Thurman#1

They have 6 games against the Bills, Fins and Jets. Of course their schedule looks easy.

Going defense at least once in the first three picks wouldn't be "Bills-like." And what does "Bills-like" mean anyway? So far, this FO has made more good moves than mistakes. No way to know what it would be without knowing who the players are, but picking the best available player would make a ton of sense in the long term, which is how we should all be thinking. I would love picking up extra picks, but my guess is that they pick at #9.

Problem is it's hard to tell who are the serious leaders, the guys who love the game and are smart on the field until you either actually coach them or get a pipeline to coaches at their school. So at the Senior Bowl we see a number of those guys, and it's obvious who they are, to us and to McBeane, and that's why they seem to go with those guys. As for us fans, it's really hard to tell because that's the image they're all trying to convey right now. Remember Dareus telling our coaches that if we didn't draft him he'd come in here and beat our butts again and again. Sounded great, but it's just what he'd been coached to say. It wasn't especially who he was. Some guys are really widely acclaimed as leaders and guys who love the game, and those guys even the fans know. For most, we don't know yet and what we do know later is about half P.R. I'm expecting Senior Bowl guys again. Other than that I'm hoping their pipeline to the colleges works. So far, it seems to be really good, from their draft results.

If you are going to use Transplants' system, how close does a throw have to get to be accurate? A WR's window would be different for different guys on different routes and yadda yadda yadda. But you'd have to start with an NFL-average WR armspan. The combine shows that NFL WRs tend to fall between 70 and 80 inches, though last year the 5'8" and change Braxton Berrios came in at 68.25. Jaleel Scott was 81.25. A few TEs were also over 80. But on average that puts it at about 75 inches, which is 6 feet, 3 inches. If you dive forward you probably stretch that forward by a couple of feet forward and if you jam on the brakes and throw yourself back you probably stretch it backwards by a couple of feet. So by Transplant's measure, hitting a window that's somewhere in the neighborhood of ten feet wide makes you "accurate." Drew Brees is somewhere cracking up with disbelieving laughter.

See? This guy is never going to get this. He doesn't understand that we're all interested in what people mean when they use it in discussions of football. What normal humans mean. What Terry Bradshaw means when he says it. There is an immensely tiny subset of pedantic people who worry about the difference. But nobody else cares. This guy and one or two more like him will go on and on boringly about this. Nobody much will care. I'm finished. Why bother.

Cross-reference what? The definition of accuracy? What? And as for your "nope," about Tyrod, um, yep. Who was it again, who went on (and on and on and on and on and on, relentlessly, unstoppably and just about never-endingly, at least till the trade) about how Tyrod was accurate and was going to be a franchise guy? Used the word "near-elite," if I remember correctly? Oh, yeah .... that was you. You did a million research projects on Tyrod too, and somehow they all came out with highly positive perceptions.

Cracks me up. This guy just don't get it. You have to go to a sit called "mathisfun.com" to find his evidence. And in the evidence he himself provides, it's talking about "how close a value is to a given value." A "value". Hmm. That's a number, isn't it? Does he get it? Nah, nor will he ever. In football there are no values and no real way to measure one. And yeah, most of us haven't worked in a field where understanding how physicists or math geeks use these words ... and therefore we understand that outside of those very cloistered little science journals and lab experiments they aren't used that way. Oxford has this as the definition of accuracy, "the quality or state of being correct or precise." And then it has a definition - labelled "technical" in green - that talks about what these bores keep talking about. You look for synonyms for accuracy and every single dictionary or thesaurus I checked (though in fairness I stopped at seven) had precision as a synonym.

Yes, in a physics lab there are differences. Frankly, nobody here except maybe you gives much of a ***** how people talk in a physics lab. Look it up in any dictionary or thesaurus. They're synonyms. One is often used in the definition of the other. The way it's used in football, it's the same thing.

Yeah, the Pats brought in Moss. He was so devalued by then they got him for a 4th rounder and three years totalling $27 mill. Belichick got Moss at an absolutely perfect time, when he had had two poor years with the Raiders and looked as if playing well was a bit too much effort for him to put in. And when his market value was low. Moss started to revolt that third year when he thought they wouldn't re-sign him and was traded early in the season. IMO the situations are quite different with the guys people want us to get.

