The Odell Beckham, Jr. Debate is *OVER*

What the fuck is wrong with these OBJ fanbois? Are they ever going to quit? How can they still be spewing their specious rhetoric when the issue has long been settled with actual facts?

For example, during episode #10 of the “For Pete’s Sake” podcast (43:40), Nicole Chatham wagged her finger at OBJ critics, and questioned our ability to think logically. She suggested that we go back to high-school debate class:

“You know what I think it really comes down to? Everyone needs to take debate in high school. This is what it actually comes down to because the number of logical fallacies that get applied to this scenario is incredible. First of all, we have the correlation-causation thing with OBJ. Just because Baker played better in the second half of the season and OBJ wasn’t on the field in the second half of the season does not mean that one of those things caused the other thing.”

Can you imagine? Debate? I’ve got news for you fanbois: The OBJ debate is over, and has been over since ESPN dropped their statistical nuke on October 29, 2020.

And I quote:

“In fact, over the last two seasons, Mayfield and Beckham have the worst completion success rate (55.6%) of any duo in the NFL (with at least 100 attempts).”

That’s right; the Baker-Beckham duo is objectively dogshit. That is not an opinion up for debate! In fact, the Browns knew about this long before ESPN published their numbers. That’s why they brought Stefanski in in the first place. His job was to work around the dogshit stuck to the franchise’s shoe by installing a Kubiak-Shanahan system that would feature Nick Chubb & Wyatt Teller rather than Baker & OBJ. The franchise was matching the coach to the talent, such as it was.

After The Great Regression year of 2019, nobody was really sure if the problem was Baker, OBJ, or Freddie Kitchens. After all, Baker played superbly with Freddie as his coach in 2018. But Freddie was made the fall-guy, and everybody thought that 2020 would be different.

It wasn’t.

Despite having the Coach of the Year at the helm, Baker-Beckham still stunk in 2020. That removed the coach as a variable. Baker-Beckham stunk under both Kitchens and Stefanski.

Then OBJ got hurt, and we saw Baker go back to his real self and play as well as any QB in NFL for the rest of the year. Anybody who even entertains the idea that Baker was the fly in the ointment is just plain crazy. You literately could not ask for better evidence to solve a mystery like this. During the second half of 2020, we learned that Baker could hit a ham sandwich if it ran a crisp route. And that proved that OBJ is the poison in the Baker-Beckham duo because even the most enthralled fanboi admits that OBJ does not run crisp routes.

Sometimes correlation *is* causation.

But that’s all ancient history.

Here in 2021, the *fact* is that while the fanbois were continuing to defend OBJ, Coach O’Shea was retooling OBJ’s routes. That’s right; the magical unicorn is now being micro-managed to fix his glaring fault: the inability to run QB-friendly routes. Maybe OBJ’s random route-running can’t be covered, but it can’t be hit either because Baker just doesn’t know what the fuck OBJ is doing out there.

Here is a summary for fanboi knuckleheads who are living in the past:

Phase 1 – Baker is awesome in his rookie year of 2018.
Phase 2 – OBJ arrives and Baker stinks for all of 2019.
Phase 3 – Baker-Beckham continues to stink in early 2020.
Phase 4 – OBJ is injured & Baker is awesome for the rest of the season.
Phase 5 – ESPN proves OBJ is Baker’s Achilles Heal in October of 2020.
Phase 6 – Coach O’Shea re-tools OBJ’s routes as first order of business in 2021.
Phase 7 – OBJ appears to be taking the coaching, though there is no reporting.

If your head is not in Phase 7, then you are a terrible football analyst/reporter, no doubt mentally crippled by your need to worship His Majesty, Odell Beckham, Jr. My advice to you is to snap the fuck out of it, and report on Coach O’Shea’s effort to fix OBJ. Because if he succeeds, it could be a truly epic event in football history. Make no mistake, this is a huge story.

Here are some questions that I want answered by the Cleveland sports OBJ-worship media:

1) Is OBJ taking the coaching? How does he feel about it?
2) Is he practicing the new routes with Baker? If so, how many reps are they doing?
3) When did he start running his random routes? High school? College? With the Giants?
4) How did Eli Manning get so much production out of OBJ?
5) How long will the Browns be patient with OBJ in 2021 if he doesn’t produce?

The last question is the most-important, because if the answer is more than three games, then we will be witnessing the Browns sliding down their Super Bowl window a few more inches.