Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Is Jordan Addison's production this year merely a bonus?

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Matthew Coller answers Vikings fan questions, including whether Jordan Addison will be the fourth option this year and what that means to the offense and whether the Vikings have the most crushing loss in NFL history Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Purple Insider is presented by Oakley. Express yourself. Build a look that's made for you. When you wear Oakley, there really is more than meets the eye. Try it for yourself. Oakley is not only the best looking, but the best quality. So head on over to oakley.com for more information today. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, and it is another fans-only episode of which there will. Matthew Collar here and it is another fans only episode of which there will be numerous this week. I hope you're having a very nice July 4th week. Got out, played some golf and it was very, very hot outside and I think I sweated an entire pool, but it was a good time. And so I hope you're enjoying your day that you're, you know,

out on a Lake somewhere or you're playing golf as well. The golf course was really, really packed with people. So maybe you were one of those people out there playing with me. But anyway, happy July 4th to everybody middle of the summer. We couldn't be more in the summertime when it comes to football season. And yet you good folks have sent a lot of great questions and we're going to dive into more of those. And then, you know, after this week, we start to really count down to training camp. It is almost here. And then before you know it, it's the hall of fame game and we're playing football again. It's kind of crazy how fast it all goes and training camp.

I think the starts maybe 18 days from now or 17 days from now, or however many, when you're first listening to this and you know, then it's go time. And there's so many interesting things and interesting storylines, which both here, we will be doing kind of position by position previews and over on the website as well.

We'll get back with some of the usual suspects who cover this team as we lead into training camp and exciting times this year. This is probably the most interested, excited that I've been to cover a training camp in maybe the entire time that I've been covering the team outside of 2017. 2017 was my first training camp. I actually moved to Minnesota in late August of 2016. And so I didn't get the 2016 training camp. 2017 had a lot of interesting questions. Dalvin Cook was a rookie. Latavius Murray had just been acquired. Adrian Peterson was no longer a Viking.

You had Sam Bradford with his first full off season and that storyline. And then also a defense that was looking really, really good. Some pressure on Mike Zimmer. I think maybe it goes forgotten because of the way that that season ended up playing out that going into that year after the meltdown from starting 5-0 and missing the playoffs there was a lot of pressure for him to you know get back to the postseason already I mean that's just how the NFL works that the goodwill from 2014 and 15 that had built all of a sudden felt a little more on rocky ground. So there was a lot of storylines that year.

And 2018, I should also give its proper credit. The first training camp with Kirk Cousins, John DeFilippo, offensive coordinator. So every year is a different thing. And then, you know, last year as well, we knew a lot of the same faces, but we didn't know the coach and Kevin O'Connell and how things were going to look. And that was fascinating on a daily basis to watch the offense have some great days, some bad days. And I definitely won't forget the practice where Kirk Cousins, I think, through five or six interceptions. And there was a ton of frustration. And then they went out against the Green Bay Packers and went completely off. But last year, some of the things in training camp about the offense were a little bit telling, maybe not as much about the defense.

I think that we believe the defense was going to be quite a bit better than it ended up being. But on the offensive side, the inconsistency of great and struggling, when we look at those final numbers of where they ranked in points score, we could say, oh, well, you know, they were a top 10 offense, but we all were there, right? It'd be first drive success. And then second quarter they're rolling. And then by the third quarter,

they're letting the opponent back into the game. And so there were these ups and downs. And it's one of the things that I've always enjoyed about training camp. And I know I'm waxing poetic about it when we're still a ways away and I'll get to your questions in a moment, but just thinking about how each year has had its own identity to a training camp and what we can always look back and reflect on like, oh, I guess they did show some of the signs of this, that, or the other thing as it was developing through camp, or this player emerged in that camp, or we started to get the sense that something was wrong with whatever.

Or there's the, you know, Greg Joseph is an absolute monster in camp and then has his major ups and downs during the season of missing a bunch of extra points, hitting a game winner. And so each player, you can kind of tell their story starting in training camp. But maybe different this year is not just the overall intrigue where there always is. And some years stand out more than others in particular because of the coach or one major acquisition. I think what it really is, is that I've gone into each training camp knowing what the roster was going to look like. Last year, I thought they might keep Chaz Surratt instead of Josh Metellus. That was not the case because

Metellus emerged during training camp for them as a player that they like and wanted to keep. That entire draft class that Chaz Surratt was a part of did not work out and all ended up dispersing, uh, elsewhere. But aside from that, I mean, okay, you miss a couple of fringe players on the 53, but all of the starters were pretty much set going into training camp. And it was the backup quarterback battle that people wanted to talk about. And then the new backup quarterback, the third running back, there just wasn't a whole lot of everyday people rising and falling to try to fight for jobs, where this year there are jobs up for grabs. There is a position of, is it going to be K.J. Osborne or Jordan Addison

who starts the season as wide receiver two, which I know they're going to play three wide receivers on the field a lot, but is Addison going to make himself known to Kirk Cousins as a guy that he can trust over the coming months? And we'll get into all the storylines, but the cornerback situation, the safety situation, there's just the running backs and who's going to have the second running back spot. And are they going to be trusted? All these things are going to develop over training camp. So as we get past July 4th, it's a real countdown to that. And I think from the position battle perspective, there has been no season like this in a very long time in Minnesota. So anyway, there's kind of what's on my mind at the moment, aside from getting in a few other things before training camp starts.

