Thurman#1

Didn't want him as our starting QB, but he was always a good guy. I root for him.

He doesn't? Not even near it? Yeah, he does. And while Belichick does a hell of a job scheming for other QBs, the way he beats them ultimately is that his Brady-powered offense outscores them. We saw for five years in Cleveland what Belichick looked like without Brady. And yeah, there certainly was more to it than that, but the major problem he had there was a lack of a franchise QB. Each would have been worse without the other. Brady was more of the reason they won SBs. If Belichick sticks around after Tommy Boy retires, I think you see a team that is almost always well above average but that the dynasty is over.

This seems like a very reasonable guess. Makes sense.

Doesn't meet the standards for being factual. I think he's correct, personally, but there's no objective proof, and there was no legal finding. Pretty funny, but he had to know he was likely to get fired. And Deadspin or whatever the name of that video company that put this up invited him to come on and talk about how his bosses are weenies. He should do that if he never wants to get another job outside maybe the salad bar at Wendy's.

"He's never going to be a big stat-guy, but a $10M cap charge for a guy who can stuff the run seems...OK." Comments are about Dareus, but make equal sense about Star.

As the Rams have pointed out, just before that the refs didn't call the roughing passer hit to the head that the Saints clearly committed against Goff that would have turned the game the other way. It's not like the Saints are the only team that's ever had the refs not call a penalty. Quit whining, Saints fans. This. Love the Saints, except for Payton. Good fans too. But they've been acting like martyrs over this. Get over it.

Wow!!

Sure, Belichick can coach as long as he wants. And he'll do really well. But without Brady they wouldn't be close to the juggernaut they've been. Belichick without Brady will produce a fine team. Not a dynasty. And while Brady has lost a little something from his arm strength, saying that he "can no longer throw the ball in the air over 20 yards with any real chance of success," goes beyond serious exaggeration into being just wrong. You do know he had a 28 yard TD throw last week, right, a catch that was caught six yards deep so it actually went 34 air yards beyond the LOS? You know that right, and that it was a pinpoint pass, right? And that that beautiful back shoulder ball to Gronk at the 9 with a minute left in the game was a 20 yard pass? You say Brady is one of the most physically limited players in the NFL? Yeah, maybe. But it's been true his whole career and he's probably the GOAT despite that. It's both Brady and Belichick but if you had to pick one, it's more Brady.

No.

Yeah, not this early anyway. Mocks are liked mostly by how well a given team's fans feel that team fills - in that mock - its biggest needs. This mock does indeed very thoroughly fill Bills fans biggest desires in terms of position. But Beane has said he won't act from need.

No. Just the opposite, in fact. Think about it. McCoy fumbles and the opponent recovers on the Bills 10. The chances of having points scored just soared. There's a tremendous chance of them getting three points and a very good chance of them getting seven points. But not when you're talking yards. With a total defensive failure, the most the defense could give up here is 10 yards, which is actually a very good result for one drive. Other teams getting the ball in consistently good field position doesn't help increase yardage totals one bit. It may even - very slightly - decrease yardage totals. If opponent offenses get the ball closer to their end zone, their potential yardage is slightly lowered. If they get the ball on their own one and the defense doesn't stop them they can make 99 yards. If they get the ball on the Bills 1 yard line and the defense fails, they only get one yard with the TD. Good field position for the offense raises the possibility of points and lowers the potential yards available. For the D it's the same. When opponent offenses get good field position the D has a higher chance of allowing points and fewer possible yards to allow. But in terms of yards, one drive's no different from another in terms of impact on the final total. The key figures here are two ... number of drives faced and average field position at drive start. Chicago's defense faced the most defensive drives this season, 183. Buffalo was 2nd, facing 182 drives. This is terrible news for the defensive yardage stats. Buffalo faced the worst field position of any defense, with opponents starting on the average of the 31.36 yard line. But the team that had the best situation had an average of the 25.57. The difference is miniscule, especially when a very large majority of drives don't get near the end zone. So again, yardage totals do a terrific job of isolating the units. Points don't. And average drive starts are so close together as to give almost no advantage or disadvantage in terms of possible yardage available. And yeah, yeah, the Bills D wasn't good in red zone defense. But they were very good at keeping teams out of the red zone, thus limiting the damage of their bad red zone D. Despite facing more drives than any other team than Chicago and the worst average defensive drive start, despite having a poor offense that gave away a ton of turnovers, meaning more drives starting closer to the red zone, the Bills tied for 11th fewest drives that reached the red zone. 1. Chicago 2.5 per game 2. Baltimore 2.6 3. Houston 2.6 4. Denver 2.7 5. Indy 2.7 6. New England 2.9 7. Carolina 2.9 8. Detroit 2.9 9. Tennessee 2.9 10. New Orleans 11. Buffalo 3.0 Again, they did a really good job of keeping teams out of the red zone. Not that they shouldn't work on their red zone defense. They should. But overall, the defense was really really good. And again, I'm with you in hoping we get a good pass rusher. It's a major need.

Yeah, this. It's the deeper question. Fans assume everyone wants to coach in the NFL. Palmer is on record as saying he loves to work with young guys. No way to know what he would want to do, assuming the Bills are interested.

Mahomes had the huge advantage of having a year on the bench to absolutely imprint his mechanics to deep muscle memory. Allen's being needed to play meant that his mechanics were essentially forgotten while he worked on the much more necessary in the moment needs to work on understanding and memorizing game plans and how to understand and work on countering defenses. With more time in the offseason, hopefully Allen can get those mechanics more deeply downloaded. It's great he's already working on it.

