Thurman#1

LInk? Is this the one you mean? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/28387743/source-texans-start-aj-mccarron-deshaun-watson-backup

I disagree, though I think you're right that losing Norman had more of an impact than they hoped it would. But losing Norman didn't send them from 6th to 21st in defense the next year and 6th to 26th in points allowed. It was a lot more than Norman's absence.

Please. Khalil Mack makes $23.5 mill / year over his contract. Tre's terrific and deserves a lot of money, but pass rushers get the biggest money for good reason. https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/rankings/average/ Xavien Howard is the top CB, and he's #54 in the league, with 21 defenders above him, most but not all of whom are pass rushers.

It's only a first step. But it's a good one. It still begs the question of whether winning is possible there under that owner. Maybe not. Yeah, maybe. Though IMO Daboll will have to have another good year for teams to entirely buy in on him.

Agreed that 17 points is not horrible. That's very fair. You're going to get fewer chances against NE. But when you get those chances, you still have to hit them, or rather a large percentage of them. Josh had plays here that he just botched, and particularly early in the game. That's not acceptable just because it's the Patriots. The two plays where Knox was open for potential TDs ... oh, man did that hurt.

Nonsense. Yeah, coaching requires a ton more knowledge. But Joe isn't doing what coaches do. He's not calling plays and attempting to fool defensive coordinators. He's just looking at what happened with the benefit of hindsight. What he has set himself the task to do doesn't require absolute genius. What happened is right on the screen, and you can watch it again and again looking at what each player did. It just isn't as difficult as people want to pretend it is. The tough part of what Joe does game after game after game is that it takes massive amounts of time to look at each player on each play. That's the hardest part of what Joe does, and I respect the commitment it takes to do that. No, you can't understand absolutely everything you see. And no, you won't know as much as the coaches do about what happened. But there's a reason that teams put interns on film study of other teams. You can understand the great majority of what goes on in the great majority of plays. It's hindsight, with video. It's not blind sudoku.

Oh, man, I should've checked the original quote first thing. It's nonsense. The OP links to an article by a guy named Bryan DeArdo, which then talks about another article by Michael Silver. But there's no link. I should've noticed that before. When you go to the Silver article, it's obvious how DeArdo messed up. Here's "Multiple sources expect there to be a shakeup on McVay's coaching staff, perhaps including veteran defensive coordinator Wade Phillips. There could also be significant turnover in the personnel department. As for the roster, Gurley's high salary and declining production may make him a cap casualty, and other key players could be traded or released as the organization builds around Goff on offense and star defensive tackle Aaron Donald on defense. " That's the opposite of saying Donald is on the block. My bad for not checking. Everyone should do that when an article quotes another article. Go to the source article and see if it really says what the secondary source tells you it did. Here it does not. Right, if you think Phillip Rivers isn't a great QB. And if a person thought that, it would make that person look extremely dopey. Rivers will be a Hall of Famer, and for good reason. 20% of your cap? So, you don't want to spend $40 mill a year on an LT or a DT? Well, I have to say, I'm with you on that. And again, yes, you're right that "Many of the best LTs and DTs to play the game don't have rings." To repeat, the same can be said for every single position on the field, including QB. That argument has no force. Plenty of good LTs and DTs get stuck on bad teams with bad front offices and don't win titles. Same with good QBs, good WRs, good pass rushers, good ... well, good everything. Dan fricking Marino didn't win a championship, and it wasn't because QB isn't important. Jim Kelly, Warren Moon, Rivers, Fouts, Kenny Anderson, Matt Ryan, Stafford, Carson Palmer, Andrew Luck, and on and on.

That doesn't make sense. Same is true of every position in football, including quarterback. Did getting Philip Rivers win the Chargers a championship? LT isn't overrated, nor is DT. Yes we've had good ones without winning championships, but there is no correlation there.

Did the Steelers and the Pats bring in a lot of "personalities" in their coaches' third year? Or was it only after they'd thoroughly remade the locker room in the image of their system that they brought in those types of guys?

The Rams aren't letting him go. That is an absolute impossibility. If they trade him, Spotrac lists his dead cap at $41 mill. Some bit of that would be paid for by the team that picked him up, but a minimum of $32 mill dead cap would be on the Rams. As for the Bills, they've got their 3-tech in Oliver, and much cheaper for the next four years. It just wouldn't make sense.

Of course they might kick him to the curb in year five. It really is simple. It'll depend on his play. There absolutely is two more years to prove himself with growth if they think he's got to show more. "What more does he have to demonstrate?" you ask. Jeez, everything, or at least the important things. Our offense has been poor and a lot of that rests on Allen. He's got to show he's a franchise QB and he hasn't done that yet. He is improving, though. IMO the signs are good. But he is by no means a top QB at this time. He's a guy who's shown that he maybe has a possibility of being a top QB with time.