And, you know, off we go. So hopefully you have an enjoyable 4th, a safe 4th of July. And now we can get into your questions. Let's start off with Jim here. And Jim submitted this, by the way, on the Purple Insider newsletter chat. So if you go join the newsletter, even if it's on the free side, you can participate in the chat. And that's where I'm taking a lot of these mailbag and fans only questions. So do that purpleinsider.com.

Click on any article. It'll take you there. And also you can support the channel by signing up there as well. So anyway, that's where Jim came from. Appreciate you, Jim. He says, regardless of Lewis scenes development, did the Vikings screw up by waiting to draft a wide receiver in 2022? Or I think you mean waiting until 2023. Jordan Addison may not end up or may end up being a solid player, but it's hard not to compare his measurables to Jamison Williams. Yeah, okay, so what you mean is, should they have just drafted Jamison Williams, not waited until this year to draft a wide receiver?

If we are doing the hindsight game, I think that if we're second-guessing that draft, it's probably Kyle Hamilton at this moment. Kyle Hamilton had a terrific year for the Baltimore Ravens, was one of the highest graded safeties in the league by pro football focus. And if I remember correctly, the only reason that he dropped in the draft was because he didn't run the fastest 40, which is probably not a tremendous measure for safeties. Think about how good Harrison Smith has been in recent years. I don't know that his 40 is all that fast in comparison to some of the

fastest safeties in the league, but it's an intelligence position. It's a playmakers position. And, you know, maybe there were some people that weren't as high on Kyle Hamilton because of that, but his tape had him as a top five player as a lot of the analysts.

So I, you know, there is something to that second guessing it saying maybe they should have just taken him with that pick and not drop down the board to take Louis Seen. But your question pertaining to Jamison Williams, we'll see what happens with him long term. I'm not counting him out because he was gambling at a team hotel or whatever the details were that got him a pretty short suspension in comparison to other guys who had gambling issues that are suspended for a year or suspended indefinitely but we're gonna have to wait to find out what Jamison Williams really looks like that

ACL injury held him off the field mostly and then he got in in a few games but Detroit's offense was really rolling and so they just kind of stuck with what they had last year and of course Jamison Williams big catch comes against none other than the Minnesota Vikings so we'll see how that turns out but as far as the caliber of prospect and throw out what you think Jamison Williams will be or what you think Jordan Addison will be there's really no question that Jamison Williams is a better prospect. Again, that doesn't mean he'll be a better NFL player. He could completely bust. Jordan Addison could be in the Hall of Fame. One was drafted significantly higher and a team traded all the way up from the back of the first round in order to take Jamison Williams. So his

pedigree, when you also consider his speed, his size is not overwhelming, but it is bigger than Jordan Addison. The numbers that he put up in college were tremendous. He was a great weapon for Alabama. And there's also the fact that he went to Alabama that is part of this as well. So there is pedigree there from Jamison Williams that is better. There's also another part of this second guessing that goes back to the Vikings keeping Adam Thielen and then not drafting Adam Thielen's replacement, which forced them to now draft Adam Thielen's replacement. That is also worth talking about as well. You could have figured out last year that wide receivers were going to be costly in free agency and you weren't going to be able to play in that area. You weren't going to go out and get a replacement for Adam Thielen in free agency. So ultimately you would have to draft one and drafting Jalen Naylor, though I like some

of what I've seen, was not really a solution to losing Adam Thielen ultimately after this year, which they should have been able to project based on where he was going in his career anyway, that last year was a very predictable season for Adam Thielen. So to your question, yeah, that's one that I would have been second guessing really from the start or first guessing, I suppose you could call it because I thought they should have drafted a wide receiver right there and then added to their group of weapons eventually as we went down the stretch of the season and then known that Jamison Williams was going to be the next man up. How this plays out historically, I guess we'll just have to find out,

but that draft in particular and that decision, regardless, as you said, of Lewis Seen and how he develops, is going to be one that we continually go back to, especially as you've seen someone like Josh Metellus develop. They seem to like Cam Bynum. He's still the starter as of this moment. And Harrison Smith decided to stay, which I don't know that they knew that he was going to stick around. So they probably thought they were drafting Louis seen to be starting this year and at least going

into camp, he's going to have to go a long way to jump over those other two guys to be the starting safety. As far as Jordan Addison though, I think that when you talk about measurables, that the measurables have not been particularly predictive when it comes to wide receivers. When we look across the league at the top wide receivers, they kind of come in all shapes and sizes. There have been undersized wide receivers who are terrific. Anthony Carter was one of them, and that goes back a long way. But there's Tyreek Hill right now, not a real comparable to Jordan Addison, but a very undersized type of player who dominates.

