Thurman#1

The minute anybody starts talking about the yearly value of an extension, call your accountant and open an umbrella because the financial ***** is going to rain down around you. AAV (Average Annual Value) DOES NOT WORK if you are only looking at an extension. It only works if you are looking at all the years he will be under contract and all the dollars he will receive under both the extension and the original contract combined. Agents, players, teams and media routinely throw out this figure used in a wrong and misleading way. Happens every time you see people talk about an extension. For example, let's say a guy has a contract that still has four more years on it and will be paid $4 mill over those four years. (I know the logistics of this don't actually work ... it's only an example to show the financial flimflammery that goes on in these cases.) He has outperformed the contract and the team wants to extend him. So they give him an extension that will pay him $56 mill - a $20 mill signing bonus today, and $36 mill in salary in the fifth and sixth years of the contract. What that means is that he now has a 6-year contract that will pay him $60 mill over those 6 years. $10 mill a year AAV, right? But that's not what you'll hear. It'll come out that the guy signed a 2 year extension for $56 million new money, which is then represented as a $28 mill per year extension. It's absolute bull####, but that's what you'll hear. Now, if Prescott is actually expecting $40 mill per year over the life of the whole contract, he's nuts, or more likely he's only establishing a bargaining position. He certainly shouldn't be given $40 mill a year. But likely that's NOT what he's actually asking for. Oh, and anything bad that happens to the Cowboys makes me happy. I hope Prescott is actually making the insane demand he's represented as making. But unfortunately, I seriously doubt that he is.

Oh, please. Rosen's situation in AZ was by far the worst of any of the young QBs. Their 2018 OL made ours look like keepers. He's better off in Miami, in a rebuild ... and that is a very sad commentary on your previous situation.

I would disagree with that. I don't think you can assume his kindness is manipulative. To me it just looks like severely skewed priorities. To me he 's handling the players right but seriously underperforming at home.

Oh, you're one of those sad fellas that thinks that a team's record is due to the defense? Sorry, for a moment I thought you were worth taking notice of. For anyone else interested, you can see that he has no answer ... for which you can't blame him one iota. Yards per game is the best way to isolate the defense, by far. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it the only thing you should look at? Nah. But it's the best way by far to look at the defense as separated as possible from the offense and STs.

Young guy. He was a good writer. That's a real shame.

Fine, you can agree to disagree on his second season. Thing is, you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think you're just disagreeing with me. It's not you versus me. It's you versus Beane ... and McDermott and the press and the pundits and pretty much every single person out there but a very few on this board. Yeah, I'm in there with them, but it's not you versus one guy. It's you laughably, daftly thinking you know more about the Bills than pretty much everyone else in the universe. Your argument that Beane was referring to the last game only ... I can't decide if it was more nutso or more pathetic. One game isn't a trend, in anyone's book. A game is a data point, maybe an outlier. A trend is "a line of general direction or movement," to quote Merriam Webster. A game is not a line. It's a dot. Your Several games start to become a trend. And again, Beane didn't say just that Zay was trending up. He said we can all agree that Zay was trending up. Daffily pretending that he'd say that after one game just shows the bizarre contortions a guy has to go into to support arguments that were completely bats in the belfry to begin with. Although it's right up there with your other equally wackadoo argument. As you noted, they said that they need receivers that can get open and catch. Did they say that any of the receivers they have now can't get open and catch? Or did he say "We haven't solved it yet." Yeah, they needed more guys and they need further development from the guys who were there. That simply isn't all that negative a statement, particularly from a team that was going to go out and get a couple of FAs. About a guy in his second year who has missed two offseasons and was trending up the last half of the season, not very negative at all.

The question of the thread isn't his future, it's his future this year. Zay was not at much risk this year, going into his third, having been pointed up. Going forwards, sure. As usual it will depend on a lot of things, his contract, the competition, etc. But how many people on this team aren't at risk going forward if a better contributor arises?

