I’ve been living in Europe for several years now, and while I haven’t brought myself to becoming a full-fledged soccer fan, I do appreciate that fans of the sport get to watch the game all year. With so many overlapping leagues and looser management rules, there is literally always something to talk about in global soccer, and on any given day when you want to watch a game, all you just have to flip on the tube.

That said, I have a secret love for the NFL offseason – at least this stage of it. By summer, the cold sweats of football withdrawal set in, but the period from the end of the regular season until the weeks following the draft is a few months of cool. There are endless hypothetical conversations to be had, revisionist retrospection on the year past and every team’s fan base is somehow imbued in the optimism that “next year we’ll be better.” Statistically speaking, only about half are right.

To kick off this process I want to start the conversation by looking simply at what we were bad at last year, and the options on the table for fixing them. It’ll be a long time before we have more actual football to breakdown so I’ll be looking at each of these particular issues individually and in detail in the weeks to come. For now, these are my general thoughts, after the jump. (more…)