Thurman#1

Easy to say that when you're not the guy managing that talent. McDermott is. That explains why Dareus is gone. The guy couldn't even be on time for buses, much less meetings. And cutting Dareus meant spending more this year and less after ... just in line with their goals, having promised the owner that they would clear up the cap situation by the end of this season.

Plenty of good coaches only pick players who fit their scheme. Belichick, for instance. And it's probably not a mistake that the team that picked up Darby fit him into a zone scheme. I certainly did see them ... try ... to refute everything. But let's face it, they're agreeing with you, and while ScottLaw and NoSaints are both good posters, the fact that they're agreeing with a prize troll on this issue means they're likely on the wrong side in this case.

Good post.

And when I want to hear nonsense, I'll seek out your posts, they're an endless source. Your last paragraph is logically the same as saying "I'll point out that oranges are fruit, yet trains are not." Both true, but having absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Maturity and readiness are two very different things. I don't have the slightest concern about Allen's maturity. I question his readiness.

Flaming out happens for lots of reasons and one of them is that the guy was ruined. See Joey Harrington and David Carr for two of many. That doesn't come even close to following logically. If anyone had said, "Absolutely every QB needs a year or two on the bench," it would be an excellent piece of evidence in attacking that argument. But that's not what people are saying. They're saying some guys need development time. And pretty much everyone says that. Including McDermott and Josh Allen himself. Yeah, some guys have tough first years and do fine. Aikman and Manning were widely considered to be NFL-ready. So, yeah, some guys, especially the ones who are NFL-ready, can have tough first years and develop. Others can't, especially the ones who are widely considered to need development time. And our guy was widely considered to need a lot of development time. I'm hoping he succeeds anyway, of course. But I fear they could have handled this a lot better and that they may be at least setting him back.

Maybe you should. They appear to have fixed ILB, CB, S, a decent DL and maybe even QB. Not that they're perfect but they've been pretty decent with obvious salary cap impediments. Too early to say we shouldn't trust them. Yikes.

It really is sad. And I'm sorry to hear about your brother. And as I look back at this thread, I'm pretty convinced Sky Diver is trolling. Which is outright sad and rude, based on what the issue is.

Frankly, you're right. I shouldn't compare Richie and Forte because Forte played much longer for the Bears and didn't show signs of mental illness at the end of his term there. The Bears had far more of a reason to be faithful to Forte than the Bills had to be faithful to Richie. And if you seriously think he would still be on this team if we'd paid him, than there is seriously something wrong with your thought process. He threatened people with gun violence and told the cops he was working for the government and yet also being surveilled and persecuted by the government. Seriously you are absolutely wrong that he'd still be playing. Totally wrong. Serious, serious problems for Richie. I wish him the best in his recovery. But at this point it's clear you're either trolling here or just wacko on this issue, so if your next reply is as bizarre as this one, I'll consider my work here done.

I'm not sure about it either. That's why I said, "I hope he'll get things righted." As for his time in Carolina, it sure looked to me like they thought KB and Funchess were pretty much the same player and Benjamin missed a year to injuries and was injured again, though playing his last year there, so they decided to keep the younger healthy guy. Yup, he's going through a bad patch. Treadwell, Stills and Pryor have also never been this bad before. If he keeps playing this badly, it will be a huge problem. But so far in his career, this is by far his worst stretch. Might just be a bad few games or a bit of a slump. Might not be that. But it might and his history says that's probably what it is.

When playing well, he's on the bubble of being a #1. He's not playing well right now. Hopefully he'll get things righted. Clay. McCoy. But right now he's not seeing all the field. Nobody's playing well on that side of the ball.

Joe isn't the only one who thinks so. https://billswire.usatoday.com/2018/08/19/harrison-phillips-kyle-williams-buffalo-bills/

Yup, this is what I get from it too. He's not saying strategy isn't important, just that with a bunch of quitters, losers and character problem guys you can have a great strategy and it won't mean much.

