Thurman#1

Shouldn't be done that way. If you're going to add a guy's running TDs to his passing TDs, you should also add his fumbles to his INTs. Whole thing's nonsense, though. Passing stats and running stats should both be considered, but separately.

It really is hilarious how people rush onward in waves to blame the messenger on anything that can remotely be conceived of as reflecting badly on the Bills. A good 30% of the posts in this thread say nothing about the argument. They instead attack the messenger, an argument that carries absolutely zero reflection on the argument. When PFF says something that can be interpreted as casting the Bills in a good light, suddenly there are no PFF comments in that thread and everyone only talks about what they said. It's just so obvious and sad. But as for them being dumb, again, it's nonsense on the face of it. A majority of the NFL teams buy PFF's stuff. They would not do so if they were not very good at what they do. Not that that proves that they're correct in every value judgment that they make. They're not, anymore than anyone is. But they're a very capable organization.

Could you and anyone else who's going to tell me I'm wrong at least read what I say? Yeah, it's short-sighted. That's the freaking point, as I've said like five times now!!! Again, I take Josh in the long-term for the future. PFF only made the argument that Duck is playing better now. So yeah, they're only talking about the short-term. Me too. It is indeed short-sighted, and taking that into account, it's the opposite of stupid. It's extremely reasonable argument. And I am overlooking the running yards, largely. They're just fine, but QBs are generally ranked on passing stats and for good reason. I give Josh a bump up for his running, it really does help. But all things considered I'd rather have a QB with a better pass game who can't run much than a QB who is a terrific runner but not as good a passer. Josh's future, I believe, and Duck's too for that matter, will come down to whether he can master the passing game in the NFL. And Duck isn't a bad runner either, though he's not as good as Josh. Typical straw man argument. Could you quickly point out where they say Allen is "terrible"? What they said is that Duck is playing better than Josh. Which is a reasonable argument. Reasonable to disagree, too, of course, but I think they're probably right. And not because Josh is playing badly, but because Duck is playing really well. You can say - as many have - that he's not being asked to do much, and that's both true and fair. But should Allen be blamed because he doesn't run up as much production in terms of yards as Rodgers or Brees do? No, of course not. Allen isn't being asked to do what their teams ask Brees and Rodgers to do. You can only evaluate Allen on how well he performs the things he's asked to do. Same with Duck. Yeah, they're not asking him to do much. But what they're asking him to do, he's doing very well indeed. And just for the record yet again, yes, I think Hodges'll be diagnosed sooner or later. Someone will figure out how to take away his strengths, and when they do that, odds are he won't be able to adapt. Maybe he will, but odds are against it. But nobody's done it so far. He's playing really well.

I wouldn't myself. Not at age 37. "Suggs struggled in recent games for Arizona. "He didn't record any stats in Week 13 against the Los Angeles Rams and he followed it up with a rough performance against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 14. "In 46 defensive snaps against Pittsburgh, Suggs recovered a fumble, but he did not record a tackle or a QB hit or anything else." https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cardinals/2019/12/13/terrell-suggs-arizona-cardinals-release-veteran-pass-rusher/2640457001/ Not just that, though. The Bills defense is absolutely humming along right now. Assuming Suggs is better today to play right with whatever guys he'd be replacing, Murphy or whoever, he'd be coming in without much sense of what the defense is. He doesn't make this team a Super Bowl team this year and I don't think he helps us the next few years when we should be competing. The good argument to take him is financial. Man, he'd be cheap. I don't do it, if I'm Beane, but I could see it.

Yeah, some great logic there. I doubt even Socrates would want to take you on with brilliant arguments like that. Pretty much any time you see a guy saying "I stopped at ..." what you've got is a guy with a serious case of confirmation bias who won't read anything he disagrees with, whether or not it makes sense.

Nobody's pretending. You're just missing the reality. A guy who is 18th in the league in yards and 25th in catches on a team that throws only 54.29% of the time (26th in the league) is not a #2. He's a #1. No, he's not what they call "a true #1," which generally means one of the top 6 or 7 guys in the league. But a completely "legit" #1? There isn't the slightest question of it. Would it help to bring in more competition at WR? Yeah, sure. I'd expect it, but there's no particular reason to force yourself to use your first-rounder, especially in a year where WR talent goes deep. They'll do what they do, what has worked so very well so far. They'll get the best guy available at a position of need. That's the intelligent way to go. It's the way they've said they want to operate, and it's the way they actually have operated. If the BPA is a receiver in the first, they'd probably be thrilled and grab him. If the BPA is otherwise, expect them to pick him anyway.

