Thurman#1

Flat-out nonsense. They lacked talent compared to what they were paying. Some good players but not enough, especially for a team that was spending their cap like a team in a Super Bowl window. And yet they didn't have a franchise QB. They didn't have excellent defensive talent, they had three or four good players and a few other decent guys. To remind anyone who might think for an instant that you have a point, let's recap our starters on D that year: Adolphus Washington Kyle Williams Marcell Dareus / Leger Douzable Preston Brown Lorenzo Alexander Zach Brown Jerry Hughes Ronald Darby Stephon Gilmore Corey Graham Corey White That's not excellent defensive talent. It's Stephon Gilmore, Hughes, Kyle Williams on the downslope, Dareus after he'd stopped being able to rush the passer and was being paid too much ... and a bunch of players, some decent, some not. That offense was just not good. 16th in the league and not explosive in the least. When we got behind we were out of the game. They absolutely lacked talent, most particularly at the one place you absolutely have to have it, behind center. And when they then lost Eric Wood to career-ending injury and Incognito to mental problems they were even further behind the eight-ball. They could have rebuilt with no QB and serious cap problems and no franchise QB. Thank God they were too smart for that. Instead they rebuilt, which brought them enough cap relief and draft capital to draft Allen, who might actually become a franchise QB, something Tyrod was in zero danger of ever becoming.

Seriously? Jeez, is your "friend" not noticing the trajectories of these two teams? You can't compare Ws and Ls here, as McDermott rebuilt and that means a ton of losses. Lynn did not.

It's not just the players and the formation that you get. You motion and see how they respond to that. Could the D put in different personnel? Sure. But McDermott isn't likely to run the same personnel and formation after the timeout. Why do something they're now prepared for? They could but probably wouldn't at that moment. But later in the game when the defense has the same personnel in play against your personnel, you know what their reaction will be if you run the same formation and motion, and you have a great likelihood of knowing whether they're going man or zone. That's a nice advantage. Can they change that too? Sure, but they'd be changing away from what the coaches considered all week to be their best strategy. It's not a huge thing, but it's getting a nice little advantage in terms of knowing what their plans are in certain situations.

Releasing Star makes no sense. First we don't have anyone else at that position, second they've made it clear that he's doing what they want and third it would save us virtually nothing against the cap. Actually, the cap would go slightly up, not down. Will Phillips get 10 ever again? My guess would be yeah. He times snaps pretty well and sometimes seems to get between guys before they have moved though he stays onside. I wouldn't expect him to do that every year but once or twice more would be a reasonable guess, I think. I'd love it if they re-sign him. Not sure they'll be able to do it. They should try.

Same deal. I'm no rules expert, but I don't think it's either penalizable or effective to punch, except punching the ball out. When another player has a guy under control and another guy comes up to make a hit, if he wants to get as much force as possible he should use the legal part of the helmet or his shoulder. If he wants to lessen the impact of his hit, make it easier on the guy with the ball, he should punch him. The reason they don't do it is because it simply doesn't make sense in any way. The only time it makes sense punching a guy wearing a helmet is if you're trying to punch the ball out.

That defense had a lot of takeaways but was 26th in yards and 30th in points. They were bad. A lot of turnovers are good, but not if that's the only thing you're doing well. The offense that years was 16th in DVOA and the defense 23rd. That defense was not good. And the offense had two first rounders, Spiller and Wood, and a 2nd in Levitre, and nobody else drafted above the 3rd by the Bills or anyone else, while the D had two 1sts, Dareus and Nick Barnett, and four 2nds in Dwan Edwards, Kelsay, Drayton Florense and Jairus Byrd. They'd put more resources into the defense and yet the offense was better. And with an OL of Levitre, Wood, Chad Rinehart, Craig Urbik and Erik Pears, producing decently was pretty impressive. Levitre and Wood were good, but the others were at absolute best journeymen. Chan really did a fine job with that group and on offense generally.

Cool. The Bills were hurt this year by their easy schedule early. Nobody was sure if they were really good or just looking good against bad competition. Now, beating Dallas and the Steelers makes them seem like they're for real, but it's too late for a lot of votes.

Oh, hey, cool. Looked like he'd make it this year, great to see.

Yup. Sigh.

Yes. Sample size is a big deal if you're making long-term predictions and thinking you're correctly evaluating a guy's possibilities in the future. They weren't. They were simply saying that with what we'd seen, Hodges was playing better so far. It was fair enough. They weren't even saying Hodges would be better this week. Just that so far he had been. Very very highly. "According to PFF, White leads the NFL in three major pass-defending analytical categories: Snaps per reception allowed (25.0), snaps per target (12.5), and yards per snap (0.43). " https://billswire.usatoday.com/2018/11/29/pro-football-focus-buffalo-bills-pff-tre-white-is-a-nightmare-for-opponents/ They also had him as one of the top 25 NFL players under 25 years old during the offseason. https://billswire.usatoday.com/2019/05/17/pff-pro-football-focus-tredavious-tre-white-top-25-sean-mcdermott/

True, but entirely irrelevant to what was said by the PFF guy. And yeah, he was playing against some poor teams. So was Allen this year. No, they look at every single play by every single player. That's what they do. And neither of those two guy you're showing was the guy who made the original comment.

Yeah, I would guess that it's both legal and very ineffective, and that the reason Oliver wouldn't do that is that the QB would then scramble away, that Oliver would be reducing the amount of force he was delivering by making that play.

