Thurman#1

Dude, you are spinning like a dreidel. Three or four times now I've said that it may not have been cap hell but it was bad. And you keep coming back with, "they weren't in cap hell." Yeah, I've agreed with that again and again and again. If your idea of cap hell is as awful as you're making it clear that it is ... then I agree it wasn't cap hell. Just very bad cap shape. And now Beane says the exact same thing. He doesn't use the term "cap hell." Instead, "cap jail or whatever you want to call it." When your take requires you to say that Beane is lying ("Just not the truth," you said), what you've got is an awful take. Where's the advantage to them in saying this? When your take forces you to say that and the only reason you can come up with for them needing to help themselves by saying this is that it "is a helpful narrative," that's good evidence that you're simply headed in the wrong direction. Your opinion is that they could have built from this. OK, I totally disagree, but that's beside the point. The point is that from instant one, Beane was not considering that. He's said again and again that even in his job interview he made it clear to the Pegulas and McDermott that the cap was in awful shape and that they needed to get it in shape. And that McDermott and the Pegulas were on the same page. So what you think about whether they could have built or not is for another argument. That's what Beane thought In his fricking job interview. "Just not the truth." This is what people do when they are on the wrong side in arguments and can't change their mind. They become willing to take a direct quote from the person concerned and explain (generally poorly) why the arguer knows way better than the guy (Beane, in this case) himself. :You're a terrific poster, but you're way off in the weeds here.

Q: Virtually all the free agent contracts were constructed with the future cap in mind. Was that the idea? BB: "Yeah, I mean, I want to try and be fiscally responsible. Terry and Kim give us, they let us use what we need to use, but we just got out of cap jail, or whatever you want to call it.” https://expo.newyorkupstate.com/sports/g66l-2019/07/518d9fee2e9c4/9-things-buffalo-bills-gm-said-on-state-of-rebuild-entering-year-3.html BN: At more than $50 million, you have twice as much dead-cap money compared to any other team in the NFL. From your standpoint, what does that mean? How is that managed? BB: That was all in this plan, back when I interviewed for the job. Again, you've got an idea of how it's going to work, but you never know when you're going to make certain moves and certain players you don't know (about) yet. Maybe it's a guy that we ended up moving that I hoped we didn't need to move, but we did. Once we started making these moves and things started falling in place, (you say), "I wanted to go ahead and take this hit this year, in 2018, to clean the slate." And I found that we're almost there, which is really going to open it up for 2019 and beyond. https://buffalonews.com/2018/09/07/buffalo-bills-gm-brandon-beane-sean-mcdermott/ If your idea of cap hell or cap strife, or whatever, is so bad that only two teams of the last ten years come to mind, then fair enough, the Bills weren't there. But they absolutely were in bad cap shape. They were aware of it. Beane knew even before his interview that it needed cleaning up and that it was going to be a priority. Fine, they weren't in "cap strife." But hey were in poor shape under the cap, particularly for a team with so few results in terms of wins and losses. Beane called it "cap jail or whatever you want to call it."

From what I can see, you're in fundamental disagreement with yourself. You say they can keep anyone they really want to keep. But then you say they'll have to make sacrifices to make it work with the cap. Those two statements are in opposition. I agree with the second. Yeah, they'll have to make sacrifices. Sacrifices mean you don't keep everyone you really want to keep. Pretty sure the 9ers would've loved to keep Buckner and the Texans Hopkins. But they had to make sacrifices. I disagree totally about the Saints there. EDIT: I see you noticed it wasn't a great example, but still worth looking at what happened when they got in cap problems ... Yeah, people said they can't sign Byrd without the cap catching up to them. And they were right. New Orleans was coming off five very competitive years and then suddenly ... Pre-Byrd and salary cap prob. 2009: 13-3 and title 2010: 11-5 and lost wild card game 2011: 13-3 and won wild card and lost division championship to Harbaugh's 9ers 2012: 7-9 no playoffs 2013: 11-5 and won wild card and lost division game to champion Seahawks then they picked up Byrd and got in a cap jam and suddenly ... 2014: 7-9 2015: 7-9 2016 7-9 ... with Drew Brees at QB, healthy all three of those years. I am enjoying the ride. Part of the ride that I am enjoying is that Beane knows that he has to keep the cap under control. He's smart. He's doing a great job. He is concerned with draft picks including comp picks. He gets it. Why wouldn't I enjoy the ride with a GM who knows how to play the system. "So, the plan is to always be in cap strength and in draft picks strength, like this presents itself. I mean there are certain teams that I would like to have traded for, Stefon Diggs or some of these other players have been traded for but didn’t have the cap space. Or didn’t have the capital to do it so will we have that every year Josh? I don’t know, but this is all been a plan to have our caps strong and have the draft picks to be able to send them to acquire a veteran player or to move up and down the draft how we want." - Brandon Beane https://www.buffalorumblings.com/2020/4/3/21206671/transcript-buffalo-bills-general-manager-brandon-beane-2020-free-agency-stefon-diggs-coronavirus