It might. Here's a quick start. There are several sites that look at drops and they tell somewhat different stories because drops are a somewhat subjective thing. Here's one: http://stats.washingtonpost.com/fb/tmleaders.asp?range=NFL&rank=232&type=Receiving They list the Bills as having the 3rd highest total of drops in the league!!!!!!!!!!!!! 22 drops. League average is about 17. That means the Bills have dropped around five more passes than average. If you added in five completions to Josh's stats, his completion percentage would go up to 59.8%, soaring all the way up from 32nd to 31st.

After the bye? That's 10 games. In order: The #32 defence The #9 defence The #25 defence The #20 defence The #32 defence again The #10 defence The #11 defence The #5 defence The #4 defence The #1 defence That is indeed a nasty late schedule, but you can't leave out the easy ones without looking like you've got an agenda. That averages out to a defence ranked 14.9th.

That is indeed the most important stat, 10-5. But it is NOT a quarterback stat. It's a team stat. That stat is officially named "Team Record in Games Started By This Quarterback (Regular Season)". TEAM wins. The way to evaluate Josh Allen is to look at how well he does QB stuff. Not to evaluate him based on how well the defense is playing or whether or not or field goal kicker is making his kicks.

Are you misreading your own stats? We're not at the bottom of the league targeting RBs. Your own link there has a bunch of other teams with lower RB targets, Seattle, the Rams, the Titans, the Ravens and the Texans. More, we simply throw fewer passes than most teams, we're 27th in the league in attempts. So of course we're likely to throw less passes to RBs than most. Probably less passes to WRs as well ... we just throw less passes. Look at the Cowboys, who've thrown 67 to Zeke alone. We've only thrown 73 passes to backs, while the Cowboys have thrown 87. But we've only thrown 473 passes, while the Cowboys have thrown 564 passes, meaning they throw 15.4% of their passes to backs while we also throw 15.4%. Go out an extra decimal place and you find we throw more to backs than they do. Some teams tend to have the RBs block more on pass plays, and we're one of them. That's not a bad thing for the QB, having an extra blocker as a last reserve. Most of the reason Josh's % is low is that he airmails a few inaccurate passes a game. That's not the only factor, of course, but it is the main one.

He's really protected the ball better in the passing game. But he's fumbled nine times since then. Whether or not those fumbles were lost is really just a matter of luck. Fumbling nine times in ten games is just plain not good. On the other hand, he's lost none in the last two games. Is that luck or a trend? We can hope it's a trend.

We've got our #1. Brown is easily one of the top 25 in the league and that makes him a #1. Yeah, we could use a "true number one," but they're very rare. People usually mean by that phrase a guy in the top 5 - 8 guys in the league. Those guys usually don't become available in FA and to have good odds of drafting one you'd better be in the top ten and hopefully the top five. More, when was the last SB-winner to have a "true number one" on the roster? You have to go back a ways. You get an average of, what?, one a year coming into the league? If that's all you'll settle for, well, good luck. If that's a "need," it's one that's unlikely to be filled. I agree we need to upgrade at WR. But a true number one is very unlikely to be found where we draft or in FA. I mean, yeah, you can get yourself an ex-true number one pretty often, but not often one who still deserves being called that. But a Billy Brooks level talent that punishes teams for doubling the John Browns and Cole Beasleys, that we could find. And if we get lucky he'll be a bit better than that.

You can't just go out and order a true #1. We tried with Watkins. There are maybe seven or eight of those guys in the league, and that means there's generally one or fewer of them coming in in any given year. They're a very rare breed. In any case, that's not a need. It would be lovely, but it's not a need. Brown and Beasley are fine as our #1 and #2/slot. At WR they need another guy or two to upgrade the guys behind those two. Hopefully they can get someone who's a good player and maybe a bit complementary. The way they brought in Billy Brooks back in the old days. If one of the upgrades is good enough to be an upgrade for Brown, that'd be unlikely but terrific. Nsekhe seems fine at RT. When he gets back from his injury, things will be better at RT. An upgrade? Not an absolute necessity, but yeah, that would be great too. A pass-rushing DE? Agreed. Another RB? Fair enough. Another CB, probably. I'd guess we address them all in FA, allowing us to truly go best player available in the draft.