They're a good team. They're legit. I'd pick us, but expect them to be in it with a chance to win.

Nerds? Yeah, maybe. But nerds whose product is purchased by a large majority of NFL teams? Definitely. People hate PFF when they say things they don't like. It's a shoot the messenger deal. But though nobody's right all the time and that certainly goes for PFF as well, they do a damn good job. If they didn't, teams wouldn't buy their stuff. Again, doesn't mean they're right in any given case, and certainly so on something as opinion-based and small sample-based as this. But they're a smart group doing a good job. And since they never said that Hodges will be a better QB than Allen down the road, instead only saying that right now he's playing better, that's a defensible argument they're making.

As you should. I'll send you my PayPal account and you can send some cash for being right. The reason it's standard is that it's correct. If there's one thing history shows it's that people aren't good at keeping secrets, most particularly when book contracts beckon. The only conspiracies that work are tiny ones. (With the exception of large patriotically-based secrets like the Enigma machine or the code-talkers. People will shut up in large numbers for the good of their country. But to steal money and undermine the honesty of a sport? Please!! It would already be out.) The ones that have tons of people working away on them and still stay secret ... are imaginary, and that makes the conspiracy nuts come a-running.

Hodges TD % this season : 5.0% of his throws are TDs JA TD % this season: 4.2% of his throws are TDs And again, given a guess at the better future, I and nearly everyone else would take Josh. But the question PFF raises is who is playing better right now. I think it's very fair to argue that that's Hodges. He's really doing a good job.

The point isn't how many yards a game he's getting. It's how he does when he passes. And he's done very well. Of course he's playing caretaker football. That's what you play when your team isn't behind and you've got a QB who has no experience. Yeah, he's not getting a lot of yards per game but that's because he's not throwing a lot. You can't judge a guy based on passes he's not asked to throw. You can't say, "See, they're running. That shows the QB sucks." It doesn't. When they ask him to throw, he's doing it productively. And you're scraping with the "in two of his games he's thrown as many TDs as INTs" thing. He's also in two games thrown an infinitely larger percentage of TDs than INTs. Both stats are spin. You look at the totals. Twice as many TDs as INTs. Oh, and your loyalties are showing when you call Baltimore, the Chargers, Cincy, Cleveland and Arizona "some of the worst teams in the NFL." Cincy, yeah, but the others not so much, really. The Cards have been surprisingly competitive against a very tough schedule. And by the way, Allen has also played against a pretty weak schedule. Young? Inexperienced? Maybe a flash in the pan? Yeah, sure, fair enough. But he's playing well.

Seriously? Man, that is a bad take. He's third in the league in yards per kickoff return, and 9th on punts. He's dangerous and he's having a good year for us. Apparently so. No other reason for its existence.

Why is this so shocking? Hodges is playing great. High completion percentage, high YPA, he's playing very well indeed. That's one guess. It may well be correct re: Hodges after people get a read on him, but we're not really sure what we have with Allen yet, and since we've seen him play worse, this isn't Allen's floor. If I had to pick one of them for the future I'd absolutely pick Josh, but right now it's fair to say that Hodges is playing better, IMO, though I haven't watched all of his throws.

... as absolutely anyone with any sense would. There's essentially one and only one way to keep a conspiracy from becoming known. Keep it to an extremely small group of people. When a lot of people know, it will come out sooner or later. And to have the refs trying to affect games would mean the knowledge of, what?, 50 people? All those different crews? We'd already know.

I do love Beane and McDermott. Both smart guys who play the odds, understand best practice and use it, and have a smart vision and a path to get there. And not only that but they're on the same page. Man, is that a good thing. It's been probably 18 years since I predicted a Bills win against the Pats. They've simply been a much much better team for a very long time, and that's not even getting into the cheating. But they have a legit shot in Foxboro this time. Last ten years i"ve given 'em a roughly 10% chance in any given Pats game. Right now I give them closer to 30 - 35%. Part of that is that the Bills are absolutely improved, at their highest efficiency since probably 2004. But the Pats have at the same time gotten a lot worse. This isn't the same Pats team. They've benefitted as much as we have from an easy schedule. That Texans game just didn't look like the Pats we've come to know, and it's about time. They're still a good team, but that offense is nowhere near what it used to be.