IMO it's just a case of people having different opinions. Happens all the time, very reasonably. Nobody knows for sure what will happen. More so with Tua. He might not even play. Or he might play and be really good.

Beane does indeed get it. He says it's not time yet but he absolutely will begin to game the system for comp picks. He understands their importance and has even built his own little system of bringing in low-dollar FAs who can either be traded for picks or can replace guys who can be traded, such as McCarron, Wyatt Teller and so on. He's not at the point in the team's life cycle where he can easily get comp picks, so he has to find a cheap way to manufacture his own. He's beyond getting it. He's smart as hell. And again, yes, you need to have good football players. Spending time and effort on comp picks and keeping the team in excellent cap shape ... are excellent ways to bring in the maximum number of good football players. It doesn't work against that. Just the opposite. If you want to bring in good football players, get more draft picks and keep your cap in good shape. That will allow you to bring in the FAs to fill your holes, like the ones I mention in the 4th paragraph. So I agree with your last sentence, but I think you yourself maybe missed what you said. "Your cap space and draft picks are currency to acquire talent, and, critically, to retain it." Yes, exactly. Dead on target. And that's why bringing in every pick you can and keeping the cap in good enough shape that you have a lot flexibility is an absolute key to bringing in and maintaining a good roster. Which is why the best teams in the league so consistently worry about comp picks and cap space. What do you mean he couldn't say that he wanted to get the guys out who don't fit our culture. Not only "could" he say that ... he DID say it. Again and again and again. Of course he could say that. Tell me, was Robert Woods a culture problem? No, of course not. Charles Clay? No. He wasn't living up to his contract. Great guy, insane Whaley contract. Ronald Darby a bad locker room guy? Nope. He would've been expensive in the near future and they needed draft picks. Preston Brown a dirtbag? Cordy Glenn? Tyrod? McCoy was overpaid, and I always thought he was a bit of a dirtball but all reviews in the locker room said he was a great locker room guy. Certainly much more talented than the aging Frank Gore. But he was too expensive. Gilmore has managed to avoid being a culture problem for Belichick. Culture simply wasn' t the issue, nor, obviously was talent with him. He would've cost too much and they were fighting to get the cap in terrific shape in a very short time. For good reason. Yeah, there were a couple of dirtballs, Dareus being the prime example, though it had also become obvious that year that he was not only lazy but overpaid. Sammy appears to have been the other main problem. But most of those moves that cut cap were done for two reasons, draft capital and cutting the cap. Again, Beane has reported in at least two places that he said in his interview that clearing up the cap mess was going to be a major priority and that he promised to do it by the beginning of the 2019 season, which he did. He didn't know who were culture problems, though he may have had some ideas on obvious guys. He wanted to clear up the cap because it's a great idea. They weren't in cap hell if you want to use the extreme definition. But yeah, Bill, they absolutely were in something like it. Cap hell, no. Cap problems, yeah. The cap situation of a team trying to get into a window? Yeah. Despite the fact that the roster was nowhere near being good enough to compete for a championship? Yeah. No, they weren't about to have to do the kind of purge where we lost Bruce Smith, Thurman, etc. But yes, if we'd kept that crappy cap situation and hadn't cleared the decks (and yes, some of that clearing also came to acquire draft capital to bring in Josh, but most of it was to clear up the cap), then they couldn't have brought in guys like Morse, Murphy, Lotulelei, Hyde, Poyer, Spain, John Brown, Beasley, Feliciano, Jordan Phillips, Lorax, Feliciano, Kevin Johnson, Tyler Kroft, Spencer Long, Nsekhe, Corey Liuget, McKenzie, Lee Smith, Andre Roberts, Kurt Coleman, Diggs, Addison, Vernon Butler, Quinton Jefferson, Josh Norman, Klein, Matakevich, Daryl Williams, Marlowe, Boehm, and Hauschka and I'm sure I'm missing a few. Sure they could have brought in some of these guys. Half, maybe? Particularly if they took the cheaper ones instead of the more expensive? Yeah, sure. That FA group is the skeleton of this team, and together they cost an awful lot, way more than they could have paid for without a monster salary cap improvement project. EDIT: Just to return to the headline, of course if Josh becomes a top 10 guy they should pay him, even if he becomes the highest-paid. It's a cost of doing business intelligently.

