Thurman#1

Hunh? "Not abnormally high"? He's ranked 32nd out of 38 in terms of time taken. That is absolutely abnormally high. Yes, Prescott is the same, but that makes Prescott abnormally high as well. It's a tough stat to understand, because a guy can be taking a long time for good reason or for bad reasons. But with Josh's poor rates on long passes this year, I'd argue he isn't holding the ball and sprinting for good reason. And again, McDermott keeps harping on taking what the defense is giving him, which is basically shorter routes where the ball comes out quicker. In a game or two he's done that well this year, but not consistently.

Which is what the eyeball test will do if your QB holds the ball too long. It's apparently not for nothing that McDermott keeps saying Josh has to take what the defenses give him. TheNextGenStats look at how well the linemen hold their blocks for the first 2.5 seconds.

You're right, elite defenses don't allow 3 30+ point games. Except Chicago last year. And the Jaguars each of the last three years. Actually, some elite defenses do. First because points do not isolate defenses, as they can be scored and hugely effected by offenses and STs. Scoring is a team stat. It's probably 70% defense, but plenty of the other facets leak through and affect points. Yards is the stat that isolates defensive performance far better. And second because even elite defenses can and generally do have a bad game or two. Elite defenses are elite. But it isn't easy to put it into one sentence so easily. There's always an exception or many.

Because the process. We are taking a shot. It's called building through using the process. They've made it wildly constantly clear that their goal is building a consistently competitive team. Not taking shots in random years.

Basically it comes largely as an urge to throw as much blame as humanly possible away from Josh Allen. People think that if he's not to blame maybe it'll somehow make him become a franchise QB. Scapegoating satisfies many deep human needs and Zay has been scapegoated since very early on, for good reason that first year, not quite so much afterwards. It also has to do with Zay's draft spot. Nor were people thrilled about the hotel window incident or missing most of two training camps with injury.

I wouldn't have been thrilled, but yeah, it looked like that would be acceptable. The first half of this schedule had always looked easy. It's the second half that looks like a serious grind.

Agreed on Roethlisberger and Losman. Too cheap to trade up. But it's more than boo-boo foot that has kept Watkin around the 50th most productive WR in the league over his time as a pro. Even on the Rams and Bills when healthy, very average production. You're right that the injuries have been the major issue, but far from the only one. And yeah, he's on pace for about 1400 yards this season. But you could also say that based on his last three games he's on a pace for 890. Or you could say that in his first year he was on a pace for 1200 yards after a couple of games. On the Rams he was on a pace for over 1000 through three games. Sammy has a history of one or two games a year where he dominates, and then disappearing for much of the year. Still far too early to say whether this year will be different, but 198, 49, 64 and 54 isn't exactly bucking that trend. And with hindsight maybe Mahomes should have been grabbed, but knowing that the next year was widely considered a great year for QBs, with a GM who'd gone all in on EJ Manuel, when the buck stops with a head coach who was in his first year on a new team who feels he'd been too busy getting his whole system put in place to put in enough time in study on a young guy who was widely considered to have a high upside but to be a very risky pick ... sorry, passing makes a ton of sense to me under those circumstances.

That is like, not much. But at $14.4 mill per year, since bringing in expensive FAs isn't really the process, we know this is a wildly unlikely possibility. If they're unhappy with Zay by the end of the year, you can bet they'll try to replace him in the draft or with a low- to mid-priced FA or trade

Wait, you mean some QBs perform differently from others? Deep.

If your main point was that he didn't want to play for the Bills, then your main point is wrong. That has absolutely never been indicated in any way, and he even said he was really surprised to be traded. Did he say that he expected to play the next two years for the Bills and be traded? Yeah ... because the Bills had made it clear they wouldn't pay the money he was going to get ... and did get with the Eagles. All the Bills had to do was pay, and he would have been thrilled to stay here. Everyone has always said that. There's no way to know how Bruce would have done at LDE. You get a TE over there chipping and double-teaming you much more than at RDE, and the QB can better see you coming. No way to know. Bruce was a better speed rusher. White was a better power rusher, and a better all-around DE. RDE has different difficulties, as you see more TEs and you also see tackles who might be less nifty but are more powerful. But there is a very strong argument to be had that if you want more sacks you should rush around the right-hand side. Look at the list of top sack artists. The huge majority played over there.

