Thurman#1

Um, no. He's saying that they aren't getting fired because the Pegulas like them. That's massively different from saying that a poster on a message board likes them, Scott. And that the Pegulas knew that the first couple of years were not likely to be good. And yeah, there are plenty of examples of teams being awful and then going far into the playoffs in the first or second year of their new regimes. Those instances happened in reload situations. Or sometimes it happens in situations where the "awful" year was the second or third year of a rebuild. Where it simply doesn't happen is in near-complete rebuilds like the one going on here. And it ain't about whether fans would be OK with 3 straight years of not being very good. It's understanding that rebuilds show massive improvement in the third year a very small amount of the time. I found it was around 20% of the time when I did a major research project a few years back on rebuilds and successful rebuilds in particular. Much more often it takes till the fourth or sometimes even the fifth year for successful rebuilds to hit the real fast track. No, fans wouldn't be thrilled. But the smarter ones would understand, through their exasperation. I absolutely expect some real improvement this year. But it's very possible that that improvement might result in maybe two or three or four more wins, and that would not look like a bad thing at all ... in the long run.

The problem is not so much that he has had problems evaluating or developing offensive skill position talent. It's that they haven't had the cap situation and draft resources to allow them to spend almost any resources on the offense the last couple of years. For what they spent (mostly UDFAs and vet min deals and an occasional flier), the returns were actually pretty solid. For every injured Matthews and just not good enough Benjamin, there's been a UDFA Foster, a vet min McKenzie, a cheap Chris Ivory, a near-minimum Marcus Murphy ... They just haven't poured the resources there in the past. This year they committed themselves a bit more. We'll be better able to see how they hit, and worth noting that next year's draft is supposed to be tremendous for WRs. We are indeed going to see if they are right going forward.

Yeah, used to all happen (or not) in the last few days before training camp in late July or early August.

Yeah, I trust the process too. Not to mention that I'd been using "trust the process" for 20 years before this. It's an old saying that originally had nothing to do with the Bills or the Sixers.

McBeane. Should've been good for about a day's worth of chuckles and then thrown into dry dock.

Sure, you can justify nearly anything you want. On either side. You can pick any receiver on any team, tear apart his play and find the plays that fall on whichever side of the bell curve you're desperately trying to pretend is the whole picture, and then you can highlight them. Then you can say, "so really he's not as good/bad as he looks." Thing is, you can do that with any receiver. Any team. Any player or side of any argument about human beings, really. But it says less about what you're looking at than it does about your method. Every receiver gets some easy TDs and some hard ones. Every RB gets some runs where he's not touched and a few where that are highlight-reel quality. It's how things work, particularly so for receivers, though, as they only get to catch balls that are thrown to them. Wide open for a TD, but the QB never sees you? Some people will call you unproductive on the play. That 31 yard TD play is an example. He wasn't left open. He was cleverly schemed open by Daboll on a successful pick play. And more, he was already open and ahead of his coverage by a step and a half when the pick happened. And that is just nonsense that he was dominated the rest of the game by the Pats. I went back and watched and he was open a lot but not thrown to early. It's not a WR's fault if he's open but not thrown to. That's not "dominated." Just the opposite, he was having a very solid game. Alpha clearly is working hard to disparage Zay in that post. He doesn't say anything positive about him at all. And the best he can say about four of the TDs are that they were against the Dolphins. True enough, but three of the four were on really nice plays by Zay, though the last of the four was on a breakdown in coverage (also a perfect play-call by Daboll, sending four guys deep against three-deep coverage, where the two in the middle do crossing post patterns). The other three of Zay's TDs were fine plays (highlights packages of the two games below) against a pass defense that wasn't all that bad (18th in defensive passer rating and 21st in defensive passing yards allowed, about five yards per game below average). https://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/2018123001/2018/REG17/dolphins@bills?icampaign=GC_schedule_rr https://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/2018112501/2018/REG12/jaguars@bills?icampaign=GC_schedule_rr It absolutely is as good as saying he had 7 TDs. Going from one TD in his first nine games to six TDs in his last seven games, and also going from about 33 yards per game in his first nine games to about 50 yards per game over the last seven games is absolutely progress, no matter how much people cavil and justify. ... Anyhow, I can see him getting traded, especially if he doesn't keep improving. Reasonably unlikely, IMO. He's trending upwards at a pretty steep angle. That could very easily continue, and we've seen that he's extremely serious about his fitness this offseason, an excellent sign.

