Thurman#1

Please. As Gunner says, nothing wrong with gauging interest. But it doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond that.

Ah, I see it. "I'm more comfortable with the offensive line depth than most people. I like David Quessenberry as a swing tackle, I like Tommy Doyle. I like Craig Mancz, I like Cody Ford in this environment. Ike Boettger as well. I'm pretty satisfied with this group. And I think the Bills have good depth at every position, including the center spot." Very early in the video, yeah? He's indeed comfortable. I'm not, personally. Hope he's right.

Hunh. Where does he say that, about their depth? Just listened to the whole thing and I must've missed it. Which could happen. But I didn't hear that at all. Was it in the first part, where he goes through the top ten RAS scores for the Bills? The part after that where he goes through the bottom ten? Gotta admit, the last part where he just read through the whole list kinda put me to sleep. Did I miss it there? This is the podcast you're talking about, right?

Hunh? There are five questions asked about ranking teams analytics. And one of them was asking about the worst, so you didn't want to be mentioned. Of the four questions asking about positives, the Bills got ranked third in one and fourth in another and not mentioned in the other two questions (only three teams were mentioned in one and only six in the other. Everyone ranked Cleveland and Baltimore first and second. Both good teams, though it's hard to figure the Browns QB situation at this point. After that nobody was an obvious third, but the Bills probably come in 3rd or 4th overall. I get you're half-joking here, but that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is that analytics isn't everything, but like other facets, if you do it well, it helps, including the performances of other facets of that team's game. The top four teams in that survey were definitely Cleveland, Baltimore and probably Buffalo and Indy. All good teams.

No, of course not. Great guy, though.

I like our line quite a bit. But tied for 4th in the league with only four teams left to be evaluated? IMO that's a bit high for the Bills OL. I do agree with them that, strongly, that continuity has helped here and should continue to be a positive factor. The last three or four games of the year, basically after Bates came in and Dawkins started playing at his capacity, this line looked like a top ten group. Throw in the rest of the year and it would be fair to put them as below average. But since the starters look likely (not surely, but likely) to be closer to the end of the year group than any other combo, it's fair to be really hopeful. But 4th? Not based on what we've seen, I think.

Any given three-yard play will have about a 50% chance of success. There's a huge amount of luck involved, as there is in soccer shootouts. Whereas typical football scoring requires a period of consistent good performance. That's why the rate of scoring TDs isn't nearly 50% of drives. Scoring a TD or an FG is around 41%, but in the current system, scoring an FG allows the other team to get the ball. Luck is involved in any play, but requiring a successful drive greatly increases the amount of luck involved. Yeah, this is how I feel too No system is perfect, or even very good, but this or something very close would be the best, IMO.

To each their own. Too much luck involved, IMO.

?? Defense tries to stop the other guy's conversions. I don't like the idea, but it makes some sense.

With these contracts the devil is often in the details. That's a lot of guaranteed money. But how backloaded is it? Is the 4th year likely to be paid out or not. The stories say it's a maximum of $56M. What's the minimum? It should be interesting to see. So far looks like they overpaid for him.

The 2022 study was analyzing data from 2013 to 2018. The 2019 study looked at data from 2013 to 2017. The 2017 study looked at incidences from 2006 to 2012. Relevant today? Yeah, but the data is still old. And things appear to have gotten a lot better in the past few years.

Now you're making me want to read about Koufax too. Amazing story. I've just been reading a bunch about Brit triple jumper Jonathan Edwards. Here's a guy who was never really special, and then at age 29 he suddenly started kicking ass. Before he was through he set a world record that STILL has not been beaten 25 years later, which is absolutely insane. The new generation is closing in on his record, but he still holds it. People develop. When somebody takes the fact that a backup is now playing better than the guy who was ahead of him as proof that the coaches screwed up, it only shows that that's the way that person thinks. It's confirmation bias.

They're really not. This is the season of rose-colored glasses. Everybody looks great in shorts running routes with no D-backs. Everything out of every camp is positive. But you have to strain pretty hard to take a positive and say, "See, that's a negative if you just look at it right."

Good stuff. IMO they'll be significantly better. But how much? IMO Zach is the one most likely to develop enough to give us trouble consistently. But while QB talent is huge, it's not everything. It's a team game. But I don't see any of those teams playing close to us this year. I could see us losing one of six somewhere, though. Maybe even two if balls bounce really badly for us.

People seem to assume that because you can now outplay someone that that has always been true. And just logically, that premise makes zero sense. Maybe Bates got better recently, started playing better and they put him in. This was his third year. That is precisely the time in a UDFA's career where a bunch of guys who hadn't been quite good enough start to become enough better that they get noticed.

