ESPN - Troy Blackburn comments on Bobby Hart signing

[*ochocincos*]

(10-01-2019, 04:16 PM)THE PISTONS Wrote: Some great irony in this now as we did end up starting MJ at Guard who was a 4th Round pick and is terrible. I forgot the Trent Brown part.

Troy Blackburn Wrote:

For those who say you shouldn’t have signed Bobby Hart, who is going to play right tackle? Who? Oh, maybe you’ll draft one in the third round and he’ll come on. Really? You’re going to bet your season on that? We may still draft somebody. We haven’t had the draft yet. But you just can’t criticize. In our business you have to solve the problem. If you’re not going to play him, tell me who? Trent Brown at 17 million? Really? A seventh-round draft pick? Let go essentially by his team. Really? We can’t go to WalMart and buy off the shelf. A high quality starting right tackle? That doesn’t exist (in free agency). You have to deal in the universe of options you have. We ended up signing eight guys. That’s probably above average. Were they perfect? You’re not going to get perfect. ... There aren’t perfect options out there. We asked Willie Anderson if he could go to a time machine and come back at age 25. We’d love to sign him, but you have to deal in your universe of options. I think the data would say we signed more guys than most in line with the cap that we talked about. If there are surprises out there we’ll try to be flexible and aggressive, but normally there are no surprises out there.

http://www.espn.com/espn/now?nowId=21-41059312-4

Interesting to revisit this.
Funny that Blackburn takes a stab at Trent Brown (who is a Top 10 OT right now) because of his draft grade yet the Bengals' best OL is former UDFA Trey Hopkins. Guess Blackburn doesn't realize that draft picks can be developed (although I can't say I blame him after seeing the lack of success the previous Bengals staff had with late rounders).
Also, Blackburn really needs to stop touting the quantity of draft picks and start focusing on the quality.

Hart, Dennard, Brown, Miller, Webb, Wynn, Eifert, Uzomah, Brown, and Hopkins = $37 mill.
Bengals still have $14.4 mill in cap space. $51.4 mill if combined with the above FA contracts.

Bengals could have gone with Hopkins ($3.1 mill), Miller ($5.3 mill), and Uzomah ($6 mill) plus Mosley ($13 mill) and Trent Brown ($15.25 mill) and spent $42.65 mill. That would have left $8.75 mill. They could have filled out the remaining 5 positions with near-minimum contracts with that budget.

Imagine how much better this team would likely be with Mosley and Trent Brown instead of Hart, Preston Brown, Eifert, Webb, Dennard, and Wynn.