TF_Titan

Like I said...their economy is not very big. It doesn't take muck to have a major impact. I'm not sure most Russians realize that they're not the super power their government tells them they are. This is why the US and Europe need to bring the hammer down with sanctions. The Russian people absolutely need to feel the full consequences of the actions of their leader. Putin is too far committed personally to back off now. The only thing that's going to stop him is for him to be removed one way or the other, and the only way that's likely to happen is by massive discontent in the population. BTW, If Putin were to try to use the army to crack down on Russian citizens I'm not sure there wouldn't be a coup. I have to believe the soldiers realize by now Putin is willing to sacrifice them in for is own personal agenda and I can't imagine they'd turn their guns on their own people. That's exactly how the Communist government fell. Then again...maybe that's wishful thinking.

Russia's entire economy is only slightly larger than the state of Florida. The bottom line is they don't have the money to build up a massive military. Obviously they have nukes, but their conventional forces are a paper tiger...as we are seeing now. There's no way they could ever hope to be a real threat to European countries other than to play the nuke card. I have to believe that even if Putin was deranged enough to want to do that smarter heads in the government/military would prevail.

This is the bottom line. We thought giving these totalitarian countries access to the western economy would convince them to become good world citizens. We were wrong. We need to acknowledge that and commit to isolating them economically. Obviously we can't do that without incurring significant economic harm ourselves, but that's the bed we made for ourselves. And the alternative in the long term is much, much worse. Unfortunately I don't think we'll have the stomach to do it because the billionaires who own our politicians stand to lose too much personally.

Sure, but it could cause Putin to pump the brakes on his Soviet Union reunion tour. It's really about what happens after Ukraine at this point.

There's only so much the US can do. We don't have much economic leverage over Russia. Europe does and holds the key to this. If they have the balls to completely isolate Russia economically that's the only real leverage the west has. But that would also cause economic pain for Europe, and I don't think European leaders would have the courage to do it. China is watching all this closely and don't think how the west responds to Russia won't have a big effect on how China behaves toward Taiwan. The bottom line is...this is what happens when you allow yourself to become economically dependent on bad actors on the world stage. The west created this mess by allowing their greed and naivety to convince them to facilitate Russia and China becoming world economic powers. Now we're in bed with them with no good way to extract ourselves from this mess...and they know it and are acting accordingly. In any case Ukraine is screwed. It's way to late to do anything to prevent the inevitable. The only question at this point is are we (mainly Europe) going to have the balls to inflict real economic pain on Russia after the fact. Again...China is watching...

Greene is definitely better. It's not even close.

I"m afraid Sankey may be the third (or maybe even fourth) best RB on the roster. He's been very disappointing.

I'm willing to give the Webster/Whisenhunt partnership a couple of seasons to put the system in place and fill out the roster. Not that I won't bitch and moan when they suck ass like they have the last few weeks, but realistically you have to give them some time given that they don't have a QB and their defensive roster was built to play a 4-3.

I could tell from his very first press conference that he was perfectly happy to defer all football decisions to Webster. He couldn't be more opposite from Bud. His title may have been COO of KSA Industries, but clearly he was little more than Bud's yes man. I'm not sure he knows what color a football is, but assuming Webster turns out to be a capable GM (jury's still out) that's probably a good thing. It will get interesting when it comes time to find the next GM, but for now this is Ruston's show. Hell, Tommy didn't even meet Whisenhunt until after he was hired.

Greene's 1 yard TD run was more impressive than anything CJ did all day.

In that case their plan worked flawlessly.

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but there's no way they could install a complete game plan for Indy unless they got started before today. I also suspect they wanted to play Jacksonville close to the vest and not expose anything that might be part of the Indy game plan. I do agree that if it's true it doesn't reflect well on Munchak.

My guess is they treated this game more like a preseason game with little game planning since they had a short week afterwards to prepare for a much tougher Colts team. I think they thought they could just line up and run CJ off tackle all day and win the game...it certainly looked that way from the first half play-calling.