No reason to think that McD did anything different here. The Bills got rid of their young vets because they either wouldn't get with the program (Dareus) or because of the double-headed monster of a desperate need for draft capital to trade up for Allen and a horrible cap situation (pretty much everyone except Dareus). You're right that Belichick doesn't have the problem of players not respecting him. But neither does McDermott. Belichick absolutely does have Dareus-type problems with guys who can't live with his system. And in that case the Pats do to the guy what McDermott did, they get rid of him one way or another. Look at Malcolm Butler. Cassius Marsh and no fun. Adalius Thomas. Reggie Wayne. It goes on. And as for your second post here, when you talk about building on what you have ... sure, there are times that reloads are the best course. But when you inherit a team which has peaked at mediocrity, is in horrible cap shape and does not have a franchise QB ... that would not be one of those times. That's the type of situation that calls for a rebuild.

Nah. People won't care. If there's one thing we know about American fans it's that they're only secondarily interested in pro leagues that are not at the highest level.

We can agree that he has the same problem but worse? Great. I'm glad too. As for the discussion over there, I've seen it before and it's beside the point. Accuracy and precision are listed as synonyms very often. There's a slight difference in physics labs. As for the real world, though, they're much the same thing. Bottom line is this. Those people who make an equivalence between completion percentage and accuracy are wrong. That is a false equivalence. As is "balls that can be caught" and accuracy. A ball thrown well behind a guy who manages to jack on the brakes and dive backwards and make the catch is a "ball that can be caught," proved by the fact that it is caught. But the idea that it's accurate is completely laughable. They are not the same thing and not even particularly close. Accuracy can't be counted. It's nebulous, in football. You counted "catchable," which itself is reasonably often debatable, but far more countable and quantifiable than accuracy. More countable, less useful, as most QBs, including the not very good ones, can throw a very high percentage of catchable balls while still not being good enough for NFL starters. Tyrod threw a lot of catchable balls.

Yes, correct, he has an accuracy problem in the same manner as all the other rookies do. But worse, as pointed out in this article and plenty of others. He could improve if his mechanics can be improved. I'm hopeful, myself. And you keep conflating accuracy as "balls that can be caught," which is just as false a comparison as saying it's equal to completion percentage. It's equal to neither.

Saying Rosen is a failed experiment is like saying the bread has failed because it hasn't risen ... before you put it in the oven. Way way way way too early. With maybe two or three more way's.

I think that's overstating it. He's not looking further down the road completely. He's hoping things come together this year. And they could. The way I'd put it is that they're expecting success in 2020 and expecting improvement in 2019 with some degree of hope that there's enough to make a real run. But yeah, his primary goal is continuous long-term success, and he values that over immediate success. And you're obviously correct that a lot of fans here and generally focus on the next year rather than the long term.

Yes, worst to first. Every year? Not hardly. But yeah, it's not wildly unusual. But that's a completely different thing from how long a rebuild takes. John's response was "It does when you are completely rebuilding it." You completely ignored that and talked not about rebuilding but about teams suddenly getting better. But again, John referred to rebuilding it. Of your two examples here, the Bears and the Fins, neither was a rebuild. Last year was Pace's fourth as GM. He had been working on putting together a good roster for a long time. You can act like the turnaround was all the result of what happened early last year, but it wasn't. It was a roster that had been improving for years, and a GM who decided to reload with a different coach. In your other example, 2007 was the third year, not the first, for Dolphin GM Randy Mueller. Yeah, they fired Saban but they weren't rebuilding. Bringing in your new starting QB in a trade (Pennington) is the textbook definition for reloading, in fact. For another example, the Walsh 49ers I referred to above went from six wins to a Lombardi in one year. But that year was the third year of a rebuild. In fact, that's how rebuilds work most of the time. There's two, three or even four years of team-building and then at some point the successful rebuilds hit a tipping point. Hitting a tipping point in one year doesn't mean all the improvement is only the result of one year's work. In fact, that's not the way it works, but most particularly so in rebuilds.

Sure it matters. Small good moves are what good teams are built through. And two good years of McDermott and 1.5 of Beane are not long enough to judge a rebuild by. Same deal as with one move, but more so. It's true that they're not there yet. But rebuilds take more than two years, that's just the deal. The best rebuild I know of is the Walsh rebuild of the 49ers, a Super Bowl victory in three years. But in his second year, they had 6 wins. Witchery is way overstating it, IMO, but it was a good deal for us, a very good deal. You're right, BillsVet, that they have a lot more to prove. But surely we can still talk about individual moves. What else would we talk about this early in the process?

