Thurman#1

Not quite Bill, though he did mention stashing. His question was, " My question to all of those who know much more than me, "how many qb's started out on a practice squad and ultimately became a legitimate nfl qb starter or even back-up? I can't think of one, but I certainly could be missing somebody." Still, play on.

Yup. Absolutely reasonable. To say it about Peterman and around 1700 other QBs who accomplished even less.. And you're right that we don't know if a guy is worse when he didn't even play. Thing is ... give those guys the benefit of the doubt and intellectual honesty demands you give Peterman the same benefit. Listen, 'cause this is the truth. We ... don't ... know ... how ... Peterman ... will ... be ... thought of. Nor will we till the end of his career. Again, it's not over. It may be soon, but it's not. And if you don't give Peterman the benefit of the doubt ... and you clearly don't ... then a neutral observer who doesn't hate Peterman doesn't give any of those others the benefit of the doubt either. Most of them didn't play ... because they sucked too much to get on the field. Fair enough that out of those 1700 (I'm choosing that number because there are just over 2000 QBs with passer ratings, but there are probably another couple of thousand who weren't even good enough to see the field and get a passer rating) there might indeed be 20 or 30 who might have been good if given a chance. Maybe Hamdan was better, who knows, though I doubt it. But the vast majority of them simply sucked, and were never even good enough to get that chance, And again, you keep avoiding my point that several QBs who turned out to be very good, including two Hall of Famers (I assume Peyton will make it), started with comparable or even worse early work with Peterman. Can we say that maybe Peterman would be just as good if he'd been given the chance? Use that logic on thousands of other QBs, as you do, and in intellectual fairness, you actually have to say that. Peterman's near the bottom, yes, along with thousands of others.

Expect away. No penalty to it but very possible disappointment. My guess is 70 - 80%. Dude, please. One year does not make you a QB whisperer. It maybe gets you on people's radar. It especially doesn't make you a QB whisperer when you've had one awful year and one solid year with the current team, and particularly not when that big step is taken in the second year when many QBs take big steps, including QBs who end up failing long-term.

Glad you understand it's an opinion. I wonder why, then, you stated it as a fact. And no, it's not an especially reasonable opinion. Just to quickly pick out a few who were likely worse, I picked the year 2010 randomly and checked the 2010 NFL draft and looked at the last four guys drafted. Tony Pike spent one year with the Panthers, was put in in Week 9 after the first and second-stringers were injured. He was then benched after twelve throws. He was benched that game and never saw the field again and didn't make it through the next camp. Nobody picked him up. Levi Brown was the second. NFL stats, 2/3, zero touchdowns and one INT. A 33% interception rate. Sean Canfield was the third. All you'll find on his NFL stats page are his combine measurements and drill times. Never saw the field even in mop-up time. Zac Robinson was the fourth and he also never threw an official pass. Must've been smart, as he's an assistant QB coach for the Rams now. But saying Peterman is worse than all four of these guys simply doesn't make much sense. And yeah, your numbers are factual. If I'd questioned your numbers, you'd have a point. Thing is, I didn't. And more, you didn't even put those particular numbers in your post for me to see, so I couldn't have questioned them if I'd wanted. So that's one weakass argument there. As is the pretense that I said it was all someone else's fault. Nice little straw man there. If nothing I said is illogical ... yeah, make up a straw man, pretend I said it and then attack the argument you just made up out of whole cloth. Pretty pitiful. And no, "His performance in actual NFL games has been worse than any player with a similar opportunity" is yet another opinion masquerading as a fact. Obviously Gruden doesn't think so, for instance. And while I think Gruden's a nut, he's an extremely knowledgeable football man as well. And no, it really doesn't make sense that Peterman's the worst ever and still in the league. There are plenty of QBs who never made it out of training camp. Thousands? They're worse. And if he were worse than every single one of them, he wouldn't be getting yet another opportunity. "Near the bottom"? Ah, finally, something we can agree on ... but the bottom is probably 1700 QBs. And again, Peterman is still around. As I've pointed out there are guys who've put up stats just about as poor over their first season or first 130 passes and yet become reasonably to very successful down the road, including Peyton Manning's first 130, Matt Barkley's first two years, and even Terry Bradshaw's first year. Nobody would argue that Peterman's regular season performances have been successful. It wouldn't make sense to do so. But he's still in the league (as of today, anyway), for a reason. Well, the juice has been squeezed out of this one and there's nothing but rind left. I believe I'm done on this subject.