I disagree on Edmunds. He was very very likely to be excellent. His floor wasn't low. Allen ... yeah, fair enough, probably. You have to take risks with a QB. They don't come around as often as you'd like, and when they do, you have to grab one. Besides, how many QBs DON'T have low floors. Very very few. It's such a huge jump from college to pros that nearly anyone who's not named Luck or P. Manning can fail if they don't pick up skills they've never demonstrated at the college level and speed up their mental processing skills by huge amounts. How long will it be a team-friendly deal? If we don't win a Super Bowl and Diggs gets angry with a lack of production and threatens a holdout, what will happen? We don't know how team-friendly this deal will be. It's friendly as hell now, it's mega-amicable, super-affable, ultra-cordial, hell, it's downright team-intimate and team-matey. But for how long? How much of a diva will Diggs end up being? This wasn't a no-brainer at all. I'm sure they thought pretty hard about it. It could still go either way, IMO.

Yes, they can. Of course they can. But they won't. Because doing so would mean they would lose flexibility, be unable to fill the holes that appear regularly. Sure, they could sign 14 or 15 guys at $10+ mill average salary contracts. And then fill in around them with guys on contracts around $1 mill or less. Sure, it's possible. But it won't happen. If it was as easy as "We'll just keep everyone we desire to keep," then there'd never be a hard choice, would there? And yet every team faces them, and the better their roster the more often they face them. Yeah, they can. The 49ers certainly could have kept Buckner. But they didn't. It wasn't smart, largely for cap reasons. What they'll do is very carefully try to figure out who they can keep while still retaining enough flexibility to make the many other things they need to do work. Generally, teams can afford to keep roughly 9 - 11 core guys. How many depends on how much those guys end up costing. Probably closer to 9 if your QB costs $40 mill. A bunch of them will be at positions that are more important, if you get a guy there who fits what the coaches want. For us, those guys at crucial positions would appear to be Allen, Edmunds, Dawkins, White, Oliver if you're looking that far down the road, Diggs, Morse That's seven, if you count Oliver this early, which you might not. After that it becomes less clear. Do you count Addison at $10.15M a year as a core guy for the next three years? Maybe. If so, that'd be eight core guys. Who'll be the pass rusher they prioritize? Hughes would seem to be too old for them to extend him if he's expensive next time. Often there are a few guys at positions that aren't generally highly valued that are either terrific players or perfectly fit what the team wants. The Colts will probably make Quenton Nelson a core guy, though guards aren't usually seen that way. Our guys here might be Milano, Ford, maybe Jefferson if he's as good as we hope. Knox, if he's as good as we hope? Other than those 9 - 11 guys, people will come in and leave. They'll be drafted and stay on rookie contracts. They'll sign cheap to medium-priced FA contracts (depending on what's available with the cap). They'll re-sign cheaply. They'll sign short contracts for just a year or two to quickly open up space down the road when they leave. They'll fit in ... with intelligent cap management and the tough decisions that that entails.

Yup. Exactly. Another reason why you want to maximize how high your picks are to give them more freedom of who they can pick, and also maximize the number of picks. If you have a lot of picks, you can trade up or you can give the guy who's less often wrong even more chances.