Theoretically, yeah. Sure, we could assume that no stories are true, even when they're proven correct. It would be senseless, it would show more about how you felt about the media than what was correct, but you could do that if you feel like it.

Whoops. Seahawks signed him. None of this is an even slightly big deal. But looks like the story was pretty solid.

I would disagree. You can always look at what you've been able to figure so far. And IMO he's right, with the info we have now, they've drafted really well. On the other hand, you're right that claiming that we know for sure we've drafted well wouldn't make sense. It'll take more time to know.

Collins English Dictionary Accuracy: The quality or state of being accurate or exact; precision; exactness TheFreeDictionary Accuracy: Precision; exactness Macmillan Accuracy: The quality of being exact and accurate; accuracy, exactitude, precision .... I know. Dictionaries, right?

Precision and accuracy are synonyms. In fact, precision is often used in the dictionary definitions of accuracy, and vice-versa. There are indeed a few pedantic people who go on about this distinction. From physics geeks and the pocket protector set generally, it would probably draw a standing O. It's not meaningful for how football fans use the term. Oxford: Merriam-Webster

It was indeed a nice try, and a successful one. Thanks for noticing. You guessed with no bother about checking your accuracy. None. Picked a guesstimate and added it to Josh's, and adjusted Josh's stats and nobody else's. Did you adjust all the other guys who were near the top? No? Well, geez, then, I'm completely sure any statistician would totally back you up on the fairness of your method without rolling his eyes or facepalming at all while you were watching.

Nobody would give a shirt in that case. But everyone should give a shirt on a pass that, say, forces a receiver to stop or dive because it wasn't accurate, limiting YAC and preventing first downs. A lack of accuracy is something everyone should complain about. The difference between a pass that throws a guy open and one that allows the DB to catch up and make a play is huge, and the accuracy of someone like Brees makes differences in productivity again and again. You're right that completed passes count. But accuracy can improve completion percentages but also improve efficiency in other ways. And yes, PFF pointed out that he had the second-highest drop rate, but they also pointed out something else, as reported yesterday. "Allen also had the second-highest drop rate among quarterbacks last year at 6.3 percent, according to Pro Football Focus. Blake Bortles was first with 7.7 percent. But Allen only put the ball in the perfect spot 8.6 percent of the time, per PFF. That is 6.5 percentage points less than the league average." https://buffalonews.com/2019/05/03/buffalo-bills-josh-allen-quarterback-jim-kubiak-year-two/

Absolutely. There certainly was an effect on his stats from the drops. But yeah, an awful lot of it came from Josh's side in terms of inaccuracy and problems with tough. But just upgrading the personnel around him should help. But he was inaccurate and had problems with touch. Which he could certainly improve with work on mechanics and footwork. But improvement doesn't always come.

Yup. As long as you take out all of Allen's drops and throwaways and spikes and then compare them to other QBs without adjusting for their drops, throwaways and spikes, Allen's 52.5% gets close to the lower ranks of normal. By your reckoning, you take out large numbers of Josh's incompletions while leaving everyone else unchanged ... and you get him to up 58.5% or 59.5%, it would get him all the way up to 29th in the league in completion percentage of QBs with over 200 attempts. I'm sure statisticians would find your methodology here - taking away significant percentages of Josh's incompletions but nobody else's - totally reasonable.

