Thurman#1

Unfortunately, I got the away guys the last two weeks. The Bears guys were far better than the miserable Lions group, but I had to shake my head when at one point the Bears guy said, on a one-on-one play in the middle of the field in easy view, "and Edwards makes a nice play, getting a solid tackle on ... the Bills pass catcher." Come on.

Rosen and RGIII are bad players? If that's your standard for bad, know who else is bad? Fromm. Those guys are better. Kaepernick will not be playing for the Falcons? Know who else won't? Fromm if the Bills try to get anything more than probably a 7th two or three years from now for him. Schaub is in his forties, yes. And better than Fromm. Bortles hasn't been on a team since 2019, and he's still better than Fromm. Sorry, man, you're kidding yourself here. Wildly overestimating what other teams will pay for guys the Bills are likely to cut is an old, treasured, popular game here in Buffalo, and you're playing it here. There's no way they get a 4th for him, or anything close. Post-draft, QBs are like new cars that lose value the instant they drive off the lot. QBs can gain that value back if they show they can play in the NFL. Fromm hasn't.

They're desperate, not stupid. You want a guy as good as Fromm, there are dozens and dozens out there. I googled FA QBs and came up with Bortles, Griffin III, Rosen, Kaepernick and Schaub. You need someone as good as Fromm, they're simply not that hard to find that you're left with your best option being Fromm for a 4th. That would be nuts.

This.

Yeah. That's my feeling. Nah. I'm sure there are some like that, of course, but the smart play is to understand that it just doesn't mean much. Either way. Better to be good than bad, but it's anything but conclusive.

Defensive coaches know more about how to run defensive schemes than anyone. Less about attacking them, though. That's offensive coaches who spend their time on that. Wouldn't be surprised if there's a fair amount of questions asked to defensive coaches, but I doubt there's a lot beyond that. Might be worth a session or two, though. Who knows more about women than women? But that doesn't mean you go to women to learn how to pick up and maintain good relationships with women. You go to a guy who's good with women.

So, your argument is that they weren't a disaster before he got here, that they were on the low side of mediocre? With a culture that had kept them bad to mediocre for decades? Fair enough. And stilll an excellent argument for McDermott. He changed the seemingly unchangeable. Daboll really is an excellent OC, an OC who was hired by McDermott, by the way. Against a ton of resistance from many many Bills fans. An awful lot of Bills fans after 2018 thought that the lack of offensive production meant Daboll was doing a bad job. Not McDermott though. Daboll hasn't shown anything beyond that at this point. A very fine OC with a chance to be more in the future. McDermott has shown he's a top-rank NFL head coach, right up among the very best in the league.

This. Daboll's good, but this isn't close.

The release says that's when he's expected back, not that he will be back. I expected Megan Fox to have her tattoos removed and drop over to my place for a date last night. Weirdly, it did not happen.

Very very far.

Walking boots can be used in cases of serious injuries or for small little things. I've got a friend who used one for shin splints. Four days and no symptoms afterwards. He caught a lot of heat for a few weeks there from being called a wuss, though.

Correct that vaccination is not stopping the spread. The evidence is that it is limiting the spread. Certainly not stopping it, but limiting it. And that is big. You're right that it is also limiting deaths and hospitalizations. That's also really important.

Yes, you can spread it while vaccinated. But you're 90% less likely to get it. 80% less with the delta variant. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-risks.html And if you're less likely to get it, you're ipso facto less likely to spread it. Vaccination is the least you can do. That number will go up and down as more studies come in, as variants appear and so on. But limiting the spread is important. And the plan to vaccinate the entire planet is simple. Day by day, inoculation by inoculation, do it till the disease stops going around. That's the plan, and it's a plan that has worked in the past, which is why diseases like smallpox and polio have been virtually eliminated. Yes, we'll never reach 100% ... some such as the immunocompromised should not be vaccinated, and it's harder to get to certain groups of people than others, such as people far out in the countryside in the least developed countries. And yes, some diseases have never been completely eliminated, such as the flu, and yet the deadlier versions of the flu did indeed get eliminated. Pandemics tend to end, and they do so much sooner when humans act rationally rather than following their facebook misinfo feeds. Once vaccination is extremely widespread, we reach herd immunity, it stops being passed as much, it stops being carried, and when that happens, variants stop appearing and the pandemic dies down. That's how this all works. Came here to share this sad article about Ben Franklin, "Ben Franklin's bitter regret that he didn't immunize his 4-year-old son against smallpox." https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/14/ben-franklin-smallpox-son-vaccine/?mc_cid=ece7b4632e&mc_eid=b891ab3b1f Sad stuff. History repeats itself again and again.

Good grief. What a sad thread. "This country is gone, killed by Democrats" is somehow seen here as more truthful than what we see in the media. The media does indeed have problems and make mistakes. It shouldn't be trusted 100%, anymore than any human system out there. But yeah, it's the most trustworthy way out there to see what's happening. It's like the old quote about democracy, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." Yup. On target. And the media is the worst system of getting information about what's happening in the world, except for all the others. But many will insist that what they get from their feed on facebook is better.

