Thurman#1

IMO Shakir has already shown that his skill set is larger than you're seeing. The last nine games of the season he had 444 yards. Over 17 games that's an 838 yard clip. He handled that just fine, a lot better than fine, actually. During those nine games, to put up those 444 yards, he received only 30 targets. And he caught 26 of those 30 targets, which is an 87% catch rate. Nor do I agree one bit with your idea that if we'd thrown less to Gabe he'd have received more money. That's a WAG. More likely you're right that someone would have figured that he'd have might be able to handle a featured role, but that he'd have gotten right around what he got, with that figure having looked like a bigger risk than it does now with less actual production to show. Christian Kirk didn't get Christian Kirk money because he was showcased less than Gabe was. More, in fact. Kirk is the 23rd highest paid WR in terms of AAY, and Darnell Mooney and Gabe Davis tied for 27th. The three guys who fell between (Tyler Lockett, Courtland Sutton and Jerry Jeudy) do not look like anything like a Gabe Davis with fewer opportunities, any more than Christian Kirk does.

Theoretically, yes, they could do all that. They could bring in an expensive guy like an Aiyuk or a Metcalf. But they've shown they don't want to. If they'd wanted to open up space they could just have moved most of Diggs' cap hit to next year. They didn't. The folks on here who always prefer kicking cans down the road are not in line with what Beane and the brain trust want. Nor with what is best for the long-term interests of the team. They were deeply constricted this year, and they want to make that a one-year thing rather than something they have to deal with every year. They're far more concerned about the 2025 cap than many on here are.

I've never heard anything about it either. Willing to believe it, but I've never seen anything. Plenty of guys without character concerns go the wandering mercenary route, particularly as they get older and develop injury concerns. It's one of the best ways for a player (if there is a legit hunger for what he brings) to maximize his career $$. Look at Darrelle Revis for one. Leonard Floyd the last three few years for another.

It could indeed. But it could also be something a lot of older vets feel about not really wanting to sign a contract till late so as to avoid OTAs and a lot of the off-season responsibilities. DEs do have to learn a playbook, but it's not anything wildly complicated.

Depending on the price, absolutely. If not him, someone who can sack the QB. I'm betting that he or another DE will be the main use this year of the $10M that will soon become available on the cap. They did it last year and while there are not as many DEs available late this year as there were last year, there are two or three reasonable possibilities and I think we'll be snagging one of them. Ogbah, Carl Lawson or Hughes maybe as alternatives depending who's still available and who they think can still rush the QB.

The film showed him getting separation a lot and not being thrown to. It also showed defenses recognizing that he was still a weapon and shading coverage his way. A lot. The way Ds covered him helped open up things for the rest of the offense. A lot. He may have showed a decline in physical skills. I'm not convinced, but it's certainly possible. But if so, it was anything but a huge decline. You may well be right that we've seen the last of his All Pro recognition, but I think that he still puts up at least another couple of 1200+ yard seasons. He's not a guy who depended on speed, more on smarts and route-running. That kind of thing lasts longer than pure speed / suddenness does. A thing of genius? No, not even close. The best he could reasonably get under the circumstances? Probably. Certainly a reasonable move, very possibly the best thing he could do given how things worked out.

"I don't need to go through all the reasons we decided to do that. I would say from a cap standpoint ..." So, no, not "simply a prudent cap move." He's not trying to pretend it wasn't a lot more than that.

He wasn't playing badly. Particularly for a 2nd year guy. He took a few more risks before the injury (7.77 YPA before, which would've put him around 6th highest in the league that year, and 6.95 YPA after, which would've been around 18th), so fewer risks at the same time as he started throwing a ton more INTs (4/2 TD:INT ratio before and 7/8 after) later in the year. It may not have been the injury, part of it may well have been just being figured out. But yeah, he played pretty decent before and not nearly so well after.