You're right, I flipped it. Stupid. Sorry about that. I went back and corrected the post. While I disagree with the first part of your post (a lot of the blame for his early problems falls on his own decision of staying as a TE in his first year as a pro, the minute he decided to go OL, he was simply terrific. Agree with most of this, though. He deserved the money he got, and Buffalo simply wasn't willing to give him what he was earning.

There's real improvement so far. They've gone from very very good last year, probably somewhere around 4th to 6th best in the league, to signficantly better this year. Arguably top two, though it's very early.

People talk about this, the end of the dominant left tackle, and how the defense comes from everywhere now ... but each year the results look much the same as they always have. If it really were true that "the best way to get to the QB is sending your best pass rusher thru the weakest/least-helped/most vulnerable pass blocker," then we'd see the sack leaders at all positions, MLB, ILB, DT and so on, and and the tendency would be to rush the guards because they're nearly always the weakest pass blockers. What you find instead is that nearly all the best pass rushers in the league come around or through the LT. Look at the top eleven sack artists from last year (eleven because five guys tied for 7th, leaving a top 11 instead of a top ten). Seven of the top eleven rush the LT: Chris Jones, Danielle Hunter, Myles Garrett, Frank Clark, Chandler Jones, and TJ Watt And the one exception who's not mostly taking on tackles is freak-of-nature Aaron Donald. The guy who's moved around a lot as you suggest is another freak, JJ Watt. For the rest of the world, it's seven LTs/LOLBs, ROLB Kerrigan and Von Miller, as well as KC RDE Dee Ford, who lined up at LDE most of his career, though he's now an RDE due to being across from a better rusher in LDE Chris Jones. Nine out of eleven coming against the tackles (and JJ Watt gets a lot of his sacks that way too) and six of the nine from the defensive right side. Sacks still mostly come over the LT, with a solid minority coming around the RT instead. You don't put your best blocker at LT just because injuries happen from there (is there data on that?), it's because that's still where the defense lines up most of their best sack artists every year. And the rest of the sack list is much the same. Far more DE/OLBs higher than other positions and more coming over the LT than the other side.

That's utter *****. His agent certainly never told the Bills he was not going to re-sign there. That has never been reported and is the exact opposite of how he worked. He may well have thought that the Bills weren't going to pay what he wanted and so Peters might end up elsewhere, but if they'd paid there's no indication whatsoever Peters or Parker didn't want a contract with the Bills. The way Eugene Parker, Peters' agent. worked was to figure out the player's real value and not accept less. The Bills had two options, pay him what he wanted, and what the Eagles paid him, or trade him. They traded him, and it was a dumb decision and meant years of sub-par LTs like Demetrius Bell, Langston Walker, Chris Hairston and to QBs with the yips from worry. It was a huge contract at the time, but a couple of years down the road with an All-Pro LT, it looked like just a fair deal according to the LT market. And you're absolutely dead wrong about how he looked after the trade too. Countless Bills fans moaned and cried sour grapes to the point that many in Buffalo believed that he hadn't been good in Philly, but it's nonsense. Peters made the Pro Bowl six out of the next seven years after the trade, and five of those seven years he was first or second team All-Pro. The only year he missed the Pro Bowl was the year he missed the season with a ruptured Achilles tendon in his fourth year there. You mention the first year particularly, and again, that's nonsense. He played 15 games and made the Pro Bowl and deserved it.

Yes, he was and is a great team guy. Ask the Eagles, you'll get nothing but kudos. Ask Bills fans and you'll get little but sour grapes. "Banner: I don’t think we appreciated the quality of person we were getting fully. We wouldn’t have traded what we did for him unless we thought we were getting a person who cared and who was going to work hard. But he was fairly quickly a leader by example and word. He worked really, really hard, he cared very much about winning and the team success. I think we got the player we expected, which was a great player and I thought we were getting a good guy and we actually got a great guy. "

Catch percentage goes to both QB and receiver. Opinions on Zay be much more positive if Allen had hit him on either of the two times he was open deep this week. Zay has had some bad plays, and Josh has had some bad plays involving Zay. They do seem not to be working in sync, for whatever reason.

Come on. Pretending that I compared Josh to Tom is far far more pitiful on your part.

