Thurman#1

What you're doing there is framing. What they are doing is fair, just as fair as people trying to say that none of the drops go on Josh at all, just as fair as your saying that they're just "trying to explain away" something. Just as fair as that ridiculous video labelled "5 Minutes of Josh Allen Drops" that actually is a collection of drops, poor throws and defensed passes and a ton of instant replays and slo-mo replays taking up very significant amounts of the five minutes. Yup, plenty of drops in there, but equally several that absolutely weren't, though Kelvin Benjamin in particular comes off poorly. All are attempts to frame the data so it implies the result the writer/film editor has decided he wants. Allen does have a problem with rifling the ball in too hard even on short passes. He needs to work on touch, and I'm sure if you asked him he'd totally agree with that. And that affects the drops. How much? Impossible to say, really, but it absolutely does affect those numbers. He does seem to be improving, to my eyes at least. But he's got a ways to go. Plenty of rifle-armed QBs had that problem early in their careers and grew out of it, Elway for instance. Equally, though, some never learned. Allen is part of the reason for those numbers. Equally, though, the receivers are too. Plenty of real actual bad drops on display also. The tweet's been removed, so I can't see what the OP is about, unfortunately.

So, both guys say Josh Allen, and this offends you? Well, OK, I guess.

That's ridiculous. Guys whose ceiling is 67.5% while completing 8.0 YPA, who put up 4042 yards in 15 games, and racked up 26 TDs and 5 INTs are absolutely going to have teams wanting him. It'll absolutely depend on his health but he was a whole lot better than average, particularly at his ceiling but even a bit below it.

Yup, and you can say the same for the other 50 states with different nicknames. Meanwhile, I visit often and it's great. And the waterfront upgrade with the Big Dig finished has made it a lot more inviting than it used to be. And it used to be great. Not that the sports fans there aren't wildly entitled after their recent run of wild success. They are. But it's still a great city.

Dude, Boston rocks. The Pats cheat and are jerks, but Boston's a great city.

I disagree, strongly. But it remains a reasonable take From a New England-centric POV till one of the three AFC opponents proves themselves by bloodying the Pats nose. If I were a combative Pats fan I'd say much the same thing. The Bills still have a lot to prove. But this FO has showed itself smart since day one. They've made mistakes. But far fewer than most. Both have been popular forever. But the reason home team-bashing has been popular for about twenty years is that we've been mediocre on a level of consistency that was kind of remarkably sad. The people criticizing the Bills were dead right. Lately the Buffalo media has started to turn. Not because they're jumping on the bandwagon. Simply because McDermott and Beane look like they're getting it right. Acknowledging that makes sense.

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001113206/article/2020-nfl-schedule-release-ranking-top-nine-primetime-games 3) Kansas City Chiefs at Buffalo Bills Week 6: Thursday, Oct. 15 at 8:20 p.m. ET on Fox/NFL Network/Amazon Patty Mahomes against Sean McDermott's defense in front of the amazing and passionate fans in lovely Western New York? Buckle up, buttercup! The scene in Buffalo is going to be wild, with the defending champs coming to town with the sun down and the juices flowing for Bills Mafia. I'm so excited I might jump through a table! This could be a playoff preview, too. I anticipate the Chiefs will win their fifth straight AFC West title. And yes, I expect the Bills to take the AFC East for the first time since 1995. Any time Mahomes is on in prime time -- with the electric Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce by his side -- the viewing offers sizzle. Can't wait to see him go against a Bills defense that ranked second in points allowed and third in total D last season. But don't discount the undercard of Josh Allen, Stefon Diggs and Buffalo's revamped passing attack against Tyrann Mathieu, Frank Clark, Chris Jones and the rest of K.C.'s underrated championship defense. It's obviously a huge game for us, and Schein has bought in to the Bills the last couple of years. But it's nice to see that this game looks as good to non-fans as it does to us.

That and if you're doing something you're not proud of, and your brother's there, and you see him on Snapchat apparently posting pictures with women and the address ... maybe tell him to put his phone in the Yondr pouch. Or much much better yet, stay home and hang with the kids.