That's sexist. Kegels are for gentlemen as well.

No, he was not comparing them. He said nothing about Flacco in that post.

Yeah, nobody good will sign here. Unless we like offer 'em money. I hate that.

Would Incognito - Martin count? Did anyone else get angry at the same time Barry Sanders retired? Or Megatron? I can't remember it. Did anyone leave the Steelers when Kevin Greene or Joey Porter got out? I don't remember it? Probably not many simply because the teams hold the whip hand, not the players. Leaving is a long, tough struggle, except if you retire, especially back before free agency, but even now unless your contract is up, and even then there are the tags. And honestly, I'm not convinced there's a ton of dysfunction there at Three Rivers. The Bell thing is mostly about money. That's not dysfunction. And I'm not clear what Brown's problem is but I think it's quite possible it's a problem with Brown himself. Is that dysfunction? Honestly, I don't know. Two very serious problems at the same time, that's for sure, but is it team dysfunction?

This has got nothing to do with rebuilding. Rebuilding isn't a tactic for every year. It's for when you absolutely suck or for when you've been mediocre for a long time. Of course they haven't rebuilt. But the Seattle renaissance absolutely started with a rebuild.

Well, if you're saying that "paying 'this' guy that much is a bad idea," then the fact that he's the 7th or 8th highest paid guy on the Bills has absolutely zero relevance to your argument. I'm "making that rookie ***** up," right? Yeah, I'm sure there must be someone out there who knows what the ***** you are talking about. Not me, though. Everything I said about rookie contracts is true. I may not have expressed it well ... I was editing it as you answered, but it's true. We're a young team and a lot of our better players are on rookie contracts and thus cheap. "Pay up for true difference makers," you say? Please. You don't get "true difference makers" for $4.3 to $5 mill after the rookie contract is over. And more, you're acting as if you know how this guy, Long, will do. And you don't. Your opinion is that he's a low demand castoff but actually he got a much higher 2nd contract ($9 mill a year if I remember correctly) till he was thrown out due to a regime change in NY. There might have been plenty of demand for him. We don't really know. What we can be sure of is that Beane valued him in this system as worth what they paid ... which is a sort of high-paid journeyman rate. We'll see if he's worth that. My guess is he will be, but we'll have to wait to see. And this really is the eternal cycle ... 1) Bellyache for two years at the pain of the rebuild and cap clearing. 2) Then get excited about all the cap space. 3) Then expect that the cap space will all be spent, and that lots of top FAs will be brought in ... despite the GM telling us he's going to be judicious about spending. 4) Then when the GM does in fact do his best to be judicious and the guys brought in aren't the top two or three guys in FA, we moan and whimper in two ways ... If the contracts are low, complain they're dumpster-diving cheapskates If the contracts are medium, complain that they spent too much without getting one of the top few FAs at his position. ... and on and on and on.

So, you're spinning this so that the many young guys on rookie contracts and therefore cheap, like Josh Allen, Tre White, Edmunds, Milano, etc ... that's somehow bad. Because that's all it means that Long is the 7th or 8th highest paid Bill ... that we don't have a lot of high-paid guys right now. A lot of rookie contracts. That's not a bad thing, just the opposite, really. Most teams are a bit older so a guy paid this much would be more like 9th to 11th. On the Rams it'd be the 13th highest. It cracks me up. People get all excited about having FA money to spend, they go on and on about how we need to get better at OL, and then when we start ... cue the moans and screams about how we're spending too much.

This is what it seems like to me. And it's precisely what Beane said would be their approach to free agency ... bring in guys to fill all the holes, so they don't have to draft from need. And yet spend judiciously. That's what we've got here. He looks like a guy who if they can't bring in a Paradis or draft a Bradbury or someone like him, that this guy would be a guy you wouldn't mind as a starter, at guard or center. An upgrade on what we have. But if we do bring in some of those other guys Long would be a backup far better than what we have now. People want Beane to go nuts and bring in tons of expensive FAs. That's not judicious. We'll be seeing a bunch of guys of Long's level brought in, IMO.