Thurman#1

Nonsense. All three posts.

Yes, the schedule was soft last year. But against the good teams you mention, the Pats, Cowboys, Titans and Ravens, they weren't "exposed" at all, actually the defense performed very very well indeed last year. In those five games they averaged 17.2 PPG (which if compared to all NFL defenses would have had them rank , lemme see, cross the t, carry the one, oh yeah, first in the league), 314.6 YPG (4th) and 1 turnover per game (1st). The D played really well last year against good offenses. DVOA compensates for strength of schedule and it had the D last year as 6th or 7th. They were very very good. They deserved being thought of as an excellent NFL defense the last two years, though it's certainly true they aren't living up to that this year by any means.

Good stuff, especially the above, and you're exactly on target when you say there isn't one thing you can point to. IMO, Star, injuries and Milano are big parts of it, but yeah, how come Hughes doesn't have a sack and what was up with those two unsportsmanlike penalties at times when we had a real, legitimate shot at the win? It is indeed a myriad. I thought it looked like something they were going to get on top of. But they haven't, and six games is long enough for that to happen, even with the lack of offseason reps. Frustrating.

So, basically, you're full of it. It's not even remotely fair what you did there, cherry-picking the worst small bits from an overall excellent report ... ... and then not posting the link because you didn't want people to be able to check your extremely shoddy, biased, petty work. Again, for those who want to see the whole report, it's very positive, but definitely does have some warnings. I didn't repost the negatives since the OP had already done it. Best is to look at the whole thing. Here it is: https://www.49erswebzone.com/forum/nfl-draft/190028-tremaine-edmunds-virginia-tech/page64/

To continue, funny how you left out this part of the same report: " The Way We See It: A true junior, Edmunds is a unique prospect -- it's not often that we see inside linebackers who are close to 6-foot-5. Very productive college player, but he is more of a reactor than an anticipator. In the NFL, instincts matter at the LB position. He can get tall at times, but Edmunds still uses his hands well to shed. He's better in pursuit than defending runs right at him. Needs to make a few more plays at or near the LOS (line of scrimmage). Very good coverage guy who gets depth with his drop and can play man. Plants and closes on the ball quickly. Not used a lot as a blitzer/pass rusher and needs to develop his pass rush technique. Overall, Edmunds is a very good prospect who is not quite there yet. With his frame, he might be better off outside, but if he plays there he needs to improve his pass rush skills. Has a lot of upside. He will be graded differently by each club depending on their profile for the position. With his size and athleticism, he has some Brian Urlacher to him -- but he's not Urlacher. He can control the middle of the field in zone similarly to what Urlacher was able to do. I'm not as high as others on Edmunds because he doesn't have top instincts, but at his age they will get better. Could be a top-10 guy. Upside: Long, massive and rangy defender — great arm length, explosiveness, athletic profile and size-speed combination. Can't draw them up too much better for the position. Great athleticism on display at combine shows up on tape too. Natural strength is impressive, and he's got a lot of room to develop and get stronger. Keeps his feet moving and can pivot and change directions with ease. Closes on the ball in a hurry. Will break extremely fast on underneath passes thrown in his area. Watch this film-study play where Edmunds reads the eyes of Miami (Fla.) QB Malik Rosier and breaks on the drag route to break up the pass nicely: https://giphy.com/gifs/ZcbIem1AaGDlSTwCaV Can pinball off blockers and keep his momentum going toward the ball. Squares his shoulders nicely and plays with a downhill thump and purpose. Effective rusher who can scream off the edge, arrive quickly on a green-dog blitz or loop around on stunts. Explosive when working downhill, especially in the run game. Sets a good, hard edge against the run, especially in goal line and short yardage. Tackling is strong, especially for such a young player and particulary in space. Closes nicely from depth and hits his targets. Scrapes down the line, keeps his balance and can shed blocks on the move. Wraps up and closes the deal with his condor wingspan and good burst. Rarely whiffs, and at the very worst he can slow down ballcarriers for others to finish off the play. Has template to be a good coverage player. Rare that a 250-pound player can check backs and tight ends in man coverage, but he can carry them past the second level. Even occasionally matched up with receivers. Has the athleticism to be a Tampa-2 "Mike" and drop into deep zones. Loose hips — can turn and run in a flash. Will read quarterbacks' eyes for tells. Tries to bait them into throwing to his man, knowing he can make up the distance in a jiffy. Highly productive player. Always seems to make 2-3 disruptive plays per game. Clean medical history — no known injuries at Tech. Strong character marks from NFL teams.

