re: Braden Smith gets 4 year 72 million extension

Joey is the underdog in a QB battle to former 3* QB Will Levis (Penn State castoff)

So he’s basically back to where he was a few years ago. Maybe he’ll win this time against lesser competition

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What's really going to bake your noodle is when you realize that we had a $70 million NFL Tackle playing Guard for his entire collegiate career .

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Braden was drafted as a G as well and they didn't think he could play T in the NFL. It wasn't until 2 players went down at RT that they moved him over out of necessity and then he excelled there and won the job.

TWill was our best recruiter too. Tell the full story, who we're our LBs before he got here? We're the players you listed some of the top LBs in the SEC? How is our LB room currently looking?

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Braden was drafted as a G as well and they didn't think he could play T in the NFL. It wasn't until 2 players went down at RT that they moved him over out of necessity and then he excelled there and won the job.

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Right, so 5 weeks into the season an NFL team got the bright idea to try a 6'6 lineman with obvious athleticism at Tackle, and he excelled immediately. Meanwhile, in college against much weaker competition, he DID get a few looks at Tackle (he started at RT against Jacksonville State in 2015) and yet they lost interest so quickly and pigeon-holed him into the Guard position and never bothered to put him back at Tackle where he obviously could have been more valuable. Lets not forget that in 2016 the starting RT was Robert Leff, and in 2017 the starting RT was Darius James (who was passable at best) - so this wasn't a situation where we were just SO loaded at Tackle that Braden Smith was forced into playing Right Guard.

The entire POINT is that this is yet another microcosm of what was going so terribly wrong with the OL: forget recruiting, they could barely evaluate their own players. You have Darius James getting whipped at RT, meanwhile starting directly beside him is a physical freak who will go onto become one of the highest paid Tackles in the NFL. Why wasn't Braden Smith playing RT while Darius James plays RG? Smith was always considerably more athletic. So yes, while Braden Smith was obviously a GREAT Guard - the question is why his talent wasn't maximized at Tackle?

It becomes much more obvious how you get to the situation where you need to convert Alec Jackson from DT to become a bad starting LT after you look back at Braden Smith and realize that they weren't even able to maximize his positional value over what was essentially 4 seasons as a starter. I could go even further and state that had they developed him properly (at Tackle) he likely would have been drafted even higher and made more money, and probably helped us recruit a few more Tackles out of HS...and hence wouldn't need to resort to scrambling to find JUCO's and Defensive Linemen to step in and start.

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TWill was our best recruiter too. Tell the full story, who we're our LBs before he got here? We're the players you listed some of the top LBs in the SEC? How is our LB room currently looking?

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I didn't say anything about TWill or the LB's or LB recruiting in this thread. You're asking for a response from the wrong guy.

Wall





Of





Gus




Sucks




Text

Who said anything about Gus sucking? The post is literally a question as to how/why we had a kid who would go on to become one of the highest-paid Tackles in the NFL playing Guard for 4 seasons while Darius James started at RT, and how that tied into the general failure at the position group which at this point is pretty unprecedented.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm sure it was Rhett Lashlee's failure. Or Chip Lindsey's. Or Chad Morris' .

I’ll do politics but not sure what side I need to pick to start the argument so I will just go with the one I think would melt the most.

Trump won.






By a lot!!