There's been big wide receivers. There's been Megatron. There's been Randy Moss. There's been taller guys. Terrell Owens, who have dominated. There's been your Wes Welkers and Julian Edelman, who come out of the slot. And they've dominated. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to do this.

And Jordan Addison is a very quality prospect who I don't think his odds are vastly different from Jamison Williams that he ends up succeeding. So I guess the way I look at it is, of course, since I advocated it at the time to just take Jamison Williams, I tend to agree with you. And knowing now in hindsight that Adam Thielen didn't have a lot left and that they were going to have to replace him anyway. But I also don't think that it turned out poorly to get Jordan Addison. He may not be of the caliber of pedigree of Jamison Williams, but I also think he has a lot of things that do translate to success. Route running, hands, ball tracking, all those things. Jamison Williams might be more of just

a speedster and he might not be able to grasp the same type of details that Jordan Addison does when it comes to route running. I mean, I think that if you had them both in a draft, it's clear what the NFL thinks, that Jamison Williams was the better prospect because he was drafted quite a bit higher. At the same time, I don't even know the draft position outside of the very top has been super predictive of these guys either, where we've seen an A.J. Brown, a Debo Samuel

become elite players from the second round. When was Justin Jefferson picked? Not the first wide receiver, not the second, not the third. So the NFL, I think, is good at picking out where these guys should be generally in the draft. But receiver is such a nuanced position that I think it's really hard to say if one player is drafted here versus there at that position that there's any guarantee that they'll be better. So that's how I kind of look at it. That I think that they made the right correction to draft Jordan Addison this year. If they had said, no, we're kind of going to pass on that.

We're just going to go with defense. That would have been OK. And there were some good defensive players there, but I think they made the right choice replacing Thielen long-term trying to build with a partner for Jordan Edison. I would have done it a little earlier myself, but in the long-term, this may turn out to be just as good or better for them. You know, that's, that's the draft for you, right? That's, that is the the draft but i think there was some reasonable first guessing when it came to um deciding to pass on both kyle hamilton and jameson williams if that's what you're asking if lewis seen though if lewis seen takes a step during this training camp one of the biggest storylines and becomes a quality starter a playmaker for them we're going to view

this whole thing differently and that's why at this moment we've kind of decided what we think of that draft but that could change four weeks from now six weeks from now probably not four weeks from now maybe six weeks from now eight weeks from now if we get to the end of preseason and lewis seen as the starting safety andrew booth juniors starting outside corner and both of them have had tremendous camps we're already going to start shifting so let's find out what happens there before we totally decide that they botch that draft this one comes from scott more crushing loss for a franchise this is perfect for this show falcons giving up a 28-3 lead and losing in the Super Bowl.

Scott Norwood wide right. Thanks for bringing that up. Or Vikings failures. There are too many to document, but we all know them. Well, the Gary Anderson miss is by far number one. I don't even know if that's challenged by anyone. The Brett Favre thing is pretty tough. 12 men in the huddle, pretty tough. Blair Walsh is pretty tough. It men in the huddle, pretty tough. Blair Walsh is pretty tough.

It happened in the wildcard round though. I mean, you can make a case that they might've gone deeper. They were playing really well at the end of the season, but it's nothing like being a fairly chip shot field goal, even for the time. Indoors at your place from a guy who never misses to go to the Super Bowl with one of the strongest teams that's ever been put on a football field in 1998. There is nothing like that. I think that that goes

in the same category as the other things that you mentioned as the cream of the crop meltdown failures in the last 30 years are probably those. I think the hardest one that you, well, in comparison, I guess we could try to rank them. I think the hardest loss, the most crushing failure of all time, hands down, maybe in all of sports, outside of the Buckner ground ball, is the Scott Norwood wide right. I don't know that it can be challenged. The Falcons giving up the lead is terrible. I mean, how about Seattle throwing the interception at the goal line? Terrible. It's not that unusual that a team would fail on a goal

line stand. It's still harsh. The 49ers failing to get the ball in the end zone against the Ravens. It's still, it's tough, but these are things that generally happen. It's not the reason a team won or lost, but when you have one kick for a franchise that went through a lot, had been around for a long time and had been building up in the late 80s with Jim Kelly to this point and they had had a disappointing loss to was it Cincinnati in the playoffs and it finally clicked for them this was their first Super Bowl and they are one kick away one play the entire universe watching and it goes wide right I I don't know I think because with 98 and Gary Anderson, you think they might've won the Super Bowl. Remember how strong that Denver team was. So they might've won the Super Bowl. And with the Falcons, you got to close out the game. You just, you just melted down. You just completely blew it. You fell apart. Leads get taken away all the time. It just happened on the biggest stage. very difficult same with

goal line failures for Seattle and for San Francisco all very very tough their fan bases will never let it go there is nothing like one play away several feet away from a tortured franchise that had been so bad or mediocre for so long for a place like Buffalo to have it go wide right. I mean, it's just when it all comes down to that, when it all comes down to one kick, it becomes, I think, on a totally different level than almost anything else ever outside of that ground ball with Buckner. And there's a bunch of different ways you can look at both of those and say, hey, you know, Belichick was really good in Parcells against the Bills offense, and maybe that was part of it. They couldn't really stop the run in that game. There's a few what-ifs, like Jeff Hostetler, who's the quarterback of the Giants, hangs onto the ball

