Thurman#1

Yeah, every team is committed to it. But things like the amount of practice time dedicated to drills on Peanut Punches, targeting the ball on tackles, confusing QBs on defense can vary wildly. Not to mention stressing (or not) throwing the ball away under pressure, hitting checkdowns and such on offense.

Um, just as much a remarkable testament to the defense's excellent skills at creating turnovers. Just sayin'. I mean, this defense has been amazingly consistent at producing turnovers at a high rate. Here's how the D has ranked at takeaways: 2024 1st 2023 3rd 2022 4th 2021 3rd 2020 3rd 2019 10th 2018 8th 2017 9th 2016 23rd 2015 12th I mean, there's a correlation there, when you look at head coach. Correlation and improvement.

Partly because he's also made some good catches. And partly because it's simply not as black and white as you're painting it. It's not "constantly." And some of those aren't real drops, they're either tough catches or contested. He has zero official drops this year. Check Pro Football Reference. Not that he doesn't need to keep working on it. He does.

IMO they already love the 1-3 formations they're running and are going to love them even more. Running those with three guys who can all block and run routes is going to leave defenses scrambling. It allows them to have eight blockers on some plays, and to force teams to defend them all with guys who can guard the pass also. These guys allow the Bills to be both really tough and really unpredictable. My guess is Knox is here till his contract ends, and maybe signs some kind of extension.

He is a good blocker, Kincaid. He's gotten quite a bit better since last year. Must've worked on it during the offseason.

They've always been good even in the postseason, against everyone except the Chiefs. I guess you could argue the Bengals that one time too but the whole team was emotionally shot. Nobody played well that game. It's the Chiefs. And mostly nobody else stopped them either, which is why they have Lombardis. The Bills need a pass rush. That was what was missing, except for early in Von's first year. So far, Bosa looks good and there are promising signs of one from the rookies and from Hoecht.

Didn't see this till now. "On the hot seat"? It would just be a dumb take. Way way way too early, not just after the Jets game but after the Ravens. It was week one. Could it eventually happen if the defense plays badly over a long period of time? Yeah, absolutely. But it's nowhere near that point now.

Nobody's asking for him to change his style. Or to eliminate all straight-arms. But yeah, when they get to you in the backfield, and it's a DL that's on you, that's not the time for him to be straight-arming. It just isn't. I'm very very sure they will coach him up on that. But it should never have happened. IMO this is partly a result of the fawning he hears when he gets a highlight play from a straight-arm. Heh heh. This. It's not nothing. It's a bad play, a mental mistake. A bad play that probably cost his team the game. Elite players make them too. And then do their best to iron out the problem. Can you point out where I used the word arrogance? I did chuckle at RochesterLifer's joke there. But I wasn't trying to imply arrogance so much as a bit of wanting to see himself on "Angry Runs" again this week, maybe allowing his excitement about the great feedback he usually gets about that tactic to twist his sense of when it's good to use it. And I would argue that "it" doesn't almost always work, if "it" refers to using the straight-arm in the backfield when already in the grip of a DL who's larger than him. I'm sure his coaches won't be telling him never to use the straight-arm again. But almost surely they've already told him there are times when it's just a bad idea, and he's got to better figure out when those times are. Still a terrific runner, though.

I was watching the game again and noticed something on Henry's fumble. He's been getting so much positive feedback on all those straightarms that he used it when he shouldn't have. Those appear on the highlights all season long, and you can bet he knows that, and gets all kinds of hero worship for them. As he should, really, but sometimes there are consequences. Oliver is headed right towards him in the backfield. Henry puts the ball in his left hand and immediately goes for the straight-arm with his right hand. That was a mistake. Oliver's right arm is free. He's got an OL leaning on his left side, but his right hand, the one closest to Henry's ball hand, it's free. Henry's play there is to wrap his right hand around the ball and cover with two hands. He didn't, and Ed made him pay. He should be coached when NOT to use the straight-arm. That was not the time, it was a time to be careful. They should also coach him that the guys he successfully straight-arms are mostly safeties, CBs and an occasional LB. Guys smaller than Henry himself. Oliver may be small for a DT, but he's bigger and stronger than Henry.

Still better than QBR.