The downside is that if you're punched in the chest when you're running you'll basically run right through the contact and keep going. You deliver less force by running the force vector up through a bunch of joints that aren't locked than you would by using a conventional tackle. Boxers in a typical fight will get punched a couple hundred times and more of them than not make it to the end anyway. Try getting tackled at high speed a couple hundred times in the length of time a prize fight takes. The reason tackles are taught the way they are is that it's the best and most violent way that's safest for the tackler.

Yeah, but on the game coverage they had another angle and you could see that Watt almost completely missed the ball. Would Allen have held on if he'd hit it on target? We'll never know. I think it's totally legal, but it's not very effective at knocking guys down, and that's why they don't do it unless they're trying to knock the ball out. Punching does a great job in making the area of contact small but a terrible job of delivering more total force. You deliver more total force by leading with a shoulder or a form tackle with your facemask.

The team that has been poor to average for a long time and is having a breakout season this year? The team that is really young and has a lot of guys on their way up? I see what you're saying, but that's not because of some unfairness. This is an extremely young team and the voters are just getting to know most of our players and teams with records like ours over the past four or five years don't tend to put a lot of guys in the Pro Bowl. This'll even out quickly now that we're winning and our guys are maturing.

Running more doesn't win games. Last year Buffalo was 29th and went 6-10. Some teams such as Seattle always prefer to run more, but others are just running the ball a lot down the stretch when way ahead, like New Orleans. Generally it's not so much that running teams win as it is that winning teams get ahead and then run. Or that some teams have QBs they're trying not to force feed and so they deliberately run more. That was Buffalo last year. And as for "being in good company" ... the Bills are running 53.32% of the time at #28, but the next five teams, all within 3 percentage points of the Bills look like this: 27. 6-8 Indy 54.17% 26. 8-6 Tennessee 54.27% 25. 6-8 Oakland 54.96% 24. 9-5 Houston 56.92% 23. 7-7 Dallas 57.54% Those aren't powerhouses.

Totally. That's why they've already got his successor on the roster. Stidham's completely ready to go to make Belichick's final years golden. Yup. Red flag generally meaning "Bizarre wrongness coming up fast."

Yeah, no. If he does get so discouraged he quits, it'll be from what happens in the playoffs.

On the contrary, cutting Fitzy made total sense at the time. He was due to make $11 mill in salary that year and they didn't want him to start and didn't want to pay a backup at that level. It was reported that they talked to him about keeping him by re-negotiating his salary down but he wasn't interested. Made sense to both parties. Fitzy wanted to start and probably knew that a team willing to start him would pay more than the Bills. Fair enough that there's "space between terrible and Super Bowl caliber franchise QB." Very true, and Fitzy does indeed come in between those two and further away from terrible. Great guy, I wish he were a better QB.

For a QB who can't throw past 10 yards, his YPA is still higher than Allen's. Being held ineffective by our defense isn't something that only happens to UDFA QBs, either. Brady and Lamar Jackson didn't have good games against us either. Nor did Allen have an especially good game against the Steelers, who aren't as good against the pass as we are. As I've said many times in this thread, in terms of predicting the future, I'd take Allen over Hodges in an instant, without having to think hard. Hodges has proved much much less. But it was reasonable to say that Hodges had been outplaying Allen so far. Again, much harder to make that contention now ... but I doubt that anyone will.

Dear Messenger. I blame you. Period.

No, I don't realize that, Scott. I do recognize that many over-sensitive Allen fans unreasonably think so, though. "Come to the media's rescue"? Good lord, Scott, talk about a metaphor that's outright wacko!! I'm not in a position to rescue anyone from anything. Do I notice that the standard response here when any media member says anything that might by any logical stretch be taken as eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever so slightly negative, is to immediately and loudly blame the messenger? Which has absolutely zero logical strength or sense? Yeah, I do indeed notice that and when it gets especially egregious I sometimes say something. And this was one of those cases. People immediately took this comparison as wildly anti-Allen when it really was pretty reasonable and more pro-Duck than anti-Allen. (Again, before the Buffalo game, Duck's passer rating was over 100. Hell, even after that game, Duck's rating is within two points of Josh's. He was doing a very good job with what they were asking him to do, and that's the only reasonable way to judge a QB.) People also took it as a prediction of both of their futures rather than a comment on how things were at the time, and this made zero sense. After this game, it would be considerably harder to make that case, but it was pretty reasonable before he played our very fine defense.

I'm no huge fan of Marrone, although I do think he's a decent coach, but everybody says the team is a family. And nearly everyone would bail if they thought they were being undermined at the team level. Marrone didn't get along with Whaley and it looked like the Pegulas were going to start siding with Whaley. That wasn't a moral issue and nearly all coaches would do the same thing if they felt it was to their best advantage. The whole "you must never leave, but we'll fire you any time we want," thing that fans tend to want to hold players and coaches to doesn't make sense as a moral issue. People make decisions by what's in their best interest. Holding that against them doesn't make any sense. Ahhhhhhhhh. Interesting.

One of your three to four weekly bad takes, and all of them supported by the logically null "Watch the tapes," which ignores that people who are trolls see different things when they watch the tapes from the rest of us. And that all of us see things differently to some degree from confirmation bias among many other things.

Plus odds of Bills beating the Jets. Give the Bills a 35% chance to beat the Pats, the Phins a 20% chance to beat the Pats and the Bills a 70% chance to beat the Jets and you have a 4.9% chance of all three happening.