Know what I thought when I saw this? That you'd loaded the dice. That there was a reason that you hadn't given the link, and that the reason was that you had extracted the exact worst little excerpts and left out the good bits. And Golly gee whiz, turns out I was right, and you were cherry-picking the worst stuff https://www.49erswebzone.com/forum/nfl-draft/190028-tremaine-edmunds-virginia-tech/page64/

Fair enough. Right now it looks like you were a bit overoptimistic. Before the season I thought it most likely that they'd make the playoffs, probably win the division (though when the Pats got Cam, I thought the odds of that dropped) but not be a serious SB contender. If pinned down I might have guessed #4 - 6 in the AFC. I didn't expect Allen to be nearly as good as he is, or for the defense to be this bad.

It's not a closely guarded secret. In fact, it's out there publicly. McBeane controls the 52 man roster. He wanted that as a condition of joining the team. On the other hand, he's trying to give McDermott what he wants and needs to run his schema, so McDermott has a lot of input. But McBeane makes the decisions.

He was a DE in Baltimore his first three years, a two-gapper. He's has legitimate 1-tech ability, but could play nearly anywhere on the line. But he doesn't appear to be a McDermott style 1-tech. McDermott generally wants a block eater and a guy who can handle double teams, a space eater. Jernigan doesn't seem to be that guy. He's an attacker, a penetrator, a ball-seeker. Strong, quick, good, at least back then. But not a block eater. He plays a different style. Went just now to watch the Eagles Super Bowl game. A few times he faced double teams and he didn't stack them, he tried to split them. Sometimes effectively, sometimes not. It's not surprising that you don't see him stacking doubles on the highlight films. That kind of play doesn't make the highlight films. But after watching for a while, I'm just not seeing any of it. Perhaps in other games or other years? Not in this game, though, though I didn't make it all the way through.

The Super Bowls. Especially the first. Music City Miscarriage of Justice. The 2004 Steelers game when we lost to their backups. That defense was flat-out sensational but on the day the whole team fell apart. The playoff game when Joe Ferguson had an injured leg and couldn't plant, against the Chargers. That was a good team. Oh, and by the way ... Hunh?

Before the season? Or after the first few games? A lot of people had us as third-most likely after seeing Allen come out of the gate like that. Many many fewer before the season started. And yeah, fifth or sixth in the AFC right now seems very reasonable. But unless we get a lot better that won't make us a serious contender for the Super Bowl IMO.

Contenders for the playoffs, yes. Contenders for the Super Bowl, no. Not before the season when the last look we had at Allen was the playoff game. Same situation now. Contenders for the playoffs? Yeah, a very good chance. Contenders for the Super Bowl? Not likely at this point, though if things fall just right and we play quite a bit better than we've looked recently and the offense figures out how to play small ball against the stop the big plays defenses we'll see for the foreseeable future, it shouldn't be absolutely ruled out. Worth remembering that according to people like Kyle Williams and many others, in his second training camp, Torell Troup had become an absolute monster and looked to be a terrific pick. Then the back injury and the team's rushing him back to play and the re-injury essentially making him an old man before his time, though he'd been very healthy and missed almost no games in college. He could have been a very very good one. IMO they mishandled Losman too. But your point stands. A lot of poor drafting and poor handling over the years.

You're not replying to him. He correctly pointed out that virtually nobody thought that we would be a contender this year during the offseason. It was really only after the first couple of games and seeing how Allen looked that that narrative became common. Go back and look and find, say, six pundits who predict the Bills in the Super Bowl. You will have to spend a long time looking. It wasn't considered likely. Plenty of Bills fans hoped so, but few with any sense of neutrality predicted it. Yeah, the rookie window is passing. It will last two more years, assuming they sign him up for that fifth year option. Right now we don't appear to be good enough. Maybe next year or the year after, though I have my doubts about next year with our cap situation. And your last few sentence is serious exaggeration. I hear the disappointment, though.