They do, actually. Tied for 9th in '24 with 50%. Tied for 10th in '23 with 75%. Tied for 9th in '22 with 66.66% 16th in '21, but that was with a 57.14% rate. You have to go back to '20 to find a season where we were under 50%. That year we were at 0%. I wonder how many we tried. We didn't even try any at home that year. Tied for 1st in '19 with a 100% completion percentage. Tied for 20th in '18 with 33.33%. But since Josh became Josh we've been quite successful with them. https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/two-point-conversion-pct?date=2019-02-04

Yeah, I remember when Kordell threw 46 passes the way Josh did against the Ravens. It was 12/13/97. 48 attempts Once in his whole career he threw that much. That's a ridiculous connection to make. People have been begging ... pleading ... for the Bills to run more to take the pressure off of Allen. They do it, become the #1 offense and make the AFC championship, and now people are complaining they don't throw enough. Jeez. You can't win.

Ah!! I assumed this must be it. Glad to know that wasn't a mistake by the refs.

I mean, yeah. But you know who else loses 1 - 2 games in stupid fashion every year? Nearly everyone. The Chiefs did go 15-2 last year, but in the years before that, they lost six, three, five, two, four and four. Again, pretty much everyone loses a game or two in stupid fashion. That's football.

I don't think this means a whole lot more than a loss for KC. Having said that, and having seen only the highlights, the one thing that encouraged me was that KC's offense still doesn't look anything like it did three to six years ago. Still solid. Still dangerous and opportunistic. But not elite. One game is too early to say much, but if asked to take something from that one game, that's what I'm taking. The thread asks for implications after one game. The guy gave what he figured were the implications after one game. This is the ultimate in reasonable. Attacking him for posting his opinions about one game after one game, in this thread, is pretty wacky. It's what the thread asked for, what it's about.

Very fair that he didn't elevate the team, but he was a rookie. Josh Allen didn't elevate this team as a rookie. Our offense was 30th out of 32 that year. The best passing game that year probably belonged to Matt Barkley. More, wins are not a stat that you should judge a QB by, particularly a rookie on a truly crappy team. You judge a QB by how he played. Maye played pretty damn well for a rookie. I mean, I still have enough leftover hatred for the Pats that I hope I'm wrong, and he still has a ton to prove but he looked good to me.

How can anyone say you "see a lot of the same inconsistencies that plagued us on defense last year"? The season hasn't started. And the starters virtually didn't play in the pre-season. Plus they seem to want to show a lot more man-to-man looks than last year, making us hopefully more unpredictable The D is going to have, what? Four new starters and two new platoon players compared to last year? Milano/Shaq Thompson, Bosa, Tre White, Cole Bishop, Deone Walker and Sanders. And all that is leaving Maxwell Hairston completely out of it. This whole defense is an X-factor. And if we'd had Benford last year for the Chiefs playoffs game, things might have turned out an awful lot different anyway.

Not so much that we needed to go right on the sneak there. It's more that we needed to go right a few times earlier in the year so that we weren't completely predictable. They were able to completely commit to stopping that one gap. And we still made it on that one key play even though the refs miscalled it. Still, I'd love to see them be a bit less predictable there, including a few nice wrinkles here and there. I love this one, myself:

Yeah, the Raiders weren't happy with how he approached his rehab, so much so that they tried to reclaim some money. I'm no expert but I'd lean towards that being not good.

Disagree on Vrabel, unfortunately. I think he's going to make them good pretty quickly. Whether they will become better than that will largely depend on Maye, I think, and how good he actually is.

We haven't busted for eight years, although certainly there have been some busts. Not all, though. Assuming you mean DT, Oliver isn't a bust. Assuming you mean 1-tech, DaQuan wasn't a bust, though he's now apparently aging. And there's a very solid chance that one or more of the young guys, probably Deone Walker and possibly a guy like Zion Logue could become that guy. For that matter, Lotulelei was a very solid space eater for his first two years here before COVID ruined his career, in two separate ways. Nothing wrong with trading, though, that's fair enough. But no reason to think the Pack were interested in giving Clark away before Parsons became available.

