Fear The Chorizo

I think the only way this nfl opening weekend would be sweeter for me is if the Bills demolish the Jets tomorrow night and the NY media jump into a September tizzy for firing their whole front office.

So much of it is the Bears having the wrong people trying to develop Fields, and them having a garbage OL...but yeah, I've never thought of Fields as a franchise-altering quarterback.

I've long thought Fields isn't accurate enough to play quarterback at a high NFL level against defenses who play coverage, and he likely will never have a receiver room more talented than who he was throwing to at OSU against ovrrmatched collegiate secondaries. Nothing Fields has done in the NFL has made me change my opinion of that.

Compared two the two prior week 1 performances, I'd say there's something to be said for having your starters play some in the preseason together... I know it's the Bears and there was a reason why they had rights to the top overall pick, but what a fantastic way to start the season. And in case people didn't remember, Walker is an absolute freak athlete!

Besides Suzuki and Swanson, who are pricey free agent additions last offseason, the other "floor" guys were internal draft picks or international signings from a long time ago (Alzolay, 2013 int'l signing, Steele 2014 draft pick, Happ 2015 draft, Morel 2015 int'l signing, Hoerner 2018 draft),., That's not really leveraging spending power - maybe retaining Happ through his early 30s at market rate contract values is, but I'm not going to lose sleep about a rival paying $20M a year for a corner OF to OPS mid-upper 700s . For perspective, Corbin Burnes was drafted in 2016 and he's 1 year shy of free agency. Steele (same age as Burnes) was drafted 2 seasons earlier than him and hasn't yet entered arbitration. The Cubs can throw money at more problems than the Brewers ever will be able to - but to me they're a team caught in between rebuilding/contending and will continue to be for awhile.

Record: 11-6 Will we make the playoffs? yes - NFC North Champs. Offensive MVP: Love Offensive Most Improved Player: Watson/Love Offensive Rookie of the Year: Reed. Most Receiving Yards: Watson Most Rushing Yards: Jones. Most TDs total (rushing or receiving): Watson Love's QB line: Rating, Yards, TDs, INTs: 95, 3750, 28, 15 Defensive MVP: Clark Defensive Most Improved Player: Walker. Defensive Rookie of the Year: Valentine Most Sacks: Smith. Most INTs: Douglas Carlson's FG%: 75% Others: The Packers' D finally emerges as the strength of this roster and gives Love cushion to get his feet wet as a starter. Watson has a monster 2nd season, and Green Bay becomes a top 5 rushing offense in the NFL for the first time in forever. My rosy record prediction is based on optimistic health of O line and key defensive players throughout the season, the Packers having a 3rd place schedule for a change, and the other teams in their division not being ready to make a strong case as being much more talented or ready to win consistently. This is a solid roster, if Love shows he can be a viable starting NFL quarterback they are going to win a bunch of games early.

Disagree...there is never a good thing about the Cubs!

A contender for what? A marginal shot at winning the 2nd weakest division in baseball? The Cubs are having a decent season and have an improved farm system (really nowhere for that to go but up based on where it was a couple years ago), but for a large market team playing in a small market division I don't see them being in a great spot for consistent success longterm. They somehow have a payroll pushing $200M dollars with a roster loaded up with those spare parts/young nobody-types. Happ is going to go from an $11M salary this year to $20M, will the Cubs exercise the $14M option for Hendricks next year? Bellinger is a pending FA assuming he doesn't agree to that mutual 2024 option and I think the Cubs may throw way more $$ than they should to keep him around. Taillon is in year one of a 4 year contract that looks brutal based on his near 6 ERA this season. Their best starter, Steele, isn't even in arbitration yet and he's 28 and about to log a ton more innings than he ever has in his career...his agent is going to be demanding some sort of longterm contract extension, or at minimum his payroll hit will be climbing rapidly each of the next 4 seasons. Of course, the Cubs can afford payroll bumps more than the Brewers - but they are still a team that should be in rebuild/retool mode looking for better longterm options at a bunch of spots on their roster.

Honestly I'd rather the Cubs win today to keep the Reds at arms length...better for the brewers for neither of those two teams to get white hot so they both can't make up ground as the calendar churns through september

Brock Purdy played really well for the last player drafted in the 2022 draft last season - but after suffering an elbow injury in his 12th NFL start I think giving up on Lance without him really getting an extended shot to be the man, and instead handing the keys to the franchise to Purdy is pretty rash. Almost seems like a move to get him out of San Fran in case Purdy struggles and they don't have to deal with calls for Lance to become the starter again. Jimmy G mentioned the weirdness related to the QB room in 49erland the past few seasons, and while some of that may be sour grapes from a former player he's also not wrong. Will be interested to see how much guaranteed $ they have to shell out to get Bosa extended...and if NFL karma follows its typical path with non-QBs signing market-setting contracts after extended preseason holdouts I'd fully expect Bosa to suffer a season-ending injury by the end of September. I can see the 49ers making another deep postseason run, or having a trainwreck of a season followed by a bunch of offseason question marks with a roster no longer as deep and inexpensive as it was a couple years ago.