There is indeed a legitimate chance he returns with decreased performance. But you're leaving out a bunch of things from those studies. First, the gears of science grind slowly. Even the 2022 study you refer to was looking at data from 2013 - 2018. And things seem to have gotten better since then. That's anecdotal, but appears real. People weren't really saying the same things nearly as much back in 2018. Second, at the bottom it says RBs, DLs and LBs performed the worst after injury. QBs the best. CBs take a lot less impact than RBs, DLs and LBs. CBs are not among the most affected positions. More, the figures they're comparing are affected by losing time after the injury and by the inclusion of the figures from the first year back. There does indeed seem to lasting effects the year after. So you'd expect that to affect both games played in the first three years back and average performance in those same first three years.

Yup. And I think they are convinced, probably correctly, that for other ticket buyers the product will be better if those seats are filled with more loyal fans who can make friendships and relationships in the seats. Not to mention filled with Packer fans. Yup, that would eliminate the wait list. And fill the stands with fans of the opponents and with corporate buyers who aren't likely to root for the team the way the fans who can afford the tickets at current prices do. You're exactly right, it's a trade-off. Out of the tens of thousands of loyal great fans, letting about a hundred seats go is NOT going to make Packer fans angry about this, except for that hundred. Who weren't being good fans anyway.

And if I have a product that you want me to sell to you, and I don't like the way I think you're going to use it ... then I should be able to use that product however I want to, including selling it to somebody else. Many times it's Pittsburgh fans, Cleveland fans, fans of whatever team we're playing that week.

There have been plenty of winning teams that didn't have serious cap concerns. The winningest team in the last twenty years, for one. Every team makes choices they wouldn't make in an uncapped environment, but plenty of excellent teams didn't keep digging themselves into cap holes all the time. Agreed, though, that Beane is really good at cap stuff.

It might indeed be five or six years before we have major cap consequences, but we are already seeing smaller effects. There would be small consequences and moves that go unmade every year if they did just keep over-kicking cans. I don't think they'll do that, myself.

Contracts are differently cap-friendly or unfriendly every year, as the salaries and bonuses generally go up and down each year. And why didn't they write them better? A lot of that is because generally when a GM writes his contract in as cap-friendly a way as possible, he then unfortunately has to give it to the player, whose reps will have problems with it. Contracts have to be agreeable to both sides. They're a compromise. More, as the contract ages, the player ages. He becomes better or worse, cagier and tougher or more lackadaisical, maybe better conditioned but older. But beyond that, the environment changes. When the contract is signed, it makes the player maybe the 3rd highest paid WR in terms of Average Annual Value. Three years later maybe he's a much better player and he's 24th highest. You're going to have to give him an extension, but you want to wait a year or two so re-structuring moves some cash forward, making the player happy and delaying the need for an extension. And the team's overall cap situation changes and affects the contracts and the team's happiness with it. It's wildly complex, but basically the environment is fluid. Things change all the time. The cap issues absolutely have major impact on the team and what you can do. It really is a concern. Beane came in with a plan to stay pretty conservative on cap issues. He also had a plan to clear cap space and over the course of three or four years put together a roster within that conservative framework. The changing situation from year to year means you'll spend a bit more one year and a bit less the next as needs and situations change. But just as their roster got better and their QB entered his years of Super Bowl competitiveness, Covid hit and it seriously reduced cap totals across the league. This threw Beane's plans well off-target. He had to either cut some guys that would make the team competitive or write contracts that would make the cap tighter in future years. He chose the second option. It's why the roster is excellent, but the cap is tight and causing restriction. He'll be trying to get to his original goal of a solid core of well-paid guys and a nimble use of low- to mid-range FAs seeded in and being conservative with future cap. Getting back there can be done, but it's a lot harder from where we are now than it would have been from the situation we'd have been in without the Covid cap hit. it's possible, but there will be roster consequences.

Yup, $12.4M above the cap with 41 signed after the draft picks all penned their contracts. According to Spotrac. IMO that's the reason Bradberry was never a consideration. The minute they brought in Von Miller there was not going to be another big FA on the menu.

Hap, your post above makes total sense. This one really does not, IMO. Did McDermott use what he knew of Carolina's draft prep from before he left them? Of course he did. It would only make sense. It's neither immoral nor unprofessional. But for Beane to use info he acquired on Carolina's dime to help McDermott after he was up in Buffalo? This would be industrial espionage not to mention flat-out immoral. Neither McDermott nor Beane is that kind of man. All you have to do is look at how Beane took it when the Commanders didn't stop trying to get their RB back after the Bills and McKissic had agreed to a contract. Beane believes in the spirit of the law, not just the letter.

Nonsense. Yes, it was a skillful move by KC to trade up to get Mahomes. Equally, it was a skillful move by Beane to trade up to get Allen. And there's no guarantee that Mahomes without Reid becomes what he is today. McDermott has made it very clear that with putting all his systems in place that first year, he simply didn't have time to fully go through the process of a deep enough dive into the QBs that year. And while he would never come out and say this part of it, he didn't have enough faith in the GM he was stuck with - the guy who bought into EJ Manuel - to let him make the decision.

Great post, Shaw. Maybe the best on here all year. Thanks.