Thurman#1

McVay didn't need to rebuild. Every part of your record will look better if only you step into a team that is already on the way up.

Nonsense. Your confirmation bias is showing. Stopping play wasn't a problem. It's very arguable that a guy with better hands makes the play, though. It was a hard catch, but could have been made. He had a good game, though.

Hold the Steelers to 16 points against your offense (can't blame the defense for the blocked punt TD) and you're doing a pretty solid job. I saw a lot of guys flash, and several get schooled on individual plays. Overall, though, the defense really was NOT the problem.

IMO it's a lot more complicated than that. I'm listening to Buscaglia on the Buffalo Beat podcast and he points out that the Bills (who last year ran four WR sets 14.1% of the time in the regular season) ran 4 WR sets on 33.3% of their snaps, and beyond that they ran 9 plays with 5 WRs, so 44.9% of the time they ran 4 or 5 WR sets. And Buscaglia says that on non-penalty plays on 4 WR snaps they got the Davis TD, but only gained 122 yards on 26 total plays. Which is bad. https://theathletic.com/podcast/61-the-buffalo-beat/?episode=154 On the 9 plays with 5 WRs they gained -2 total yards. You read that right, negative two yards. Yikes! 120 yards on 35 total plays with 4 or 5 WRs. Whereas with 11 personnel, they managed 249 yards on 39 plays. This may have been a large part of the problem. The OL just didn't look good, and they were doing really well with the running nearly all game, but still not running much. Not that they should've turned to ground and pound, but they could've run a bit more.

Yes, certainly. You could be right. We'll see.

Yes, an actual 1-tech is what we needed, most particularly a space eater for 1st and 2nd downs to get the blockers off Edmunds and Oliver, and that's what Star is. Would they rather have a guy who can also rush the passer? Yeah, that's logical. Would they rather have one who both eats space and then is able to make tackles as well? Almost surely. Would they have to pay a hell of a lot more for that kind of unicorn of a guy? Yeah, they would. Does Star do what they need him to do, to eat blocks, singles and doubles, to not be pushed back, to clog things up in the middle? Yeah, he does. Again, they knew what they were getting with Star. They'd coached the guy for years. They knew what they needed and they brought in Star to get it done. Star or a guy like him is what they needed. As for injuries, if he misses a bunch of games this year, you'll have a point. Missing just one so far is not a big deal. Phillips, Butler and Zimmer are all decent 1-techs, Harry and Zimmer probably more so this year, but they're not the same type as Star. They're all more capable of penetrating and filling holes and less capable of being a space eater. I wouldn't want to see them only those three all season, but in one game against an OL that doesn't appear to be very good, I think it should be a good test. And as for his pay, there just aren't that many guys who can do a really good job as a space eater. Those guys do get paid, and not much less than Star. Second contract FAs who go in the first week or so do tend to get overpaid a little bit. If you need a guy to come to Buffalo after a mediocre year when Tyrod was your QB, you settle for that.

The word is "if," not "when." By using "when," you are indeed confusing a guess with a fact. More, if they do cut him, it is likely to (unofficially) be just as much about vaccination status as performance satisfaction. If they were unsatisfied with his performance, it would only have been prudent to bring in a space eater type to get him a year in the system, either in the draft or in F.A. They didn't do that.

He's played 32 out of 32 games for us. This is his first injury to keep him out of a Buffalo game. His first game missed to injury since 2015. And if you want to blame him for opting out for COVID, fine, but that's something we're getting from fans, not from the NFL. Coaches, players and teams understand valuing family health over football, especially last year before vaccines. He didn't play after opting out, but he didn't get paid either, excepting a very small (compared to NFL salaries) stipend ($150K if I remember right), that is only an advance from his salary this year.

Just not true. In each of his last four seasons, he's played all 16 games. So that simply is not true. In his career, and counting this week as an absence, he's played 108 out of 114 games. As Alpha and many others have said, McDermott and the Bills can be, and in fact are satisfied, and they have made that clear again and again and again. It's you who are not satisfied. People have to choose whether to believe McDermott and the Bills ... or you and a few guys on here. Not much of a choice.

Fair enough, but IMO is just fine. Do you think they need to make another move?

Yeah, this is just creating a bit of a cushion in case of injury or emergency.