Yeah, you gave 2017 Seattle as an example and pointed out exactly the problem with that example. They were damn close. They had Russell Wilson and we had Tyrod Taylor. Seattle had more money than Buffalo, $26 mill in March and had far fewer important FAs they had to re-sign. The biggest guy they risked losing in FA that year was if I remember, Luke Willson. And is going from 9-7 to 10-6 and a playoff game loss really a reload from 2017 to 2018? IMO they never changed much of anything, they kept their system going. They just recovered from a down year. The year before that down year, they went 10-5-1, won a playoff game and only lost to the SB-bound Falcons. I don't consider that a reload. That was a team with a terrific core just working their system. As you yourself point out, our team was in a totally different situation. Maybe we're using the word "reload" differently. To me, a reload means you're planning to be competitive that season. If your coach has been around a while, this is probably his last shot. If he's new, he's been hired with the assumption that he and the owner both agreed that the team wasn't that far away. If they thought the team was not ready to make the leap in this year, you don't usually hear the word "reload." Instead you hear about putting in our systems and building the culture and yadda yadda yadda. As I thought about the Falcons, what I realized is that I hadn't followed them closely enough to have an educated opinion. I don't know why they improved under Quinn. They don't look to me like a reload because their improvement took two years. They only went from six wins to eight in Quinn's first year. But I guess I don't really have a good enough grasp of their situation. In any case, both those teams had more cap money than the Bills did, a better cap situation going forward and both those teams had a proven franchise QB. The Bills had some decent talent if you ignored QB, but the Bills core players that year, the ones who were traded or cut in the rebuild outside of Dareus (who was wildly overpaid and expensive, at $16 mill / year, not to mention unwilling to accept McDermott's rules) were mostly coming due to be re-signed. Re-signing the guys we jettisoned like Robert Woods, Watkins, Darby, Gilmore, Preston Brown and Tyrod Taylor, nearly all of whom we'd probably have needed if we expected to be competitive immediately, would have meant kicking more cans down more road and put us in cap hell sooner rather than later.

Great comparison. Brady = Allen? Pats OL = Bills OL? Please. They're a terrific team and we gave them a hell of a game on both sides of the ball. We're a young offense that hasn't played together much. Two starters from the offense last year, and the Pats have a ton of time in their scheme and have a lot. Play the game called "The Pats Did It, So If We Didn't, It's Daboll's Fault," and you'll come to the conclusion you want but that won't mean it's a conclusion that makes any sense. Very few teams play like the Pats. Their record will show that.

Trust the process has been around for many decades. McDermott hardly coined it. He is one of the first to use it so often in sports, so I guess that's something. But you're missing the point about wins. We rebuilt. It was a near-total rebuild, and when you do that fans should understand that you're going to suck for a while. McDermott has maximized each of the three rosters he's had. Managing five wins last year with that group was exceptional.

That's overstating it. But yeah, they're limited. But they're averaging 20.5 per game, so you're really overstating it. And yeah, it's been three straight weeks ... against the #1, #4 and #10 defenses. Creativity isn't the problem. It's personnel, and a lot of it is Josh Allen. He is improving but he's young and inexperienced and this shows. Hopefully his improvement will continue and be consistent. The OL is good but not good enough, partly because they're still gelling, and partly because they might be able to use an upgrade. The TE group is inexperienced or unexplosive. There are problems with this roster ... especially as they really are here a year early. The biggest problem is still Allen, though.

Ravens WR receptions chart: Marquise Brown 67 catches for 563 Willie Snead 28 catches for 317 Seth Roberts 31 for 248 Miles Boykin 19 catches for 190 So, no. And the Ravens were the first team I checked. Oh, wait, had a second thought and yeah, NE's third oftenest-used WR, after Dorsett and Edelman, is Meyers at 39%, almost exactly the same as McKenzie.Cleveland's was 39.0. The Chiefs use four WRs fairly often and their third WR was out there less than 50%. Indy only has one guy above 50% for the season. Their next two are both about 42%. Minnesota's 3rd guy, Thielen, is about 42.1% It's just not that unusual.

It's not a desperate need. It's surely something they could use, but they're no longer in the bottom ten of receiving corps. They've got a legit group. Could they use an upgrade? Sure, but it's not an emergency. Plenty of teams don't have three really threatening guys. With Knox as another option, they're not desperate anymore. I'd certainly expect them to address it this offseason, though. As for Foster, he's only appeared in 15.2% of their snaps. He hasn't done a ton, as he isn't out there all that much.

They worked as hard as they possibly could to win that game. Let's not work very hard ... not really something you'll hear much in someone who believes in "the process." They had a ton to win in that game, the division was still up for grabs. If they did have a top three, it probably looked something like this: 1) Win 2) See #1 3) No injuries Mission very much not accomplished, but it was good there didn't seem to be too many major injuries, though I haven't checked the reports yet, and don't know how Morse is feeling.