WrigleyField 22

I still blame Hinkie for ruining a generation of sports fans to trust the process.

Sports tanking is the real reason everyone is leaving Illinois.

Trust the process

The very highest I think Poles can justify a QB would be like 3rd round for say Hendon Hooker. Any picks before that (64) should be going to find immediate starters/rotation guys with a good chance of being impact players. And even then I probably wouldn't want to burn 64 if they don't get a big trade haul for #1.

Hotly debated and you're gonna piss off someone either way. Welcome.

There are 3 tiers of 2nd contracts for RBs. The elite tier is 15-16M/year = McCaffery, Elliott, Kamara The 2nd tier is 12-12.6M/year = Aaron Jones, Henry, Mixon, Chubb Then the 3rd tier is all the way down at 7-8M/year = Conner, Fournette, Ekeler Now there's a guy in each tier that probably shouldn't be their (Elliott down 1, Henry and Ekeler up 1), but I think Montgomery would rightly value himself in that 2nd tier. Maybe he's not on Derrick Henry's level, but he's clearly better than Fournette and James Conner. And Barkley obviously belongs in that elite tier. So, you're talking about 12M for Montgomery vs. 15M for Barkley. Barkley is worth that difference. Now to be fair, Montgomery may not get 12M on the open market as all those guys re-signed to avoid hitting the market, so there may not be an open market to pay a guy that much. But that's besides the point for the Bears who would be paying for him NOT to hit the market. I guess there's a scenario where he hits the market, realizes he's not valued in that 2nd tier and signs back with the Bears for like 7-8M/year, but that's risky for the Bears to let him hit the market. And still, if the Bears miss out on Barkley, they could go much cheaper than 7-8M for a backup RB and give the reins to Herbert. I was surprised when you got to the part of Montgomery being in the second tier. I do not think the broader public views it that way. I just looked at a few different lists for the top FA RB's for example, and Montgomery is usually 5th on those lists. That would be a stunning contract for me if he got 12 million a year. A year ago I would have said DM had a chance to hit 12 to match Mixon (which isn't even the same as cap% adjusted that would still be a smaller deal). But I definitely got less bullish on that just on how the market has shaped up, and partially just on DMs play. He didn't really change, but I think seeing Herbert's explosiveness in the same scheme really confirmed some of DMs weaknesses. Plus I really think Mixon proved he isn't worth that deal and Aaron Jones had a similar deal he just agreed to negotiate down. So I think the RB market still hasn't fully had its corrective adjustments in the market. Still has some good things going for him, but he's really a short yardage and 3rd down back, who's ideally paired in a timeshare. PFF has him at 3/19.5 I had put it at 3/25 before they did that estimate. That seems like a likely range though, unless he gets stuck holding out and missing the market and has to go with more of a prove-it deal.

Pretty interesting. May dig in more later. Bears aren't awful, but could be better. Poor food grade. We better be giving Fields the best Vegan meal options possible! https://nflpa.com/chicago-bears-report-card On individual grades you can see how much players love Halas Hall renos: top 5 for weight room, training room, and locker room. All teams grades https://nflpa.com/nfl-player-team-report-cards

For the two dead kids and their families, definitely.

And just like that, heres more. It's a misdemeanor offense.

Yikes I know theae guys are still basically children and most of us did really stupid things in our late teens / early 20s. This is a bad look for him though. Wonder if it will drop him.

Or when 51 of us agreed on anything. Not even the usual suspects are taking the contrarian take, apparently. Impressive.

Compromise: we'll create a site no one likes. This guy gets it

It's okay I never needed insider status to feel validated!

Seems low (hockey casual here)

Yea I don't know how practical it is on the backend, but I go to a Bears board that has experimented with merging 2 or 3 boards (Bears, other NFL, Draft) in an out of the main board due to volume at different point of season / offseason. It works well but I imagine it may be a little bit of a pain.

I mean surely Brock is just smart enough to insult the Cardinals to endear himself to us, but I'll accept that blatant ass kissing as genuine. I approve of our new corporate overlords.

