Thurman#1

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.

Please. A few (very few), may have said that, particularly folks still having Kool-Aid still in their systems from picking Allen. What 95% of us actually had as a narrative was that cutting Tyrod despite the fact that he was likely to be - THAT YEAR - the best on the roster made total sense due to Tyrod's ridiculous cap hit of $16 mill and the fact that we weren't going to have a good year anyway in 2018. Cutting Tyrod was the way to go in the context of the rebuild. And again, there are always folks with rose-colored glasses riveted to their craniums, but last year for the sane among us was always likely to be a pretty bad year, not to be worried about as part of the rebuild.

Very true. You are set up to be to be somewhat less wrong than anyone who thought he'd be cut.

Beane answered a lot of your questions in the PC after those trades. He wasn't actively trying to trade either guy. The teams called him, he didn't call them. If a team offers good value, he feels he has to consider it. And he made it very very clear that he absolutely considered signability and salary cap concerns as a major factor. I'd disagree with those who say Beane has been non-committal about Shady. IMO they've been very positive about him. They've said he's the number one, they've said they want him here. They've said they think he's got a lot left. They're not going to say anyone's untouchable, because you never know what value will be offered. He says he doesn't even like the word "untouchable." There are a few guys who are in practical terms untouchable because we're going to value them higher than anyone would give for them. Shady isn't one of those guys but I think they fully expect him to be here this year ... subject to competition and to the fact that nearly anyone's available if the offer's good enough.

Sorry, man, no. Poor analysis. When you are looking at scoring defense, drives on which a team scores count far far more than any other drive. Seven points is about 2% of the total points scored against you, though one drive is way way less than 1% of the drives faced. Scoring drives count more. But when you are looking at yards, every drive counts the same as every other. Yeah, one drive might start on the opponent's 10. The next might start on the Bills one, 99 yards away. Since each drive counts the same, it's only the average that matters. Yeah, some drives start closer, but other start farther away. Only the average matters, and the average for every team is close. The Bills defensive average was to start on their own 31.36 yard line. The league average was to start three yards further away, on the 28.28 yard line. Again, a crappy turnover-laden offense has very little impact on defensive yards. A ton on points, and very little on yards. If anything it has a bad effect on defensive performance, as the Bills faced the 2nd most drives of any NFL defense last year, due to that crappy offense.

Just the opposite. A crappy turnover-laden offense makes it harder for a defense to put up good stats, not easier. The defense will face shorter field behind them and more drives if the offense is bad. A better offense makes it easier on defensive stats, holding the ball and giving the D better field position and fewer drives to defend. There is a bit of an exception if your offense runs a hurryup as we did in the SB days. But the Bills weren't as bad as you remember in those days. They were up and down even facing more drives than most teams and teams throwing more because they were further behind. 1990 8th 1991 27th 1992 12th 1993 27th IMO we were somewhere between probably 3rd and 6th best on D last year, probably 4th or 5th. Which is damn good.

#1 in scoring defense would be terrific, but that's a whole-team stat, not one that isolates the defense well. Field position at the start of opponent drives is a massive factor in scoring defense, not to mention that if Allen throws a pick-six somehow that counts against the defense in scoring defense. It's a whole-team stat. Yards per drive is probably the best stat that isolates the defense. I'd put YPG and turnovers at the top, and sacks after that.

Oh, jeez, yes.

I may be overreacting. Probably am, and should've just shut up. Misleading thread titles just irritate me. I'll let go of it now. Sorry, all.

Yeah, I'm sure that's the way it happened. Out of nowhere the reporter said, "By the way, did you think the Pats were going to trade up for you in the draft?" Poor guy was trapped. But more, in the modern world, there's nothing wrong with being Crash Davis and giving out non-answers. If you don't want to answer, it's what you should do, and everyone will understand. "The Pats? Golly, who am I to guess at what they were going to do? I'm just happy I'm with the Cleveland Browns, the greatest franchise in the National Football League." He'd have been showered with love for that answer.

Parrino's tweet: "Who does Brandon Beane think is the model when it comes to choosing to run?" Your headline: "Many think Beane believes Allen should model his game after Cam Newton ... but he hints it's actually Russell Wilson." Misses the target if you're saying you took the headline from the tweet. Not a huge deal by any means but it does misrepresent what was said.

Really? Was it the reporter who wrote that title? At newspapers, the reporters don't write the titles. And since nothing in the article says what the title does, I'd bet the same is true here ... that some editor somewhere looking for more hits jazzed up the headline by overpromising what was in the article. So what Beane actually said was nothing more than that Beane wants Allen to do a better job of balancing the run and the pass, and that one example of a guy who did that was Wilson. So, your title, "Many think Beane believes Allen should model his game after cam Newton ... but he hints it's actually Russell Wilson," has nothing in it of anything Beane actually said or implied. That headline is half your own mention of Cam and half a headline written by we know not who ... and nothing Beane actually said or implied. What the reporter actually says in the article is simply that he used Wilson as an example. Your headline doesn't represent at all what the reporter was saying or what Beane said. I know it's the offseason but jeez.

He really isn't. Looked for that one year like he'd really turned the corner and was headed for that kind of a career, but that's not how it's turned out. So far, at least. Newton was one of the main arguments for why the Bills might pick Allen. The Bills were building their team in many ways using the Carolina blueprint, and Carolina picked a big physical guy with problems in being consistently accurate and built a very competitive team around him, even reaching a Super Bowl. The fact that Beane did select Allen made me think that this is yet another area where the Bills like the Carolina template.

