I personally feel Lovie Smith has been good for the Bears, I mean, we’ve enjoyed some of the best Bears years in recent history with Smith at the helm, I mean just taking into account the Bears/Packers rivarly, I’m pretty sure up until this year’s game at Lambeau, Lovie was undeafted up there.

But I do agree that since Babich as been DC the defense has just been horribly inconsistent, which makes this years team one of the most frustrating to watch, take last night for instance, a 21-7 lead and boom, right out the gates the Saints just start converting on third down and long, it was only through the play of Ogunleye they didn’t score on that drive.

and whose call is it to throw the ball with a lead with about 5 mins left in the game? we should have kept the ball on the ground and tried to sustain a drive and eat up the clock, but thats just my opinion

because, well, his inability to really separate is something that teams will always be down on. I think he could be useful as a possession guy, 4th/5th receiver, but I can also understand not going to him when he doesn’t bring a key dimension to the skillset at WR.

with them passing on Albert last year. I like Chris Williams … but for a passing offense. For a coordinator like Ron Turner? Albert has much better upside and is a more physical presence. Sure, he would’ve been a gamble on adjusting to tackle, but it was a gamble most felt he could make.

I was hoping for Clady last year, but alas, the Broncos took him.

That said, I’d give Williams a bit more time. He’s a good talent that could be decent in the run game.

but a possible idea i was mulling over would be

1. Cubs send DeRosa to the Indians for a couple prospects, working with the Marlins to identify who. Indians are still looking for another middle infielder, as Luis Valbuena needs more time (and I’m still not sold he’s a starter). I think Adam Miller might be a pipedream, but if you can net Miller, than I think the Marlins would have interest. Kelvin de la Cruz is a thought, and they have some positional depth that the Fish could look at, although the Marlins have a deep pool of positional options, along with some pen possibilities, with Tony Sipp working his way back as a guy to keep in mind.

2. Send 3 guys from Pie/Castillo and whoever we get from the Indians for Hermida.

To be honest, I’m not sure this is enough. We don’t know how much they like Castillo either (they want a ready guy, and they might not view Castillo as that).

my issue with Kubel is that I’m not sure he’s a regular and more a platoon guy, and if we are looking for platoon options, I think we can find some cheaper possibilities.

the Bulls did it a two summers ago with Ben Wallace and Kirk Hinrich. It has been widely panned. Granted, there are reasons why it was panned, largely to do with the fact that they overpaid for mediocre/bad players, but also due to the fact that expiring contracts are a much more relevant issue as trade commodities, and by frontloading the Bulls reduced the value of the expiring contracts.

But yeah, with regard to baseball, there’s no reason it couldn’t happen. It’s just that most teams prefer to slightly backload a deal to allow more current financial flexibility and to soften the financial impact of the contract by considering inflation on the back end years.

The “win now” idea has something to do with it too. If you frontload, you make it harder to bring in talent now. Considering that there’s no guarantee a GM will be around to see the back end years, they’d rather more flexibility to bring in talent today than to bring in talent in 4-5 years when it’s possible that another GM will be reaping the benefits of the added flexibility.

There’s still some of those who remain among baseball’s GMs. Kevin Towers comes to mind pretty quickly

sent signals out afterwards that other teams were viable. namely, he pointed out the giants.

as i’ve said before, the idea that public negotiations is necessarily a flawed strategy is a flawed concept in some respects. from a theoretical negotations analysis, to an academic perspective, to a practical analysis, there is very little to suggest that the notion of public negotiations automatically causes the side to initiate it to suffer. in this situation, towers started out with a short deck. he made missteps along the way, but he, imo, made the most viable play possible to establish any sort of leverage. i don’t like towers, i think he’s done poorly in some moves, but i also think he’s been hamstrung by his ownership and his bosses.

i still think, though, that peavy will get moved. I do, though, expect towers to try and establish some more leverage over the situation. how? well

a) I think Giles gets moved sooner than later. Giles won’t net a huge return … but he could increase the Peavy return by enhancing the argument that this will be a baseball decision and not a financial decision.

b) I expect to hear about other teams getting involved. It was quite noticeable how the Angels package was floated out there real quick. Either the Angels were sitting and waiting … or this was an intentional leak.

The one problem with public negotiations is that it has the potential to engender bad feelings, but that shouldn’t be the priority for Towers right now. To compare this to the Santana situation would be somewhat flawed. Bill Smith limited his own market last year, by most accounts, whereas in this situation, Towers had the short deck to start with.

Now, how it finally plays out will interest me. There’s been so many different rumors about what is going on in this that I think some college kid could write a term paper on it if they could interview all parties involved.

What will interest me the most, from a theoretical, academic perspective, is how Axelrod and Towers’s relationship might have impacted this process. I ask this because everyone is automatically assuming that Axelrod called out Towers by saying the Padres asked for too much. The assumption being, once again, that going public implies something negative. One of the counters to the above assumption, though, would be that Axelrod is helping Towers lower expectations, either to lessen the backlash from the fan base or to make Towers look better with whatever the end result turns out to be. Keep in mind the mixed signals that have been sent throughout this process, with rumors and suggestions that Towers and Axelrod, if not coordinating, knew what each other’s moves were. In short, considering the complexity of the process, could Towers have simply been participating in a good faith gesture to Peavy by negotiating with us? It’s difficult to make a full analysis of this without knowing what the actual parameters for a deal were. Could it be that he goes to Peavy now and says, “hey, I tried my best to keep you in the NL. If you want out, you’ll have to look to another league”? At the end of the day, if the only option to getting out is out of the soft top 5, Peavy probably takes it, imo.

some random guesses:

by next week’s end (around the 20th), we’ll see some dominoes fall in the OF market. Before Christmas, we’ll see the Braves reluctantly crawl back into the Peavy negotiations despite the current stance right now. B/w Christmas and New Year’s, Brian Giles will be shipped out somewhere. Sometime after the New Year, Jake Peavy will be on a different team. My bet as of now? Anaheim will miss on Tex, causing them to run to another option, say, Adam Dunn, leaving them enough leeway to make a Peavy deal.