Thurman#1

YPG is a nonsense stat. Depends far too much on how many throws a guy made, play calls, how often his team was ahead and whether they like to run out the clock, as the Bills do, when they are ahead. And what a surprise that you left all the running stuff out! Gosh, who could have predicted that? Except anyone looking at your agenda, of course. As for the rest of these stats, they're not all that representative of who Allen is now. If he'd stayed the same QB he was through the first four games of the year, we really would be in the position of having to worry. But he didn't. As he said, the NE game was a wakeup call for him and he played much better after it, as all his stats show. Taking passer rating as just one example, if you take his passer rating for the final 12 games of the season, it's not even close to the bottom 33% of starters. It's actually in the top half, 16th to be precise. Hell, his TDs:INTs ratio was 17:3, which put him well in the top third. So even throwing out the run stats, which shouldn't be done, he wasn't bottom third after those first four games. Again, what you have there is a very questionable opinion. Doh!!! Right is right, and you're right. Thanks for the reminder.

Listen, drop over to the house some time and I'll be glad to teach you the difference between "truth" and "questionable personal opinion." What you've got there is the latter.

Yeah, fans know way better than Andy Reid or Mahomes himself. There's no reason to think you're right about that. He had the whole year to concentrate more on putting together the mechanics and understanding of defenses that he needed to. He didn't have to worry about week-to-week game-planning. When you saw videos of the practices that year, you'd see him again and again ten yards behind Smith, mirroring every step on that rep and going through progressions trying to see what Smith saw and why he did what he did. Having that year was huge, and having it behind a smart guy like Smith made it even more valuable. Reid is a guy known for developing QBs. Him and McCarthy are among the absolute best in the game for developing a QB. That year was valuable for him, very valuable.

Alex Smith has journeyed, but he's no journeyman.

So now Shanahan is supposed to have been uncreative? Like us? And the Bills offense and the SF offense is supposed to be a good comparison? Garoppolo has a passer rating of 102 as a seventh-year man and Allen has one of 85.3 in his second year, and this is alike? The Niners have the 4th ranked offense in the league and we have the 24th and it's similar? Sorry, just don't see it. Not when it was happening and not now.

Not everyone wants those kinds of team jobs. And I doubt QB coaches are paid all that much. It's really when you start to hit coordinator that the money gets serious. More, he's said before that he makes a good living and chooses his own hours, who he works with and where he lives. Enjoys spending time with kids and family and is able to do that consistently with his current job.

Agreed Josh got significantly better. And I'd argue your hopes were too high. His accuracy improved, his footwork, his decision-making ... he improved on many fronts. But sophomore slump is a real thing. Mayfield is an example. Sam Bradford. Even Matty Ryan could be argued as a guy who performed worse his second year but then got a lot better. RG III (mebbe from injury, but it was real), Dak Prescott ... They think it exists too, not for everybody, but that it's a real phenomena: http://harvardsportsanalysis.org/2019/12/does-sophomore-slump-exist-in-the-nfl/

Not by far. Remember how surprising it was that DeSean Watson was so good so early? He spent a lot of time with Palmer between the draft and training camp his first year. That's how come Darnold and Allen both showed up the next year. Screen passes caught behind the LOS and run for 40 yards count in that stat. He really did have problems with passes that went a long way in the air this year.

I don't think you can call that guy a reporter. An announcer, maybe? Sump'n along those lines. Anyway, funny clip.

No thanks on #1. The problem wasn't so much that it - the Sammy trade - didn't work out as that it was never very likely to. The rule of thumb - though consistently ignored by teams that are desperate or behind the curve - is that you don't trade away another first for anything but a guy you think is a franchise QB. For teams that do, the success rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%. Don't do it even if you think you'll be in that top 20%. That's what the other 80% thought too. Re: #2? That's nuts. Two WRs in the top two rounds? That's science-fiction nuts, Terry Pratchett novel nuts. One or the other of Shenault or Pittman? That'd make sense. Maybe another in the later rounds too. It's an extremely good bet that we'll be bringing in another $5 to $10 mill WR in FA, and following that up with one high-round WR would make sense. But even if we don't address it in FA, it's still nuts to go WR in both the 1st and 2nd. We have other areas that they will want to address early.

If people weren't reading it, the media wouldn't worry about it. Hell, I'm not following it closely, but I've read a couple of these stories and I bet a lot of the people on here did too. You too, I see.