Yup. Remember bringing in Charles Clay when we didn't have a QB who could throw to the deep and intermediate middle of the field? With Clay we had very little improvement as an offense. With Star they've been an excellent defense.

"Really? His cap hit if cut after this season is $12M"? That's some nice spin. You say, "he's making $12M this season," and that's nonsense. He's making $6.15M salary, $235,294 in a roster bonus and $250K in a workout bonus. That's $6,585,294, and that's what he makes this year. As for the rest of the $12M you're talking about as "this season's," it has nothing whatsoever to do with this season. It was paid in 2018, and it would hit the cap in 2022, and neither of those is this season. Not to mention that it's entirely theoretical since the Bills could easily keep him. If he gets cut after the season (and it's true the likelihood of that probably went up a lot with him remaining unvaccinated), the Bills will still have to deal with dead cap from his signing bonus, but Star of course will not make a penny more. As for the money they've paid him for his first two years, yeah it's a lot, and that's how it generally works in the first few years of a second contract since you're including the signing bonus. Contracts with signing bonuses have a very high per year cost the first couple of years of longer contracts. The Bills expected to keep him for a long time. They might well have continued to expect that if he maintains the level of play he showed in the early part of his term here and in camp this year, but his vaccination stance might well easily change that going forward.

Clearly by "the wrong way" you mean the opposite way from you, which will generally point me in exactly the right direction. There is a group on here always looking for scapegoats. Star, Tremaine and a few others are the ones that group has recently settled on, and clearly the anger is there for you using the word "boo boo" for an injury to a guy who has missed five games to injury in seven years of DL play. I'd love to see you call it a soft tissue boo-boo to his face. Was he expensive? Yeah. Higher-level FAs get good deals. But McDermott knew exactly who Star was, and knew he needed him, and brought him along to Buffalo. And in 2018 our defense allowed 4.2 YPC, in 2019, 4.3 YPC and last year when he opted out, 4.6 YPC. McDermott was right that he needed him. The years Star was here the defense took a major step up to very very good in 2018 and was elite in 2019, and without him last year (yes, there were other reasons, but he was a big one), took a real step back.

Yeah, that's the reason they drafted his replacement first in the 2020 draft three months before he opted out, and then again this year. Your suspicion is very unlikely. In your opinion they wanted to cut him ... and so they brilliantly instead guaranteed his salary for the next year before he opted out. Yeah, good thinking there. Hell, they'd likely have drafted someone this year if they planned to dump him next year. But the odds have gone way up on cutting him "for performance reasons" next year since he hasn't been vaxxed.

Yeah, in seven years of playing and including this game tomorrow, he'll have missed five games, three in 2014, two in 2015, and the one tomorrow. He's a workhorse. Yeah, it should be. During the offseason there was a lot of discussion that these two were playing against each other for a spot. It'll be nice to see them both play and see how they do, though the Steelers OL is not what it used to be.

No. In McDermott's scheme, the LB absolutely does need someone up front to eat blocks. That's why McDermott has guys like Star up front wherever he's been, and why he brought Star to Buffalo. It's why he had Star and guys like him in front of Kuechly.

Another great player would surely help. And I can definitely see them drafting someone next year to replace Star. But the last year we had Star we were an elite defense. His first year here, the year before that, a very good defense. But particularly for a week, we'll be fine.

We're better against the run with him, but their OL this year is anything but intimidating. We ought to be OK for this game.

Utter nonsense.

Well, unsurprisingly, in my opinion it was indeed. It's a defensible opinion. The teams that kept the KC offense less potent last year all had the same M.O. They pressured him successfully. The WRs "got manhandled" because they were all injured. And the teams that rushed Mahomes well by and large were able to keep their speedy recievers covered for the time it takes to rush well. Just not for three, four, five seconds. He had a ton of time to sit back there against us. It wasn't the only problem we had but yeah, I think it was the worst. And I believe the national media saw those two things and it changed their minds in the preseason. Nobody in the media believed our rookie DEs would pressure well the first year, or that Epenesa would be much better either. Then they saw in the preseason that we were damn good at pressure. And there was some residual doubt that Allen might regress. And they saw last week that he very much didn't. It's not proven he can keep it up, but they saw that he looked like he might have even gotten better.