I've mentioned I thought the Cubs would be the Brewers' main competition for the division since mid June when I just didn't have faith in either the Pirates or Reds sustaining the hot streaks that got the to the top of the standings at different points this season, and never really thought the Cards had enough pitching to play winning baseball over an extended stretch. That being said, the pitching issues the Cubs are dealing with make it feel like their recent hot streak isn't going carry deep into September, and the next couple weeks on their calendar isn't exactly a cakewalk. It almost feels like the Brewers treaded water at about a 0.505 winning percentage clip through July until some of their deadline bats hit a little, Woody got back in the rotation, and Adames figured out how not to be a black hole in the middle of the order and now it's their turn to be white hot for a few weeks and get us excited for what they might be capable of in October if all their key players stay healthy.

I don't think the Cubs have enough pitching to stay hot enough to pass the Brewers provided Milwaukee keeps getting even average production offensively now that the Brewers are running out Burnes, Woody, and Peralta more often than not on the mound..

Next offseason? absolutely

This is very common for star players on their rookie deals who weren't drafted in the 1st round, meaning they're on 4 year contracts with no option for a team to extend a lucrative 5th year option and use that extra guaranteed year as a starting point for a longterm extension. And it isn't really an issue limited to running backs in the NFL. Specific to Taylor, to get what he wants he has to be on the field. Aaron Jones got his 1st big payday after playing out his 4 year rookie deal and became a free agent - he still opted to stay in GB signing that deal. I hope his representation is giving him some good advice - this is probably the year to work out a longterm extension with the Colts if he actually wanted to stay there, but it's not the time to try and push your way out of town to a different team when there are so few with healthy cap situations to actually give him a large guaranteed deal. Sure, the Colts could franchise Taylor next offseason, but they would then shop him via trade leading up to the draft across the whole league, likely sending Taylor to a team that's a good fit for him and getting more value back. Then again, now actually would be the time to gripe and try to force his way out for a new contract if Taylor did have some lingering injury concerns with that ankle or any other issue.

Didn't Taylor also fail his pre-camp physical due to a combo of a bad ankle that's already undergone surgery once and a potential back injury that the Colts are claiming happened off the field? I don't see any team willing to part ways with a draft pick package equal to a 1st rounder in a trade to appease the Colts, let alone also want to hand him a longterm contract paying him $10M a season without knowing if he's damaged goods or not. Not getting on the field to show other teams he's fully healthy is no way to wind up securing a trade to a new team and a fat new contract, so I think there's something serious going on with Taylor's health right now. Some of the antics between him and Irsay could stem from Taylor's frustration with not being 100% healthy with a risk of him not ever being the same player that would be deserving of a big contract. Taylor's collegiate workload has to be taken in consideration when trying to determine how much good tread he has left on the tires, too. He didn't suffer a ton of injuries that would cause him to miss time, but he did push through a bunch of minor injuries any RB who touches the ball almost 1,000 times in 3 seasons would suffer. Bellcow running backs are indeed a dying breed in the NFL - and for the few elite ones that are still around, they need to pick the right offseason to hold out/force a team's hand on a new contract to get paid while they can. Unfortunately for Taylor, he seems to have waited one offseason too long since he's not healthy and really has no leverage until he is back on the field.

I mean, I guess it's not to the extent of oil companies yet simply because the scales we are talking about even now aren't remotely comparable with all the lithium/cobalt/etc mining to date helping to get 1.5% of cars on the road today being powered by EV batteries. And, O&G companies make much more than gasoline and fuel from the oil the extract - they aren't going away anytime soon no matter how many or few ICE passenger cars are on the road over time. China is jumping head first into EV car production not because of any green/renewable efforts - it's because they also happen to control most of the world's known supply of mineable battery minerals and do most of the high heat manufacturing for batteries (and frankly most of the world's other material needs that require high heat processes) powered by an electrical grid driven by coal. China got a big head start because they already had the supply chain and mining reserve rights gobbled up for phone/computer/electronics manufacturing. China also happens to have a pretty limited reach in controllable proven oil reserves and a population that is adding more new drivers/cars on the road than anywhere on a daily basis besides India. Make no mistake, if China was sitting on a ton of readily extractable oil EV's wouldn't be a thing anywhere else on the planet, either.

I agree with you on local package delivery vehicles and a good # of fleet trucks for contractors working locally (wasn't even thinking about that segment), but anything that needs to haul significant weights of materials, no matter how far the distance, is unlikely to be shifted to EV on a grand scale - at least with the current battery technology. Batteries for those type of vehicles would take up too much weight to be road-worthy unless the freight they haul isn't very dense. Rail infrastructure as currently designed is already at its max capacity and needs a ton of semi trucks to facilitate loading/unloading and transport on a local scale. Long haul trucking is already heavily integrated with the rail system - there are just too many places freight needs to be in order for rail to be the most efficient on a time basis. It would take significant infrastructure development to expand rail capacity in the US, and there are lots of hurdles to make that happen. It also gets much tougher for work vehicles that are used for remote jobsites at distance to heavily go towards EV - particularly ones that are set up as diesel engines.