The article does say that about hinting he should model his game after Wilson. But there's no mention of Newton in the article whatsoever. Bringing in Newton was pure Yolo, with neither the writer or Beane dropping the name. But the only thing Beane appears to have been mentioning Wilson for is to say that Wilson builds his game around passing, not running. I'm sure in that sense, yeah, they'd like to have him be more like Wilson. But they're two very different players in style, build, skill set ... Both great runners, but that's about it for their similarities. Wilson's rookie year completion percentage was 64.7%. That was good for 9th in the league that year, and he got that while maintaining a much higher YPA than Allen did, 7.9 for Wilson compared to 6.5 for Allen. Wilson and Allen started with wildly different strengths to build on and weaknesses to improve.

Agreed that you have to coach the whole team ... but Coughlin didn't win with Hostetler. Hostetler's last year with the Giants came 12 years before Coughlin joined the G-Men. And Parcells didn't win with Hostetler either. Those Giants won with Simms/Hostetler, with Simms going 11-3 before his injury, 11-3 on a team that finished at 13-3. No Simms, no title. Same with Pederson. He didn't win with Nick Foles. He won with Wentz/Foles, with Carson Wentz going 11-2 on a team that finished at 13-3. No Wentz, no title. And Rypien was an absolutely sensational QB that year. Go take a look. His third and fourth years, he rounded into a guy who looked like he was on a straight shot to the Hall of Fame. Go look, in '91, the year the Skins beat the Bills in the SB, Rypien was 2nd in passer rating, 2nd in YPA, 2nd in TDs while still managing to have the highest TD:INT ratio of anyone over 250 attempts ... all in his fourth year. He looked like he had a shot to become a true great ... and then he went off a cliff and nobody knew why till recently it's come out that he had a bad concussion on the heels of a bunch of others and he simply wasn't the QB he could have been. It's a very sad case, but it sure isn't a case of a coach winning without a terrific QB. Rypien was sensational that year. Namath? Please, there's a backlash against the guy, partly because of how mouthy he is, and it's true that he wasn't the same after the knee injury, but he was terrific. The year they won the Super Bowl, Namath was first-team All-Pro. Not just the Pro Bowl, but first team All-Pro. Please. McMahon? Fair enough. You have a point there. Same with Dilfer and one or two others such as Doug Williams and maybe Brad Johnson. But the list of QBs on Super Bowl winning teams is a list of very very very good QBs with somewhere around 10% being exceptions. And 10% isn't a model you want to build your attempt or your argument around.

Cowher's a lot better. He brought the Steelers to AFC Championships time after time with QBs like Kordell Stewart, Tommy Maddox, Mike Tomczak and the gem of the group, Neil O'Donnell. The instant he managed to get a real QB the rewards were fast in coming. You won't find many to rank Tomlin with Cowher, though Tomlin seems to be a fine coach indeed.

Nah, the Rams weren't quick. Their GM has been building that team for quite a while now. This'll be his eighth year there. Five years of building with results that weren't all that obvious, then he gets his franchise QB three years ago and all of a sudden things start looking better not just in terms of the roster but in terms of wins. It took a long time for that Rams team to hit the tipping point. This is an extremely consistent methodology problem people have when they talk about quick turnarounds. They ignore the years of work and losses that came before and only count the last two years, when the tipping point was actually hit. Sure, any turnaround will look quick as long as you ignore the first few years where the foundation was laid. But it's like calling an actor an overnight success after he suddenly becomes famous after eight years of waiting tables and failing auditions and taking acting classes and being thrilled when he was chosen for a Clearasil ad.

That's not fair lumping Unitas in there. Most of his career was pre-Super Bowl era and the part that wasn't was not the old, uninjured Johnny U. I don't think it's all that clear that Brady's the GOAT. But certainly one of all-time greatest few. Top two or three, and very possibly one. How did Belichick do without Brady? No franchise QB in Cleveland, and in his first year, playing with Bledsoe, they went 5-11. The next year, with mostly Brady, 11-5 and a title. Then you look at the year Brady was injured and they went a good-at-first-glance 11-5 against a stunningly easy schedule, in a year when the AFC East had such an easy schedule that the Fins went 11-5 as well. The difference between those 2008 Fins and the 2008 Pats was that the year before the Fins went 1-15, while the Pats with Brady went 16-0. That would seem to indicate two fairly divergent types of team. What you refer to as a solidified fact, that Belichick is more responsible, is neither a fact nor particularly solid. I really look forward to seeing Belichick play without Brady. Very very soon, hopefully. I think the Pats will be a good team with Belichick, but having side-stepped disaster with Garoppolo, I don't think they'll be regular champions anymore. Belichick does have a lot more impact than most coaches, much more. Because he's not a coach. Or put more specifically, he's not just a coach. He's a very under-estimated GM. As a GM he's put consistently solid rosters on the field, built with consistently smarter methods than most GMs. But he's been able to build rosters around one of the greatest QBs of all time, and more, a QB who was willing to be paid less than he could have gotten. That's a huge advantage for a GM, and a coach as well.

Belichick, because he drafted Brady. Kidding. Brady. Belichick's terrific, but Brady is the main reason, IMO.

Hard to know who he will look like when he develops. And so far he reminds me of a rookie with a terrific running skill set, a howitzer and accuracy problems.

We don't need another RB. And trading for a guy demanding a new contract, in his fourth year, is exactly how to start yourself down the road to cap problems. I like the player, but no thanks under the circumstances.

You say "corp players." Do you mean "core players" or "corps of players" or something else I don't understand? Assuming you mean "core," I think it's an interesting topic, but I don't see them making their mind up about anyone they have to have before around mid-season except for maybe Tre. I suspect he'll try to sign guys a year early so he can get them a bit under market value at a moment when it would benefit both team and player. I think they'll be forced to spend serious money on Tre, Edmunds and Dawkins of the bunch you mentioned, if they decide to re-sign them.