toffee
Well-known member
Robert Gallery, and Luke Joeckel both were first round bust, and both played for the Hawks. From skill and performance perspective, who was better?
We got gallery when he was old and injured, but was he awful? I don't remember him being that badNeither was very good here, but from what I remember, Gallery was particularly awful.
I think we got both on the cheap, and Cable tried to give their career a reboot?
I think the Joeckel signing was just further proof of how bad Cable was at assessing linemen. I remembered this quote from back then:Joeckel was NOT cheap.
Joeckel was drafted second overall in 2013 to be a tackle for the Jaguars. They tried him at LT and RT, correctly saw no reason in his first three seasons for them to pick up the fifth-year option on his first-round rookie contract, and then happily let him walk once their four-year sentence for having picked him was over. In Joeckel's four seasons with the Jaguars, he missed a bunch of games with injuries and didn't play very well when available.
For the Jags, Joeckel had been a poor investment of draft capital at tackle, by then a highly-paid position. Jacksonville was unsatisfied paying him what he made on his rookie contract, under which his percentage of the Jags' cap peaked at 3.5%.
The Seahawks then brought him in for $8M, with a cap number of $7.25M, which was 4.3% of the 2017 salary cap, and moved him to guard, where his cap number made him the sixth-most-expensive left guard in the league. His cap hit would also have been third-biggest among right tackles that season, or even 12th-biggest among left tackles. And Joeckel was absolutely awful as a guard. I'd say he was a turnstile, but turnstiles offer more resistance to the person passing through them than Joeckel did. Joeckel's season age in 2017 was 26, but he was never signed by any NFL team again after that.
I stand up for Carroll and Schneider against the people who complain about the Seahawks front office's bad moves while ignoring or undervaluing the good moves. However, that doesn't mean I don't criticize the bad moves. I consider the signing of Joeckel one of the worst moves the "PC/JS" Seahawks have ever made. I still don't understand it. It was a one-year deal, but it wasn't a cheap "prove-it" contract. It had the sixth-biggest cap hit among 2017 left-guard contracts, for a guy who wasn't one of the 64 best guards in the league. It didn't have a team option for further years, so the best-case scenario for the Seahawks was that Joeckel would play reasonably well in 2017, and then cost more after that, so the Seahawks would have either had to pay Joeckel even more to keep him or let him go and sign somebody else (spoiler: in the next offseason, they ended up getting Fluker, and he and Pocic did considerably less badly for a good deal less money). The contract paid Joeckel without him having shown any signs of being worth it, and didn't give the Seahawks any advantages at all, like a team option that could have given them a discount for 2018 if Joeckel had been good in 2017. If the front office thought Joeckel was going to be worth $8M in 2017, it should have gotten at least a team option for 2018. If the front office didn't think Joeckel was going to be that good in 2017, it shouldn't have given him that contract.
My initial assessment of the Joeckel signing when it was announced was that it was a cruel "Joeck" on Seahawks fans, and I'll stand by that over six years later.
I think the Joeckel signing was just further proof of how bad Cable was at assessing linemen. I remembered this quote from back then:
Apparently Cable thought that Joeckel was the best LG in the league the year prior to signing him. So that huge contract they gave him wasn’t intended to be a “prove it” deal, they actually thought his play with the Jags warranted a contract like that.
I don't remember Gallery being that bad, but it could just be that he looked so physically imposing that it made his play easier to forgive. He looked like you want your linemen to look, for the most part (could get a little leaner). Big and mean.
View attachment 59567
Side note: He's lean as hell now.
Jackass Coach Cable was very confrontational with both players and other coaches. He got in trouble with the Oakland Raiders when he fought with and broke another coaches jaw. He brought that same selfish attitude here as a Seahawks coach.
In my humble opinion...He is the one who "Broke" Thomas Rawls after his injury. Self confidence is so important and "Little Train" seemed to hesitate after the injury. I remember reading about Coach Cable talking some trash about him. Sorry that I can't find the stories that back up my claim.