Didn't think of him till you said that, because I was thinking purely of on-field, but yeah, Beasley is #2 for me. A distraction, selfish, and all just at the time when his skills were leaving him. He went from one of my absolute favorites to my most disliked. But nobody will ever beat out Billy Joe Hobert. Publicly admitted he hadn't read his playbook and wasn't ready to play. Coach? Rexy. Never thought he was a good pick, but hoped he'd be OK. It became obvious after awhile that he was coasting, I thought. Second-worst? Rauch and Harvey Johnson for not building an offense around OJ Simpson. I mean, you have Simpson on the roster and you keep him returning kicks? Jeez.

Um, he did play through it. Did his absolute best, but he wasn't the same. He did an excellent job here last year, more than earned his money. He was a great pickup, good enough that he got a major raise in salary from the 9ers and a signing bonus of more than half his two year contract. Got 60% of his contract guaranteed because he did a great job here. So good we couldn't afford him again. But as noted above, we'll get a comp pick for him. He didn't say or imply anything bad about the Bills. Thanks and good luck to him.

Not really true about Singletary. He had a bunch of long runs. His longest in 2019 was 38 yards, 51 in 2020, 46 in 2021 and 33 in 2022. A bunch of TDs of over 20 yards. Cook is more explosive, but Singletary was not undangerous. "Elite" is a bit strong for Cook. Damn good, though. I wish he was a bit stronger at pass blocking. It's a weakness in an area that's really important on this team. But he can catch and he's fast and even pretty decent running up the middle.

I don't think this opinion makes any sense at all, and won't until we know what kind of condition he's in. The contract was fine, very good even, until he was injured. And that's true with all contracts, basically. Injuries are a possibility with anyone, and they make a contract's money useless. Fair enough that he was older and therefore a riskier signing. But he'd been wildly healthy as an older dude till this happened. Before the injury, he made our defense an absolute metric poo-ton better. I wouldn't have done that contract myself. But that doesn't make it a bad contract. More high-risk high reward. You keep him on this team in case he recovers all the way. And the Bills do NOT want to take a big hit on next year's cap. They made clearing up next year's cap a big priority this year. IMO Miller had plenty of leverage knowing what we all do about how they wanted to clean up the cap. He did this pretty selflessly.

"He knows spirits—'entities,' he calls them—move through us all via the etheric body, one of the seven bodies of multidimensional consciousness. They can be good. They can be evil. They all want to experience our physical world. Most humans are not conscious of them. He is. He can consciously ignore evil spirits trying to cling to him. But he also believes this: When he refuses to let that evil spirit get what it wants in him, it can cling to someone close to him." This article on Sammy Watkins: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2889029-what-sammy-watkins-believes

Well, yes, that's underestimating him. He's never had a year where he had more STs snaps than offense. In the one year where he played most of the snaps, he put up 690 yards. Dunno how he'll do, nobody does, but he's not just an STs player, though that certainly is part of his appeal to them.

We do indeed know many, far more functional. My bet is they do find CTE. Sounds like he's always been a jackass but he was worth putting up with for years and years, until things accelerated insanely and he wasn't, even while in Pittsburgh he was still wildly productive. Ryan Clark says there's always been selfishness there, and maybe some narcissism. IMO it's gone beyond that into absolute weirdness and self-destructiveness. Ocho Cinco didn't manage that, quite, but he saved like crazy. Great story about living in the stadium early in his career, too. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chad-ochocinco-saved-83-nfl-140000522.html The question is how you can save salary and not be near-insane about it. Marshawn was famous here for going into bars and bringing his own booze. And for taking money off a fan which he claims led to his having to leave Buffalo, because the cops hated him so much.

Don't really see that with Morse at all. Of course he signed quickly. He is a good player and it's not surprising there were quick offers. As long as he wanted to keep playing, it was to be expected that he signed elsewhere quickly. I don't have the slightest doubt that they didn't want to let him go but the money and the need to get younger resulted in letting him go. They were $40M over the cap at that point. Five days isn't six minutes. He had time to consider, plan and act.