Independent of cost, in the end environmentally it boils down to the question of whether EVs on a global scale are better environmentally than ICE for personal automobiles - and not just in terms of CO2 emissions. I'm removing freight/trucking/construction equipment from the conversation because quite frankly, they need petroleum-based fuels to deliver the power output necessary for effective performance. My reasonably informed opinion is that there is a threshold the EV fleet can reach where that supply chain becomes environmentally worse globally than current conditions, and that threshold is much lower than 50% of the personal vehicle fleet. Personal vehicles account for roughly 40% of global CO2 emissions at present, so turning that fleet from a majority ICE to EV would indeed put a dent into CO2 emissions - but it wouldn't address the remaining 60% of CO2 emissions if that's what someone is dead-set on slashing. As of mid-2022, approximately 1.5% of the global personal vehicle fleet was EV - projections are for that total to triple by 2025, which would bring the worldwide EV share to about 5%. The stick in the mud is, to scale the share of EVs globally to anything close to the level where it would significantly reduce CO2 emissions for personal vehicles, we're talking enormous, sustained increases in mining for battery materials whose extraction/manufacturing processes have a significant carbon footprint of their own and their byproducts generate a much more significant amount of hazardous waste. Unless someone has a dedicated solar array and battery storage unit at their home that their EV charger is powered by, EV vehicles should not be considered powered by renewable energy at present, IMO. They still rely on fossil fuels that provide sustained grid power for energy - particularly during off-peak demand hours when most people may wish to recharge their car at home overnight, and as the amount of these vehicles on the road increase there will be grid capacity issues in certain markets. Also, the batteries themselves are not efficiently recycleable at the moment, so there will be ongoing demand to mine more materials for new/replacement battery generation and increased hazardous waste management issues with spent battery materials as the initial EV fleets in developed countries age out of operating use. Oilfields do have well-documented environmental issues of their own, no doubt - but once a well is established the environmental impact during extraction operations is quite limited, and frankly oilfields can be reclaimed and restored much more efficiently without destroying habitat compared to the type of mining operations needed for EV materials. The advances in ICE emissions control technologies have largely curtailed much more significant air pollution than carbon dioxide concerns across most of the globe over the past 30 years despite an exploding population and dramatic increase in total vehicles on the road. There are also some emerging technologies focused on CO2 capture that could significantly reduce ICE greenhouse gas emissions to keep an eye on - although I think they may wind up being more readily utilized across the industrial manufacturing and freight transport sectors. There is a role EVs can play, particularly in cities/population centers of developed countries that have alot of routine suburb commuters driving 30-60 miles daily - I think improved public transit options, city planning changes, and a general change in how people go about travel/routine schedule all play an even larger role in trying to reduce the amount of all cars on the road.

He's also been very good this season, but up until a month ago Stroman had been their workhorse and had better #'s than Steele besides W/L record...and that workload appears to have caught up to him a bit as his last 4-5 outings have been pretty short.

There's comparing apples to oranges in terms of legality/ethics, and then there's comparing apples to a grown man with essentially celebrity status having a relationship with a minor.

and they have some pitchers who seem to have success against the Brewers. Based on how most of the season has gone for the Brewers offensively, I think the above statement is true for every team. I've felt since very early on this season that the Cubs would be the primary competition for the division if they got more consistent pitching and decided not to sell at the deadline. Their pitching has been better of late but their recent good stretch of baseball is largely due to Bellinger's return giving their offense a boost to take them from pretty good to really good in terms of run scoring. Their pen still has holes and their rotation leans awfully hard on Stroman, a guy who hasn't been good for over a month, now. I still think the Cubs can hang close based on their schedule, but part of me feels like it's just their turn amongst the Pirates, Reds, and Cubs as the team closest to the Brewers in the standings as this season has progressed. If Burnes, Woodruff, and Peralta stay healthy along with a few key guys in the lineup staying healthy and productive enough, the Cubs won't be able to pass the Brewers up in the standings.

Shades of Vazquez from the Pirates if true... In case anyone wanted to know if there was any downside of guaranteeing an early 20-something almost $200 million over 11 years, here's one. Although I would think there may be some sort of out clause in the contract if the player proves to be a felon.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for clearing the deck and putting Chourio on the opening day roster next year if he proves he's ready - generational talent shouldn't sit in milb longer than it needs to. But I do think calling up Jackson from AA after having a white hot 1.5 months hitting is probably a little soon in the heat if a division race - I'd actually be more open to it if the Brewers weren't contending and planned on him being in MLB to start 2024, similar to what the dbacks did with Carroll last September to get his MLB feet wet.

I mean, Chourio and his agent would probably be a pretty big hurdle to instantly extend him for most of his MLB career before it starts. Those Acuna extensions aren't handed out like candy. I just don't think Chourio would be ready to make an impact that would push this team into the playoffs this year, because putting that on a 19 yr old isnt a good baseball decision even without factoring in service time concerns...and if I'm not mistaken players have to be on the 40 man roster before September callups to be eligible for postseason rosters. Doing that with Chourio may have longterm roster control impacts there isn't a reason to have to worry about right now.

Also, this tends to happen to younger teams leaning on inexperienced players to win ballgames. And, their schedule has been pretty brutal since the AS break