Sorry, man, no, you've completely misunderstood my post. And your point is incorrect. You started off going on about how when your offense sucks and hands the ball to the other defense within the 20 your team won't lose many yards when the other team scores. Bad logic. You're talking about maybe 3% of the drives our defense faced, if that. Any argument based entirely on ignoring 97% of drives is just dunder-headed. Seven drives started inside the 20. Three of the seven were against Baltimore, and two were against the Colts. Then there was one against the Chargers, Colts, and Jets. That's 7 drives out of 182, or 3.8%. The key figures are two: average drive start and number of drives faced. Having a poor offense / STs doesn't help a defense have few yards allowed. It has a very small effect, but if anything that effect is to make it more difficult for the defense to make good YPG stats. Since you don't seem to get this as stated, I'll use math instead. How many yards did the Bills defense have to protect over the course of the season? It's completely easy to figure ... if a drive starts on your 20, you're defending 80 yards. So you multiply average # of yards being defended by # of drives faced and you get an exact tally of how many yards the D defended over the course of the season. (100 yards - AVG Defensive Drive Start) x Number of Drives Faced Bills ( 100 - 31.36) X 182 = 12,492.48 So, what about the other teams? Ranked here from 1st (fewest yards defended, which is the most favorable situation for a D to be in) to least favorable situation for the D. 1) DAL 11,460.32 (MOST favorable situation for the D in terms of yards) 2) TEN 11,811.28 3) OAK 11,815.44 4) LAC 11,825.55 5) NO 11,859.26 6) DET 11,949.3 7) WAS 11,973.98 8 CAR 12,009.72 9) SF 12,014.7 10) ATL 12,031.8 11) IND 12,180.0 12) NYG 12,254.19 13) SEA 12,309.96 14) CIN 12,337.56 15) GB 12,339.36 16) PHI 12,387.24 17) JAX 12,402.25 18) BAL 12,402.37 19) TB 12,405.75 20) BUF 12,492.48 21) KC 12,504.24 22) MIA 12,684.28 23) MIN 12,689.13 24) PIT 12,742.23 25) LAR 12,781.12 26) NE 12,972.87 27) ARI 13,029.6 28) DEN 13,059.15 29) CHI 13,208.94 30) NYJ 13,243.94 31) CLE 13,674.05 32) HOU 13,769.55 (LEAST favorable situation for a D in terms of giving up yards) Having a good or bad offense/STs group is horrible for a defense in terms of giving up POINTs. But in terms of yards, there's very little difference, and Buffalo certainly didn't benefit, as they were below average in terms of favorable starts. Which yet again shows that yards isolates defenses a ton better than scoring does.

Not so much after the draft, though. I don't think RBs need camp all that badly. I love to see people hold the Cowgirls over a barrel. I hope they pay him too much.

Yup. A lot to like in that text, that he's studying Donald and that he knows he's a rookie and needs to talk like it. I was so hoping he'd fall to 9th.

He was doing due diligence. If the price had been right, he could easily have signed him. No way to prove it, but it's a very reasonable guess.

That isn't true. It's an opinion. And I find it really unconvincing to say a second-year guy is "just kinda bad," producing the way that he did on a team with major flaws at QB and on the OL last year. He was a low- to mid-level #2. (37th in receptions among WRs, 47th in yards among WRs and tied for 13th in TDs among WRs). On a team that was 28th in pass attempts. Agreed that none of that matters now. He absolutely needed to improve more, and needs to continue now. But so does every other rookie, 2nd year guy or 3rd year guy on this team. Except maybe Tre, when it comes to young players, if they don't improve, they start to disappoint.

