WhitewalkerInPhilly

A June 1st designation is not a magic wand that gets rid of dead cap. What it does is carry over the dead cap into 2025. So yay, the Bills STILL need to make the same cuts and restructures to get under the cap, and get the money after the top tier (and medium tier) free agents are gone. So, to recap, a Diggs cut: 1) will absolutely not get us under the cap 2) Removes a 1000 yard receiver from the roster 3) If it happens is a back breaker for bidding on new talent in 2025. Some people are going to need to wake up and smell the coffee. The numbers all but guarantee that Diggs will be on the team in 2024. Odds are, he's probably going to be here in 2025 as well. Make your peace with it.

I mean, I think it makes sense. Note that the report that Roman is not necessarily being given the OC job. But I WILL say that he's been one of the more interesting run game designers I've seen over the last decade. With him, Shady had some career highlights. It's just that the current NFL is so pass focused that even in a run heavy Ravens team a run focus isn't enough. It needs to be a complement, it can't be the main show anymore.

Great? Nah Look, we rag on Tua here. He's a rival team QB. He's not a one read QB. But I don't think there's any denying that he's come up small in December and January the last two years even with a HOF WR, a #2 who could arguably be #1 on most teams in the league and an offensive coach who tailored the offense to maximize Tua's strengths and hide his weaknesses. If I have to build a team from scratch I am taking Mahomes, Allen, Burrow, Lamar and Stroud over Tua in a heartbeat. Above average QBs get paid and very recently have been paid stupid money. With the Dolphins in as much or worse cap hell as the Bills I won't knock anyone cheering the Dolphins to lock their budget for the next 8 years. Josh's contact looks ridiculously good right now

Right before? That blows

The Daniel Jones experiment only goes as far as a compare and contrast. Both were project QBs thrust into rookie roles where they struggled early with completion percentage. The Bills went out and got Daboll early and built a supporting cast. The Giants... didn't. With Daboll in 2022 Jones had his best year ever. But Isaiah Hodgins was a contributor. That's the talent drop off. Josh all day any day

I am excited to see the Patriots have 15 more years of looking for a franchise QB Same. There were multiple times where I thought he deserved more of a shot and never got it. I was hoping he'd join us again but I'm not suddenly terrified

I just thinking of the Bills vs Cowboys. The Bills smashed them in the mouth and didn't stop and Dan Quinn couldn't stop it.

I would not necessarily plan our 2023 starters on rookies, but our depth took a beating and other than a year left of Poyer we have nothing at safety. My philosophy for the modern NFL defense is that you build to baseline with journeyman and hope your draft picks become splash players

I suspect we end the season vs the Jets. We've been rotating and the NFL loves doing division matchups on Week 18

Anything that makes investing in a WR in the first round less sound for 27 others teams is good news for me!

From your lips to God's ears

The more I see, the more confident I am that there is an immediate WR2 and potential WR1 to be had at the back end of the 1st round. Especially with an expected run on QB expected

Of course Filthy Beast is repping the Dolphins. Phins are as deep into the cap as the Bills are, only they don't have a built in restructure on their QB like the Bills have. Please let them put big guaranteed money on Tua.

Well also to people who are immunocompromised

Nate Hackett is the one piece of evidence I see that makes me think that the Rooney Rule has a point. There is nepotism in the league. There's no secret. Shedeur Sanders doesn't get this much buzz if his dad isn't a Hall of Famer. There are plenty of coaches for whom it's a family profession, with coaches bringing their kids on. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2022/11/22/nfl-coaches-nepotism-filled-dozens-positions/10702777002/ I don't think it's malicious. I think coaches want to share the love of the game with their kids. Aaron Kromer started with his dad. I am sure that no one in San Fran is going right now "I don't know, I think that being Mike Shanahan's son might have helped Kyle, are we sure he's really got it?" But when coaches staff teams with their kids as coaches, and then they make friends with people their age who have similar life experiences and worldviews and you get coaches where you ask "how the hell are they still in the league?" and it's because they have a connection like this. Hackett is just the most glaring example of someone who has failed upwards to the highest levels

I know there are jokes made, but yes. The Chief's gameplan was to take away the middle of the field and force Lamar to throw at the boundary. While I think the smart thing would have been to run the ball straight at them (rainy day, the Bills had their way with the Chiefs in the run game, you have the quickest running QB in the league, you handed the ball to your RB once?!?) when the game was on the line, Lamar just couldn't do it against a decent Chief's defense.