Damn, I hope when the terrorists strap a bomb to me I can handle it with more dignity than this guy. or So ... he hunts panthers with boomerangs? Yeah, right. Lemme see ... Dude, where can I buy one of those little things with the laser beam you got coming out of your back?

And you proved a few things conclusively there. What you didn't prove is that he's the worst ever. Nor will you ever prove that, as it's an opinion, not a fact. In fact, if you think you did prove that, it says more about you than about him. It would say you don't get the difference between opinions and facts. And it says that your feelings about Peterman are leading you towards irrationality on the subject. What you proved: 1) that Peterman has the lowest passer rating of any QB with 130 passes or more. That's it. That's all. That's only fact you've listed here. That you think that fact proves the opinion that he's the worst ever only shows your confusion on the nature of facts vs. opinions. "He's literally the worst player that's ever played the position," is an opinion, and not one that makes especially much sense. You know who's worse? Most of the guys who threw less than 130 throws and probably a bunch of those who threw 130 or more but were in better situations or had more experience or had better luck in their extremely small sample of passes. Again, four of his INTs were good passes deflected by his receivers up in the air for gifts. Take out those 4 and his passer rating goes up a ton. I'd do that for every other QB, but the work involved would be great. But there can't be very many players in league history who had 1/3 of their INTs come as a result of receiver airmails to the defense. Peterman got very lucky. Worth noting, though, that Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw in his first season threw far more footballs than Peterman has in his career, and Terry managed a lower rating ... 30.4. Guys sometimes improve. Peterman might be one of those who does. Or not. But again, we'll have to wait and see. And that Gary Marangi was worse in his first 130. I'm sure I could find more. Not to say that Peterman's been good. Or anywhere near it. But the idea that you can prove him the worst of all times by a few stats is ridiculous. Again, if he were the worst of all time, he wouldn't still be in the league.

Yeah, it would probably explode. But that says more about fans than what it would actually mean. The people on boards like this are a bit nuts. It's why we're here doing this instead of something useful. And I include myself. But it doesn't mean much in practice, unless they were practicing something like avoiding INTs that day. In that case it would mean something. Otherwise, though, it doesn't mean much for Garoppolo and it wouldn't mean much for Allen. Not that I'm very confident in Allen. He's got an awful lot to prove. But the proof - good or bad - starts in the games.

"Worst" is an opinion, not a fact. In Peyton Manning's first four games (146 throws) he threw 11 INTs and 3 TDs. That's right in the same neighborhood. And in that fourth game he threw 2 INTs before the first TD. When he actually hit Nate's level of 130 passes he may well have been at 2 TDs and 10 INTs, an even lower TD:INT ratio. And as has been pointed out many times, of those INTs by Nate, four were good passes deflected up in the air by Bills receivers and air-mailed to defenders. I don't know if or how many of Peyton's early INTs were also caused by his receivers. But it's no fact that he's the worst in his first 130. That's an opinion. If it really were as simple as worst ever, he wouldn't still be in the league. I think it's fair to say that Peyton proved himself a better QB than Peterman ever will. But in early days, sometimes things get distorted. Peterman's story isn't over yet. It might be soon, but not yet. Too early to call. And in Barkley's first year he was also pretty awful, and lucky enough to only be called on to throw one pass his second year. Barkley's certainly shown a ton more than Nate has. Part of that is he's had more opportunity and he improved with time. Peterman may be starting an office job in the next six months. But ... maybe not. We'll have to wait and see. Yup.

Good for him. Nice play. I'm rooting for him.

Yeah, they looked really good. Mind you, having Luck on the sidelines probably made them look better. But I'm not worried about the defense much at all. They were already very good last year, and I think they're going to be even better with Oliver and with an extra year in the system for so many. The offense? Yeah, I'm perspiring a bit there. Points are a huge concern. But unlike yards, defensive points allowed doesn't even come close to isolating the defense. It's a stat that is hugely affected by field position. It's probably somewhere on the order of 30% offense and STs and 70% defense. Yeah, it's a concern, but it's more of a team concern than one that isolates the defense. Yards on the other hand is about 99% defense.

Again, did he turn down a 30 million a year contract? Outrageous!! Or did he turn down a 30 million a year extension? Because that could make complete sense. A $30 mill a year extension might easily turn out to be $17 - $25 mill per year over the period he will be signed for. That's a huge difference, and I don't think anyone out there has reported the specifics yet.

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.