Nope, that's not Josh who had a 100% "beat the hell out of Dak's team" percentage. That was the Buffalo Bills. Wins and losses are team stats. Did Josh outplay Dak in that game? Yeah. Does that mean he's a better QB, because he outplayed a guy in one game? No. And it's worth remembering that the defense Dak's offense was playing against that game was significantly better than the Cowboys defense Josh's offense was facing.

A crapshoot is something that has an unpredictable outcome, according to Merriam-Webster. The draft as a whole is anything but unpredictable. Every single year in history more first-rounders stick and become good than fourth rounders. It isn't unpredictable by any means. The higher up you go, the better your odds. Is it difficult? Yeah, you bet. But out of the six cited players: 1.1 Myles Garrett DE Browns 1.2 Mitch Trubisky QB Bears 1.3 Solomon Thomas DE 49ers 1.4 Leonard Fournette RB Jaguars 1.5 Corey Davis WR Titans 1.6 Jamal Adams S Jets ... you've got four excellent players, Those are good odds. Yeah, some fifth-year options haven't been exercised, but that's not a draft issue. It's a multi-factorial decision, involving cap space, injuries, motivation of the player, who else you've got at the position, how valuable the position is and a ton more. I wouldn't have made the Diggs trade, myself. I'm clear that Beane is way better at this than I am, but IMO he paid a bit too much in picks, Diggs may (or may not) be a bit of a diva, and while I absolutely love his pay schedule the next few years, my bet is that he either gets paid more and quite a bit more sometime before the 2022 season ... or that he proves unhappy. My guess is there'll be a re-negotiation in the next two years, which will make that trade look worse. Of course, if the Bills win a Super Bowl sometime soon, that result would validate the decisions made to get there. Hope this is what happens. I wouldn't have made that trade, myself, though.

Again, I politely but very strongly disagree with calling those issues peripheral. Well, not media slights, that's entirely peripheral. But cap space and comp picks are the opposite of peripheral. It's not a mistake that Beane in his interview with the Pegulas promised that he would completely clear up the cap problem within two years. The reason he was talking about that at that important moment is exactly the obvious. Because it's not peripheral. Anything but. Are these in the top five issues a GM should be concerned about, once he's past the rebuild? No. But it's not a mistake that the teams obsessed with those "peripheral" issues, the ones who play those systems the best, are among the best in the league, the Pats, the Ravens, the Pack, the Steelers. You look at their history and you find that whether they're having bad or good years they're always maximizing comp picks. Teams that have rebuilt don't generally get them, but look at the Pats and after that first four years of the Belichick era, suddenly they're always getting them.Now that they've lost Brady and their window, watch the Pats go back to the penny-pinching, comp-pick-pinching ways that they've hammered away at through nearly all of the Belichick era. Yes what wins is talent. No question. And the way to maximize your talent is to do the things that allow you to bring in more, better, younger and cheaper players, and two of those things are absolutely cap space and comp picks. When you have to overpay for a QB, comp picks allow you to bring in a few more guys on cheap rookie contracts and cap space allows you to fill holes with low- to mid-priced guys who aren't weaknesses, and that's something you can't do when you are up against the cap.

I've never thought Dak a top 12 guy. Till last year when he was a top ten guy. If you've got a top ten guy you have to re-sign him and unless he's willing to give you a discount, or unless the NFL is going through hard financial times, you have to make him the highest-paid guy. Yeah, assuming he's a top ten QB at that young age, I'd do it. I'd grumble. But I'd pay him.

Not buying the whole "when they committed to the run, they ran well" thing. It was just the other way around ... when they ran well they committed to the run. When their efforts to run didn't work, they didn't try so much. Before and after that one drive they tried run plays and more than half their runs were two yards and under. They had very little success with the run game, and that's why they stayed away from it. The proof is precisely that one drive, the fourth series in the second quarter. The first run was successful. So they quickly went back to it. They had success, and so they stuck with it. It wasn't like they weren't running well in that drive but they stuck with it and things started to turn around. They were running well and so they kept running. Pretty much the rest of the game till the Ravens went into prevent at the end, the run game was being absolutely stifled. They tried running. They simply didn't have any success. Most likely either the Ravens changed the defense a bit right there and the Bills noticed it and had success running, or the Bills tried an offensive wrinkle that made it easier to run. In any case, the Ravens adapted after that drive.

