Thurman#1

Yeah, this. Knowing what we know, and with the bonds fans have built for White and Allen in particular but with Zay as well ... yeah, I think you would take that in retrospect. Of course, part of the development of Mahomes is due to being with Reid in that situation. But if you could trade Mahomes as he is now for our three as they are now, you'd probably do it. I don't know if I'd say it's obvious. You'd think about it first, but at least for me, I'd do it. The guy who was in charge was McDermott. The guy who actually puts the board together does it the way the guy in charge wants. It was McDermott's draft. Whaley doubtless had a lot of input, though, if that's what you're trying to say.

How well did he do in his first NFL game again? A game which came after months of training camp? Zero catches for zero yards, wasn't it? As a matter of fact, in Foster's first six NFL games he had two catches for 30 yards. On 9 targets. And after that, he was waived. And yet by the end of a full season of immersion into the NFL culture he begins to get it. He has vastly improved. Your evidence if anything supports the opposing argument. It points out that after a long time in NFL camps and on NFL rosters, and in Foster's case actually being waived, some guys can learn and improve enough so that they can begin to make a difference in the NFL. Some. So yes, even Foster, an NFL newbie, is a seasoned NFL pro compared to the Alabama guys. Minus 64? Yeah, this sort of thing would be required before Alabama would start to look like a good bet.

Wouldn't be very surprised to see him as a coordinator at some point. HC is probably a stretch. He might need to put in some time in coach rehab, at a college somewhere or something.

Here's the final sentence on Manish's story: "Time will reveal whether they were right this time, but it sure looks and feels like they nailed it with Gase. " Gase and McCarthy both looked like they would at least maximize Darnold. I'd have picked McCarthy if I were the GM. Manish's comment was pretty reasonable, IMHO. I think Gase's got a decent chance. It always seemed to me that it was Miami and Tannehill holding Gase back rather than the reverse. Time will tell. Hope I'm wrong, as a Jets team mired in failure is always an entertaining spectacle.

I think he's got another year or two left, but can't see it being the Bills who bring him in. More likely a team that feels they're in their SB window right now.

It's pretty clear they have 2 - 3 years short of some kind of complete collapse. If I had to bet, I'd bet positively on both. Far more smart moves than dumb ones from both of them. But since I don't have to do anything, I'm still stuck at my default for guys who haven't proved it yet ... they've got a lot to prove. Just kidding yourself, Scott, if you think you know much more than the fact that the Pegulas have a great deal of confidence in these two guys and have shown plenty of patience at times in their handling of Sabres and Bills FO personnel. If they show no signs of improvement whatever next year even with all the FA money available, they might be in trouble. But as long as there's progress, they'll likely get those two or three years.

Me, I predict that after digging under the surface of the moon, they will indeed find green cheese. I mean, your prediction could come true, but there's no particular reason to think it will. So far at least they appear to be completely different types. One from a huge program, one from a tiny one. And Lawrence has already had more success passing than Josh ever had in college or the NFL yet, for that matter. No apparent similarities.

Yup, this is a good point too. A year or two from today, the trend could easily switch back to DCs being the flavor of the week.

Same can happen with an offensive head coach. Your OC will tend to be given less credit than you, so will be less likely to be chosen as a potential head coach candidate. But at the same time, your OC will be looking to move on to a different OC job where he can be given more of the credit for offensive success. Either way, teams with very successful offenses are more likely to lose their OCs and teams with very successful defenses are more likely to lose their DCs. Nah. Head coaches who aren't experts in taking advantage of offensive rule changes can hire OCs who are. More, head coaches from defensive backgrounds are also experts on how teams take advantage of various defensive moves. You can learn a ton about offenses by being a good DC, and a ton about defenses from being a good OC. And yeah, Brees likes Payton and wouldn't want to see him go. But if he went, I doubt Brees'd want an offensive HC more than a defensive guy willing to hire an excellent OC and seriously consider Brees' advice on doing so.

I can definitely believe there are some GMs who feel that way and make decisions based on it. I seriously doubt it's most. A more competent guy can indeed challenge authority. He's also more likely to win more games and thus extend the GM's success and length of tenure. Besides, the most obviously competent guy in each cycle generally gets hired by somebody even if it's not the first team. I'm willing to believe the process is flawed, but I'm not sure what better way there would be. It's always tough predicting how a guy will do a level up. It might be a case of the Peter Principle, or he might be the right guy. It's really hard to tell, IMHO.

Promo, you say that the Bills were "the team that took a chance on him." No. Several teams were interested. The Bills offered a bit of extra money and won the bidding war, but it they hadn't signed him he would have been somewhere else. And it's nonsense that he quit on the team. He held out. Those two are not the same thing. And your point about Wood doesn't hold either. Do people still call Wood injury-prone? Nope. But Peters has been more consistently reliable over a much longer career. Ten years just in Philly.