No, Fins, don't do it!!! Don't rebuild!!! Reload again and again. One year of easy wins isn't enough. Reload and give us five more years of fairly easy wins instead of one year of extrmely easy wins.

But most are in the right neighborhood. That didn't look bad for so very early.

Oh, that's a shame. He'd have been a good pickup. Disagree. Plenty stay as good and a reasonable amount get better. Incognito. Hutchinson's the classic example. Zimmerman was a historically great pickup for the Warner-era Rams. Andruzzi was successful with the Pats. They're around. And you don't need a guard to change a team. You need him to successfully fill a hole and to play well. Those guys are out there. Very few players at any position change a team but you don't stay away from FA because of that.

Hunh? Our D's yardage totals were terrific. 2nd in the league in total yards allowed. 2nd in the league in total yards allowed per drive. 2nd in the league in defensive DVOA. And no, the offense and STs weaknesses have far less impact on yardage than they do on points. Yardage does a much much better job at isolating the defense from the other units than points does. For example, if Allen throws a pick six, in yards the D's stats are unchanged, but points allowed makes it seem as if the D allowed seven points. Or if the offense fumbles and the opponents get it on the Bills 7 yard line and the Bills rack up three sacks in a row, yardage correctly shows a terrific result to the drive while points allowed shows the defense looking bad by allowing three points on the 48 yard field goal. Yards are much better at separating the units. Yeah, I'd love to add to their pass rush but they had a really really good year. Probably somewhere around 4th to 7th best.

Interesting that he was getting open more than you would think from the targets. May well just have been that Allen and he weren't clicking but it could happen next year. The blocking breakdowns were a bit disappointing. Overall I'd thought it was a near sure thing that he'd be going. I'm less convinced now. $4.5 mill would be nice to save but he's still doing a decent job. Not a $9 mill job, the Whaley contract was ridiculous. But maybe worth the $4.5 mill. I could see it go either way. Thanks for posting, Yolo.

Yeah, they could have given us a game. In the sense that they could have used the same field at the same time and put eleven men on it. We'd have destroyed them utterly. There were no pros on those two teams, unless you want to count a few likely under-the-table payments from boosters to twenty-one year olds and younger. Some future pros. But no pros. He wrote it because some people are interested. You're not? Hey, fair enough, very reasonable indeed. But the interest is here, in this thread and in the countless stories referencing it if you search for it. It's not like there are only a few oddballs out there with an interest in gambling lines.

I think you're still missing it. His words were, "Not comparing talent, only weight". And you immediately started talking about Donald's talent and production. And have continued to do so ever since, when he clearly was only trying to say that being effective at DT at 280 is very much possible. Kyle Williams played very well at 303 and these days Oliver is listed at 295. Jay Ratliff was a four-time Pro Bowler and one-time All-Pro DT who played very well at many weights from 287 - 303 and just retired after the 2015 season.

He's not relying on his opinon of the team at all for those numbers, not one bit, in either article. In the original article he's relying on his opinions of Vegas and how they predict bettors will act. In my article he goes through a bunch of statistical measures from last 2017 to predict 2018 outcomes, a method which he says has worked well for him in past years to predict the next year's results, and he was almost exactly on target, predicting 6.4 wins when actual results were 6. And I don't blame him for being negative about last year's Bills. We weren't good. He says good things about the defense, very reasonably and expresses doubt about whether we'll be able to help Allen enough on offense in a year in which both draft and FA are a bit weak on the offensive side. Reasonable, especially when it's trying to figure how bettors and Vegas will see things well before the season. Bet what you want, but don't act as if your guess about his future work is something you can reasonably comment on as far as it having anything to do with him. He might guess close to six nearer the season. But he might not.

Cody Ford in the 2nd? Jeez, I really doubt he falls out of the 1st. I hear you. But IMHO you're arguing for what you want rather than what is likely. And yeah, Cleveland was going to try to get Kizer or someone, but when you pick a QB in the 2nd you don't want to start him early. Your need for a decent FA starter to make your new GM look good is increased not decreased. Not to mention that Cleveland last year had three 1sts, a 2nd, two 3rds, a 4th, a 5th, a 6th and two 7ths. They were swimming in picks and had an extra first and an extra 2nd in the next year as well. Washington hasn't got anywhere near the volume of picks that Cleveland did when they made that trade. They've got four comp picks, a 3rd, a 5th, and two 6ths. That's not nothing but not nearly the bounty that Cleveland ended up with. Also you keep saying we moved up five spots last year, but it was a higher, more valuable five spots. We jumped up 300 points while they would only have to go 250. And as AlbanyN.Y. pointed out above, we didn't have an Alex Smith last year. Washington does have one coming back probably in 2020. We were rebuilding and looking long-term in a QB-rich year. They are not rebuilding, they're looking short-term in a year that's not great for QBs. Hey, I hope you're right. But I wouldn't bet $10 on it, much less the rent.

No, it's just the result of a mathematical process rather than one based on feelings and pure guesswork.

Nah, the game is designed for points to be scored ... or not. Either way, there's a winner. Plenty of drives end with no points. You want to maximize that number. Neither the D nor the O is fighting the rules. Both are playing within the rules. It's just a matter of how well they do that. This year, the offense has gained the advantage. But it's a cyclical game and the D will analyze and adapt and catch up. That's how it works. Overall the formula that's had most success is this ... get a good defense and a top ten QB. That'll put you in contention consistently. EDIT: I see, the video explains the meaning of the thread. And it does indeed make more sense as a mildly sarcastic comment than as yet another examination of the question.

Tied for 8th in takeaways? That's doing it pretty well.