Thurman#1

It's not the QBs. It's the teams.

Don't know McCann well enough to have an opinion on him, but the type of deal you're talking about here would make me happy,

Yeah, depending on availability and price, I'd like to see them address the OL. I doubt there'll be any big moves, but wouldn't mind seeing something.

Yup, and the decision would be no.

If there's a pattern, it's generally that a few here blame anything that went wrong on the coaches (which is a fan tendency, I mean, who turns in to these games to watch the coaching?) Nobody is burying their head on that play. Wallace literally said that they'd called the right play for the situation and that he'd screwed up on-field communication with the safety by not looking back at him. Laugh it up, Scott, but yes, we do. Levi Wallace: "That last play we had a good play called. But we were all on different pages on how we thought it looked, right? ... I put a lot of the blame on myself, thinking that I was going to know where Jordan and Matt were going to be, so I never looked. I think that's where we took it for granted, seeing where they were at. Because we had to defend outside and we had to defend that little in-route that he ran too. And I never looked at Poyer or Matt to see their lineups. And Poyer, usually he's near me and usually that (unclear word) route is usually a pick, and looking back at the play now I'm like, 'dang, he was that far back , like if I had just looked back I would have scooted in." https://www.reddit.com/r/buffalobills/comments/uibn9g/levi_wallace_explains_what_happened_in_the_last/

Well, yeah, they're not official or anything, but there's nothing that's official. Having said that, Joe watches every snap for every guy and he's smart. His stuff is generally on target.

It's not poor planning. It's just something you disagree with. He might have dropped more than the other people did. Fact is, this is how McDermott and the FO develop rookies. You look at Singletary and you see that in his first nine weeks he had 49 runs and 22 targets. One game with more than 8 runs. Moss in his first nine games had 52 runs and 10 targets. Didn't really see much of him till Week 13. Cook really doesn't need to be productive this early. The Bills are doing fine with him doing what he's doing now. There's no particular hurry.

Plenty of guys improve without getting any or many game reps. That's what practice is for. I'm with you that 10 games seems like a good guess at when we start to see some results.

Um, 6:20 in the 3rd quarter of the Ravens game. That's actually very recent. Singletary lines up in the backfield and the play goes for 14. More, Orlovsky didn't say the Bills were one of the best "regular RB screen" teams. He said they were one of the best screen teams. And with three screens in the 2nd half alone of the Ravens game (the one above, the one where Singletary lined up outside and the one to Shakir), each going for 14 yards, it would appear that Orlovsky is right just based on very recent evidence. I mean, the Bills threw 36 passes in this game, and in three screen passes from the 2nd half, they got 42 yards out of their total of 213 yards. That's 20% of their passing yardage on three plays, and I didn't even look at the 1st half to see if there were more screens there. (I apologize, Turk, for that little dig. I have edited it out. I thought you were being sarcastic and see that you were serious. Sorry about that. Even more stupid there than I usually am.)

Think we couldn't find some bad teams that run a lot too? The Giants, Browns, Bears, Falcons and Eagles are the #1 to #5 teams this year at running yards. The Eagles have showed success so far, but that top five is not exactly Murderer's Row. The top five in YPC is equally unimposing: The Lions, Giants, Ravens, Bears and Seahawks. The fact that one team runs a lot doesn't show much beyond the fact that that one team runs a lot. IMO the Eagles are a good team that won't compete for a championship this year. I could definitely be wrong about that, but we'll see. The Rams last year won the SB while averaging 4.0 YPC, much worse than the Bills. 25th ranked in terms of run yards and also 25th best in terms of YPC. The year before that, the championship Bucs were 28th in run yards and 26th in YPC. That doesn't mean that a run game won't help. But those two data points absolutely and without doubt show you don't need a great or even a good run game to win a championship. Anyway, the OP is right that the problem in our run game is mostly OL problems.

A good running game doesn't require 25 - 30 attempts. Where is that written? That's just something you're making up. A good running game requires a good running game. That's it. A good running game would help. It's not absolutely necessary, but there will absolutely be times and situations where it would help. IMO as the line gels, our run game will get better, as it did last year near the end of the season. There's no guarantee, though.

No. when they get good blocking they're both productive, Singletary in particular is excellent. It's the line.

Um, Zach Moss' "sub 2 YPC" is 5.3. Is 5.3 less than 2 these days?