Yeah, it was a hopeful game at the time, I felt. IMO, hell yeah we want Devin Singletary catching down the field passes, anytime. I think he had problems last year with nervousness. His drops looked to me like he took his eye off the ball early. It's something that he can do much better at as the game slows for him and he feels more at home, I think. He's a terrific weapon in the open field. McKenzie not quite so much, but he's not bad. Just not as good as what are now our top three. I've never bought the "We need more size" thing. Not when I watched the Ravens game and not now. It's not a bad thing at all, but it's not a necessity either. Our top three guys are going to get a lot of separation and that's just as good as size. And the OC didn't ignore the blitzes, there just wasn't much they could do. The run game wasn't working, this group hasn't done well with screens. The play calling didn't seem to me to be the problem. It just looked like the Ravens D was better than the Bills O. And yeah, Moss seems like he will really be an upgrade on Gore. I'm looking forward to see how the OL does with a year of experience together. My guess is there'll be significant improvement. We'll see, I guess.

Most likely? Oliver. Ford. Harrison Phillips. The leap between first and second years is often the biggest, and because of the injury Phillips is in a way going into his second year. That's my best guess. Most seem to be answering who they want to improve most. I don't really think that's as interesting a question, as what we want doesn't influence anything much and also because many if not most people will just answer the most important positions.

Not at all. If he'd been being paid $15 or $16 mill, yeah, but $5.5 mill was probably a bargain for what he brought. He was one of the best backups in the league at that point. Wasn't his fault he wasn't sitting on the bench behind someone better.

Um, people are still dying of COVID. As in football games, it ain't over till it's over. As with most pandemics, there's likely to be a second wave and we really don't know how big that will be. Thank goodness for social distancing. There have been massive failures in how this was handled. But what was done still seems so has drastically cut down the numbers we would have seen. Not cut nearly as much as could have been, but still a major difference was made.

You're confusing the government with elected officials. Why would you trust the government? You shouldn't unless they listen to the medical experts. Good elected officials, of either party, will listen to the medical experts and act accordingly.

By this ridiculous logic, Marv Levy apparently screamed he was not head coach material when he fired his STs coordinator and his DC after his first year as HC. Apparently Pete Carroll also screamed he was no head coach, replacing OC, DC and STs coordinator in his first year.

Best guess is same as last year, Feliciano and Ford/Nsekhe. If Ford is still out there by the end of the year, IMO it will mean he's taken a real step up.

The NFL really is not all about who you know. That's ridiculous on the face of it. Does who you know come into it? Absolutely. But we haven't seen many horrible coaches get a lot of opportunities. We see guys doing a pretty decent job get plenty and we see plenty of those prove that at the next level they may be horrible. No, I did not poll all the players, coaches or front office personnel. You might want to settle down in front of a dictionary and look up the words "consensus" and the word "most," both of which I used. Oh, maybe "widely considered," too, as I look back. Is it "after three years" now? Have I missed a year somewhere? No? Got it. OK, then here's something you've missed. Nobody knows the future. That would include you, by the way. And me too, I hasten to say. What happens at the end of next year will depend extremely heavily on what happens during the intervening time. You're kidding yourself if you think that there aren't plenty of circumstances where they could feel that the offense didn't improve much and it wasn't primarily Daboll's fault. Just as a quick example, if Diggs and Allen miss the season with injuries they might easily feel that though the offense didn't improve much it wasn't Daboll's fault. There are plenty of other scenarios where they might feel that way. Like it or not it simply doesn't make sense pretending you know now what will happen based on imaginary future results. What they'll do is much more complex than checking the date and the stats from a website and saying, "Welp, it's the day after the season ends, and as I check, the offence isn't in the top half ... Daboll's gone." It just is a ton more complex, and thank goodness for that. This FO is a group that grinds. I absolutely love that about them, they grind, and they do it with intelligence, with an understanding of context, and with a plan. And what it comes down to is simple to put into words but will be arrived at with a lot of grinding ... they'll look at whether he is doing a good enough job under the circumstances and whether they can improve more with someone else. And you're dead on with Dennison, but that's an argument on my side, not yours. Dennison was fired after a year. Daboll is still here after two years. Clearly they thought Dennison was not doing the job, and that Daboll is.

