Thurman#1

Don't know where you got that, but elsewhere, STATS has the Bills in a five-way tie for 10th worst with five drops, behind Cleveland and Denver with 6, Jax and the Bengals with 7 and the Vikes with 9. http://stats.washingtonpost.com/fb/tmleaders.asp?range=NFL&rank=232&type=Receiving And three games and 88 passes are not a great sample yet.

It was very cool. The wife and daughter and I were flying out of Denver last Sunday after a couple of awesome weeks off the grid in Grand Teton and Yellowstone NPs. Fantastic, though I had pretty much missed everything Bills-related. Saw half the first game at Lodo's in Denver, which turned out to be great Bills bar but that's all I'd seen, and I'd tried to avoid the rest so I could watch it on Game Pass back in Japan, but I didn't have any idea how the season had gone. Anyway, we're leaving the check-in counter and I see that a smiling lady, an employee of the airline we're on, has given my little three year-old daughter a set of pilot wings. I thought that was sweet, so I went over to say thank you, and I noticed she had a Bills piece of jewelry right on her uniform. I asked her if she was a fan and she said she was, and we talked for a minute or two. She mentions player names and I can see she's a real fan. So I was about to say goodbye and my Japanese wife, who absolutely loves to talk to strangers, asks her why she became a Bills fan. And she says, "Oh, my son's on the team." I kind of did a double-take and asked who and she said, "Ryan Lewis." I pretty much blanked on the name. Stupidly, I had a kind of glimmer and said something moronic like, "He's ... wait, is he? Is he a linebacker or a defensive lineman?" Not my finest hour. She says, "No, he's a cornerback." Looking like a fool, I just said, "Oh, that's great, when did he ...?" And she kindly told me he's just joined the team. And then she says, "He's playing today. Are you listening to the game? Do you know what's happening?" It was just a bit after noon in Denver so it took me a minute to realize that the game must have started. Then she says, "It's 24 - 0." And she's smiling, so I'm like, "The Bills are up? Against the Vikings?" She says she's checking her scores app every few seconds, hauls out her phone and says, "No, it's 27 - 0," with obvious glee. We both got happy after that and talked a while. We had to go through the long security line so we had to get moving, but we talked for about five minutes. She said Ryan loved Buffalo and that they had connections in the city and to the team. I asked her about what the connection was and she said that she was related to Robb Riddick. Brother-in-law, I think she said ...? I was psyched as I remembered him well and had a chance to make up for my idiocy. "He was a running back, right? He was a good player." She just smiled and said thanks. It was a really nice conversation. She was a very kind person and talked a while to my daughter as well. You guys probably already know the Robb Riddick thing but as I say, I've been off the grid, and I just thought that was a very cool thing. She said the family went a little nuts when the Bills called to bring Ryan in. I've never really met a Bills family member before, so it was a really nice thing for me. She couldn't have been nicer. I wished her and her son good luck and we shared a "Go Bills."

The Bills have roughly $8.14 mill available under the cap this year according to Spotrac. Matthews has a $5 mill base salary. If the Bills traded for him, say next week, after game four, they'd have to pay him $3.75 mill against the cap. I don't see this happening, as it would leave them too little for injury pickups. Not impossible, but not a fiscally conservative move, and those are the kind they seem determined to make this year. If the Titans do release him as he says they will, what kind of contract would he demand / sign? I'd guess he might demand a one-year contract for similar money and get it somewhere. Maybe the Bills could finagle a deal that would be cap-friendly this year but more costly the next few? Would they do that and cut into their cap windfall next year? I don't know, maybe if they really like the guy, but I don't see this happening. We'll see, I guess.

Hope it works out.

Yeah, you build a team for success from the trenches out. That's why the Bengals have racked up so many Super Bowl championships. Oh, wait ... You build a team for success from QB first and everyone else later. If you worry the guy might get injured you draft a McCarron and put your guy on the bench for a year, especially if the guy you draft is widely considered a guy who needs development. The Colts drafted Peyton Manning first thing and played him behind a bad OL. The Cowboys did the same thing with Aikman. Those guys were more NFL-ready than Allen. My guess is that Allen isn't ready but if he is, plenty of great QBs have taken a pasting behind bad OLs for a year or two. And that's nonsense that they haven't prioritized OL for years. They've been a good OL for a couple of years. The Wood and Incognito problems weren't a matter of priority. IMHO the Bills wanted McCarron to play all year, but he simply underachieved.

Either that or if we'd offered less the Bucs might have turned us down. And maybe Arizona would have traded up above us and grabbed Allen. Ideally, you don't overpay. In fact, if you have a move you're determined to make, you pay what you have to. And yeah, you're judged on how successful that move was. If Allen doesn't work out, they'll be blamed, rightfully. If it does work out, they'll be praised, rightfully, and nobody will give a damn that we gave up two 2nd.

