BearFan PHX

the same is true of every drill and every throw. A 12 yard out is a 12 yard out in practice, at half speed, in high school and in the super bowl. Some guys drop the pass right into the bucket every time, but most guys have a wider area the ball falls into across many throws. Caleb was like a machine, it looked like a rerun each throw. Awesome.

hes still dropping the throws right into a small area repeatedly, no matter how fast the WRs are running, he's throwing to a spot.

I just went looking, and found this. It's just a couple drills, but you can watch how his footwork and timing is always the same and the ball drops right into the same location on the field every time. He is very accurate and repeatable. If he can make reads, he can definitely make the throw. We havent had that kind of technical consistency in the passer in a long time.

awesome! Was the minicamp practice online to see? Is there a link?

Yeah, Im saying that if the result of the new rule is similar to how kickoff returns used to be then fine, but *IF* it turns out to enable a lot of cheap TDs *THEN* I will be against it. For example if we had the old kickoff rule, but just moved the kick point back to the 20, and made the coverage team only be able to walk, then returners could "earn" TDs but it would ruin the game, and make that play too important in determining outcomes. I am not predicting this will be the outcome, Im just HOPING it wont be.

when the chaos is the result of a dominant player or performance, that would be great, but when it's just an unstable situation awarding unearned points, thats a problem to me. For example, would we like it if every sunday at 3pm, a lottery was held in NFL headquarters and the winning team got a free 14 points? So great kick returners are fantastic, but kick return rules that (maybe?) facilitate lucky touchdowns that come not from skill but just an unstable rule, then i think that corrupts the game. I love trick plays - the defense has to watch for everything - but if the new kickoff rule hampers the coverage teams, then Im not for it.

yeah I dont know either. Im saying I HOPE the new rule doesnt overshadow the rest of the game with easy points scored.

There is no such thing as a game without flukes and chaos - I think you misunderstood me. What Im saying is that I am not in favor of changing rules to create more chaos and flukes so that the chance of the inferior team winning increases from where its already been.

I totally disagree. Especially now that we are becoming one of the good teams who can win games without flukes and chaos.

all good points. I know DJ is invited to everything, my point has been more about interviews and such. I just hope everyone is feeling the love is all.

because if they play superior offense and defense, but a chaotic play like a kickoff determines the outcome with an effect out of proportion to the rest of the game, then there is more chaos in the outcome and it measures the quality of the teams less. I always felt the same about surprise onside kickoffs too. Punts and kickoffs as they were, are fine, they didnt disproportionately affect game outcomes. i wonder (but do NOT know!) whether this new arrangement will end in more kickoff returns for touchdowns than the previous form did, and if it does, then I think it corrupts the game.

I'm a little bit concerned that we keep hearing a lot about Caleb and Keenan Allen, and Rome Odunze, but not a lot is said about DJ Moore. Allen will probably only be on the team for a year or two, so eventually Moore is going to be very important to this team. I assume that Williams is savvy enough to keep DJ feeling love, but I'd like to hear Williams mention him in interviews the way he does the other two, and in the press in general. I sure hope DJ doesnt get disgruntled. Im sure in the end if he gets his targets he will be happy, but right now I just keep noticing he isnt as much of a part of the conversation.

sure, but the other (possible) side of the coin is some BS touchdowns that change the outcome of games, where the better team is edged out by a fluke kickoff.

that sounds about right. there are several DE options. might as well wait until at least one of them is willing to take a cheaper deal, or maybe until the one you really want is ready, or signs somewhere else. We got a whole bunch of OL in too. Between the Free Agents, the Draft and UDFA, there are a bunch of them. Maybe one will surprise us. If they all have potential, it's a lot of lottery tickets, maybe one will hit.

oh for sure, but since it's so new, people are going to find loopholes and techniques that we havent thought of yet. Im not really sure how I feel about it yet. If it feels normal, then OK, but if it turns into some weird new thing, Im gonna think its a bad idea.

I'll bet we see a lot of innovation on kickoff returns. the best technique probably hasnt even been thought of yet.

Agree. Im not sure who our punt returner is though, that's a possible role for Scott too. He did it for us, but muffed a couple so they took it from him. Maybe with another year's work he can do that.

ah youre right, the increases over the years make up that $135k. You beat me to it AZ and you got the numbers right.

The league minimum for rookies is $795,000 and for players with at least one year experience is $915,000 a year, and $985,000 for two years experience. So the least the three year contract could be worth is $2.695,000 so we gave him an extra $135,000 - so i guess it's a slight increase, but not much. We probably had to outbid someone else? But not by much.

LOL exactly.