Time and a draft or two, and a year or two of FAs and scheme consistency. I know nobody wants to hear this, but that's the nearest reasonable solution.

It isn't like they have guaranteed he'll be on the team for the next three years. He gets pretty much the veteran minimum and a shot to show he can display enough character. If he can't, they don't lose anything if they cut him.

Oh, yeah, the Bears are way way warm-blooded and gooey where personnel moves are concerned. They make loyalty their #1 concern. That's why they handled the Matt Forte situation the way they did. They honored a guy who was the face of the franchise, a guy who left his blood and guts on the field every week, a pillar of the Bears by deciding not to try to re-sign him. You could see their loyalty very very clearly from the statement when they announced they were not going to re-sign him they said, " "Matt is one of the all-time great Bears and did an excellent job for us on and off the field last season." That's loyalty. Just about makes me cry, that powerful commitment to doing right by Forte. Your argument isn't just not winnable, it's plain stupid. Sure, if the cost of loyalty is minimal, then yeah, teams will be loyal. They'll bring back a Thurman or a Freddie Jackson for a symbolic one-day contract. Or the Bears might do what they did in your link, pay Miller $458K when they have $10 mill in salary cap space and at the same time keep his rights in case he actually recovers. Sure, small gestures? Yeah, if it doesn't hurt the team. What they did was not unclassy. But it also wasn't a big enough gesture to affect the team much at all. Nonsense. $3.5 mill isn't chump change to this team. It's almost half of what we have left under the cap to sign injury replacements. Did the Bears sign Zach Miller for $3.5 mill? Or was it about a tenth of that, about a twentieth of their cap room? And Miller was hurt playing for the Bears whereas whatever issues Richie has, the Bills have no measurable responsibility for. If we paid $3.5 mill a year to do nothing to everybody who had been a cap bargain for us, we'd be a laughingstock. And continue our Whaley-led recent history of cap irresponsibility.

The comparison is based on the fact that loyalty should in no way be based on how well you play. It's based on how long you've been there and whether you gave everything you could and whether you yourself have been loyal. Are you loyal to your friends only if they've been successful in life? Were the Chargers loyal to Drew Brees when he was injured even though he's performed extremely well for them? Were the Skins loyal to Kirk Cousins when he wildly overperformed as a 4th rounder? How many thousand other examples could anyone with the slightest bit of interest find? Loyalty exists in pro football, but it's only expected within certain bounds. Teams aren't expected to be loyal to guys who - like Richie - can no longer produce. Were the Bills loyal to Peerless Price, who had produced extremely well for them? A history of production means squat. Teams trade productive players if they think they can do better, and they cut productive guys if they're going to be too expensive to keep. Loyalty in football is honored in the breach. It's a lovely idea. People go on about it. And between the players and coach within one season, it means something. But in terms of personnel decisions and salary negotiations and holding out and all the rest of it ... when it counts, in other words ... it means nothing. And everyone knows it.

A measured rebuild is what they did. If they'd done a total teardown they'd have dumped or traded Tyrod, Kyle Williams and Incognito. Probably Hughes too, as at 29 he was already starting to get old. They certainly wouldn't have carried the personnel to win nine games last year if it had been a total rebuild. And as I've pointed out before, there are three excellent reasons they let go plenty of guys who were at least useful. 1) Some didn't fit the new scheme. Darby is the best example. 2) They needed to assemble an awful lot of draft capital for the 2018 draft to be absolutely sure they could get one of the top three or four QBs in that draft. This was an absolute necessity. 3) And the one people again and again try to ignore is that Whaley left them in horrible cap shape and the Pegulas knew it and wanted it cleaned up, and the new guys have publicly said that they promised the cap situation would be completely cleaned up by the end of this year. This was a huge part in the utility of getting rid of guys like Watkins, Woods, Gilmore, etc. Keeping them would have been massively expensive. This is why we have historic levels of dead cap this year and aren't rolling it over. They're swallowing a bitter pill this year, courtesy of Whaley's horrible cap management.