Thanks for the Cliff notes, I guess. Unfortunately, the Cliff notes are still nutty. You keep going on about how his last games were bad. Again, you ought to go work on trying to convince Beane of that, because he obviously sees better than you do and made it very clear that he disagrees with you. And - again - when he made that statement to the reporters at the PC ... "I think we all can agree that Zay Jones is trending up." - Brandon Beane in the 2018 post-season press conference https://www.buffalorumblings.com/2018/12/31/18163024/buffalo-bills-end-of-season-press-conference-open-thread-sean-mcdermott-brandon-beane-josh-allen ... there was nothing but head-shakes and agreement. You disagree. That says more about you than it does about Zay. You're seeing this differently from everyone else, dude. And while this could mean you're just way way smarter than anyone on the Bills staff, even though they knew the plays, what the reads were, what the game plans were and what they wanted from Zay, it probably doesn't. I mean, maybe you're way way smarter than them. But that's really really unlikely. When a guy disagrees with everyone, including the people with the most info ... he's usually just wrong. And I get that you'd like to see me stop recycling the same arguments. But you've been recycling the same daft supporting arguments for nearly 60 pages now. If you stop recycling, I'd certainly consider it myself. But you won't. This whole thread has been lovingly tended and maintained by you with the constant repetition of your wacky support. Again, the main idea of the thread - that Zay might get traded - was always quite unlikely but certainly possible. If that had been all you said, I'd never have posted here, beyond maybe a sentence like "could happen but the chances are seriously low". But you followed it with constant nuttiness ... that Zay wasn't getting a great deal better the last half of the year despite the stats, Beane, McDermott and the pundits all disagreeing with you. You actually had to go with the saddest argument of all on that one ... "go watch the games," as if Beane, McDermott and virtually everyone disagreeing with you had been going after marlin in the gulf last fall and had never gotten around to seeing the tape. Absolutely zany and screwy. You've recycled the constant mentions of that pointless Josh Allen fan video labelled drops but actually containing a ton of bad throws and good defensive plays. As if being on a fan video was a good argument about anything. Just silly. You keep recycling the idea that only his games with Josh count, and that therefore you can ignore all Zay's other good games that weren't with Josh. You've pulled this in this post, but literally dozens of times before in the thread. Zay improved a great deal the second half. The fact that Josh was out for some of those good games has nothing to do with Zay. It only makes it wildly clear that you've got an agenda and that if facts don't fit it, you're willing to ignore them. You keep saying "stats don't mean anything, you have to watch the games" when somebody posts good stats ... and then you post bad stats and act as if you've told the whole story. It's a receiver's job to get open, make catches and go for YAC. And to block. And to run as parts of plays. What's NOT a receiver's job is to see a ball thrown to somebody else and go over and steal it. Sometimes, game plans go mostly away from one WR and he can have a good game anyway, getting open but not being thrown to and blocking downfield. You've got an agenda. You're daffily ignoring everything that doesn't fit with it. And it looks like you're going to continue recycling this flaky stuff while expecting me not to continue pointing it out. I'll feel completely free to keep pointing out your recycling. But hey, if you stop with the loony tunes stuff, I'll have nothing to point out ... if your post had been only the last four (very reasonable) paragraphs, I'd have had no real complaints. Instead, the whole top was more wackiness.

You went round the bend so often, I just put my answers above, in red. Oh, and My fingers were getting sore from typing the same obvious thing again and again.So I just introduced green asterisks, (*) and used them the last five or six times the situation came up. Read those as, "No, that's not a fact, it's an opinion by absolutely any standard." And again, "I think we all can agree that Zay Jones is trending up." - Brandon Beane in the 2018 post-season press conference https://www.buffalorumblings.com/2018/12/31/18163024/buffalo-bills-end-of-season-press-conference-open-thread-sean-mcdermott-brandon-beane-josh-allen The reason he thinks that is because your "facts" about the last few games are actually rather doofy opinions with which Beane and nearly everyone around the team and the league disagree. Wacky, in a word. In the New England game, for example, he played pretty well throughout, getting open but not getting thrown to even when open. The first throw to him on the first drive is a sad case. He's wide open over the middle for 12 yards or so and Allen just stone misses him. In that game he had five catches on 9 targets for 67 yards and a TD. And if Allen had hit him on that play it would've been 6 catches on 10 targets for 80 yards or more and a TD. Your continual insistence that it is a "fact" that it wasn't a good game ... well, it's a bit daft. One might say bonkers.

Nonsense. Losing in the first two years of a near-complete rebuild says nothing about competence and everything about what happens in a rebuild. The next couple of years and their record in them are going to show what kind of coach/GM combo they are. Nah. Look through history and you'll see a ton of great coaches cutting guys who weren't fitting the culture early. Bill Walsh is a famous example, he was absolutely committed to jettisoning guys who didn't fit the culture, no matter how talented they were. And the way Watkins and Darby have played since shows even better what a good decision it was to trade those two guys for picks that could be used to move up for a QB. And equating unused cap money and wasted cap money shows profound misunderstanding. Unused money can be rolled over and used the next year. Are the Eagles a stupid team? They have more unused money ($25.5 mill). Are the Colts big on wasting money? $44.8 mill. It's plenty smart. Fair enough that they haven't proven themselves yet. In the end, only wins will do that, but they are working in smart ways with great consistency. That's more than we've seen from the Bills FO for decades.