Yes, I do understand this is a results based business, Scott. Scott, you do understand that absolutely nobody with a brain looks at those results without context? Or do you not? Because I've just said so about three times in a row and you have ignored it each time. And yet it is without the slightest doubt absolutely true. If they did look at results without context, the Niners would have fired Bill Walsh after his first two years when his results were very poor. They didn't because they looked at the context, which in that case was that Walsh had rebuilt and was working with a quarterback who was young and developing. Sound familiar? And again, "you don't get 4 years to install an offense if your first 3 years demonstrate lackluster results" is wrong for exactly the same reason. It ... depends ... on ... the ... context. You will get that 4th year sometimes. Other times you will not. A management group with a clue will look at both results and context and will come to a nuanced conclusion depending on what they think. What they will not do is exactly what you say they will. "Let's see, three years, bad stats ... well, we don't have to look any further or think any harder, this guy's out." Any management that makes decisions that poorly is a group that no coach should want to work under anyway. And Beane and McDermott are very clearly not thinkers who work that simplistically. And, no, Daboll is not on the hot seat because a guy named Scott on the internet thinks so. Believe that if you will, but outside Oz that won't make it true. I mean, in a sense pretty much every coach in the league is, and in that sense, sure, you're right. They clearly have confidence in him and think he's doing a good job. We know that because he's still here and still has the job after two years of working with him and watching every day. He's not on the hot seat. But will he like all of them have his performance evaluated carefully at the end of the year as they go over everything? Yeah, of course. And if they don't like his performance, will he be gone? Without a doubt. Will they check the internet to see what that guy named Scott thinks? I'm sure both of us know that's highly highly unlikely, and I'm quite sure they don't check my opinions either, or any of ours. And as things stand, does the context he's operating in appear quite a bit better than it has been so far, and will that be taken into account? Yeah, of course. The difference is that you don't like the job he's doing, which again is fine. Nothing wrong with having an opinion. But they do like the job he's doing. They do.

OK, I guess there's nothing forcing you to count the interview the Giants asked for but were denied by the Bills. It still exists in reality, though. I'll try to remember to use "be offered interviews" rather than "get" them. As far as indicating what the league-wide opinion on you is, though, it's pretty much the same thing. And that he was offered those interviews when he's coaching a team so early in their life cycle, and an offense that's far more coming together or finding it's feet than already producing at a high level again shows the way that the league sees Daboll. That's who. The consensus on him around the league is he's doing a good job, given what he's had. The offense has to improve? Well, you're right, of course it does, but if they don't ... it is at this point far too early to know what the reason for that will be or whether Daboll will be considered to be a major part of the problem. It certainly could happen that way. Or - especially if Allen improves significantly - they could easily improve a ton and Daboll could be considered one of the main reasons.

Rebuild. Young developmental QB who is seriously improving but has a long way to go. Offensive roster that was a distant second priority in 2018. There is indeed a reason that some fans question Daboll as OC. They mostly don't get it. They don't see that context matters. A lot. Does he still have something to prove? Sure. But there's a reason that he's getting those interviews.

Except here. And as has been pointed out a billion times before, he's been in horrible situations in his previous NFL OC positions. Terrible QBs and front offices that were sinking ships. There's a reason that around the league Daboll is seen as an up-and-comer, and that he got interviews in the off-season. He's widely considered to be doing a fine job here. Yes, a few fans here complain, but that's nearly always true. Yes, it really is. Results matter, but so does context. And the context here is that he's been here through a rebuild, and that particularly in his first year this regime was putting almost no resources into the offense outside of Allen himself. And he was supposed to get a year off. Again, he's gotten a head coaching interview and the Bills denied the Giants the chance to interview him for OC. You don't think he's doing a good job. Fine. Most of the NFL does, though.