Significant contracts? Hey, absolutely. Expect three or four guys in the $7 to $10 mill range, and that's very significant. White is signed up for the next two years? There's no particular reason to think so. It's very clear that you don't value re-signing guys, but the thing is, the FO does. Very strongly, and intelligently so. If you sign White earlier, you save money on the contract he'll take, and doing so in a year when you have a ton of space makes a ton of sense. It means that next year and the year after when Edmunds, Allen, other guys you want to re-sign come up for contracts you don't have to worry about signing White at the same time. Milano, White, Dawkins, Poyer, not to mention guys like Spain, Kurt Coleman, Kevin Johnson, Levi Wallace, Shaq Lawson, and a few other cheaper ones, could all make a ton of sense to be re-signed or extended. Waiting to extend or re-sign your core players till they all come due the same year just means you have to let some go. More, doing it in a year when you have less money because you weren't smart and you went out and won the offseason the year before is even more of a recipe for trouble, for a clogged cap down the road and having to let guys go that they don't want to. This is without the slightest question a year to improve the roster. But your idea that bringing in high-ticket guys is the only way to do that isn't factual. You almost seem like more of a fan of the "spend it while ya got it" approach than of the Bills. If so, it would make sense for you to pick another team to root for, at least up till April or so when the big FA money is more or less all spent. Lil' Danny Snyder's Washington team, perhaps. This FO is financially conservative. That's what they learned in Carolina, it's what they've said every single time they've been asked, and it's how they've acted. There really isn't much question about it at this point. They might get one big FA. You could reasonably expect one every five years or so, as even conservative teams sometimes bring in one of the high-priced guys in about that often. Who knows, maybe this will be the year.

Cutting Kroft would only save us $3.9 mill, not $5 mill, but yeah, that could be doable, I think.

There isn't a limited amount of time. There's hopefully around 15 years. Yeah, he's only on a rookie contract for a few of those, but the end of the rookie contract isn't the end of success. And please. Did Mahomes or Lamar Jackson do their college time at Wyoming? Allen was always going to take more time to develop than most, you had to know that when you drafted him. More, neither of those two teams did a rebuild as the Bills did. Their rosters were already quite good. We had nine new starters on offense this year. This was always very likely indeed to take some time.

Rodgers is still playing really well, and in the first year of a newish system. Age is the reason they're treated differently. 36 doesn't mean you're done these days.

I don't think that's at all clear. Brady's stats had an awful lot to do with the personnel around him. He can still throw with steam, probably with more steam than Brees. Saying that, I hope you're right but I don't think so. In that last game, Minny seemed to be willing to let Brees try to make those long sideline throws, confident he couldn't do it consistently on them anymore.

I think there's a decent chance Hill's the guy they continue forward with, next year or the year after. Bridgewater will have a say, but Hill was very very productive and Payton could want to switch his scheme to take advantage of a guy with different strengths. Chris Simms for one says he's hearing it from a lot of his contacts that this is a real possibility, that it's something Payton wants. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/chris-simms-unbuttoned/e/66369992?autoplay=true

Peters didn't force the trade. He attempted to force them to pay him what he was worth. Said in his Philly intro press conference that he was shocked by the trade, that after they didn't give him a new contract that he expected to play out his Bills contract and then go elsewhere.

Hunh? No. The last play wasn't a spike. They faked spiking it and ended up running a play, and Rob Johnson without a shoe and with his ankle tape trailing behind him threw a completion to Price who went out of bounds with 20 seconds left, and that was when they kicked the FG.

For anyone else old enough to remember him, I find it hard to imagine anyone saying anything but Billy Joe Hobert. A backup QB put into the game on injury, he was awful and afterwards admitted he hadn't bothered preparing. Jackass. #2 Marshawn and #3 Mike Williams and #4 McGahee.

No, they haven't. Last year was the first year they poured significant resources into it (excepting bringing in Allen the year before) and there was very real improvement.

I was a News afternoon paperboy as well. Good memories for me.

Yup. And Shanny at least had the GM he knew he was going to be working with in the future. McDermott was working with a place-holder who'd been on board for picking up EJ Manuel.

You're sitting at your desk, working hard, and your boss comes to your and says, "Dude, we traded you to another company. We really like you but this is best for the company. You'll have to move all the way across the country and they expect you there tomorrow. Good luck." Of course you're shocked and scarred. The players get over it but naturally they're hurt. Not being hurt only be an indicator that you hated the job you were in, the neighborhood you lived in, and everything about life in that city. Of course he was hurt. What is the big deal about this?

I'd be surprised if most trades didn't leave the players scarred. It hurts to know the organization you're with doesn't need you as much as you'd thought. They don't talk about it, most of them, but of course he was scarred a bit.