Well, you can only be gaslighted if you allow yourself to be, and certainly not if you write this:
"I dissected that faux dynamic in realtime right after the first round was complete last month....everyone saw it and knew it."
Of course. You have only been gaslighted if you take the "best player available" story at face value. The only reasonable conclusion is Love was targeted from the outset. Gutekunst may have had a contingent trade higher on the board that the trading partner nixed as the board fell out. "Would he? Could he? Nah," with repect to Love were my thoughts when Rapoport tweeted hours before the draft that Gutekunst was making calls for a trade up.
With the water under the bridge, the relevant LaCanfora assertions to consider are:
"They moved up to, if anything, reach for the younger, cheaper guy to take over for Rodgers when they don't want to pay him $34M a year anymore to manage games for them in a risk-averse offense. That's the deal. Just own it, guys." And that Love is "a QB you are banking on being a more cost-effective replacement for Rodgers come 2022."
If there's a concensus baseline expectation this would be it among those with at least a casual acquaintance with cap matters and what a LaFleur offense might look like in its true form. But it is not something anybody should assert with certainty.
What if the Packers are sitting at 5-9, or a shortened season equivalent, in 2020 and are out of the playoffs, not far off the 5-8-1 of 2018? Does Love get the last two starts? What if the Packers are quite happy with what they see? One simply cannot rule out the "schedule", which must written in pencil at this point, gets accelerated to 2021. $32 mil in Rodgers dead cap isn't relevant if you're not planning to play him in which case you take the $5 mil in cap savings.
At the other end of the spectrum, there's another bit of revisionist history to take into account. That Rodgers was the heir from the get go, just biding his time, does quite not line up with the facts. With Favre out and Rodgers taking over in his 3rd. season the Packers drafted Brohm at #56, closer to where Love should have been taken. There was certainly the opportunity to be gaslighted by the Wolf storyline of "develop and trade" possibilities. The more plausible scenario is they were not entirely sold on Rodgers.
What if you get to 2022 and they are not entirely sold on Love while Rodgers has a 2020 or 2021 Super Bowl win in his pocket with a lot of optimism for a Brady-like twilight?
Or what if they get to year two with Love and find out he's a box of rocks as far as grasping a pro system and gets cut as with Brohm?
Projections are just that, not future realities. All you have is a baseline of expectation. The future has a nasty habit of not caring what your projection might be.
So, what in this piece is worthy of being angry about? That LaCamfora called LaFleur and Gutekunst liars? Maybe Packer fans were conditioned too long by Thompson's, "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," mode of operation, speaking infrequently and then saying next to nothing when he did. McCarthy had a knack for inarticulation where there wasn't much to latch onto in all of the words.
LaCamfora's seeming outrage at the misdirections is itself naive. GMs, coaches, people lie all the time to advance their ends. It's just the degree and importance of those lies that matters. These lies cannot be elevated to the extent of outrage. Nothing to be suprised about or particularly upset with this spin, otherwise you've gaslighted yourself. What matters is whether the decisions and projections pan out.