Nope. You keep trying to sell this old dead fish of a narrative, and nobody's buying. It was never true in the first place, as you keep ignoring the fact of the rebuild, the fact that we were in awful cap shape and struggling to bring it under control and the fact that we were desperate to bring in a franchise QB and had to get draft capital to have a chance of doing this. Those all had huge repercussions in terms of dead cap space. You're right that it's not rocket science, but it is far more complicated than you're pretending. A quick example is that a very nice chunk of that dead money was from Eric Wood and Richie Incognito. Aaron Williams' injuries. Dareus' inability to get his ass on the bus. Your self-serving and over-simplistic idea somehow leaves them out and a lot of other factors that don't happen to fit your narrative. They were in horrible cap shape. Really really bad cap shape, and especially so for a team that wasn't winning a lot of games. Beane promised the Pegulas in their job interview that they would get the team into good cap shape by the beginning of the 2019 season. At the same time, they desperately needed a franchise QB, and not having a high draft pick, that essentially meant trading guys off for picks that they could then use to trade up for that franchise QB. Luckily, getting draft capital and clearing up a horrible cap can both be accomplished with the same technique. The basic strategy is rebuilding. You will suck for two years or so and after that you have a chance to improve. The relevant part of the rebuild is that you trade away (or even cut if you can't get anything for 'em) guys who are either costing you a lot of money, are going to do so in the future, or will soon cost a lot to re-sign. You don't do it with all your guys, but ones who don't fit your culture (Dareus), or aren't living up to their draft status or expected contract figures (Watkins) are easy choices. And it gets immediately worse when you are forced to cut guys the way we were And the tough and painful part of the rebuild is that when you're that far behind the eight ball in your cap and have to get in good shape fast, you will have to cut even some guys you would really like to keep. But can't afford. Like Stephon Gilmore and Robert Woods. It's a sad byproduct of being handed a poorly handled cap. Another is that if you want everything off the books as soon as possible, you can trade guys early so the hit all comes that year, or you can trade them late and choose to NOT pass any dead cap on to the next year. This actively transfers money from your next year's cap (2019 and 2020) to this year's cap (2018 in this case), and they did it in most of last year's cuts/trades. It fit the timing of the rebuild and the timing for cleaning up the cap they'd given to the Pegulas.

JMO, but you may change your mind when that number starts approaching. Always liked and respected Buoniconti. A tough-minded guy. RIP.

Again, you continue to support a prediction that was always unlikely but well within possibility with arguments that are on the far side of wacky, far enough out there that Voyager and the Hubble are having trouble confirming sightings. Yeah, he had problems in the first year, (not surprising with being a rookie who missed a lot of camp with an injury) but he simply improved a lot in the second half last year. Pretty much everyone but you and a few Zay haters on these boards acknowledges that. Again, it's not your contention that's so whack-a-doodle. It's the way you've supported it with nutsy stuff. For example: I know. Amazing how that "mythical claim" caught on. Beane's two cents: "I think we all can agree that Zay Jones is trending up." - Brandon Beane in the 2018 post-season press conference https://www.buffalorumblings.com/2018/12/31/18163024/buffalo-bills-end-of-season-press-conference-open-thread-sean-mcdermott-brandon-beane-josh-allen Golly, I sure wish we didn't have a GM who gets caught up in "mythical claims," and doesn't know "if it really happened or not," and somehow bought into the whole "myth" that Zay got better. He should talk to you about his evaluations about his players, because McDermott is obviously feeding him the wrong info. Coincidentally, you kept referencing this same PC earlier in the thread, didn't you? About how Beane was saying good things about Duke? And yet you somehow forgot to mention him saying this about Zay ... Hmm. Hard to figure how that might have happened.

