Kyler, Deandre Hopkins, Aj Green discussed on The MMQB NFL Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
After the playoff loss. Kyler is really only familiar with that system at this point. That system is not great. Limited. I mean, you know, again, I don't want to sit here and criticize someone who knows so much more about football than I do, but it's not a great system that they run there. And there's really not any other options. So it's like, okay, if we're going to commit to Kyler, are we going to bring in a new coach? And try something completely different, which we don't know how our quarterback will react to that. Or do we want to do a complete tear down and tell Kyler? Well, you know, it didn't work out. We'll trade you off to somewhere and recoup picks and just reset it. I think they just put themselves in a really weird spot and part of the reason it's weird is because they got off to this flukey hot start last season, which carry them into the postseason, so now you can point to it as, well, we did make the playoffs, there's progress. But I'm not really sure there's progress. I think that, I mean, I made fun of Eric burkhart a little bit. Kyler Murray and cliff Kingsbury's agent. I said that the statement that he put out on behalf of Kyler said it like it was written by like an angry high school dad. You know, and it might have been. But. He's a damn good agent. To get cliff, that length of an extension off of. And here's what struck me, you know, he said at the combine, I peeked in on his press conference, and he said at the combine, I didn't do a good enough job when Deandre Hopkins went down of switching things up. And I was like, yeah, you know, that's a fair thing to say about the way that everything ended last year. But here's the problem. You're then basing your future success off the idea that like, okay, everything's gonna be fine when we get him back, but it's like, no. Deandre Hopkins is a soon to be, oh wow, his birthday is two days after mine. He's gonna be 30. In early June. So this will be his celebrate together. Yeah, I might call him. And this will be his age 30 season, which for a wide receiver, you know, I mean, he'll probably be good for another two or two years, but at what point does that kind of production arc start to tilt a little bit and I don't know. Now you're trading Andy Isabella probably and you're already admitting that you screwed that up. You spent a second round pick on that. You're going to need to get Christian Kirk back or you're going to need to figure out some sort of way to make something work there. You're going to have to get way more on the weapons front if you're going to want to legitimize what cliff is doing. And you might be able to. But I don't know. I mean, this is a deep receiver class, but at the same time, are you going to be able to get the number of weapons that you would need to give him the kind of like almost 5 wide receiver depth of like were there 5th wide receiver is a two somewhere else to make this thing work? And that's the thing. Theoretically, you might be able to do that. There are a lot of there are a lot of good receivers. It's a deep position. That said, they ran AJ green out there last year. He was productive in the early part of the year, but, you know, part of it was the domino effect of losing losing Deandre Hopkins and AJ green now becomes sort of your de facto number one type of guy, and he just, he's not anywhere near that guy anymore, that he was earlier in his career, but if you go back to the early part of the season, AJ green's numbers, like his efficiency numbers, as far as like a downfield target, they were, I mean, they were otherworldly. They were through the roof. I mean, he was everything being thrown his way downfield. He was catching, and then it sort of just regressed back to human levels. And that's kind of all it took. If Kyler Murray and AJ, these guys are not clicking on a level that is just frankly, it's not sustainable. It's just not going to work out for this offense, unless, as you said, they managed to get themselves, I don't know. I mean, there were a lot of guys coming off ACL tears. Maybe they bring them all in and get them all right and now we have, now we have now we have a team here. Yeah. Boy, how good did it feel for you to bring up regression in the Cardinals again, by the way? So good. It's tattooed memento style. It's tattooed backwards across my chest. So I see it every morning. It's like it's like how certain people have a certain political affiliation with. Whether it's whether you're left or right or whatever. It's like there's always like something that you just love talking about that's just like a truism in your world. And for you, Gary is apolitical, but he loves regression to the mean. If you brought up regression to the mean to Gary, that is like unmasking for a certain group of people. He's just like, oh, I could talk about this for hours. Yeah. I mean, that's going to be our next show, I think. We're going to skip free agency in the draft this year. We're going to talk about statistical regression. We're going to follow a show where Connor reads his tweets with a show on statistical regression. And then we will truly see the meaning of regression when we look at the download numbers. So this is like a football guy hot take, which I'm not qualified to make, but I'm going to try to make it anyway. And that's that you knew you couldn't get rid of cliff, right? Because you know you probably can't get rid of Kyler, or there's no better option right now. And you probably knew you were going to re sign them anyway. You probably going to you're going to have to do the deal now. No matter what. And so if you were probably kind and you were talking to Michael bidwill, you're probably like the only other thing we could do. Offensively, system wise is get another outside zone guy. Like that would buy Kyler enough time to throw and give him enough space back from the line to be able to see. But as we've seen, and I know you talked about this a lot before teams started doing it last year was on these bootlegs. Now, people are just running at the quarterback and they're jamming them up. And so I don't think that's the answer for Kyler either. And so I don't know if there's a system that necessarily makes a whole lot of sense for him at this point in time. And that's the thing. I would like to try him in and out if he'll come play on my football team that doesn't exist. I'd like to try him in and outside zone scheme and just see how it goes. But we have no idea. I mean, it really, it's such a huge departure from what he's doing now. It's really difficult to project him in any other sort of system. And I'm not making a Jimmy Garoppolo comp here, but Jimmy Garoppolo was a spread guy for most of his career. And then, you know, that's what he was known as. And then he gets to Kyle shena and they have him doing something different and it worked ish. So I don't know. I just don't know what you do with Kyler going forward, but I guess they made their decision and they're going to stick with this system with this quarterback in this coach. And we'll see where it goes because I guess the alternative was you really were going to have to tear the whole thing down and you're probably looking at a terrible year at 20 in 2022. And then.