Look, I agree with your feeling that we should have tried a total rebuild. It's what I would have done. But there are legit arguments on both sides. The owners must have been thrilled with making the playoffs last year, lucky as it was. Thrilled. And the players notice when a new regime tries its best to win from minute one. It might easily bring out more of the best in them. I'd've totally rebuilt. But they made it clear from minute one that that's not what they were doing. Now we'll know how things went a couple of years down the road. Both ways can work. It's not like there's only one correct way. You say if they wanted a QB high and a QB of the defence, they should've gone about it differently. And yet, they got a QB high and a QB of the defense. Got it done. And it's not like running a total rebuild last year would have produced a good team this year. They still would have been awful this year.

It is absolutely too early to judge. Again, not a single guy drafted by Beane here in Buffalo has played more than one NFL game. Ignorance isn't the excuse. Sometimes things take time. Sure, it'd be great if your kid graduated college in a year and a half. But blaming someone for not graduating college in a year and a half is similar to blaming a GM this early. Some things take time. This is one of them.

Yes, you've got to have studs. No, not all studs are jerks. So yeah, you can have a team with studs who have character. That's what this group is aiming for. Jimmy Johnson had a different plan and a different group of players. How did Jimmy's acceptance of bad character guys work out for him in Miami? Where were all the bad character guys in New England or Philly last year?

On the contrary, it was certainly very obvious to them that they were likely to have problems at OL once Incognito and Wood left, and even more so when they traded Glenn as well. Nobody's dumb enough not to notice this. But they had other priorities they decided to handle first. You can't prioritize everything. Attempting to do so only shows a lack of priorities. Another thing that should be very obvious is that you can't address every weak area each year. They had problems this year at one CB, at LB, at OL, at DL and at WR. Oh, and did I forget QB? There was never a chance to fill all the possible holes so things would look just fine this year. Particularly for a team which had been in serious cap trouble and with a GM who had promised the owner to get rid of that cap problem this year. It simply was not going to happen. It's bizarre to me how people expect every hole to be filled even though it doesn't happen on even the best teams with relatively few holes. It's what makes it difficult to be an NFL GM. There is no perfect solution and even good solutions tend to take several years before things start to look good if you're starting with a lot of holes. And we are.

What's apparent is that anyone who thinks he can judge a GM this early in his tenure isn't correctly grasping how the system works. His grade is an INC. And will be so for three or even four years. The guy has been here for a year and a half and run one draft. Not a single player he drafted here has played more than one NFL game. It's not just early, it's far far too early.

Getting a QB high was an absolute necessity. Far from making no sense, it was the only move that did make any sense, except maybe bringing in Alex Smith or Kirk Cousins. Calling it a waste is missing the point. There are very very few ways to bring in a guy with a legitimate shot at being a franchise guy. When you have one of those chances you have to go for it even if it's expensive. They had to get a guy who might grow to become the franchise QB we've needed for so long. Unless they wanted our run of prolonged mediocrity/badness to continue. And yeah, OLs take time to develop. So do QBs. But it's a hell of a lot easier to draft a good OL even if you're winning than it is to draft a good QB. And yes, moving up delayed filling the holes on the roster. It's worth it. Same as in house construction, building a good strong, stable foundation delays the building of the walls and the installation of the plumbing and everything else, really. But it's necessary to build that strong foundation regardless of the delay. Same thing here. It's necessary to bring in a legitimate potential QB because it's almost impossible to get one when you have a good enough roster elsewhere to consistently win eight or nine games. You never get the chance to draft a potential franchise guy. This is the only way to get it done, and also the smart way. If we're rebuilding as you say (I'm not sure I agree, but put that aside), then you have to keep understanding what a rebuild is. It's not something you do if you want to have a great chance to win the year you trade up and draft your QB. You are sacrificing the short term for the long term. Which is a great idea if the long term is very successful, and true rebuilds increase the chances of extreme success. What was your prediction for the year? Did you think we'd win eight or nine or ten games? People who predicted a lot of wins this year weren't quite understanding how long it takes to build consistent success when you're switching schemes and the regime before you put you in awful salary cap shape.

A solid plan? Yes. And it involves waiting to see what happens with the guys they kept, observing the consequences after far more than one game, and acting accordingly. A solid plan that would make us look like a good offense this year? Nope. That was always a fairly low possibility. And that's OK. Football personnel plans should be long-term. If we'd wanted to look as good as possible this year we should've kept Tyrod. Or brought in Alex Smith or Kirk Cousins.