Nice post. Thanks. Worth noting that the McCarron trade now looks like a bit of a mistake, although you could also say that maybe the mistake was not bringing in Anderson the minute the McCarron trade was made. And also that the last couple of years they were also on a desperate mission to cut salaries and get the cap in shape. This year the cap looks good rather than terrible. It's less urgent on cap grounds to cut/trade guys if you think they might still be good depth than it was last year when we were still working our way out of the horrible cap situation they'd been left in by previous management. If there's anyone they can spare that could draw a pick in value, I could see it happen. McCoy is the obvious guess. Lawson, maybe, if one or two of the younger guys takes a step up? When I read your post, I thought OL immediately, but as I look at the roster, I think the guys that they brought in as proven FAs are likely to be needed as depth. I don't think anyone trades us for Ducasse or Bodine if they want one of them. A 7th, maybe, for Bodine, and a 6th or 7th for Ducasse? Could we get that? Both of them look likely to be cut, so would teams trade? We're doing well at CB but that's a position that often sees injuries. I'm not sure beyond McCoy and Lawson. Worth remembering also that a lot of the reason they brought in so many trade picks the past couple of years was to be sure they had the ammo to move up and take a QB. I like GMs who play the draft thoughtfully. Bringing in extra picks is just good smart strategy. Anyway, good post.

Nothing Frazier said there implies unquestioned. Incumbent? Yes. Current? Yes. Favorite? Yeah, maybe. Unquestioned? How can you say that when he says "it's always about competition and yadda yadda yadda," or "we'll see how things go." Did Frazier say more, and you accidentally left it out? If not, he's the starter for now, subject to how things go.

My feeling is that Oliver is an upgrade over the aging Kyle in run defense. Check out the draft evaluations on him for run defense. He was generally rated higher in that part of his game. As a younger player, Kyle was much the same way, but he'd lost a bit last year. We'll see. As always, the less your offense scores, the more runs your defense will generally see. It'll be an interesting season.

You may not hate the guy but many of your posts here have been a lot more personal and frankly wacky than you're trying to appear here. Quick example: Apparently, the guy can't do anything. You've gone way out into the wackzone with the "You can't count this play because I would rather you didn't even though it happened" nonsense that is one of the first calling cards of people with an unbalanced stance on any issue. Your idea that he didn't get better in the second half - repeated again and again along with a number of plays that we should pretend didn't happen - has also been pretty bizarre. If you'd really only said what you refer to in your post here, it would have been a somewhat improbable but unwacky stance. But you've gone well beyond that, and that's what has been wacky. It sure has looked like you're not pulling for him, though obviously nobody but you can speak to that.

That's just nonsense. I credit you for being consistent, but that's about all. He played quite well the last two games, getting open even when he wasn't thrown to. He improved a lot the second half of the season after missing a lot of his offseason work in both of his first two years. That was seen by nearly everyone, certainly including the FO. You wanna ignore it, that's fine, but the people who know what they were expecting from him were happy. He did earn his criticism, particularly in the first half of the year. In the second half there just wasn't much criticism except from you and a few others on these boards. Yeah, fair enough that he got owned by Slay, an elite CB but in the other games he was very solid. As for others who got owned by Slay the last couple of years you'd have to count Stefon Diggs, Mike Evans (2 catches for 25 yards) and Julio Jones among others. If getting taken out of the game by Slay means you aren't good, just about nobody in the league covered by him would be considered good. Hell, Antonio Brown was thrown to a way above average 15 times against Slay in 2017 and had a below average day of it in spite of all those targets, and his one big catch, a 30-yarder came when Slay was elsewhere. Beckham had four catches for 36 yards against Slay in 2017.

I grant you he only threw 25 passes last year, but I think it's fair to say EJ probably wouldn't have beaten Matt Barkley's passer rating last year of 117.4.

It wasn't even his second year when the dropoff came. Go back and take a look at his first year's progression. His first seven games he was on fire as teams didn't know how to play him. Then they got film on him and in the NE game, Belichick schemed up a way to limit him ... basically keep him in the pocket, don't let him run and don't worry too much about his passing game. He only played 14 games that first season and if you look at his second half, the final seven games, his stats dropped to almost exactly what we would see from him over the rest of his Buffalo career. In those seven games his passer rating was within a couple of points of his career passer rating. Same with YPA completion percentage, everything, really.