Win/loss is NOT a QB stat. It just isn't. It's a team stat, and to remind people again, the actual name of the stat is, "TEAM Wins in Games Started By This QB (Regular Season)." (My caps.) Team wins.You judge a QB by how well he performs his QB duties, not by whether a K hits or misses a field goal or by whether the defense sucks or excels. Taking out a guy's best years and looking at what's left isn't a fair way to judge his performance either. And Cassel isn't a bum, he's a game manager who won't be explosive, but also throws too many INTs to be a really good game manager. And in any case, it's very much worth noting that the Pats went 10-5 in games Cassel started, NE had an unbelievably easy schedule.

That's my best guess, 8 or 9 wins. Now, anyway. Belichick defenses have long showed form in being top defenses even when they lose guys who appear indispensable such as Richard Seymour. A lot of their success comes down to multiplicity and unpredictability. Guys like Beau Allen, JC Jackson and Adrian Phillips just suddenly seem to become good somehow in Belichick defenses. They're wildly unlikely to be as good on D as they were last year but I don't expect them to regress as much as many expect. On offense, though, Scarnecchia and Brady are going to be huge losses and I do expect major regression there.

While I agree with you that Beane is in no way - yet - top three, you are drastically undervaluing the importance of excellent cap management. Which is most important, a good roster or good cap management? If you want your team to be not just competitive for a year or two, but competitive in the long term, consistently ... they're both necessary. An awful lot of the reason Belichick has been able to field competitive teams year after year after year is Tom Brady and his defensive game-planning, and an awful lot more is how he husbands every single cap dollar year after year after year, getting rid of expensive guys when they hold out for what value they can get elsewhere, letting good players go early so he'll never waste a cap dollar on a guy past his prime, and consistently spending less than other teams do on various position groups that other teams throw dollars at. He's got a magnifying glass on this at all times, as do all of the consistently competitive teams, except maybe the Saints. Cap space is huge. Sure, it means nothing with a crappy roster, but if you can be competitive and still have cap space, you can become one of those teams that's nearly always good. And the Eagles have shown themselves over the years at being really good at handling the cap. But they have low-first-year-base-salaried themselves into cap trouble now, and it's coming back to bite them. They haven't really been able to fill holes this year, largely because of their cap situation. I suspect Roseman will learn a lesson from this going forward. Till now, he's always Agree with you on pretty much the first six or seven GMs you cited. They've proven excellence. Maybe Beane will be a top three guy some day, maybe even soon. But he's got more to prove. And I do really really like this brain trust, both guys, an awful lot.

IMO, a bad article, for two main reasons. First, there's an article based on the exact same idea, with pretty much the same evidence, written by Thad Brown, called "Is Brandon Beane Cornering His Own Comp Pick Market?". Posted on March 30th, about a week ago. And the new article never mentions it. https://www.rochesterfirst.com/sports/buffalo-bills/is-brandon-beane-cornering-his-own-comp-pick-market/ And second because unlike the first article, the new one puts down the idea of getting actual comp picks, as if it's a bad idea. Implies that Beane thinks so too. And clearly, Beane doesn't, and has said in no uncertain terms that he thinks aiming for comp picks is important and that as soon as possible, he'll be planning to get them. He knows that comp picks are smart. So why hasn't he gotten any yet? Because comp picks come mostly in the mature stage of the life cycle of a team. When you're rebuilding, you need to bring in FAs to fill your most urgent holes. It's teams that have good solid veteran cores and depth that tend to accumulate comp picks. The Pats are absolute comp pick masters, they accumulate them year after year, but if you go back to Belichick's first three or four years, not so much. Ravens, too. It was too early in the life cycle of this team to pick up a lot of comp picks. And while Beane's method here is really nice, very smart ... it's not a replacement for comp picks. It's an excellent way to supplement them.

Those seem pretty reasonable to me. I'd put Hodgins higher, maybe 50 - 60%, and also Jackson, maybe at 25 - 30%. Those are quibbles, though.

