Competitive Rebuild

Unless they deal Cousins for draft picks, they have no intention of getting a true franchise QB to change the trajectory of this franchise. Some fans see it this way but I suspect most do not and the people in charge like it that way.

With Kirk, you will never be bad enough to get to the top of the draft. You will also never win a SB.

They never had a chance the day he signed his contract. I said it back then on the Purple Thoughts forum and it still holds true.

You cannot rebuild until you have a different QB.

My guess is we won’t be bad enough in 2023 to get one of the top QB’s and will be forced to sign KC again in 2024 to fool the fans yet another year and waste more time.

Not as much as I HATE the term competitive rebuild

So how many of you here used the term "I am taking my toys and going home" when you did not get your way.  

First and foremost it is a business, getting butts in the seats and selling merch is the drivers of all things

Competitive rebuild is the way you do that "reset" is not.  Overspending for short term gain is not (sorry the Rams did this and will be also rans for a long time, even then it was at the very last point of the window).  

The Brown have blown it up on a consistent basis and still have not succeeded.  

Right now the model teams are the Eagles, Chiefs, Bills, Bengals, 49 ers.

None of those teams "Blew it up and started over only the 49ers' and Bengals were really below 500 teams for any amount of time.  But they had pieces in place that most of you would want to jetison.

I disagree with the premise that you can’t win a SB with Cousins.  I think you can, if the other parts around him are good enough.

I also think there is value to just being a pretty good team, in that lightening may strike, you get hot at the right time, other teams get banged up… and suddenly you are SB champs. 

The OL was markedly better last season with development of young players and Bradbury bouncing back.  The guards were weak, but that is a rook and some regression by Cleveland,  up there is room to hope both improve. 

So, for me, I don’t have a problem with them not blowing it up. I don’t love the execution - I think the spending on a blocking TE and keeping Ham at his cost were both mistakes.  I think that if they have to release Cook for nothing, they probably would have been better of letting Mattison walk and keeping Cook.  I think flat releasing Dantzler was a mistake - his contract wasn’t that much, and could have kept him and tried to ove him later for at least a future 6th or 7th.  I wouldn’t trade or release either Hunter or Z. Smith, because I would want to take a shot… even with the signing of Davenport… but I would have spent more capital on DL and CB over TE and FB and RB. 

What is your point? 

They went 2-14 hired Reid and it took six years of what most on here would consider mediocre football before winning the Super Bowl in Mahomes 2nd year (there has not been a Mahomes in the 2 drafts of this regime to give up the 27th, 91st and the next years 1st) or even a decent QB within striking distance.  The Bills have not done anything yet including that includes 3 losing season in 10 years (by the way the Vikings have only had 2 losing season and the same number of play off appearances).  The Eagles biggest mistake was Kelly but again no huge roster blow ups.  If anything they let stars move on for a payday elsewhere.

Again none of those team blew it up.

The concept of a competitive rebuild is fine if you have the right critical pieces. The Vikings as an example were structured properly for a competitive rebuild when Kwesi took over but he screwed to pooch and held onto and pushed cap of non critical players into future years while not getting any compensation for those players. I put part of the blame on Rick as well as the Vikings should have been sellers of talent at the deadline in Zimmer’s last year when it was clear to everyone we weren’t going anywhere. But Kwesi still had a chance to make it work and is wasting the opportunity.

The 3 most influential positions on a football team are arguably QB, WR and DE….. essentially the ability to score and apply pressure. Frankly this has been KC’s model. When Kwesi took over he had Kirk, Hunter and Jefferson under contract and all had at least 3 more years of solid to elite play in front of them. The key to a competitive rebuild is to keep the SB window open while these key people are in their Primes and drafting as many top end talents as you can get your hands on in the draft giving you not only the best chance at a SB during that 3 year window… but also to acquire as much “Elite” talent as possible on cheap contracts so when that window is up and your Elure players may not be Elite, you can trade or let them walk at the end of their contract. You now have other young elite talents on the team on cheap contracts, holding up the quality of play and now you have cap to be aggressive to fill holes while you draft to replace. But the key is your draft strategy in a comp rebuild is quality over quantity. We didn’t do that. Keese should have extended Kirk through 25 allowing us flex with cap, extended Hunter through the same timeframe and Cut Kendrick’s, Theilen and Smith when he came on board. He would have gotten pics, and would have had plenty of cap space in 23 to fill out his roster. But instead he kept dead weight that did little, it cost us pics and cap going into 23 and he drafted for players who couldn’t contribute right away. And he did it again in 23 with this last draft. We picked 2 people in 23 I think will produce any meaningful snaps and that was our 1st and last picks. Everything else in between will be lucky to see the field in 23 unless injuries create an opp.

But if you aren’t going to execute a comp rebuild properly, then the better decision would have been to trade Kirk and Hunter for a truckload of picks to get us back to competitive as soon as possible.