What you've generally laid out sounds good to me. I don't have answers as to why some of these things like rants got split out. I'm sure long ago with much different activity levels it ended up making sense, and just hasn't been updated in ages.

fair. the off topic stuff was what i was mainly thinking of as the place for some megathreads. i guess it depends on how granular you would want to get with that stuff and how much the traffic does or doesn't warrant it. I'm kinda with you; I don't mind the megathreads, but would prefer more subforums. Like, one for politics, movies, music, food, etc.. Having a broader off topic forum still makes sense, and rants is fine. I think a "serious topics" forum is a decent idea, too. I know I'm biased, but I think the non-sports posters/topics have been doing a LOT of the legwork in keeping this place from being a ghost town. I know some of it comes down to moderation effort from volunteer mods, but I think social has always had a great beat to it. To borrow the movie or TV example, when Game if Thrones was on its live run, we busted out a separate thread for it. Or MCU and Star Wars have kept separate threads from Movie thread. Don't need a whole subforum. Sports/socual sub forums have stayed active and the frequency of talk between different topics has stayed fresh, without pushing activity off page 1 too quickly. There is no need to get so granual with OT type sub forums IMO. Perhaps by total accident, but those sub forums are keeping activity up because the rhythm to topic frequency actually makes sense and are accessible.

The new software has a robust activity tool that many of you will surely want to explore. It has all sorts of settings and can be quite granular based on your own interests. And you can save these settings to be quickly-toggled options for future use. https://brewerfanatic.com/discover/unread/ Very excited to see it in action. As long as those tools exist, it should hopefully help with killing mega threads.

To be blunt about it, I don't care about off-topic/social stuff unless it goes against advertising policy (ie. gets us blocked from our advertiser, which requires some pretty awful stuff or nudity, which definitely isn't awful by my standards but they feel differently) or goes against what I talked about above (ie. basic human decency). And when I say "basic human decency", I *do not* mean dark humor, I mean racism and general awfulness that is all too prevalent in our society. My opinion is that the first page of a forum should roll over every couple of weeks (again, specifically talking Cubs content here). Having more, focused threads increases engagement while encouraging new users to jump into the pool. Hell, just the news of the site purchase and this active thread has bumped traffic considerably in the past 24-ish hours. I encourage people to start considering what they're about to type and go ahead and create a new thread about it if it's a timely, specific point that will spin off its own conversation. To a significant portion of users, long-running mega-threads become wallpaper. More topics with specific titles encourage people to not only read more but post more, too. And a more visually active forum with lots of recent posts takes down one of the barriers people have to registering and making their first comment. I tend to agree. A lot of us I think use the active topic shortcut to view activity. That looks like it's rolling over from Sunday on page 1 right now. Not sure if 48ish hours is typical there. So you might get some pushback there from users accustomed to logging and and seeing a couple days worth of active topics. But probably a majority of those are not even cubs/baseball related since the non baseball forums actually start new threads with regularity whereas all Cubs/baseball discussion gets swallowed into mega threads almost by default.

Let's adopt this forum and let Mojo go nuts imo https://brewerfanatic.com/forums/forum/42-head-2-head-debate-forum/

I think social/sports forum has a pretty good mix of mega v non mega threads honestly. Like every subset of idiots we talk about there has there own thread and we are consistently adding threads for new kind of idiots and occassionally spinning them off into tangential threads. General Cubs Chit Chat on the Cubs Discussion sub forum is definitely a mockery of forums lol Page 1 of Cubs Discussion still has a last post date of July 2022! Just start a new damn thread! Compare to Feb 2023 for social and Dec 2022 for other sports for latest post date on page 1

You don't have to worry about this. We're in this for the long haul and fully expect to lose money the first couple of years, maybe turning a profit by year three or four. And if things go disastrously wrong from there, it costs us virtually nothing to shut down the parts of the site with high overhead (front page news, videos, etc) and return to being a forum. There will be no need to ever shut down the site provided there are people here interested in discussing the Cubs. What if 80% of my posts are in social/other sports sub forums