PFK, I can certainly agree with many/most of your points
2. Does anyone still question that as good as Wes Welker has been, Danny Amendola is going to fill that role without missing beat…..IF he stays healthy. Let me put it this way.
I'll include all the points, but why waste the space (above).
I think the coaches got the right read on Amendola and he certainly looked to be capable of doing the job. there was one bad miscue between Brady/Amendoila, but that's to be expected. He's further along than where I thought he would be and he needs to improve his situational awareness. One of those early receptions was close to a first down and he got tackled before he could make it. If that was a 3rd down pass, it would have been a punt.
He must love Brady throwing it to him. Brady (per poitn 1 in your original post) is awesome and he hit Amedola in stride on 2 great plays. One was on 3rd and 11, the other was the TD.
3. I liked what I saw from Ryan Mallet tonight. I saw him look off receivers. I saw him go to second options. I saw him throw it away when nothing was there. As far as decision making was concerned, I thought it was his best night as a pro. Even when his passes were off, they were to the right guy. It was an fairly significant improvement over his first game. Still a ways to go, but very few QB’s look good when you are being compared to the “exemplar”
Definitely in agreement on the decision making part. One thing I don't like about his throws is that half the time his receivers are in a stopped position. He'll need to be able to lead the receiver and hit him in stride for "our" offense to run smoothly.
4. Speaking of the OL, the first group stuffed a pretty good TB front 7 to night.
Still, it's against a vanilla D. Because we play them in week 3, I'm fairly certain teams aren't showing their hand at this time. Which works both ways and it's a very good run defense, so we can be competitive in the run game against most if not all defenses (that's my ope).
Also, I don't think any runner is going to unseat Ridley. He looked great going through the holes and even had some good vision and bounced for extra yards on many occasions. No worries about "happy feet" with him.
7. Dobson, Boyce, and Thompkins looked like the rookies they are tonight and took a small step back from the frantic pace of the first 3 weeks of camp. But Zack Sudfeld certainly DIDN’T. The kid looked Jimmy Graham good. With Fells out Sudfeld took full advantage of his opportunity. Both is scoring plays were TOUGH contested catches. This kid might end up contributing more than any of the rookie WR’s early this season.
I think i get what you mean about Jimmy Graham good. Not that he is on the same level as Graham, but seems to have a similar style and is much better than anyone could have imagined at this point. He appears to be a good player at this point and we'll have to see what happens going forward. But, very excited about his potential pass catching ability.
And Thompkins blocking has looked great so far.
......most of the time tonight I wish Tebow would have just pooch putted!
