Hobsons choice: no need to invest more in the offensive line?

[leonardfan40]

(02-07-2020, 01:25 PM)Schmitbuck Wrote: Pretty sure the birth dates listed on ESPN and the team site for Geno & Dunlap are real. 

My job is in the accounting field. Over the years, I've spent a lot of Octobers & Novembers forecasting and creating budgets for the upcoming year. And if my team misses/ignores certain variables, it makes for some not so fun conversations when the books close each month. 

My point is that good organizations will take into account things like players declining with age. Perhaps Geno & Dunlap don't drop-off in 2020, but they can't kick the can much longer.

Some of my favorite drafts were when the Bengals were a playoff team and could draft BPA and plan ahead for expiring contracts/guys retiring. I hope they're back to doing that soon. 

Sounds good in theory, but that’s not actually what good organizations do. Take the Ogbuhei draft. We had a very good, playoff team, arguably a couple of pieces away from winning a playoff game and maybe competing for a super bowl. Good organizations sense that and try to improve their teams. The bengals thought they were smarter than everyone else and that they needed to replace one of their best players before he started to decline.

The Steelers would have spent their high picks on players that could have pushed them over the top and turned a weakness into a strength. Then when Whit was actually declining they would have addressed that at the appropriate time. While that position may no longer be a strength, they would have had a few years with a young stud at a position of need and Whit still locking down OT. Instead the bengals decided the rest of the roster didn’t need improvement and we needed to worry about what would happen a few years later when whit declined...then on top of that they bombed the first two picks. Steelers would have turned a weakness into a strength and kept their strength at OT as well. We managed to turn a strength into a weakness and neglected the rest of the team at the same time.

That’s why they never got over the hump. They’re too worried about the future to improve the current team. Steelers used to be known for defense around their first SB with Ben. They didn’t spend all their time trying to keep the defense stacked for 10 years, they started drafting stars on offense so that both were good. Then the defense declined in the mid 2010’s but the offense was so strong it didn’t matter. Now their offense is going down but defense is on the upswing. That’s how you win a championship every 10 years or so. Build the best team you can every year, don’t worry about 3-5 years from now on you’ll suck now and you’ll suck then