Some teams around the NFL have officially named starters, but as of today at camp, Ron Rivera still hadn’t – saying that “we have to sit down with Eric (Bieniemy) and go through it and talk about it and evaluate Sam, and Jacoby (Brissett) as well.”
So he’s QB1 but not the starter?
“It’s probably as simple as just the translation I hear there, that ‘I haven’t told Sam and Jacoby yet, or the meeting with the staff yet, where we make the public announcement’,” Grant Paulsen said Wednesday. “Not announcing it today when asked isn’t the issue, the issue is that you still haven’t done it.
Is that odd to anyone else?”
Danny Rouhier said “that’s exactly it to me,” before GP expounded.
“If they were competing and splitting reps and Brissett was about to start against Baltimore, yeah, that makes sense you haven’t named a starter,” Grant said. “But to me, it’s saying one thing and doing another, and we’ve all accepted it as the way they’re doing business. But it all came to a head for me when he said it today, because we know the media is going to start asking now, and it becomes a story.”
Because of that, Grant thinks we’ll get an official announcement within the week, and Danny agreed with his assertion that you can’t fabricate something to change a clear narrative.
“If there really was an honest to goodness competition, no one would care either way; we’d be wondering what they’re judging the competition on,” Danny said. “But we all know it’s not a real one. The thing in life I cannot stand is when we both know what’s happening and you look me in the eye and say it’s not happening. Yes it is! You can’t BS me and lie to me.”
“He has been on record in the past citing these two practices against the Ravens as important for Howell,” Grant replied. “Rivera may come out and say we needed to get through the Browns game, and after the practices, just to make sure he looked how we wanted him to look and didn’t fall on his face. But my point is that I don’t think he ever even had the choice; from January on, it was Sam Howell or bust, and you can’t go back on that, even if you had a competition.”
That, and Brissett never really got a chance to even pretend to be QB1.
“If I was a Jacoby Brissett guy who thought he was better, I’d be upset that he didn’t get a chance to compete, even though they are pretending he did,” GP said. “The whole thing has been strange, and we can all see it. Everyone is looking at the same thing; we all know what a competition and a depth chart looks like – but you have a starter, a backup, and a number three, and you’re acting like you don’t.”
Follow Grant & Danny on Twitter: @granthpaulsen & @funnydanny
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