AI is different from the other kinds of computer programming we've known. In regular deterministic systems, you can look at the program and see the algorithm. You can look in the code and see that completion percentage is defined as completions divided by attempts. And you can see errors or bad assumptions such as having that fraction accidentally upside down so all completion percentages would end up over 100% lol or you can see organizations like PFF who try to relate different data points into compound stats, that we all know rarely align with reality. For example, if i took a QBs completion percentage, how often they ate kale, whether their name begins with a letter in the first or second part of the alphabet, and used that as a predictor, I could probably find some statistical trends that would fit all the data so far. I am also pretty sure it would fail to hold true into next season. AI on the other hand is kind of like a black box. It trains itself on a data set and finds patterns in the data. Anyone who has interacted with ChatGPT knows how eerily familiar and human the text completion engine they have built is. At it's heart it's just a bigger version of the program that suggests the next word youre going to type on your cell phone. But with enough computing power behind it, not only to these pattern completion algorithms appear to think, they exhibit personalities too! And this is only because people who had personalities wrote all the material in the training data. For example, if you used every facebook post ever made as your data set, youd find personality threads behind the completion percentages. people who say "F*CK" often say "YOU" as the next word. That doesnt mean the computer is "mad". One might be tempted to believe that the AI was thinking or feeling, but it was the people who's output created the data set who were thinking and feeling AI is just pattern matching. It's kind of a humbling wake up call to realize that we as humans are probably not doing much more than pattern matching either. The we hold our thinking in such high esteem, but it is also probably very basic pattern matching too, since ChatGPT can already emulate it so well. Anyway, AI creates output data that harmonizes with the existing data set. it does not think. For example, several lawyers have gotten into trouble for using ChatGPT to write briefs for them. It writes really good briefs and papers, but it also often cites fictitious court cases that never existed. The formatting, and kind of case law is copied, but the cases themselves were made up. In other words, AI can find patterns and emulate them, but it does not do any thinking or cognition. So if AI is looking at the NFL season and making predictions, those predictions will clearly fit the data set. The problem is that bettors have been doing that forever too. Sports is notoriously chaotic and hard to predict. yes Vegas favorites of over 7 points probably win the game a large number of times. But most games are closer than that, and the players are human. They succeed and fail. They lose confidence, and gain experience. No one would have predicted Brock Purdy, just like no one can be sure that Caleb Williams is going to be league leader. We can use statistics to guess at who a likely candidate to win will be, but on any given sunday... All this to say that AI season prediction and stat predictions can only be in line with everything that has happened up through last year. They cant include the crucial data of whats going to happen next of course. Right now, AI should think that the Chiefs will win every Super Bowl they ever have again until Mahomes retires. And that IS is the most likely outcome for each Super Bowl. But it aint gonna happen in the real world. I dont think the problem with AI is the garbage in garbage out problem of deterministic programming from the last generation of technology. And it's not a problem with poor algorithms either, because AI does it's own programming. We literally cannot look inside the program and see WHY AI made the choice it did. All the node and strength data is available, but understanding how it caused the AI to come to that answer is hidden to us, impossible to see. Just as we can know where every cell in the brain is, and how each individual cell works with complete knowledge of its inputs and outputs and chemical processes, and still not have even a clue about how consciousness arises from it in total. And I dont think, at least in this case, that its an issue of the prompts being corrupted for example, "AI, show me a statistical outcome where the Packers win it all" then presented as just an unbiased prediction. I think it's simply a matter that each new season is so far out of line with all the seasons that preceded it, that using last season to predict this seasons outcome is impossible. There are too many stats that affect too many other stats. Hell, we can't even figure the orbit of three bodies in space because each one affect the other (the three body problem) so how can anyone or anything ever solve something this complex? At the core it's not a matter of the stage of technology. 10,000 years from now they still won't be able to predict the complete outcome of a season of football. If such a thing WAS calculable by any level of technology, then the future would be predetermined, and we would not even have free will! Quantum Mechanics in physics proves to us that you can never know enough to predict the future with any accuracy. No matter how advanced your technology. The uncertainty principle literally conserves the future as probabalistic, and in doing so, preserves a space for our free will. All that said, AI can do a damn good job of giving likely outcome ranges. It doesnt take a computer to know that Trubisky isnt gonna have 4,000 yards next year, and Williams will have more than 1,000. There are things that can be reasonably known. From that point of view the info adam has posted is excellent. It says "you have quantifiably good players. You are very likely to succeed with them" It cannot say that they wont get injured, or how many yards they will have with any real certainty. Or that DJ Moore wont get pissed off that he's not the big name in town anymore and quit on the team. That kind of thing isn't in the data set, so it can't find its way into pattern matching outcomes either. Even the simple question of how Caleb Williams will handle adversity and coaching cant be in the data set. No matter how well you sift his on the field numbers, you wont find an answer there. So in this case AI is another tool for statistically quantifying that you have good players and arent crazy to have high expectations. It IS likely we will be much better next year. But to say that Moore will have 850 yards or 1,300 is beyond the scope of that or any technology. The existing data doesn't tell anywhere near enough of the story to use it to predict what's gonna happen. Or even how defenses will cover our WRs. Who gets doubled is gonna affect those numbers a lot.

Ha! Love this! Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? It's rare enough for the guy being tackled to try to lateral or something, but the RB has no idea what Williams is doing!

for sure, and for me, against NFL DBs. I think our defense will do a good job of giving Caleb looks before he gets into NFL games. I remember for many years Bears QBs looking shell shocked when we played other teams, because our defense in practice wasnt very good.

Im just scouting his abilities, and what his game looks like. Im not still at the decision to take him, Im interested in his style, and what he does well.