04-30-2024, 06:01 PM
(04-30-2024, 05:44 PM)CJD Wrote: Compared to last year's team, the following rooms are better:
QB (healthy Burrow beats recovering and then absent Burrow)
RB (Moss seems like a better fit for this offense than Mixon)
TE (3 new faces and no more Irv)
OT (OT3 being Mims is much better than OT3 being Carman. Brown also seems like a better fit for this offense than Williams. Orlando was playing through injuries last year so he should be improved as well. I cannot express just how comforting is to know that we are not one injury away from Carman Jackson starting a playoff game).
DT (Yes, we lost Reader, but he was injured at the end of the year anyway. Jenkins as DT3 and Jackson as DT4 feels a lot better than Carter and Tufele in those roles. Plus we got a great pass rusher in Rankins to pair with Hill).
Safety (Dax and Scott were disasters back there in regards to allowing explosive plays. We added two new starters in Stone and Bell with Battle as a key reserve behind Bell for a year)
Compared to last year's team, the following rooms are about the same:
DE (Cedric and Ossai will be battling for the last spot, but there will likely be no change to 2024)
LB (We lost Bailey, but he was the 4th or even 5th LB off the bench. Not a big loss overall).
OG (No change to the guards at all)
C (We added Matt Lee, but I'm not expecting a 7th round pick to come in and significantly upgrade a position. Decent depth though).
ST (Maybe McNamara beats out Robbins. Maybe the coaches prefer their draft pick. We'll have to see what happens there. Other than that, no change.)
Compared to last year's team, the following rooms are worse:
WR (This may be a bad take 10 months from now, but replacing Boyd with an unknown rookie is likely a downgrade. Burton has all the potential in the world, but I wouldn't dare expect him to be as good as an 8 year veteran.)
CB (Losing Chidobe and basically not replacing him is not great. Hopefully, Turner takes the next step into a quality starter, but I am worried about the depth behind him and CTB. Hill is joining the CB room and that could go really well or horrifically wrong. We'll just have to wait and see.)
Overall, way more improvements than losses. If Burrow stays healthy, we should contend for a Super Bowl again. Especially since we are now better equipped four our own division by emphasizing stopping the run with our draft picks. That should help us be more consistent week to week, since we've historically only really struggled with our division rivals (10 of our 19 regular season losses in the last 3 years have been to division rivals).
Nice post CrazyJDawg. Have to say, the improvement of Myles Murphy, DJ Turner, Jordan Battle in their 2nd year on Defense will be key...
Same with Chase Brown, Iosivas and Chuck Sizzle on Offense.
I would like for us to add a Corner and an IOL now that the Draft is over. Last I heard Stephon Gilmore and other Corners are out there,
Dalton Risner, Connor Williams and Andrus Peat are out there.