Nice selfie, dude. In the meantime, appears everyone's still guessing at what he's talking about. If someone wants to have a conversation with any depth, he need to tell people what he's talking about. And if you're talking about a story, that means a link.

If those are your definitions, he's neither. Half and half, maybe. He started out more of a thrower, but certainly not mostly "thowing strikes," out of college. He was off-target far more than usual. In terms of velocity, yeah, he's got the capabilities of steaming it in on any play. Now he's significantly improved his accuracy, and we do see plenty of short to mid-range balls that aren't frozen ropes. He's changed, become less of a frozen rope thrower and throws more strikes. He's getting touch. But yeah, he still needs to work on mechanics, poise, reading defenses and basically an awful lot of stuff, some of which comes from bad habits or knowledge voids, but an awful lot of which is simply stuff that second-year guys have to learn And plenty of throwers gain enough touch that they're essentially passers a few years in. As someone mentioned above, Elway's a great example of that.

You mentioned CBS Sports. Are they predicting this? Wondering if it could happen? Got a link?

Dorsey's got one year as a QB coach. Daboll's got one year as a winning OC. Frazier's got three years as a terrific DC on top of a long and successful career before that. But people suspect that the defense is McDermott's and they're clearly partly right. I don't think the odds are great that anybody gets poached this year, at least not to go to a plum position that's an obvious move up. Could happen, though, certainly. I feel like Frazier's the guy who would be the best pick for another team, and maybe Daboll is the most likely to be grabbed if it happens. Most ready, maybe, but not ready, IMO. One year in charge of a successful NFL offense, assuming you find this offense successful. I know Daboll's been mentioned for a position but I don't buy it, and the mention wasn't specific that the reporter had great sources and Daboll's name came from one of them.

You know, you said in the first paragraph there that you understood that the play-calling might have been different. And yet you make it clear in the second that you didn't understand it at all. The Bills got the ball back with 5:27 left. The drive ended with 1:07 on the clock. That's because they ran it a bunch. Not one guy ran out of bounds that drive. They weren't hurrying, as if they did score that TD and tie it up, the last thing they wanted was to leave the Ravens a bunch of time to get down the field. They didn't need to hurry, hell, they didn't want to hurry. But of course, if they'd missed that conversion, they would have hurried it up an awful lot, they'd have run a two-minute drill. If they'd scored, the Ravens might easily have gotten the ball back with three and a half or four minutes left. The Bills could very easily have had a third possession if they had known early that they needed one. They got a tactical advantage knowing how many points they needed. It wasn't enough, unfortunately, but it was the smart play.

He's mildly irritated because your argument is dumb. If you do not convert, you need an extra possession. However, this is true whenever you miss the conversion, early or late. Same deal. It's like knowing you're going to have to flip a coin at some point and worrying whether you should do it earlier or later. Doesn't matter. Either way you win the flip and you're golden, you lose the flip and you need an extra possession. Knowing earlier the details of your situation allows you to call plays and use strategy better and more specifically. More so when they thought they knew what look they were going to get. And yeah you don't always go with analytics if the human factor in that moment calls for something else. But going with the analytics most of the time is simply smart. The best organizations do it.

Having 12 guys in the huddle is a major tactical advantage for that team. Which is why it's a penalty in the first place. Which guy will leave? Depending which guy leaves, the opponent might want a different personnel package in. Any coach would have been angry about that, regardless of how much it showed in his face.

Don't know if anyone answered this yet. In case they didn't, it's around 18:45. He said there was some jawing from some Ravens, he'd heard (not seen) and wasn't even sure it was McDermott who was involved.

Since when is till 1:00 a.m. "all night long" that close to New York City. It was indeed a stupid thing to do, but it was hardly all night long. The New York City media strikes again.

No, Lamar didn't complete any, but he didn't have the opportunities to hit a deep ball that Josh did. It's important. Enough with the spin, it matters. Complete a deep ball or two and the whole defense will loosen up underneath, not to mention you having either scored a TD or made a huge gain of yardage. It matters. Have conditions been bad every single game this year? Having said that, he's improved, and as young as he is he could still address this, but it does need to happen.