I didn't just look at the drive charts for that Ravens game. I looked at the play-by-play. Every single play. And then I read your post. And it said a lot more about your point of view than it did about that game. Your argument doesn't hold up. Take out that 38-yarder and Singletary had a really bad game. Now, it's not fair to take out whatever play you don't like ... but that 38 yarder didn't happen till about halfway through the 4th quarter (specifically, 8:47 remaining in the 4th, down by 15). So right up until then, he'd gone 13 for 52 and nearly all of those 52 came on that one drive. Outside of that he'd been completely contained. And after that big 38 yarder seemed to indicate they might have success running him? Three carries for -1. You look at the one productive drive he had ... exactly one and no more ... and you say that in your view this drive proved that the run game will work if you commit to it. You can't back that contention up. I'd argue that's confirmation bias. You ignore the rest of the game and look at the one time he was successful. That didn't prove squat. Ups and downs is how things work in life. One short success doesn't prove things will work. Only thing it proves is that things CAN work ... under certain circumstances. Till that one drive, they'd run Singletary three times, for 1 yard, for 5 yards and for -2 yards. Three runs for a total of four yards. Then the drive on which he was successful. The first play was for six yards. Then three, then eight, then three, then 14, then 9, then -1. That didn't show that if you commit to it, he'll succeed. Just the opposite. The first play on that drive was successful, far before they "committed" to using him. If anything, that showed that if he was successful, they'd commit to continuing to use him. Most likely the Ravens tried a defensive variation that the Bills liked Singletary against, or the Bills tried a variation to work Singletary that the Ravens couldn't handle. And when things worked, they continued running him. After that drive, though, Singletary's next run went for two. Hmm. His next was for one and the one after that was for -2. Not surprisingly, they didn't run him consistently after that. When he was successful, they handed it to him. When he wasn't, they didn't. This makes a lot of sense. Most likely the Ravens adjusted after that good drive to work much harder on taking Singletary away, and they were successful till late in the game and prevent defense time. You say, "As we all know, that usually, the more a team runs the ball the better the RB does over the course of the game." We don't all know that, by any means. It's a pretty common thought, but it's likely a great example of the logical problem of confusing correlation with cause. More, where are the numbers that even show correlation? It's a common cliche, but what's real is that sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. And that if there is some correlation, it's probably more result than cause ... if a guy's having success early, he's likely to get it a lot late, and if a team's winning, they're more likely to run the ball late to burn clock. Singletary was underused and Gore was overused all season? Yeah, fair enough, that's a very reasonable feeling. This FO absolutely loved Gore. And late in the season it got hard to see why when you looked at his production. But in terms of the OL, well, yeah they looked bad, but the Ravens D was killing everyone, all year, especially when they were able to take away the run and make teams one-dimensional, which they mostly did in this game. Again, more than half of Singletary's carries went for two yards or less. Any OC is going to be affected by a lack of success like that. And up till that long run near the end of the game, it was even worse. Anyway, I've said enough on this. Nice to talk to you.

I'd disagree. He processes well plenty of times. Just not as consistently as you'd like. Which is not uncommon for a guy as young as him. A lot of what we call processing comes about when you have the correct inputs, which often come from knowledge that comes from experience. I'm not convinced on Allen yet, but definitely hopeful and convinced he's got a chance.

No. Brown's cheaper, younger and not injury prone. The difference in salary alone would not be worth the difference in production even if Green stayed healthy.

Yeah, this.

I said no holes for starters and I still think it's true. But the more I think the more I believe the closest thing we have to a hole is big nickel.

Yup. This. The beer vendors, maybe. They'll stair-climb their way into fitness.

Yeah, I hear you that his time to throw was high. I'm saying that a lot of that was on him because he tends to hang onto the ball and look for longer plays. And that when you do that you are basically accepting that you'll get pressure while also possibly getting the chance to make a longer play. Which he sometimes did and sometimes didn't, but which makes the line look bad in terms of the tim-to-throw stat for something that was not their fault. If Allen starts hitting the shorter timing routes instead of holding the ball, we'll likely see the average time go down, as it did this year. In 2018 he was worst in the league, well above 3 seconds per play. Oh, and yeah, it's details, details but I question how well the running game was working against the Ravens. Allen had two runs for nine yards. Gore was stymied. And Singletary's yards per carry look pretty good, but on his 17 carries he had only six went for four or more yards. He had the beautiful 38 yarder, and one really productive second quarter drive, but other than that he was really held in check. Four of his 17 runs were for negative yardage, that's nearly a quarter of his runs. And eight of his 17 runs (more than half) were for two yards or less. And I believe you that the best pass rushing teams got in his face often. They do that to everyone. That's why they're the best pass rushing teams. As for what will happen after this year, I suppose major changes are possible. Dawkins could demand too much money and force his way out of town, though he's a fine player. And while I'm hopeful, it's possible we don't even have one right tackle, never mind two. IMO, though, if RT doesn't look good, that would result in Ford moving to guard and if he replaces someone, my guess is they wouldn't need to make more changes. If Ford succeeds, I could see one of the two guards being replaced from the draft or FA. Maybe two but I doubt it. This line is above average. Far from great, though, but they might easily get better just from Ford figuring things out, Nsekhe staying healthy and from increased familiarity. And no, I'm not satisfied with above average. I'd like to see excellence. But I'm also not unhappy with this o-line. My guess is they'll work towards excellence, on the OL and at every position group.

