Thurman#1

Maybe a few. I was there too and yeah they booed the ones they thought were fakes. Probably that included a few real ones. But when fans see genuine injuries, it reminds us it's more than a game, it's people's lives as well.

It also tends to be the most realistic way to treat the likelihood of a team that was as bad the year before as we've been most years for the last 19 or so. It's the realist's way when looking at a team that hasn't been very good recently. Particularly for a team that before Allen hadn't had a QB with even a tomato can's chance of becoming a franchise QB in a long time. And IMO while there are a few guys out there predicting 4 or 5 wins, the average and the way the realists are tending to fall is to expect improvement ... just improvement that isn't as fast as the Kool-Aid brigade would like. That's not a negative outcome at all.

They are not few and far between at all. There are tons of them. Most of those many many examples are from a longer time ago. Yes they are fewer and further between recently. But that's the point. Back when teams gave coaches a longer time, there were a lot more success stories. The fact that there are so few now is likely because there are so few chances for it to happen as social media whips up fan outrage faster than ever and gradually erodes the patience of pretty much all of America. A lot of the reason you don't see those success stories anymore is that there are so very very few coaches who get the chance to continue after two or three years of not much winning, regardless of the circumstances. My logic isn't that keeping a guy a long time will work for every coach. There are bad coaches. Keeping them won't help. But there are also good coaches getting fired too early and it happens more and more often. Good owners have to figure out - they have info we don't have and access that is almost infinitely better than ours - to make good decisions about whether the coach and GM are good or not and whether they can work well together. And that if they are good, they should be given more time than they usually get these days. Agreed that their win record will depend greatly on Allen. But if they get the rest of the team functioning very well even if Allen does poorly, they could be here for a while. Bowles I don't really know well enough to say. Frankly, I thought he was a competent guy, but I wasn't paying all that much attention. I am not sure he was the main reason for the quagmire over there. I thought it might well have been the lack of good players rather than bad coaching. Jauron didn't seem to get it. Great guy / bad HC. I wouldn't have kept him. Might have given Gailey more time, though. He was generating offense with poor players. If he could've gotten a really good DC in, I thought he had a chance. But nobody wanted to come here with Mr. Wilson in bad health and the future of the team so up in the air.

They've cheered many many injured opponents over time, especially if it seems like a serious injury.

Overdorf has never managed the cap. That was up to Whaley, who did a very poor job. Overdorf did the contracts, yes, but the GM decided whether to sign the players based on the contract terms. Overdorf gave Whaley cap advice and info, without a doubt. We have no idea whether that advice was good or bad. The GM decides whether to pull the trigger, and he likewise gets the credit, or in Whaley's case, the blame. Overdorf clearly can get this done when given good direction from above, as the terrific cap situation this year (and on into the future as well) shows. It does indeed suggest it because McDermott and Beane chose not to spend significant resources on the offense the first two years while he built up the defense, bringing in Josh Allen excepted. You don't spend resources on an offense that was already at best mediocre, of course you're not going to be good on offense. What suggests that McDermott has a good chance to be better is that this year they finally spent a lot of resources on the offense.

