My fear, if they were to let Hoyer walk (I think they may franchise him) is that Manziel comes in, is a dud, and they are back to looking for a QB again.
This is why I was riding the play Johnny bandwagon so hard.
8-8/9-7 to me accomplishes nothing other than feeling better than 5-11.
We know Hoyer is just good enough to win some games, but he is not the guy that will take you to that next step.
Now we have created a situation where we still don't know if Johnny can play, we have divided the fan base, and we still aren't in the playoffs most likely so we really didn't accomplish anything.
I posted before the season that was my nuclear scenario. Win just enough games that it makes getting rid of Hoyer politically difficult, but at the same time make no forward progress because we still have no idea whether Johnny can play or not. We have wasted a season essentially.
You are correct that he could bomb and we'd be back at square one, but that is why they should have been trying to figure out if he could play this season instead of wasting it with a QB they knew had no long term future with the franchise. From a long term planning perspective it just never made any sense when the payoff was only going to be an 8-8/9-7 type season.
With 2 first round picks next year in what looks to be a deep QB draft it was imperative if we accomplished nothing else this season that we knew after this year whether we should be looking at them or not.