He was very good. Smart and a good writer. Good luck to him. It's kind of the opposite of Rodak, the difference being that the Pats fans won't care that he came from Buffalo, whereas Bills fans were so owned by the Pats for so long they never forgot where he came from.

His argument was that mediocre was living up to expectations. It's not. As I've said a bunch of times in this thread, yes, over the course of the year they were a very good offense. He said, "To be clear: the 'context' here is the defense - the offense did its job every week except against KC, basically. So the issue was the defense letting the other team keep the game close." You're trying to look at mediocre performance on one day through the lens of their overall very good season. He has consistently tried to argue that he was right, that they did their job every week except KC. NOT just that they did their job looked at in the context of the season.

Very much agreed that everything should be looked at individually. But saying that they really did well against the Steelers because even though they were really awful in the first half, they were pretty solid in the second half ... that doesn't make sense. Agree that that last drive was really nice. I loved it. But that doesn't mean that they performed well on offense. Would I expect them to perform it's best? No. But to perform well? Yeah. Allen has had a number of games where he's thrown well in bad conditions, and the whole Bills offense has also. Those weren't awful conditions, just not very good. Not counting the final kneel-down and the halftime kneel-down, they had eight drives, and five of those went for five plays or less. They weren't awful by any means. But they also weren't good. Come on, man, in that Jets game the offense was not good. And you can't use a pre-snap penalty as an excuse. Who committed the penalty? The Bills offense. It was their fault. Same with Kroft's almost-TD. The reason he finally fell down was that Allen had like 20 yards available to his inside, but instead threw it outside and high right next to the sideline, forcing him to attempt some unusual balancing steps to stay inbounds. Bad luck is sometimes a factor but those were both cases of the Bills having the results of their actions hurt them. They killed themselves with penalties, and that's not luck, it's bad performance. They went 3 for 11 on 3rd downs. They didn't score a single TD despite good field position, starting one drive in Jets territory and two beyond their own 40. The Jets didn't have any other game this year where the opposing offense scored less than two TDs. And in only two games was it less than three TDs. "... with regards to predicting future success or lack of ..." you say? Well with those words, I'd have to agree. I haven't expressed any concern about future success with the offense. I made it clear that I think overall they're very good. I have been responding to a somewhat nutty statement he made. He said, "To be clear: the 'context' here is the defense - the offense did its job every week except against KC, basically. So the issue was the defense letting the other team keep the game close." And that's nonsense. Yeah, the offense was better than the defense, though the defense really improved the last half of the year. But arguing that there was only one game where the offense didn't do its job doesn't make sense. They had some problems in several games, though again, overall they were certainly very good. Permit me to drastically disagree about the Titans game. That was dreadful. Just went back and watched the whole thing a few days ago as I slowly work through last season. It was awful. On both offense and defense. But the offense absolutely killed themselves with penalties, two INTs and a lost fumble. They couldn't get out of their own way. Agree that the schedule change sucked and may have had an effect. That's not an acceptable excuse. Agreed that the Chargers game was another one with some problems.

No. I get why you want to establish a random cut-off in a place where you can ignore a negative Bills performance and pretend it never happened. We all get it. Couldn't be clearer. Unfortunately, that's not how stats work, that you can randomly eliminate them because you feel like it. What you've got there is a negative DVOA performance. And 0% in DVOA isn't "doing what it's supposed to do," as you say here. Nice spin there. In real life, mediocre performance isn't "doing what you are supposed to do." Your boss isn't going to come into the office and say, "Hey nice going, Coach Tuesday, half the people in the world could do better than you are doing. Great stuff!!! You're doing what you're supposed to do." You don't get to randomly decide which numbers you'll ignore after checking out how you can gerrymander a way to exclude a game or two that you don't want to think about. You either use DVOA ... or you don't. If you don't, that's fine. If you do, you face up to the consequences of doing so. The consequences of basing your argument entirely on DVOA (while desperately trying to avoid anyone noticing that the offense scored less than twenty points in four games), the system you love so much, is that according to that system, the Bills had four games where they were below average, sub-mediocre. Football Outsiders don't say anything about a 1% cutoff. They don't attach any importance whatsoever to that. That's entirely your own made-up little attempt to justify leaving out the game that is inconvenient for your argument.