And yet again, he in no way was terrible those last three weeks. Had an unproductive 14th week, but he was very solid week 15 and downright excellent week 16, and I say that as a person who went back and watched much of those two games - with All-22 - over the last three days or so. He was open a lot, even when he wasn't getting thrown to, and he was making catches when he was thrown to. He had a very good last two weeks and improved a lot over the last seven games as compared to the first nine, which is what should be expected of a second-year guy who misses most of training camp and the off-season. We certainly agree, though, that he still has a lot of improvement necessary if he's going to be a successful pick. It's very true that the whole system had major problems and didn't work as well as it should have. Everyone on offense was less productive than they might have been when surrounded by better players. How much so - especially for each individual person - is a question, but it's clear the offense wasn't working well. That hurt everyone.

Nah. You simply don't know, no matter how much you think you do. That's certainly a legitimate guess you have there. But it is indeed a guess. Some WRs take huge steps at this time in their careers. Eric Moulds is a good example, though there are many more. Zay had more TDs and more yards last year alone than Moulds had in his first two years combined. Then the light came on for Moulds. Will it come on for Zay? Dunno. Nobody does, really.

26 TDs would have put him in the top 12 last year. For a 2nd year guy, not reaching the top 12 in the league is hardly alarming. 3500 yards is more reasonable, but it would still put him above Russell Wilson and Cam Newton at 18th. This team is likely to stress running and run a higher percentage of runs than most teams. I don't think putting cumulative total stats as his goal is going to make sense. Just my feeling.

IMO it's too early to "expect" anything. Too unpredictable. Guess at? Yeah. Hope for? Sure. Predict? Yeah, why not. But "expect"? Things aren't clear enough to expect yet.

It may be a bad pick. But if it is, it won't be because they didn't need him. If he's good, they'll find a way to use him. Rookie contracts are four years long and the guy drafted in Singletary's spot last year earned $936K per year for his four year contract. A good RB at that salary would be very useful for this team. Probably by next year, Gore and Shady will be gone. A good RB at that salary would be very useful for this team, particularly looking into the future. It'll only be a bad pick if he doesn't become a good player. Which is true of all draft picks, really.

Agreed, and strongly.

This is pretty much it. It's nice if you have one guy who can jump and catch a fade, but some shorter guys do that well with body positioning and blocking out. You don't absolutely need even one tall guy, but it doesn't hurt to have guys with a variety of talents and abilities.

You're making up "best player in the league" too. Why don't you settle for what they're really saying about Mayfield ... that he doesn't look like a rookie while the other three do, and that being that good in his first year is really really promising. That he looks much more at home behind center than any of the other rookie QBs. That so far he looks like he's going to be the kind of QB who can take a team to Super Bowls, though it's still early. Me, I agree with what I mostly read about Mayfield. A lot of the Browns Super Bowl talk is about the whole team, though. They've got a terrific lineup in terms of talent, one of the absolute best in the AFC. Man, it drives me nuts how sometimes the "EDIT" feature disappears on me and I can't edit some posts. Above I mistyped "29th" rather than "20th" for the Jets and I can't correct it. Oh, well.

'Cause Mayfield has been terrific, though the Brady comparison is your own. And because they're comparing Darnold + McCown to Rosen + Fitz. Both of those look better to me than Allen + Barkley + Anderson. And probably there's a smidge of it being pretty legit to think that while Allen's running ability absolutely destroys Rosen's or Darnold's that both of those to could be said to have shown more throwing the ball. And that in the long run passing ability trumps running ability at QB. Disagree? Fair enough, but I think it's a pretty reasonable opinion at this point. As for slanting it towards big markets, please. Kansas City is around the 30th biggest market and yet they're ranked number one. And if they cared what New York thought in that way, they wouldn't have ranked them 29th. That's hardly blowing wind up their skirts.

It's not that Rosen is two spots higher. It's that Rosen and the Amish Rifle and Jake Rudock, who I've never heard of till just this instant, are two spots higher than Josh, Matt Barkley and Derek Anderson all put together. Which seems reasonable to me. Fitz is probably one of the two or three best backups in football. Anderson and Barkley not so much. Maybe if he hears about it it might give Josh some motivation. I can't imagine it, myself. He knows the situation. He's got a ton to prove. As do all the young guys from last year and this year, particularly Rosen. I'd imagine Josh is already just about as motivated as he's likely to get.