Really. Wilson was a guy who was NFL-ready. Wilson's a terrific QB, still playing very well, in a far less talented lineup. Kaepernick simply isn't as good as Wilson, or close.

Sorry, man, it means exactly that. If Rodgers would have been good from day one ... wait for it ... he would have been good from day one. But he wasn't. He actually was disappointing for three long years. Beyond disappointing and into bad, actually. But they developed him, relentlessly. The HC set up a "Camp QB" and worked and worked his ass. They changed his mechanics and he sat and learned the playbook and how to read defenses. And that meant by the time he started getting a ton of playing time his mechanics had improved, and he understood what was going on around him. Yeah, he had Favre in front of him, kicking butt. And with the same personnel, Rodgers was dismal for three years. And in year four he'd finally developed and his performance took a major extremely visible leap. And it's pretty well-known. Here's Bob McGinn the 30-year Packers beat reporter: The MMQB: "You documented how fortunate it was that Aaron Rodgers didn’t have to play the first couple of years—he just wasn’t ready." McGinn: “He was a very poor player here for his first two summers and regular-season practices. Fortunately for him, and he knows that down deep, he didn’t have to play early. His delivery was a mess, bad body language, he didn’t know how to deal with teammates. He learned so much from Brett Favre on how to in some ways be one of the guys and relate, and he became much more of a leader. He was really poor and how many great players have ever had a start like that? Not that many. A lot of scouts look at that exhibition tape those first two years and he was a little bit better the third year, but not to any degree, and then he just really developed. He lost a lot of close games in ’08, but by ’09 he was playing great and by 2010 he was maybe the best in the business. " https://www.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/13/themmqb-exit-interview-bob-mcginn-green-bay-packers-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-nfl-beat-writer That doesn't mean that every QB needs time at the beginning. Though it would probably help nearly everyone. But some guys are far more NFL-ready than others.

He signed an endorsement deal for butt wipes? Good grief. I guess if that's what he wants to be associated with, it's his choice. You'd think people would get a clue, but you would be disappointed again and again.

You're right. We should stay loyal to our employees. Cutting EJ Manuel, for instance, was just wrong. We owed him more loyalty. Eric Wood, too. I mean, sure, he was injured, but we should have factored in his contribution over the years and kept him on the roster and paid him to sit and cheer, just as a gesture. And Mario Williams ... I'm still shocked by the disloyalty we showed by releasing him. Rex Ryan, too. Never should have let him go. Pro sports aren't areas where loyalty has much of a place. When a guy gets old, he's gone. When someone else gets better, the first guy is gone. Does Belichick show a lot of loyalty? Teams owe the fans a lack of loyalty to players. A team's goal should be winning. The players know and accept that, and it's why they don't feel much of a problem about holding out or asking for a new contract. So, you're saying Richie screwed up, then? He signed the contract, so it would be a fair point if it weren't pretty obvious that he has serious issues. It's not a mistake nobody else is on the phone to Richie. Hope he can fight through these problems.

Wonder! The problem isn't nastiness. It's that Richie was still far better than anyone we had to replace him. But it's not as if the Bills had a choice. The guy has real problems. I wish him the best.

Exactly right, dude. When you suck in preseason for three years, you're not ready. That's what made it impressive that after three years of development suddenly he turned it around the next preseason. He developed. As do many. Who are the best three QBs in the league right now? Brady, Rodgers and Brees? What do they have in common? Oh yeah, they all spent time on the bench developing and soaking it up before they got on the field.

If only what we are "willing to give it" mattered. It doesn't. Not what you are willing to give it and not what I or any other fans are willing to give it. What matters is what he gets. And that is very likely to be the rest of the year at least. One thing that is certain is that Daboll is being handicapped by the offensive personnel.