Yeah, if you are mediocre to below average for three straight years, you aren't going to emerge. That's why Chuck Noll is so well-known as a loser of a coach. 1-13, 5-9 and 6-8 his first three years. Clearly he sucked. It's why we know for sure that Belichick will not be remembered as a good coach. Jason Garrett: 5-3, 8-8, 8-8, 8-8 his first three-and-a-half years. Looks like in the right situation he might be very good indeed. I hate Jerry Jones, but he's valued continuity and understood that things sometimes take more time than you would like and he appears to be reaping the benefits of that understanding. And as Bandit pointed out earlier, Kubiak is another example. Yeah, it's rarer these days than it used to be. But that's largely because in the days of social media: 1) There haven't been so many full rebuilds as there used to be, as two to three and even occasionally four years of real badness does not look good to unpopular fans. Better to reload and go for 8-8 in the short term, and .... 2) Impatient (and often bad) owners rarely have the patience to wait as long as they should. Plenty of NFL teams are stuck on the "I need to see something new right now," treadmill, getting a new start, seeing progress that they feel is too slow and firing the coaches too soon and watching the new regime put in new schemes and new protocols and firing them before their work has a chance to bear fruit. Carroll's a great example of that, fired after one year by the Jets and after three years of diminishing returns by the Pats. Neither the Pats nor Jets were rebuilding but we know that in the right situation and with a good QB, Carroll can be an excellent head coach. But it would've required more patience for either of those teams to find that out with Carroll. In the old days that was better understood and guys like Landry could go 0-11, 4-9, 5-8, 4-10, 5-8, and 7-7 and still be on the same bench the next year watching his work finally start to pay off.

Your logic here made me chuckle. The 2017 team wasn't a McDermott team according to you, although 5 of 11 defensive starters and 4 of 11 offensive starters and the fact that the defense and offense both totally changed schemes? And yet the 2018 team was a McDermott team and one they should be judged on. And you feel it's OK to make those judgments after one season that you feel is a "McDermott team." Boy, what a coincidence ... the way you've got it set up there happens to be the most negative possible way to look at the situation!! Wow, who'd have thought you of all people would find a negative way to look at the situation? The way it should actually be looked at is simple. The first couple of years of a major rebuild should be expected to suck. Reasonably often the first three, actually, but always the first two. We'll be able to start judging them based on wins this year and next. If they get worse this year or don't show improvement, seat temperature will start to rise a bit, as it's time in the life cycle when a significant amount of teams started showing real post-rebuild improvement.

If you believe he might be in line for a GM position after the season ends, do you bring him in? Do you bring him in only if he accepts we don't let him go till after the draft next year? Does he disrupt the prospects for advancement of anyone there right now? If all that's OK, yeah, bring him in.

Yeah? I don't see it. Oh, I bet Belichick has an issue with it. Too smart to make it public but the first time in camp when Brady misses a throw you can bet Belichick will be saying, "Hey, is that Tommy Terrific out there? Pretty terrific there, Tom. I can see how you felt you didn't need OTAs what with how terrific you are."

Born in Smiljan, Tesla moved to America at age 26. He was indeed naturalized here, but just saying he was an American leaves out a lot.

It kinda is. Just because we have cap space doesn't mean we'll use it. They're going to need it next year when the guys they want to re-sign come due. They've made it real real clear that they aren't going to bring in a lot of high-priced FAs, that they don't want to build the team that way. They want their model to be sustainable for the long-term. Their model is building the core through the draft, filling in holes with low- to medium-priced FAs and re-signing our own FAs. Expect that to continue. You're right that they've made it a priority to fix and build the line. And they've done so. Done a terrific job of it so far, from the looks. He's older, he's expensive, we have two guys who can play the position well, and we'd have to give up a relatively high pick in the draft. I think it's really safe to say he's not going to be here.

Not just a game. A kid's game!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ah, got it. When people give the figure as "an extension worth ..." it's almost always a total ego massage, because they'll be getting four extra years, but the money won't only be going in those four years. It's a fake metric. The total contract, including the extension is the real way to look at it. The extension is for 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, yet he'll be receiving a huge portion of that money as a signing bonus today, in 2019. "An extension worth $X per year," is spin delivered at centrifuge speed. Six years for $154M. Good deal for both sides, IMO. Wentz will lose a few mill total this way, but will be getting his signing bonus a year early, which make him safer in case of career-ending injury. Good deal for Philly too. Less than $26 mill a year for Wentz. They pay him now they get him for $26 mill a year. Wait a year and you end up paying him Luck money, assuming he works out. And the consensus is he will. Though you're right there are injury concerns.