when he gets hit by Bruce Smith in the end zone, and it's not a fumble for a touchdown. It's just a safety. And there's a lot of different things you go through that game and say, well, what if this happened? Or what if that happened? But when it is encapsulated on, you make it, you win the Super Bowl, you miss it, you lose the Super Bowl and you miss it. Nothing harder, nothing harder in sports. Never. I considering it was the Super Bowl, nothing harder in sports. Maybe soccer fans would bring up a famous missed penalty kick or something like that. And I'm sure there are. I don't have a lot of knowledge in that. But just in the major sports that I've watched, I can't think of anything that is more soul

crushing than that. So happy 4th of July, everybody. You're not the worst with Gary Anderson. You might have the most of those types of things although music city miracle is pretty tough but you're you're not the worst folks i know you have heard me talk a ton about my oakley sunglasses this summer but the more i wear them the more i like them i went on a little summer vacation and spent a ton of time outside in the sun and let me tell you before these i had to squint even when i had sunglasses on but these matte black prism sapphire polar

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Oakley, express your style and build a look that's made for you. Next question comes from Daniel. Is Addison as a third or fourth option a pivot point for the offense this year? I tend to think that he's likely more of a bonus with Osborne as wide receiver two and Hawkinson as the actual number two option for the moment. I would agree with you. I don't know if I want to say a bonus. I think I would say that probably the next option down, this is how we're starting training camp. This could change very quickly. If Jordan Addison comes out and he's flying and he and Kirk Cousins are on the same page. He's getting open. He's making plays. The coaches like him. He's mastered the offense.

All those things come together. He can win the wide receiver two job. You know, I've tended to sort of play the safe with, well, look, I mean, B.C. Johnson beat out Justin Jefferson for a couple of weeks and training camp doesn't always get it right for who starts the season and is ready to go. And by the second half of the season, we could see Jordan Addison ahead of K.J. Osborne. But K.J. Osborne is also pretty good at football, has emerged over the last two years as being a solid NFL wide receiver and solid NFL wide receiver is likely to be more consistent, understand the

offense better, the blocking element of it, uh, than someone who's a rookie where I think there's more peaks and valleys, even when rookies are really good, unless they are, you know, Randy Moss. So at this point, I do think that that is how it will go. TJ Hawkinson is clearly the number two option for kirk cousins based on what we saw last year i mean i didn't even realize this because it was kind of in a happening with a lot of other stuff going on and all sorts of crazy late you know last second wins and kind of the end of the season with the green bay game and everything and the way the playoffs ended that the only tight end in the league who had more targets and more yards last year than TJ Hawkinson was Travis Kelsey, who's one of the greatest tight

ends in the history of the game. I did not really have that sink in until I was writing about TJ Hawkinson the other day and went like, oh, wow, I did not know he was number two. Plus, you know, I didn't add up the stats between Detroit and Minnesota, but a lot of that comes from his time in Minnesota. So he's the guy as a go-to other than Justin Jefferson. And it's the job of the others to show up when they're called upon, when teams are taking away Jefferson, especially down the field and that's where you know Jordan Addison I think we've maybe talked about this a little bit but like what's a successful season for Jordan Addison if he's got 500 yards on 35 catches and he's got some downfield plays I don't think that's a failure because I think you want him to be that extra option as of right now this is a projection right now you want him to be that extra option where KJ Osborne you know will be solid and make some big plays but there's only so many passes to go around and even if they are playing in a lot of shootout types of games

if you try to think well he's going to get 70 80 passes or something right away. Well, with Jefferson and with Hawkinson, that's just hard to project. And Osborne still being a trusted weapon for Kirk Cousins. So sometimes we put fantasy numbers on these things and that's how we decide whether it's how well someone performed. But if he can give them just what I described, 35, 40 catches in a wide receiver three situation, they could still have a great passing offense and you could still come away feeling very good about his future, depending on what those look like. It's just that targets are going to be a little bit difficult to come by at times. So he could blow by those expectations.

That's within the realm of possibility. That's kind of where I'm setting the bar though, is not crazy high, but I think that that was something that was missing last year. So you're talking about it as a pivot point. And I think that's true because if Jordan Addison does struggle and can't really get on the field the way that we expected him to, and they're running more two tight ends or they're throwing out Jalen Naylor. This is something we saw with Laquan Treadwell years ago. I do think that that is going to make the offense sputter a lot more to not have that one more option. And I just think that when you

look at the best offenses, unless they have Patrick Mahomes, but even then, you know, we talk about Patrick Mahomes wide receivers as if they didn't exist, but they got Kadarius Tony. He made a big play in the playoff game. Juju Smith-Schuster is a proven receiver. He had a lot of good at the wide receiver position and great at the tight end position. I think when the opposing team can't really just focus on one guy, that's when you're at your absolute best. So sometimes that third and fourth wide receiver or receiving option, those are the guys that make the biggest difference.

