We may already have our starting RT.

https://twitter.com/Matthew_Paras/st...10899191894060

We may already have our starting RT.

https://twitter.com/Matthew_Paras/st...10899191894060

May is a good choice of words. I hope he is able to turn it all around. He should make the roster and get some chance to show if he has improved in real regular season games but it might also be reasonable to bring in cheap competition in case he struggles.

Looking at both sides of the coin, Penning struggled last year, was then benched the latter half of the year and barely saw the field even with many starters injured, reports out of training camp had him getting dominated on many reps, he played very poorly the first preseason game, then improved in the latter two preseason games. His confidence may be up, but early in the season he will face tough experienced pass rushers looking to target his weaknesses and that confidence may go back down or prove to be an illusion. Its possible that everything just clicked in week 2 of year 3 preseason but its also possible that a few quarters of football over an 8 day period in preseason is a mirage and years of struggle is the reality, or that Penning is just inconsistent. Overall I think it could be reasonable to view the odds as something like that 1/3rd he is truly improved, 1/3rd he will be a mixed bag, and 1/3rd he will be a train wreck and a few quarters against backups in vanilla plays is a total mirage. A 1/3rd scenario that Penning will be so bad he will get Derek Carr so badly injured that Carr will be unable to pass a physical on 3/17/2025 and Carr's $30 million 2025 salary will become guaranteed even if the injury is career threatening is a scary scenario so I think its smart to have some backup plan desite 8 days of more encouraging preseason performance.

To illustrate the point that we have to take preseason stats of notoriously unreliable players with a grain of salt, I give you Nathan Peterman's 3rd year preseason stats. Peterman had a superb 2019 preseason with no INT's and looked like a QB who could potentially be starting caliber. In particular in the final two preseason games of his third year, Peterman was 17 for 20 with no turnovers and his team won both games. Peterman was then injured, never played a down in the 2019 regular season, and has since continued to be extremely unreliable in regular season games.

https://www.nfl.com/players/nathan-p...ats/logs/2019/

Overall, with Pennings improvement, I feel like our situation at RT has gone from barreling toward a sheer cliff to speeding into a blind intersection against a red light. Its gone from knowing Carr is going to get killed to crossing our fingers knowing he might get killed but maybe we get lucky.

I don't get where you come from on thinking Carr would absolutely get injured. Carr has missed TWO games in his entire career due to injury. Sounds pretty pessimistic.

Everyone uses a little bit of exaggerated and colorful language. The point is that last season Penning struggled in 6 starts and Carr did get an injury that nagged him the rest of the season. Also, although Carr refused to miss games, he had 2 concussions and a nagging shoulder injury last year where perhaps he would have missed games. To me, if Penning was a turnstile this year and we played him anyway, the odds of Carr getting injured could be pretty high, if not 100%. If the oline was worse and Carr increased from 2 concussions last year to 3-4 in 2024 that alone might end his career. Also we saw at least two older QBs have season ending injuries last year early on in Rodgers and Cousins. Both of them had been relatively healthy before, just like Carr. So if Penning was a turnstile, it just could not be that crazy for Carr to suffer a similar fate to what two of his closest veteran QB piers did just last year. Rodgers contract was the closest to Carrs among veteran QBs switching teams in 2023, and Cousins was the closest 2024 transaction to those two, so if two of three can suffer major ACL type injuries out of the blue after years of health, the risk to Carr is real if our oline is a sieve.

Another key difference is that Carr could have a $30 million financial incentive to get injured if he struggles too much this year. If he struggles, he would stand to be cut, and have diminished value as a free agent two teams have given up on, more of a Russ Wilson or Ryan Tannehill type option. But if he got hurt, his salary guarantees right at the start of the league year, and he could not be cut while hurt, so it could be tempting to 'rehab slow.' Last year Carr's upcoming salary was already guaranteed so there was no big financial incentive either way. I hope our oline is decent because I worry both that a weak oline could get Carr injury and cause him to struggle in a way that might tempt him to stay injured. This may sound wacky and far fetched but this exact line of thought was what caused the Raiders to bench Carr and the Broncos to bench Wilson, fear of triggering guarantees in big QB contracts with injury is a real topic on every GMs mind.