"Anybody but Whaley right." Nope. Not anybody. Just McDermott. Two weeks into McDermott's term here the Pegulas had already switched control from Whaley to McDermott. What defence was McDermott coordinating after he was hired by the Bills? He wasn't. On your point about coordinated effort ... fair enough. I totally agree Whaley was here for a reason and had input. But it was extremely clear who pulled the trigger and ran the process, and it was not Whaley. That was McDermott's draft.

Not just win. Destroy. There was an earlier thread on that topic and several times it was absolutely assumed on that thread that Alabama would be the champion. I compared this year's Alabama team to one of their championship teams a few years ago and people were aghast that I would dare compare any Alabama team to this year's model.

He does indeed. But like Josh, he has a lot of time to do all that work. He and Josh are both young.

Got my Masters at UMASS. Now you've got me interested. Go Minutemen.

It's very true that we shouldn't give credit to Beane for McDermott's draft of 2017.

Exactly. Walker and Bell were awful at LT, though Walker had been pretty good at RT. This was another of the myths floating around, that he didn't want to be here. Which was nothing but sour grapes. He wanted his $10 mill a year, is what he wanted. He actually made it quite clear in his arrival speech in Philly that he had expected to spend his career in Buffalo and that he was totally shocked to be traded. "It blew my mind" was one of the things he said.

To correctly rehash all of this, the Bills paid him UDFA money and then put him at RT where he immediately was one of the two or three best in the league. They then gave him a contract based on RT salaries and literally a few games later they switched him to LT, a much higher-paid position, and expected him to be happy with his contract which was drastically underpaying him. He didn't say anything for a year and a half but at that point he began to complain, and it was very very reasonable that he did so. He was one of the two or three best LTs in the league instantly and was the lowest-paid LT on a non-rookie contract in the league. Of course he felt drastically underpaid. And no, he wasn't out of shape. Even Jauron, the coach at the time, admitted he'd been working out hard. What was true was that he wasn't in game shape. And there's no way to get in game shape when you hold out. You have to play football to get in football shape. This is another thing which has been said by nobody at the Bills. In fact, they said the opposite, that he'd worked out a ton and was in great shape, but not in football shape. But you still hear people saying what you said, that he'd been in bad shape. More, the fact that he was in good shape - but not good football shape - showed. The first four or five weeks he wasn't playing all that well, but after that he was once again absolutely dominating opponents. People forget that he was chosen for the Pro Bowl that year, and for good reason.

Russ was the guy who handled that negotiation. I never minded Russ much when he wasn't making personnel decisions, but he botched it. He released some statements to try to pressure Peters and it didn't work a bit. It only angered Peters and his management. Peters was worth every penny Philly paid. We should have paid him what they did. Bills fans after those public statements simply never liked Peters again. To the point that for months after he left people would tell you that Peters had said publicly that he took plays off. He simply hadn't said that, and no matter how many times people asked for a link and never got one most of the boards hated him so much they were unwilling to face the facts about what he'd actually said being very different from what had been perceived. Haven't seen the game yet, but Peters should have been a lifelong Bill. Particularly as they had a terrible time replacing him, with Bell, and a number of other poor attempts for three or four years of QBs taking far too many unexpected hits.

I would disagree. They're the Chicken Littles. It's who they are. It's what they do. We understand it. But we also understand that it doesn't make sense. Rebuilds are painful, especially so when at the same time you're rebuilding you're also dealing with a horrible salary cap situation. Pain and losses were to be expected this year. A lot of people didn't get that, but it was still true. Guess what the over-under was before the season. Six wins. https://www.oddsshark.com/nfl/nfl-over-under-win-totals This was always going to be a bad year. Now they've got a healthy cap situation and are going into Beane's second draft and McDermott's third season. The roster is starting to be mostly their own players and we're starting to see guys get comfortable in the system. Next year we should see some real improvement.

I don't vote in these things. He still has a lot to prove, but so far he looks better than anybody has since well before the drought.

Not much. He's a better runner than I thought. But I thought he was a guy who had a chance to be really good but that he would need a ton of development to get there and wasn't a sure thing. That's still what it looks like to me.

Yup. Good stuff. Talking about Malzahn dismissing him from the team at Auburn, Williams said, "He gave me chances to grow. And I made that mistake, so it's not his fault. It's my fault ... Coach Malzahn's one of the best coaches too. Only wanted the best for you. To become a man. And, and I wasn't a man ... I held back tears till I left. And all I did was shake his hand. I said "I wanna thank you for everything." Gotta like that. Impressive.

QB play in the passing game. It's something that happens in rebuilds, a lack of talent, often in several areas. Not everything is somebody's fault.

Yup. Even that year people not caught up in the saga with personal feelings voted him to the Pro Bowl. He played well here, including that year. I've always thought that the new administration would have loved having him but couldn't afford keeping him with the salary cap disaster Whaley left them with. If he'd really been that bad, Gilmore wouldn't have gotten the money he got, and especially from one of the most notorious cheapskates in the league. Bills fans always tend to have a sour grapes attitude towards guys who leave or who they think might leave.