Did Allen fuel a massive outpouring of points when he came in? Guess not, so should they cut him too? As usual, the intelligent answer does not involve making immediate decisions on too little information. Yeah, picking a quick scapegoat feels better. But rushing to judgment is bad policy. When will they cut him? In camp next year or the year after, possibly, or they'll see him go after his four years here to possibly get picked up elsewhere. We'll find out which of these by doing what good decision makers do. Grinding it out, gathering data and making sure there's enough to make as good of a decision as possible.

Not true. Yeah, he sat for nearly two years. He then played 5/16ths of his second season and all of his third. To say the least, he did not look good. I mean, his passer rating did not exceed 65 for those two years. And he still looked awful given three games to start in each of his next two years. He looked awful in Tampa. Given three games to start his first year in SF he looked very good. But had he developed or was it a lucky three games? His poor performance the next year when given three games would argue it was a statistical anomaly. It really wasn't till he'd been several years developing in SF that he looked good consistently. If anything the evidence indicates that he only started to look good after sitting the bench for a while in a place where they knew how to develop QBs.

Fair enough about your plan. But Peyton Manning coming out of college was widely considered one of the most NFL-ready QBs of all time. Josh Allen not so much. He may possibly be ready but the evidence certainly isn't convincing.

What you've proved here isn't that quarterbacks can develop while getting smashed. Oh, and Favre is a counter-example. He's a great example of a QB who developed sitting on the bench learning from film. He spent his whole rookie year on the bench. Steve Young's career also runs counter to what you're saying. He spent his first year and then eleven weeks of his second year on the bench. Then he played solidly for a year and a half and was so awful that they let him go. Only after sitting a ton behind Montana being developed well and correctly did he become the Steve Young we know today. What your evidence shows is that SOME quarterbacks can develop while getting smashed. All of the guys you reference here were considered NFL-ready coming out except for maybe Favre. And there are tons of examples of guys who were smashed and didn't develop. Trent Edwards is not the least of these examples. Remember when he DIDN'T look like Captain Checkdown? David Carr is the most obvious but there are a ton more.

... or it takes time for QBs to develop and it helps to have good offensive personnel around them?

No, you're spinning like crazy. He did take away the job he had but asked him to keep writing for the paper. That is in no way "expendable." And both Graham and Sully have said that from many responses, the complaints were very few. Enough, apparently, but have BNBlitz subscriptions soared since Sully left? Nobody has said so. I don't hear any of the folks here saying, "Now that he's gone, I'm signing up." Not that I've read all ten pages. But if there have been one or two, have there been many? And not all promotions from within would mean everything staying the same. And while newspapers are disappearing, their sports sections are generally considered the strongest circulation drivers. It's the other stuff that people are finding elsewhere. Why else would they try to sell the BNBlitz separately.

It was like that. And as you point out, so was watching the Bills. They've sucked or been mediocre with extreme consistency. It was Sully's job to describe that, not to fill lives with sunshine. So yeah, fair enough that you or anyone doesn't want to read that kind of thing. But for sunshine, you've got Murph and Chris Brown and all the rest of the buffalobills.com crew. And now the BNBlitz.

Fine. I'm sure it's mutual, but if you really didn't care, you wouldn't post. You say as much. You don't click links to the Kardashians, right, yet you posted here. Jerry's time at the BN is indeed over, because he decided to step down, and his reasons for doing so are right on. Sully's writing developed on a newspaper, and newspaper - columns anyway - developed around writing columns which are thoughtful and reasonably though not perfectly neutral. And then the BN turned to a fan site, which is a site where neutral articles are not what people are looking for. They're looking for actively positive slants. Graham pointed out the same thing when pointing out why he left. Fanboy articles aren't what Sully and Graham signed up to write. Pretty reasonable to be a bit pissed when someone hires you and then changes your job description almost completely. And yeah, many here are happy. Again, this also is a fan site and most on here actively don't like much that's negative about the Bills, even when it's well-deserved and spot on point.

He's a fine writer. Not to everyone's taste but it's not an accident he got offered a job as a columnist at the third-biggest paper in America at the time (9th biggest now, Newsday). And turned it down to come to Buffalo.

it wasn't that clear that they wanted to keep him. They should've. But they waited and waited. The offer was a ton of money but it seemed that that regime was looking for a different kind of guy, that they wanted road graders and thought Levitre was a finesse guy.

Yeah, I've never heard two guys have two separate views of the same incident. Must've been lies. I like Tyrod as a person, but this is sad. It's small. Move forward, dude.

Thang is we don't know yet whether what is due is blame or credit or whether the fans were right or wrong. We do know that McD has a ton more info on the situation than we do.