So those 40 catches, if that's what he gets, I mean, who knows, right? But if he ends up with 35, 40 catches, a lot of them being big and important, that could both, you know, drive more success of this offense than they had last year and also be a very good sign for his future. That's, that's kind of a, that's a really good case scenario. Your best case scenario is that he just blows by KJ Osborne. He's the guy and everybody knows it. And you have Moss Carter. That's your best case scenario. Your good case scenario is that he's a solid weapon in year one and then can take on from there that wide receiver to roll after a year kind of behind KJ Osborne. So we'll see how

it plays out, but that goes under that same umbrella of very, very interesting things once training camp arrives. And this question comes from John. I really don't understand the Cousins contract restructure. Do you think that it was a miscalculation by Kweisi? I feel like he tries to keep all of his options open and paints himself into a corner. Yeah, the contract restructure thing is probably going to keep coming up because when we go back to the start of the off season, and if I were to have told Kweisi Adaflomensa, hey buddy, nobody is trading for Zedarius Smith,

not giving you anything of significance. A couple of fifth round draft picks swapped for some sixth with Cleveland. No one is trading at all for Delvin Cook. Would you just release him? You probably would to make the salary cap space that they need. And even at that time, if I had told him, Daniil Hunter's holding out.

He's not going to take whatever you're offering. He's holding out. He's going to try to force your hand. Would he have traded him at the draft, before before the draft for whatever they could have gotten back tried to get extra draft capital uh you know to continue to build up the defense maybe pick a potential successor at outside linebacker edge rusher maybe yeah that's hard to do, to know all those things for sure. But I think we also could have seen all of them coming. I don't think, though, that the restructure has to crush the Vikings' future. So one thing is that they can carry over cap space.

We know that. There's a lot of cap coming off the books. And keep in mind that my general opinion is shouldn't have done that. You should have just let it play out and had the very reasonable dead cap hits for over a couple of years. But the plus side of the restructure, the way that it is, is if Cousins goes after this year, it's one tough year and then it's over. And I remember initially thinking, wait, what is happening here? Are they going to be paying him more? And then it's over. And I remember initially thinking, wait, like what was happening here? Are they going to be paying him more? And then it's spread out. And some of the details were a little

murky, but with that, with the fact that it can be over after one year of a big dead cap hit with the restructure, that's very manageable with their timeline. Now that does restrict what they can do next year. But even then, when you sign free agents, you can set it up to have their first year be a little cheaper. You can work around some of those things. And if you're playing with a quarterback that you drafted, you're not really thinking Super Bowl in the first year anyway. You're really looking two years out if that's the way that they decide to go. And the other thing is

if they got another quarterback and all of a sudden they were all in, you can always manipulate the cap in short term. So if they had Tom Brady comes out of retirement to play for the Vikings or whoever, I don't know, Kyler Murray, whatever it is, then you can shuffle around things to make it happen and accelerate your window. And yes, it will hurt you a little bit longer term. But I don't know if that's a reasonable scenario. The most likely is that they draft a quarterback. Yes, they're still spending a decent amount on the quarterback, a big amount.

But you're probably not winning the Super Bowl with a rookie anyway. And then it's that second year where you look for the rookie to take a jump. And then you pour tons of cap space into free agency, build up your roster and profit. That's the, that's the plan that has worked for a few teams in the past. Again, I don't want to make it sound like I'm defending the restructure because I didn't like the restructure. I think that the bigger picture though here is that if this is the last year of Kirk Cousins and it only lasts one year with a dead cap hit, that doesn't destroy the future of your franchise because you're just still sunk under Kirk Cousins for a long time. And again, with the bigger picture, if you've set yourself up to move on to the next quarterback, that matters more

to me than one year of dead cap space. So yes, but to your point, trying to keep all the options, painting himself into a corner that happened for sure that happened to this off season. And I think that there was probably too much patience maybe for some of these things where they couldn't really get answers. They couldn't get in with other free agents that may have fit for them early on because outside of Byron Murphy, outside of Marcus Davenport, they basically had nothing to work with and bringing back Garrett Bradbury, which should be included as a free agent signing. But there wasn't any other real money to work with there.

And probably if they could have prognosticated a little better to how the market was going to react to their players, if they hadn't hung on for so long and so long and tried to get that potential trade might've worked out better. So yeah, I mean, this is the twist and turns, I guess, of trying to evaluate a general manager with such a small sample size is there are things we can look at and go, I don't know about that, man. Was that really, was that what you were trying to do? Or that doesn't really look great that it worked out that way. And then there's the bigger picture of this whole thing, which is, I think they've got the overall direction, right. And maybe, you know, picking away at, well, I'm not sure this was done right or this done right at this moment,

