Welcome to the team, Jonah Williams!

[THE PISTONS]

(04-26-2019, 03:02 PM)NKURyan Wrote: It's easy to play pretend and say "oh yeah, I would've done this, this, this, and this", but there's no indication that any of these suggestions were even plausible. Maybe none of the FA linebackers were the slightest bit interested in joining such a bad unit. Maybe Saffold had no desire to come to Cincinnati. Maybe there actually WAS a market for Bobby Hart despite how hard people want to yell and scream that there wasn't.

We.
Don't.
Know.

And the worst thing you can do going into a draft is pigeonhole yourself in to taking one position, which is exactly what would've been the case had the Bengals not re-signed Hart. Bringing him back meant we could genuinely take a look at taking other positions instead of saying "OMG we must take an OT no matter what". The result of this is that a) we convinced the Steelers we were leaning LB strongly enough that they paid to move ahead of us and b) no other team who wanted Jonah Williams had any chance at jumping over us to get him because they all thought we'd take Bush and by the time the Steelers did it was too late.

To be fair, I did suggest this at the time too. (Drafting an OT and not signing Hart.)

It's a fair point about pigeon-holing ourself in the draft to need an OT. We did need a LB bad and the Steelers traded in front of us fearing we'd take Bush.

I just still see no positives for the Hart signing. He's the worst starting OT...and even if he makes the minimum on his contract it's bad still. As a backup, I never want to see him play.