Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dantés" data-source="post: 729299" data-attributes="member: 12283">Fans tend to only look to the new faces on the roster as sources of improvement. Player development isn't ****. And yet when you look around the league, a lot of improvement from season to season is driven by existing players making progress. Obviously free agency accounts for some of it, and the draft as well (though I would say the draft is routinely overrated in terms of year 1 results). But fans often seem to think they know who a player is after only a year or two. Now it can't be denied that TT has given himself less of a margin by eschewing free agency for the most part on defense. There's no argument there. He's put almost all his chips on the development of previously drafted players entering their 2nd or 3rd seasons. And there are a lot of them. Kenny Clark, Dean Lowry, Kyler Fackrell, Jake Ryan, Blake Martinez, Damarious Randall, and Quinten Rollins all figure to have substantial roles and are 2nd/3rd year players. For better or worse, this is who Ted Thompson is. So I think it's fair to say that defensive improvement lives or dies on player development. But it doesn't make any sense to argue that player development isn't a viable avenue of improvement. Clearly it is. If it fails to work, it's a failure of execution, not of strategy.</blockquote>

Total: 557 (members: 1, guests: 556)