Not certainly or anywhere close. Nor did the Chiefs know they could do whatever they wanted. If they had known that, guess what, they'd have done whatever they wanted, and would have scored a hell of a lot more than 26 points. I'm not arguing the D played well, but the Chiefs weren't doing everything they wanted or getting everything they wanted. The Bills turned a lot of drives into FGs that game.

No, we can't stop complaining. But yes, it is what it is. (Not that it ever is what it isn't.) And what it is is a 4 - 2 record, the two losses being against two of the four best teams in football, and the four wins being the Jets and three decent, solid teams. It's hard to know what direction this is going or what we'll look like in four or five weeks.

Exactly. One small correction, though, Ngakoue's salary is $8 mill. He's been paid 5/16ths of it. That leaves $5.5 mill still to be paid. We couldn't afford him without cutting elsewhere, and we'd be left with virtually nothing left under the cap to roll over, so that would leave us in even worse cap shape next year. Also, we wouldn't be able to pay him next year, he'd almost certainly be a one-year rental. So, very very unlikely.

He did gamble and lose. It's hard for me to feel sad about it, though. He might not get $175 mill, but I'm pretty sure he can still be comfortable with the - what? $130 mill? that he will make. And for those who couldn't understand what motivation Tre White had for signing that contract when he might have gotten more down the line, Dak is an exemplary cautionary tale and explanation.

You're right that there's a lot of underachieving going on there. And you're also right who's doing it. "...gross underachieving of that team." Yup. Precisely. Dak is playing like a top ten QB. IMO in the last couple of years more like top 7 or 8 and often better. And that's all you can expect of a quarterback. You can't expect him to run in like a hero and stop the run at DT. You can't expect him to both play guard and throw the ball. You can't expect him to guard the wide receivers. Great QBs don't win Super Bowls unless they're surrounded by good teams. And you don't pay a guy based on how good his team is. If you did, you'd have given Trent Dilfer the BBBBBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGG money. And you wouldn't have paid Aaron Rodgers squat after the Packers went 7-9 and 6-9-1 two years in a row. You pay a QB - in fact you pay any player - based on how he plays his position. Dak plays the position very very well. You compare him to Rodgers, Mahomes and Russell Wilson and find him wanting in the comparison, ignoring the fact that Bill just finished saying, "He isn't Rodgers or Wilson. But he is closer to them than he is Andy Dalton." You're not making a point there, except that you agree with Bill about who Dak is in terms of those comparisons.

Indeed. Nicely put.

No, he doesn't have one playoff win. The Dallas Cowboys have one playoff win. Wins are a team thing. Playing quarterback is how you judge quarterbacks. Dak has played quarterback well for a while and at a top 5 - 8 level for the last two years. That's how you judge a QB. Mahomes never won a Super Bowl. The Chiefs did. Watson is a top three QB, probably. Wilson didn't win a Super Bowl. The Seahawks did. Put Wilson or Mahomes on the Jets and they don't get close to a Super Bowl despite the fact that they're terrific QBs. You don't seem to get this, but teams win. One player doesn't, except maybe in tennis or golf, that kind of sport. Dak's a top 5 - 8 guy. Those guys get paid top two or three. Look at Cousins. Look at Watson. Is he worth not just #1 but way above the current #1? That's a question worth asking.

Then the world is insane. Top five money? He absolutely deserves that.

10x more? I'd have to agree with you if you're talking about the first four games. But I'd argue it's pretty comparable the last two. You're right that it could be because we played two very good, smart teams. But they figured out a way to play this offense better. That was always the likelihood, that someone would figure out a way to defense them. So far, they haven't made anyone pay, and so we'll likely see defenses play the Titans version of a defense for the Bills until our offense shows they can handle it consistently. And you're certainly right that in past years this defense played much better. The question is when (if?) they get healthy and adjust, can they significantly improve their level of play. I'm hopeful but not very confident, not with this roster, not without Star. He's not the only reason we're playing poorly but he's a lot of the reason we're playing poorly against the run.

That's on you. We run a platoon system. None of our guys played more than 65% last year. The only two guys above 53.9% (Oliver's number) were DEs (Murphy and Hughes). Didn't mean the DTs weren't important. He wasn't constantly taking on double teams. But very often and nearly always on runs anywhere near him.

Funny how the people who bring this up never bring up that in exchange the Bills gave him another year and a half of guarantee. Which is big for a player. Or that the pay cut was $1.5 million on a $50 million contract.

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