that doesn't matter. There will be a moment where it does. So I don't think it's crushing what they did, but there will be, as we go forward times where the small details do matter a lot more than they do now as you're tearing it down. And over the coming months, however many, you will hear me probably next off season a lot, talk about how it's easier to tear it down than it is to build it up. And so they've torn it down and they've drafted a lot of players and they've got this sort of, you know, overhaul direction that they're going in. That's a good thing for them. It's what they needed. But that restructure is a little bit of a weird sore thumb for them. And I think a lot of people, if you are a skeptic of Kweisi Adafo-Mensa, which is fair at this point, that's something you're bringing up. You're probably

bringing up the last year's draft. You're probably bringing up the restructures, your two biggest critiques. Okay. This one comes from a introverted Purple Insider subscriber who didn't want their name listed, which is fine. What the hell is going on at ESPN? Will there be anyone left? I don't like seeing mass layoffs. You have experienced the kind of hack and slash management mentality. Your thoughts? Well, my first thoughts are that it is hardly just ESPN, that there are lots of businesses or industries that go through this same sort of thing. I think anybody who works in a hospital knows that they're understaffed. People who work at schools will probably tell you that they're understaffed, underpaid. And people who work in a lot of different industries, their job security isn't anywhere near what it probably should be. And there's a lot of frustration. So it's hardly just media and it's hardly just the ESPN. The Athletic cut a number of writers, some who were really good. And there's kind of been this transition going on in how media works. And I don't know where ESPN fits into this in general, but sort of post pandemic. And maybe this was happening even before that. There was a time maybe about

eight years ago, something like that, where newspapers started to hack and slash and they cut down. And this didn't happen to the Star Tribune, luckily, but they cut down from having these huge news staffs to just bare bones. And, you know, you had reporters being asked to also be photographers and cover multiple beats and just be overworked, underpaid as well. And then everybody else lost their jobs. So this is not new in general. I think that ESPN is trying to figure out where revenue is going to come from in the future because there's just so much cord cutting. There's so many options. There's so many streaming options for people. They're probably laying out what is going to bring us money. I think it's unfair to pin it all on Pat McAfee because whatever he's going to get paid, his show is incredibly popular

and will probably make it back tenfold because of his popularity. And that's how they're going to have to do business in a lot of ways. I did think though, that it's very frustrating to see someone like Susie Culver, who is so good at her job. And for, for a long, long time has been a pillar of the national football league. Just be thrown out the back door. Like, oh, sorry, you make too much money. See ya. That, to me, is wrong. And was very, very frustrating to see the way that that went down.

So this is kind of the industry as it is. Every ecosystem has its different reasons. There are, you know, in the athletic, they built up the athletic a ton with all these hires. And then inevitably when they sold to the New York times, there were going to be cuts. Uh, they were going to make assessments of who they wanted to pay for and who they didn't want to pay for who's bringing in revenue. And I've never thought that journalism should be something that's, Hey, how much revenue do you bring in?

I think it should really be based on the quality of work that you do as a journalist, not, hey, do you have the right number of Instagram followers or whatever that's going to bring you an X number of dollars in subscriptions? To me, that's very short-sighted. I don't know if that's why they made decisions because I'm not in those meetings. I don't work for them. But I think that that's a mentality that is really chasing your tail. And I also think when companies take a bunch of money and set super high expectations for how much profit there is, there's just limitations on how much profit you can make. ESPN also has these huge contracts to pay out for sports rights. It's a complicated issue. And there are people who know more about it than me that you should listen to for that

answer. That's just my perception of what's going on. I don't read a ton about it. Um, but yeah, that's, I think that's a little different than what happened with my former employer. I think we had the right idea long-term and timing just didn't work out well for us. With the pandemic happening, people weren't sure when sports were coming back. There was a lot of confusion and maybe a rash decision was made that shouldn't have been.

But I think it's a little bit different from what we're seeing now, which is just the shift to, we got to figure out how we're going to make all the profits for all the sports that we paid for and the huge NBA rights, the huge NFL rights and all those things. So it is a tough, a tough place to work. I'm sure where a lot of people will be looking over their shoulders at all times wondering, am I going to be the next one up? So yeah, that's pretty tough. All right. The next question comes from, again, happy July 4th, everybody. Sorry to bring you down with that, but a fascinating subject. And I guess I should do a little bit more in terms of understanding what happened there. I kind of live in my own bubble a little bit. This from Jake. If they end up trading Daniil Hunter,

what would be a successful season in this rebuilding year? 10 wins, 11 wins, division title, playoff win. And no, you cannot say six wins for draft pick purposes. It's a good question. I mean, if they trade Hunter, it's hard to see 11 wins it's hard to see a division title it's hard to see a playoff win because there's just not a lot of ways to pressure the quarterback and our buddy brandon thorn who comes on the show sometimes he put out some data which is worth looking at that he tracked all these pressures and watched them

back because he's crazy about football. He does Trench Warfare, the newsletter, if you want to go check that out. Really, really great work. But he looked at all the pass rushers and the quality of their pressures. You won't be surprised that Daniil Hunter was up there. And if you're losing that, guess who else was up there? Z'Darrius Smith as well. Losing those two guys in the same season and then replacing them with Marcus