Limeaid, that's a reasonable question, I think. That kind of thing has certainly happened a lot in the NFL and also in Buffalo in the old days. Bruce Smith, certainly, but many others. That said, I think the answer is a clear "no." Dawkins bought into the process as has this team, really, and you can't improve every day when you're not practicing. He's seen in his own career what happens when he doesn't go all in, he saw that during his second year and publicly owned up to it and committed to changing. He's not breaking any rules, but that's not the issue. The issue is whether he's giving it all and whether he believes that's what he needs and wants to do. Bruce's teammates knew he was dogging it. They just didn't care. Today's Bills are behind a different philosophy, and today's training camp isn't comparable to the old days of two-a-days and no rules on padded practices and so on. This group would know or very clearly suspect what Dawkins was doing. This locker room would not accept that kind of behavior the way they did in the old days, as it would essentially mean, "Yeah, you guys need to improve 1% every day, but me, I'm good. I'm there." It's not the way this team rides.

Yeah. Hart appeared to be brought in as the security blanket for potential problems like this. Turns out I don't feel all that secure.

We have some indicators. He's missed two weeks. That's more than most have missed. It's been announced that he's not ready or even close now. Most who've come back from COVID have not had that kind of announcement. That's not proof but it certainly is evidentiary that he had a bit more serious case than many have had. Not that surprising now that the Delta variant is out there now, while last year guys didn't have to deal with that. Guesses and guarantees are not the same thing. As many have said here, not being vaccinated could very easily have McD sending messages. We don't know for sure who's vaccinated and who's not, but the team likely knows. Messages here might make an awful lot of sense even if he came in in great shape before getting sick.

I know. And it's so easy for receivers to make plays even if the QB doesn't throw to him.

If it were really all about fame you'd have about 3 OLs, 100 QBs, 50 RBs, 50 WRs, maybe 30 sack artists and a few mashers like Butkus. It's got to be mostly about worthiness.

First ballot? Gore? Don't kid a kidder. Eventually? Could be.

Agreed that we need to see how it goes. But I don't think we know much about how the younger players from the last two or three years can be. Last year's lack of an off-season was a major handicap for younger guys. Took away a lot of their chances to grow and develop. Last season was like none before and I believe we'll find a lot of guys league-wide making major "unexpected" leaps forward this year, particularly young ones.

There absolutely is a lot riding on this season. But they really haven't been rushing on this D "with relative ease / for big gains in the past few years." 2018 4.2 defensive YPC 2019 4.3 defensive YPC 2020 4.6 defensive YPC When Star was in front of the LBs on early downs, and Edmunds and Milano were mostly healthy, the Bills were pretty good to decent against the run. It was last year they got significantly worse. And then better at the end of the year as they got healthy.

Two years from now? Maybe. The cap will be soaring again. Now, certainly not. It'll depend on how he plays this year. I can't imagine they'd give him a contract like this now. Edmunds is a Pro Bowler. But Leonard is an All-Pro, a three-timer. That's a major difference.

He's not likely to be a one hit wonder, agreed. This is a wild overreaction in trying to make Josh's first season look far better than it actually was. Josh did not play well that year, he just didn't. What he did was show that he had a ton of guts, that he would never quit, that he was a leader, and that he had flashes, including the ability to run far better than we had supposed he could. He was certainly NOT the only reason they won any games. And that's not an opinion, it's a stone-cold fact, unless you want to argue that our Week 10 41-10 win over the Jets was won entirely by Josh's cheering from the bench as Matt Barkley played QB the whole game. "Those of us who actually watched the games know the only reason the Bills managed to win any games that year ..." is a phrase that makes absolutely zero sense that season or any other. It's a team game. There were many reasons we won a few games that year. The main reason was that the defense was very good. Our six wins that year included a 13-12 win against Tennessee, a 14-13 win against the Lions, but more than that, in our 6 wins, only one time did the opposing team score more than 17 points, and in only two of those six wins did an opponent score more than 13 points. In those six games, our opponents scored a total of 79 points, an average of 13.2 PPG. That had an awful lot to do with many or most of those wins. Like many Bills fans, you're being wildly oversensitive here. After the second year, few were saying "Josh was still a bust," as you say.. A few trolls and curmudgeons here or there, sure. But most were saying that his major improvement, particularly in his accuracy, meant that he had a chance to be a good one, though he absolutely needed to continue to make serious improvement. Did some still say he might be a bust? Yeah, it was still a reasonable possibility. Did some say they thought he would be a bust? Yeah, it was guessing, which is reasonable. But few were saying "Josh was still a bust," as if it was a fact. It simply didn't make much sense at that point. Yeah, there were a few ... who's that guy looks like a ferret with a hundred dollar haircut? Him, Domonique Foxworth, they were out there, but there were few of them. There was still a possibility he wouldn't be the long-term franchise guy, a decent possibility at the time, but his rate of improvement and the way he'd improved his accuracy meant there was also a very solid chance that he could be that franchise guy. That was the general opinion. There may well be many fans on fan sites hoping this contract will turn out to be a bad decision for the Bills. Mostly simply because they'd rather see their team get a great QB than the Bills, that they'd rather see their team have a shot to reach SBs for a decade than the Bills. It's still possible, but that's not the way to bet. Last year was a revelation, a guy playing at an elite level. The reaction around the league among the pundits has been wildly positive about this contract, and for good reason. It's a risk for both sides, but a good calculated one, for both sides. The consensus recognizes this.

Bill Belichick for one.