And John Elway. And Fran Tarkenton. And Steve Young. Steve McNair. Donovan McNabb. Aaron Rodgers. The Amish Rifle could and did run and it hasn't come back to haunt him. And plenty of other recent guys who can run who didn't stay in the league because they weren't good enough, rather than because their running caused them injury problems. Kaepernick. Bottles. Gerrard. Mariota seems headed in that direction. There are plenty of running QBs who had long healthy careers. That's a fact. Also plenty of running QBs who didn't. Also a fact. But what you said was, "Cam Newton has proved that running QB's don't last in this league." He didn't do that. What he did was provide an example of a guy with tremendous potential whose career does indeed seem to have been harmed by physical damage, a lot of which was caused by running. Fair enough. He's a reasonable argument. He certainly hasn't proved that running QBs don't last. And I do remember losing out on La'el Collins. I was pissed. Do you really think that this F.O. wouldn't have tried to get him on the roster? I think they would have.

He's better than decent, he's very good. Not great. But very good LTs are what you should have to protect your QB, and they aren't all that common. IMO they'll try hard to get him back, but won't be held hostage. If he expects top three or four money, they might easily draft an LT high next year. People who think he's just good, as in pretty much average, are underrating him. For example, the only place we did better last year than over left tackle in terms of yardage was around right end. Over left tackle, behind Dawkins, we got 4.59 ALY (see Football Outsiders where this data comes from), which is 10th in the league, which is far better than decent.

Yup, He was pressured a lot. He was also one of the QBs who held the ball longest, as ranked from quickest to slowest, he was 29th, as per Next Gen Stats. It's not difficult to see that there is likely to be a bit of correlation there. Hold the ball longer and you make the job of the OL harder. In fairness it goes the other way too. This OL wasn't bad by any means. But equally they sure weren't great. What they were was professional. Slightly above average, possibly? Hopefully they'll be better this year with a year together under their belts to gel and perhaps someone beating someone else out by playing better. We don't have any journeymen as starters. You're right, though that we also don't have any All-Pros. But I'd argue that Rex lucked into Incognito as he was available cheap. Credit to him for reaching out to Richie, but if Incognito hadn't lost it, he'd likely still be here. This regime loved having him till it became impracticable. Can you point out any Richie Incognitos out there for being picked up? I can't. But Cam Newton didn't prove that running QBs don't last in this league. He proved that some running QBs don't last in this league. All you have to do is look at Russell Wilson to see that it's possible to last. But fair enough that it can be dangerous.

We have no real holes, positions where the starter is significantly below NFL standard. But that's not all you need to win a title. You need impact players, in particular at impact positions. You need to either have few injuries or great depth. Our depth is very good but injuries could still drag us down. You need good strategy. And you need the players to play together synergistically. And you greatly increase your chances of getting a title when you have a QB playing at a top ten or twelve in the league kind of standard. As for real holes, though, no, I don't think we do.

Hodgins isn't going to make the team? IMO he's got a strong chance. And if he doesn't, could easily be a practice squad guy. Don't count any of them out. Beane has a history of trading guys for picks in August, and that means other guys get a shot that maybe they wouldn't have been expected to get. Cardale Jones, Reggie Ragland, AJ Mccarran, Russell Bodine and Wyatt Teller. Doing that, trading guys who have a shot, opens up spots for others. IMO it's possible all three make the roster, though the odds are against it. But I think two is very possible. Here's that great article on his "cornering his own comp pick market." https://www.rochesterfirst.com/sports/buffalo-bills/is-brandon-beane-cornering-his-own-comp-pick-market/