Davenport and question marks on a defense that already has a questionable secondary. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's pretty hard to get to 11 wins or more when it comes to that. I think I will give you a less specific answer in terms of a win total of what would be a good year. The right people playing well and looking like they're going to be major parts of the season would be a success. So winning the difference between winning eight games and 10 games, as you've really found out the last two years is pretty small, very small. You can miss a field goal. You can get a fumble. I mean, we go back to 2021, the first couple weeks of the season,

Dalvin Cook probably didn't fumble in Cincinnati. Greg Joseph missed a field goal at the end. I mean, they're right there. And last year, Joseph makes the field goal at the end, and they didn't fumble very often and, you know, so on and so forth. So, yeah, okay, if they win somewhere between seven and ten games but if they do it kind of on the back of just justin jefferson being justin jefferson and they rank 28th in defense and you're still asking who the heck are the cornerbacks for the future uh the running game doesn't emerge and we're just sort

of shrugging our shoulders. That's not a very successful season. If you win, even if you win nine games that way, that's really not a very successful season. It's a successful season. If Jordan Addison is good, if Andrew Booth Jr. or Caleb Evans or both are good. If a rookie emerges who was not Jordan Addison from this year or last year, if Louis seen is playing, if we see a major jump from a pass rusher in that scenario, say it's Patrick Jones or even DJ Wanham, who we've kind of written off, but he hasn't shown a ton of signs of being a consistent rusher, but there is a thing such as development and players can emerge. If the offensive line is really good, then that means they're going to stay together and they're going to extend

Ezra Cleveland and Ed Ingram looks good and they made the right decision on Garrett Bradbury and they're extending Christian Derrissaw and he had another great year. There's a way that you can win eight or nine games and have this be a very great year. There's a way that you can win eight or nine games and have this be a very successful season. There's also a way you can win 10 games and have it not be a successful season really at all. If it's a bunch of luck, again, if Kevin O'Connell is just the luckiest luckster who ever lucked out and he gets all the field goals to go in, the other team misses game-winning field goals, they win the turnover battle in a handful of games and they get to 10 and it's again, just kind of bogus. Well, that's not, that's not great for the future. I think that's what

really matters here. Yeah. If you won six games and got a higher draft pick, that'd be a pretty successful season because you're looking at the, you know, the quarterback of the future, which everybody's always looking at. But since I can't say that, that's how I will answer. It's a great question though, but I don't think that it's really based on a win total. I think it's who emerged and who played the best football. All right, let's get three more questions in here and always happy to take more at Matthew Collar. Send me a DM on Twitter or a regular mention. I'll see it. And you could also go to purpleinsider.com as well. Contact us, do it that way. From Francis, I know rankings week has pretty much wrapped up. Yeah,

last week, if you want to go back and look at that on the website. But I was wondering if you'd be able to rank your three to five favorite places to consume online content in the off season. Well, yeah, I mean, PFF is always a place that I'm going to read what their people have for sure. For me, it's really kind of a individual writer type of basis. So I just mentioned Brandon Thorne. He does great stuff on the trenches, trench warfare.

Kevin Cole, who was on this show recently, I subscribed to his newsletter, Unexpected Points. So I've kind of gotten into a lot of writers who do individual stuff. You guys know Tyler Dunn comes on this show. His substack is called Go Long. And I really like the way that a lot of journalists are kind of going in the direction that I did. Now, I was forced to go in that direction, whereas a lot of other writers are leaving their jobs and kind of taking their audiences with them, just like I did here. But I like to support those people who are doing that. Cody Alexander does a great job. He's been on the show before, the defensive guru.

So I read some of his stuff. But there's a lot of great people out there. I don't know if I could give you three. I like to read local beat reporters. I follow a ton of local beat reporters. And when interesting stuff comes up in Cleveland or Atlanta or wherever, I'm going to try to pay attention to it. Local newspaper beat reporter usually knows the most about the team.

And so if I'm looking for a little information on somebody, the Vikings are playing, I'm kind of going to go to their local newspaper and see what they've been writing. And the ringer has a lot of great football content. Kevin Clark is one of the best. So if he writes something, I'm absolutely going to read that. So it's for me, it's a, it's a mixed mash. And this is why when Twitter went weird the other day, and it looked like it might just collapse on all of us or not allow us to read tweets anymore, which is a weird business model. But the biggest disappointment is that there's so many people's work who I read on a daily basis that even when it was down for a whole day for me, because I maxed out my tweet limit or something,

it was weird to not be reading stuff because people are always posting their articles and I'm just clicking on kind of, or it gets shared into your feed and you read something random. So I'm always just kind of constantly gathering what everybody's writing. And it's hard to say three to five because I'm going to read, you know, Bill Barnwell on ESPN, what he's writing. And it's hard to say three to five, because I'm going to read Bill Barnwell on ESPN, what he's writing about. So there's just so many different places that I consume content. So hopefully Twitter kind of gets it figured out and everybody doesn't have to leave. And we'll see from there. But yeah, I can't say that there's like one specific person

or several specific websites that I'm just always going to. So this one comes from Chuck and I don't understand the question, but this was a question inside the newsletter chat. What kind of bear is the best? What kind of bear is the best? I don't know if there's supposed to be more to that question, but I would say the type of bear who tanks to then get the number one pick and then trades down and gathers more draft capital. And if it doesn't work with the quarterback that this bear has, then this bear will draft the next quarterback next year. That bear is Ryan Pulse.

