuries. If a player is going nearly 100% all through OTAs, and then the pre-season at 100% (maybe they're competing for a job), then by mid-October they're going to have more wear and tear on their bodies than players who didn't hit 100% until closer to the regular season.

I'm assuming the trainer staff is still under Harbaugh in the organization chart. I could be wrong about that.

If it is true and I'm a great guesser, then I agree it's the trainer. Come to think of it, the trainers/med staff could be a common theme.

The only thing I can think of was maybe he was hitting the weights too hard. Maaaaaybe he was trying to add muscle to his legs or get stronger to make a good impression. But not adding any flexibility put some strain on the ligaments. That's entirely speculation, but it seems possible. And I don't have any better guesses.

Okay, that's fair. For the injuries that were nationally televised, I think we can figure out what happened. And I really do understand that injuries are going to happen. I'm just trying to figure out why they're happening to us more than others. Leading the league in IR moves seems like a bad thing. I see how going person by person makes some sense. But I know they all have some things in common: the facilities, the coaches, and the practice schedule. So that seems like a reasonable place to start.

I definitely 100% agree that you can tell who is conditioned better by the end of the game, that is consistent with my own experiences as well. My concern is that the team with the most pulled/torn ligaments isn't well conditioned. I've never seen an instance when that was the case. I do think there was some random luck involved in BP's injury. I'm not saying that one is completely on the coaches. But I'm seeing that this team has been more injured than most since 2014. I'm not ready to say that's all just random bad luck. I don't know how to assign responsibility for our complete record (aging vets, lack of conditioning, etc). But I'm not ready to say the coaches had nothing to do with it. They didn't bring in a conditioning coach this year for nothing.

Okay, that makes more sense. But yeah. Pads. We've already shown the coaches want them to go 100% already.

Well, actually, you're sorta agreeing. If you insist the players aren't going 100% right now.... and he's saying players shouldn't be going 100% right now..... it looks like you're on the same page.