I think Rodgers could make a run effectively playing like Stafford: statue in the pocket, but distributing the ball. Of course, that depends heavily on getting an O-line together. I think Rodgers is still dangerous, and certainly feels like he has something to prove, but I think this is his last year because the money starts getting stupid real fast.

I made a pithy comment a while back about only trusting Rodgers in his taste in drugs. Look, I am not expecting football players to be MENSA members (though there certainly are some extremely intelligent players in the league) but Rodgers has gone completely 'round the bend. From being a vaccine denier, to claiming alien sightings are being used to hide Epstein updates, to explicitly stating that a (arguably not very funny) comedian who mocked him will be revealed to be a child molester. He has become a liability

Curses, what if they get the Ty Dunne treatment!?! But on a serious note, it does confirm what I know a lot of people on here and in some sports talk were saying: that Hackett was there because Rodgers wanted an OC that he could control to tailor the offense as he liked it. That's why you had so many ex-Packers vets brought on past their prime. The Jets in 2024 will go as far as Rodgers will take them. He's coming off an Achilles, but you don't have to be fast to sling the ball. I can see them legitimately making a bid for the division, because otherwise Joe Douglas has constructed a sound roster. In 2025? Rodgers costs $51 million against the cap with 94% of that guaranteed. That's going to be an interesting discussion.

Fair enough. Perhaps I should rephrase. I would say that there is a reason why players with Josh's talent often get that level of refinement. It astounds me how big of a business that college football is to the extent that you saw Harbaugh eff off to Michigan for almost a decade after never having a losing record as a NFL head coach and making the NFC Championship game three years in a row. College scouts are heavily motivated to kick over every rock imaginable for a superstar, that it's amazing that Allen had to go to JuCo, then to the Mountain West conference (not a historically competitive one) without being poached. And kudos to the Bills scouting staff for finding those things you mentioned, that his mechanics were fine but that he hadn't had top tier coaching and WR support.

I have a name you know!

yeah for the most part regional bank branches don't keep all that much hard cash on hand anymore. That's why you don't see as many bank robberies anymore: it's a lot of risk and attention for not a lot of money on hand. More common targets now are marijuana dispensaries. Because of the strange mix of federal and state regulations, they are a mostly cash only business and banks will not allow corporate accounts (because banks are federally regulated). This means that you have a slew of cash only businesses, whose bookkeeping is always going to be suspect and an inability to get any federal law enforcement involved.

Just wait until people hear about Russel Wilson /s

Look, the Pro Bowl never meant much and it means even less now. Right now, the Pro Bowl is a useful bargaining tool for players when negotiating a contract. It means that they played at a high level that year and have a public fanbase interested in them meaning that they are a name. And I will not begrudge players that. When it was held in Hawaii, that was a chance at a paid vacation in the winter when people might otherwise not have the excuse to go and that was a nice treat for players who deserved some recognition for a good season. Then they moved it to Arizona. Legit, who wants to go to Arizona? Now? It's in Orlando? I don't know if you can pay me to go to the tourist death trap that is Orlando. Enjoy your tee time Josh

I was one of the people who hated the draft pick at the time. This was my reasoning: The Bills had just ended The Drought, 17 years of missed postseasons. We had a QB in Tyrod Taylor who, while having obvious shortcomings, could have absolutely electric games, was a threat with his legs in the early Pisol/Read Option era before it got schemed against so hard. He wasn't a franchise guy, but after post rib injury FItz, Trent Edwards, Kyle Orton, EJ Manuel, and JP Losman it didn't seem like a bad place to be. So when the Bills shipped Taylor off for a 3rd, I was immediately worried that we had traded away an interesting journeyman while we had a pick in the 20s. This was the year of Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold after all, players who members of this board had urged to tank for and they would be long gone before we picked. Especially worrisome was the memory of EJ Manuel: an absolutely physically gifted player who was never unable to unlock anything and was benched. In retrospect, Marrone did not help his chances, but the sting was still fresh. In fact, overall, almost no prospect of the "physically gifted but not an accurate passer" mold works out. Almost all run into the same problems that Manuel did, and up until that point the most successful example had been Blake Bortles. So I despaired at the idea that we were going to go through another cycle of that. Josh is the one in a million player who gets more accurate. He got help, he got coaching, he got time and he worked his ass off so I won't call it luck, but he is the exception, not the rule, and if there is a single Bills take I am happy to be wrong about it was this one.