Hopefully a bit better. I think there's a good chance of it. Last year he wasn't quite as good. A good deal of that may well be that defenses have figured out how not just to slow him down but how to do it better. Same with the other long-ball terrific QBs such as Mahomes. I don't think it's a coincidence he also had a down year. Hopefully he's taking ball more seriously this off-season. I think there's a decent chance of that. Defenses will force him to play possession ball and throw mostly shorter passes. Which isn't quite his game, but it's something he can do very well when he decides to. But it will depend how well the new playbook meets Josh's game, and how well the other players on the offense play around him. My guess: a little bit better.

Must we do these same not very subtle anti-McDermott threads so very regularly? It's the exact same crap every time. No new ideas to start conversation or stimulate thought whatsoever. Profession of curiousness. Then a very negative "summing up" which involves about eight or ten words that are positive with zero specifics and five or ten times that number of space on negatives. We get it. You don't like the guy. That's fine, it's your prerogative. Must we be subject to the exact same thing so consistently?

Agreed. Valdez-Scantling was the receiver. We need another pass-rusher. Stat. Well, after the money becomes available anyway. Someone like Ngakoue, if affordable, would be terrific.

We don't need to have an elite offense. A very good offense? Yeah. Elite? Nah. Can you have a very good offense by spreading the ball around? Yeah, you can. Below are the top three offenses every year for the last ten years. Bolded and in red are all of the teams out of those elite offenses that won the Super Bowl. 2023: Fins, 9ers, Lions 2022: Chiefs, Bills, Eagles 2021: Cowboys, Bucs, Chiefs 2020: Chiefs, Bills, Titans 2019: Cowboys, Ravens, Bucs 2018: Chiefs, Rams, Bucs 2017: Pats, Saints, Steelers 2016: Saints, Falcons, Commanders 2015: Cardinals, Saints, Steelers 2014: Saints, Steelers, Colts And out of that one team, bolded and in red, that was an elite offense that won a Super Bowl in the last ten years, what did their WR room look like? Juju Smith-Schuster was their most productive WR, with 933 yards. Valdez-Scantling was their second-most-productive with 687. And yes, they had a sensational TE. That's the way we are trying to go as well. Again, Kincaid has the 4th best rookie year in history for TEs in terms of receptions and the 10th best in terms of yards. He could very well be very very good this year.

That's certainly not impossible, but Allen's passing is significantly better than Newton's ever was. Josh is also really good at pocket movement in the non-athletic sense, just stepping in the right direction with his eyes downfield. He doesn't do it every time, but overall he's pretty damn good at it. That skill should help to stand him in good stead when he begins to slow as he ages. We'll see. It's something to keep an eye on, no question.

That's just not true. Some do and some don't. Some people talk about this and some don't. Josh did videos during those years where he was interviewed with Palmer and specifically addressed what he was working on improving. Plenty of QBs don't do anything like that. Questions are generally asked at some point, but there are plenty of ways of answering while not answering, or just being real general about it. "I'm working hard out in California. In my playbook every day," for example.

Oh, yeah. I clicked, expecting to hate them, but those are sweet.

Good stuff! I love that the Bills so often do this with a UB guy or two on the 90.

Josh isn't in the top two in the league? Um, OK, I guess. I think he is. If he isn't, he's damn close. And while I'm as sure as you are that fans will be talking about trading up to draft WRs again, any but a small tradeup was a ridiculous idea this year and will almost certainly be equally so next. Yes, fans talk, and Allen fans constantly talk about receivers. Doesn't mean it makes sense. Beane made it clear that he didn't even make calls about those top three, but on the boards they were close to a majority preference. People will prefer shiny baubles, doesn't mean they're a good idea. The bottom line is that what Josh Allen needs is not a great WR room. It's a great team. If more and better WRs are a part of that, wonderful. But history shows very very clearly that you don't need a terrific WR room to win Super Bowls. Yes, the Chiefs didn't have a great WR room, but that's not a wild exception. A large majority of SB winners compensate for a WR room that's solid with an excellent QB and a really good roster, including the defensive side. And in the past two decades or so, a very good TE on top of the WRs, and often good receiving backs as well. Both of which we appear to have.