Why "other than a heavy defensive draft"? Why leave that out, and the same with "no eye popping free agents"? If Joey Bosa isn't an eye-popping free agent, your definition is arguably too narrow. Bosa - if healthy, a legitimate concern - shows every sign of making a serious difference. Same with Hoecht although I hadn't expected him to be as good as he has seemed to be in camp. And our two rookie DTs are making plays, Sanders here and there and Walker fairly often. They'll show a lot of inexperience, particularly early in the year but around halfway though they're reasonably likely to start making a visible difference, IMO. There's also the chances of real second-year improvement from guys like Cole Bishop, Coleman, Van Pran-Granger and Ray Davis. I'm a bit less hopeful about Solomon, but if we're lucky. There's reasons for concern as well. The injuries in the d-backfield sure haven't helped. But I think there's very reasonable likelihood for last year's terrific offense to play in the same neighborhood and for the defense to take some real steps forward, particularly in terms of the pass rush. On a team that came very close to the Super Bowl last year, that's a hopeful outlook. The rubber's got to meet the road. Still a lot to prove, but the same is true for every team every year, really.

Way. Not saying it'll happen. But it's absoutely one of the options. I'd like to see them keep Shavers. But there are five or six very reasonable options, depending on available trades. I'd like to see them keep Ciarlo too, for that matter. My guess is the odds are against that, unfortunately.

Can we stop with the "Of course Beane is going to say that," crap. Because that's what it is, it's crap. Beane is a guy who says what he means. Ask anyone in the media, they know this by now. And yeah, sometime he's put in a position where many GMs would just tell a polite lie. But Beane is media-savvy, he just says he can't answer that right now or passes some Crash Davis pabulum. "Which did we want more, A or B? Well, you know, A will run through a wall for the team, and B always gives 110%. We love both guys, really. Next question." As a rule of thumb, if you think that Beane lied because you can't believe he'd really disagree with you that much ... you're wrong. He did feel that way. If he didn't feel that way, he wouldn't have said it. Beane does disagree with people on this board sometimes, believe it or not. If he said it, he meant it. And it's totally possible that he thought that Cooper was a better solution to the problem than Adams. 100% possible, even if he thought that Adams was a better player than Cooper, which he likely did think. Beane's job isn't to acquire the best player regardless of other considerations. It's to acquire the best solution to making the team better, which means he is forced to include other factors such as whether he is willing to give away more draft capital than another team is, and how much each guy will count against the cap. Oh, and you're right that Adams was wildly productive w/ the Jets. Couldn't a lot of that have been that he was with a guy who had thrown to him for close to a decade and knew him inside-out? Not to mention that Rodgers was absolutely forcing the ball to Adams, just the situation that we were trying to get away from, having to force the ball to a diva. Game 13 (Miami): 11 targets, 9 catches, 109 yards, 1 TD Game 14 (Jax): 12 targets, 9 catches, 198 yards, 2 TDs Game 15 (LARams): 13 targets, 7 catches, 68 yards, 1 TD Game 13 (Buf): 8 targets, 5 catches, 47 yards, 0 TDs Game 13 (Miami): 12 targets, 6 catches, 88 yards, 1 TD That's 510 yards in five games, spectacular. But it's also a massive force-feed of targets, and two great statistical games against two fairly weak pass defenses and then teams figuring out that Rodgers was going to him a ton and adjusting and the last three games being pretty good but unspectacular especially given the number of targets. 56 targets in those five games. Over 17 games, that would have been 190 targets, far more than anyone else in the league actually received. JaMarr Chase got 175, Nabers 170 and Drake London 158 went numbers one, two and three. He wasn't going to get that kind of a volume of targets here. Still a good player in 2024, though, I won't argue that at all.

Gotta say, I'm not on your wavelength here at all. They've had a few flat games over McDermott's term. But very few. I feel that's a strength of this team, they don't always play well, but I think they play hard with very few exceptions. Generally there's one game or so a year, but that's so with pretty much all teams. Agree that he seems to leave it to the players to find motivation but NFL players don't generally make it as a career if they can't provide their own motivation. Not the bully? I mean, I guess I can see that. It's not what stands out, what stands out is Josh and the high-flying game, and very few of that type of team are though of as bullies. But if you can play with the bullies and not get run over, and I agree with you that this team generally does that. I think you're doing what needs to be done.