Palmer is absolutely not more a spiritual guru than a coach. He's a mechanics and QB play guru, if anything. Read an interview with Palmer sometime last year when he said that when he was with the Bears he was the 3rd stringer and didn't feel he was helping the team much and he felt he knew the offense inside-and-out so he thought that to help the team he would sit at a desk in the lobby of the facility at night and guys could come and ask him questions about the offense and just details and techniques. He did that several nights a week and each time he did for hours there would be multiple guys there asking him questions they weren't getting help with from coaches who didn't have time. He knows football. And there's no evidence the Bills recommended it. He started with Palmer before they drafted him. EDIT: Oh, and that's nonsense that he could end up with the same stats as last year. He's averaging 50 yards more per game, and went from 52.8% completions last year to 50.3% this year. He'd have to collapse to end up with the same numbers. He's been a lot better this year, though there wasn't much sign of that against the Pats, but every player has bad games. Dunno if he'll ever be a franchise QB, but he's better than he was last year. Please. Brady gets yelled at on the sidelines. This isn't even a molehill, it's a grain of sand on the side of a molehill.

IMO they're working with it, and they haven't maximized their talent or abilities yet, much less had as much of a chance to gel as they would have if they'd settled on five guys to play. It's seemed to me that Nsekhe has been OK at tackle and Ford at guard, but they seem not to want to do that for some reason. In any case, I think this is part of the process and I don't see them bringing in an expensive FA in Williams. Or trading Zay, their third-best WR, either for that matter.

Very true that they don't all take the same path to greatness. No argument there. And I really hear you about the people who were all over Manuel and Tyrod Taylor and all the others through those horrible years. It looked to me like he wasn't so much selling hope as saying we need to wait and see. But maybe you're right.

Aikman already had Emmitt Smith and most of that same o-line the year he was bad. 1990 starting OL: Tuinei, Crawford Ker, Mark Stepnoski, John Gesek, Nate Newton. 1992 starting OL: Tuinei, Newton, Stepnoski, Gesek and Erik Williams You're definitely right he was in a better situation, and that absolutely helped him. But he also made huge improvements in how well he made decisions, threw the football, understood defenses and generally performed as a QB. The bottom line is this, in 1990 he wasn't a good QB and by 1992, he really was.

Nathan Peterman can still go on to be great. It's very very very very unlikely, but not out of the question. Sometimes people improve an awful lot unpredictably. And while I think you're a great poster, I think you're off the mark here (not about Peterman but about what BillsBoy is saying). He's not saying that this proves that Allen will make it. He's simply pointing out the fact that many QBs who became terrific stunk it up for a while in the league first. And that Allen might be one of them but it's too early to know.

Really? Are there threads about bringing in Foles? Jeez, you're right, that's nuts. Threads on his long-term viability make sense. Most of what there is to say about that is that we don't know yet, but it's reasonable to bring it up. But anyone who says we know he doesn't have long-term viability is just a fruitcake. He absolutely did fail this week. But we'll have to wait. On the other hand, "losing faith" isn't nuts. It's just somebody's opinion. I've got no problem, especially with just asking the question. Most of what you quoted there seems OK to me, but yeah, some of it is pretty wacky. Fan boards do get nutsy after really bad (and really good) games.

On the contrary, you can prove plenty with older stats such as Aikman's from nearly 30 years ago. Yes, it's stupid to directly compare them. You're quite right about that. And you're also right that without context stats can be very misleading, especially older stats. But looking at Aikman's second year is very instructive. But by any standards, today's or that era's, Aikman was still bad and still learning in his second year. It's not like having 11 TDs and 18 INTs was good back then, or even borderline acceptable. It wasn't. In his second year, that's how he looked, and then in his fourth year suddenly he had 23 TDs and 14 INTs and was "suddenly" one of the better QBs in the NFL.

Of course it's not time to think of pulling the plug. Are there any nuts on here implying that it is? You're dead right that for some guys, it simply takes time. More time than fans would like. Are there guys who get it quickly? Yeah, a few. More take time. Some guys are NFL-ready. Some aren't. Some guys who are thought to be NFL-ready prove they actually weren't and with time improve a lot. From minute one, Allen was not considered NFL-ready. He really should have had a year to sit and study and practice his mechanics. He didn't get that. And it probably set him back, as it's exactly his mechanics that he seems to be abandoning, and complex NFL defenses that coming out of Wyoming he hadn't seen much of, that are confusing him. Nobody knows if he'll become a franchise guy, though there are reasonable guesses on both sides. He's going to need time, and we won't know till we know.