This is a very very fine defense, but no, they aren't the kind of defense the Ravens had the Trent Dilfer year. Opposing teams scored 18 TDs that year against the Ravens. 18 TDs in 16 games, and two of those were pick sixes. That's an average of one offensive TD scored by Ravens opponents per game. The Bills have allowed seven TDs in four games, all scored by the opposing offenses. The 2000 Ravens defense allowed 10.3 PPG, the best in the history of 16 game seasons. The Bills 14.5 PPG is still damn good, but doesn't compare. Those Ravens put up an insane record of 23 INTs and 26 fumbles recovered by the defense. That's 49 turnovers in 16 games, 3.1 per game. Way way way too early to assume the Bills D should be mentioned in the same breath as those guys.

He's had 139 snaps, which is 64% of all of our offensive snaps. That's not what anyone should call decreased playing time. Especially as he had 60% last year.

Being a scumbag has not been shown to provide any immunity against CTE. Here's the facts: We don't know. Either way. Anyone who says they know, either way, is only showing that they don't know the difference between facts and opinions.

Dude, don't drink and post. Go sleep it off, you'll be fine in a few hours.

I don't think we do know that. It's a guess. It certainly looked that way, but injuries aren't as easy to diagnose as we'd like to think they are. Doctors make mistakes, some injuries have similar symptoms. It's just not as clear as all that. If they did somehow cheat his way through that, the team is sick. There's an unaffiliated Neurotrama consultant in the medical tent. I suppose it's possible they could get to the guy somehow but more likely is just that he didn't show the symptoms in the locker room. Will he have effects? No way to know. No way to do anything but guess, really, and why do that?

How light or heavy the boxes are isn't the issue. It's irrelevant. The question is how long it takes before the backs are hit. Last year through the first 2/3rds of the year, they put up extremely low yards before contact figures. Then when Bates was put in and the line came together the same backs abruptly changed to some of the league's better figures for the same stat. The problem wasn't the RBs. And it still isn't. As Joe B. put it after his all-22 study this week: "The Bills did away with their ground game up until garbage time in Week 2 against the Titans, and the initial inclination is to blame the running backs. But when you analyze the full scope of the ground game against the Dolphins, Devin Singletary, Zack Moss and James Cook really didn’t stand a chance. "The key focus is on yards before contact. The Bills had one breakout play when Moss busted off a 43-yard run where he was untouched until driven out of bounds. It’s a great run, but it’s like hosting a party and keeping everyone confined to one spotless room when the rest of the house is in complete shambles. On the other 13 carries combined, the three Bills running backs had a total of one yard before contact. That’s an average runway of 0.08 yards before contact per rush. The backs were set up to fail. To advance the point, here is a look at each of the 14 running plays involving the running backs and how they all broke down." https://theathletic.com/3638288/2022/09/28/bills-all-22-film-review-dolphins/

The thing about close games absolutely is a fluke. The year before that they were terrific, 4-1, something like that. It's statistically typical to have that number go up and down season to season by quite a bit. The sample size is so small that often happens.

I totally agree that they have to get things together on the OL. But I have a lot of sympathy for them with how very little time they had in training camp playing together as a unit. With injuries and problems, there was very little time to gel They will need more time to get it together. If they manage to do that. It's not a given. Not only were there three backups, but two of them were playing out of position.

Singletary is a very very good pass blocker. Not that he's perfect. He might have made a mistake there. Or not. You can't tell because whoever made that clip totally edited out the early part of the play where Singletary was making the decision. Based on that clip, no way to know whether he was to blame for that. Could've been. Just that there simply isn't enough evidence there in that clip to even begin to tell on that play. Ah, you can see it all on this clip. Thanks, GoBills404, for posting one that actually tells the story. Yeah, that was a nice deceptive formation for Miami. They lined up all on the line and the LG and LT were facing a 4-on-2. As it's snapped, one of the defenders slips around the center to attack the other side of the line, leaving a 3-on-2. There's a guy coming unblocked between Dawkins and Saffold who Singletary has to account for and that guy comes forward two or three steps and pulls up. The instant he does that, Motor switches to trying to block the guy who has totally beaten Dawkins, but he's too late. That one's on Dawkins, but when they rush so many guys, you have to get it out quick. Allen could have stepped up one step and avoided that guy. It's not like he'd have escaped everything if he'd done so, but he'd have gained just enough time to bring that arm forward. Almost, but not quite.

We don't have a TE out there anywhere close to all the time. When we do defenses often bring a safety down towards the box and it becomes an eight man box. No. It isn't Allen.

Even with seven in the box, seven outnumbers five, even if you throw in a fullback blocking or a WR in motion hitting someone. That's just the way it is. That's why running plays are schemed to create one specific hole rather than four or five. Very little blame goes to Josh, IMO.

Yes, this.