There you have it, someone who doesn't get it. Stats simply reflect what happens on the field. What you find, when you look, is that good QBs have good stats and bad QBs have bad stats. And it's not coincidence. It's an opinion that was asked for. I was there, and I watched Fouts. He was certainly better than Ferguson. But in my opinion, formed watching Fouts and Rivers and a lot of QBs - and yes, informed by stats - is that Fouts was very good but Rivers is better. And as I said, there were about 5 - 6 years when Fouts was at his peak but for the rest of his career he wasn't as dangerous as he was during that heyday. If your opinion is different, fine.

Rivers and Montana. Fouts was very good, especially for his time, but he threw a lot of INTs. Some of that was desperation from being on a bad team and being behind a lot. Not all of it. 254 TDs and 242 INTs. It's a bit startling to see. And yeah, it was harder back then to put up great stats, I get that. Still. Plus Fouts had about 5 - 6 years when he was very good and in the rest, he wasn't hitting on all cylinders. I liked Fouts a lot, both then and now, but Rivers is terrific. He's underappreciated.

They're not building the team by bringing in high-priced guys, especially older ones. Williams is good. Not going to be here, though.

He's been solid. Best of luck to him. Yup.

Those are some bizarrely self-confident fans.

It's a major deal for the OL. But other than that, yeah, it's business as usual. Especially this early in the life cycle of the team.

We have talked football with him. Online. Where he's doing pretty close to the opposite of going out of his way to be polite, kind and gracious. That's fine that in person he's a great guy. But he's still responsible for what he says here, including the insults and the undeserved condescension. I might indeed like him in person. I'm pretty different - much mellower and less argumentative and sarcastic - in person myself. But I'm responsible for both of my "selves," the in person and the online persona. And I expect to be judged on what I say as both.

Yup. I don't think it was a mistake that McDermott started accumulating draft capital for a QB well before Beane arrived and far far before McDermott benched Taylor for Peterman.

Yeah, and the Wawrow story, "Bills Not Ready To Talk Rebuild," has "rebuild" in the headline but not the story. And the headline seems to be based on a statement from Eric Wood that they want to win this year. In the first story, you can't tell how the question was phrased but essentially McDermott is talking there about wanting to win. He's not addressing whether they are going to turn over the roster, whether they are going to accumulate draft capital like crazy to bring in a QB, or whether they are going hell-for-leather to get the cap in shape (though as has been pointed out several times, Beane promised the Pegulas in his job interview that he'd get the cap in shape by this year). That's a rebuild, whether you use the word or not. Here's specifically what McDermott said, "... the odds are stacked against McDermott succeeding in the short term, but he refuses to use the word "rebuild" to describe the philosophy being embraced by him and new general manager Brandon Beane. "That's not it at all. It's about winning football games," McDermott said in June. "Our goals are to win now, because winning now helps you sustain success down the road." He's denying a tank.

No, Beane absolutely never said it would not be a rebuild. I've asked other people to provide links on that, and none have. He said it wouldn't be a "tank." Which it wasn't, considering there's never been a tank in football nor probably ever will be. Tank is really a hockey word, maybe another sport or two, but not football. Go ahead and try to find a link where he said it would not be a rebuild. You won't succeed. But the rest of your post is on target. I really like the moves he's made. Definitely made some mistakes, as does everyone. But he's established an extremely sensible plan, followed through, and been smart with extreme consistency.

This is how people talk when you have sucked for ages. And won 6 games last year. And no, they don't need to win a Super Bowl. They just need to become a team that competes for championships ... a top 6 or 8 team.

Without seeing the story you are specifically talking about, this can't really be discussed. I googled "four small steps out cut" and got nothing to do with sports. Then I added "football" and got a lot of soccer stuff. What specifically did they say? Where did you see it? We need to see the exact words to know what you're really referring to here. Generally, though, yeah, route running is immensely technical and guys who are really good at it gain a real advantage over DBs.