He has been the best bear. Although the trade for Chase Claypool, we'll see how it goes this year. Maybe bear is Ryan Pulse. He has been the best bear. Although the trade for Chase Claypool, we'll see how it goes this year. Maybe a little bit questionable, but you have to admit that the bears are in maybe the best position they've been in, in quite some time to build a real winning team. Is that what you were talking about? You're talking about Mike Singletary? You're talking about throwback Mike Ditka bears? Is that what we're talking about? You know who I thought was going to be a great bear that wasn't was the A-Train, Anthony Thomas.

Anybody remember him? He was not the best bear. Thomas Jones is a great bear, though. Anyway, lots of great bears. Brian Urlacher. When you go to Chicago and you drive around and you see Brian Urlacher with hair on a bunch of billboards, he's probably the best bear. But I don't know why he did that hair thing.

All right, final question. This is what you get. You want a football podcast on July 4th. This is what you got. Final question from OldDrummer55, a longtime supporter of Purple Insider. Greatly appreciate him. Barring a visit from the injury Grim Reaper, I believe the offensive line will improve this year. I'm very curious whether or not Bradbury will continue his upward trend. I think if Garrett Bradbury just plays the

same football that he did last year for the rest of his career, he will be considered a very, very solid and good player and absolutely good enough to win with. You can't have two guards that just get throttled. It wasn't every single game that they did, but it was far too often. You can't have every third down teams just send a stunt or a blitz and have it work. You can't just have Jonathan Allen or,

you know, Dexter Lawrence blow through the interior of your offensive line time and time again. It's going to make it very difficult to succeed in the passing game, even if it is a different quarterback down the road. I am, where am I at with the offensive line improvement? I don't want to put myself out on this limb. I just, if it happens, I think that it should have because of where they drafted all these guys. If you're going to spend that much in draft capital on the offensive line,

yeah, eventually this should be a great offensive line. If you're spending all second and first round picks, three firsts and two seconds, you should look like the Cowboys in 1993 with all that draft capital that you're putting forward. So far, that hasn't been the case. And I think it's one of the potential outcomes that Cleveland and Ingram get better and that Bradbury continues what he's doing.

It is an outlier season so far from Bradbury. We've only seen him do it once. He has to do him do it once. He has to do it more than once. And it wasn't even the entire season because he was banged up toward the end of the season. So he didn't even play every game. And we're kind of declaring it, oh, this big step. Will he continue to improve? I don't think that there's much more to squeeze out of that.

But I do think that what he did last year was top 10 type of center stuff. And if he can be in that fringe, he won't be the number one center in the league. But if he's, he's just not big enough to be the number one center in the league, but if he is very good and very solid and pass protection, then you can have an elite offensive line without a center. Who's necessarily the best pass blocker. But those guards, I just don't know if I want to make the bet yet because I am concerned about the element of just giving up those blitzes and stunts and twists and everything. Can you learn to spot those better? Can you learn to see those better can you learn to see those

better that wasn't a Garrett Bradbury problem Garrett Bradbury's problem was not anchoring when he was getting pass rushed and there's also context too was he being attacked less last year that's worth asking as well maybe they were just going after the rookie guard a lot more Ezra Cleveland has not gotten that part down he is a very good run blocker but he has not gotten that part down. He is a very good run blocker, but he has not gotten that part down of being able to really see what the defense is doing, diagnose it, and make the right blocks. And also, there's just a lot of swinging and missing. So are guards like home run hitters, where they swing and miss? I think that's a question to ask, because I don't think Bradbury was a swing and miss.

Bradbury was a get picked up and driven back into the quarterback by Kenny Clark or Akeem Hicks. Not having Akeem Hicks in the division also helped his pressure and PFF grades, I'm sure. But is it something that you can vastly improve that you have these lunge moments or these complete whiffs on pass rushers? I think we're going to find out with Ingram and Ezra Cleveland. So I'm not ready to declare it. I think that it's in the realm of possibility. And if it does happen, then wow, are they set up for the future? I mean, just wow. On the offensive side, if you were to put out a great offensive line with Jefferson, maybe Hawkinson on an extension, a first round draft pick, there is so much to work with there if you have the offensive line figured out. If not, then kind of back to the drawing board. At least you have the tackles, the hardest part, but that means a couple more positions being replaced in the future. All right. Thank you, everybody, for all the great questions. As always, we'll definitely be accepting more.

I think we're going to do some version of Hot Routes on the YouTube channel. And we'll obviously post it to the podcast as well for July 4th. I mean, I'm just kind of enjoying the day. Might as well talk some football when we can, right? So thanks again, everybody. Continue to keep those questions coming. Go check out the newsletter, get in the chat there, and we will have some fun conversation from there. So thanks, everybody. We'll talk soon.