Thurman#1

Yup, points matter way more than yards. But to repeat yet again the obvious, points given up matter a lot but they refer back to the whole team. Not just the defense. The whole team. Whereas yards given up do a great job of isolating the defense as the responsible party. How many points are charged against the defense if Tyrod throws an INT and it's run back for a TD? Or if Tyrod ... um ... does his Tyrod thing and throws INTs at a much lower rate than other QBs, who gets the credit for that if you only look at points given up? Yup, great job, Tyrod ... uh, I mean great job defense. So call it wonderful all you want, but you're calling the whole team wonderful, not just the defense. The offense and STs share a lot of the credit if they consistently put the other team in bad field position by not turning the ball over, etc. The stat that isolates the defense tells the real story. Yards given up. Which again is that looking at those 13 games alone the defense gave up yards at a rate that would have put them at 20th in the league. That of course meant that the offense was given relatively poor field position and started drives at a disadvantage.

Certainly possible. Significantly more likely I think is: 1) McCarron 2) Peterman 3) Allen We'll see. That's what people said after the Chargers spent the 4th pick and a whole bunch more on Rivers. But if Brees hadn't had that career-threatening knee injury, he'd probably still be starting in New Orleans. Clearly they wouldn't make Peterman or McCarron permanent without one of them becoming elite or very near to it. And yeah, that's not the way anyone sensible would bet unless the odds they got were very tempting indeed. But it could happen. I don't think it will but never rule out the unexpected but possible.

I've heard it a million times, but I've read a lot of British stuff. I read Uncut, Mojo and the now sadly defunct "The Word," and all the way back to Trouser Press in the '70s. Big fan of the Anglo view of rock music. A lot of British novels and TV shows as well. Even spent a couple of months doing a home-stay there in high school and visiting three other times. Whinge is really common there.

No, they did not play wonderfully. And when a guy trying to pump up the achievements of the defense has to resort to talking about how well they played in the first half of two games, you can hear the sound of spin, spin at hypersonic speed. I don't care what the scores are at halftime. I care what they are at the end of the game. Whether the other team scores more in the first half or the second doesn't make the defense worse or better. And yeah, though you made a mistake and we scored a bit more than 16.7 points, actually, our points allowed statistic was pretty good in those thirteen games. But scoring is a better measure of the whole team than it is of the defense. Which is why when they say some team is the #1 defense they aren't talking about scoring. They're talking about yards. Scoring is maybe 70% defense. It's also about field position, number of drives faced, and a bunch of other things which offense and STs weigh heavily into. Not to mention that some scores don't come against the defense. You want to measure the defense you look at yards they gave up. Outside of those three games, the Bills defense gave up 341.5 yards per game. Would've been 20th in the league. Decent. Very very far from great or wonderful. And that came in 13 games against offenses that averaged 19.07th ranked in the league, a ranking significantly below average.

I love Schwartz as a DC but think he won't be a great HC. I think he'd have been better than Rex, particularly on defense, but not actually very good. And I have hopes that maybe the current group really will be very good down the road. So I think we're better off having suffered through the Rex era.

You make an educated thoughtful guess. Which is also hopefully interesting. Unless you're the kind of person who never predicts stuff, say the Bills record next year, you do it too. But if you're not interested, fair enough. There are a lot of other threads to click on.

"The other thirteen they did wonderfully"? That's a real overstatement, "wonderfully." Yeah, except for those three games they were pretty decent, better than most people have given them credit for. "Great"? Nah.

By Golly, I think you're right. I suspect that these media guys who do their best to guess at the future will NOT be 100% correct. I think their guesses at future results will contain incorrect guesses. They should be forced to crawl on their knees. And meanwhile the incorrect predictions made by people on these boards every single year ... well, that's OK, really. Why do people get upset about this stuff? Of course they don't predict the future with absolute perfection. Nobody does.

Plenty of times Brady takes more than two seconds. That's around his average, so obviously he takes longer an awful lot. You can't expect a second-year guy (that's when I'd like to see Allen play) to play like Tom Brady, most particularly when even Tom Brady doesn't play that way.. Sometimes you get it out in two seconds. Plenty of times you don't. Plenty of plays aren't set up to facilitate that, though plenty are. So removing the "in 2 seconds" part, yeah, "being able to make the right throw, accurately," is only one part of it, but by far the most important and the most difficult part of it. Here's hoping. I agree with the rest of your post, though. The Pats have a good system. And continuity is huge. But what's even more huge is having Tom Brady.

Dallas appears to be working with a QB who is not capable of being a top ten type guy without a near-ideal situation. And that's not a good thing for Dallas, because it's hard to set up and maintain a near-ideal situation. I'm hoping Prescott doesn't develop any further. He seems like a good person but I hate the Cowboys. The 'Boys dumped Romo a bit early, thinking Prescott was ready and a franchise guy. I love the fact that now it's a really open question whether he'll ever be a franchise guy. Put those same missing pieces around Brady and you don't even notice they're missing.

You know, people say that EJ was never supposed to go in the first round as if it was a fact. It's not. Mayock thought he might go in the first. NFLDraftScout had him 1st-2nd, and more specifically mid-to-late first as his high and mid-second as his low. Gil Brandt had him as #27 in his top 100 big board, behind Geno, but in the top 32. Yeah, there were people - and not a few - who thought he was picked too high. But it wasn't a unanimous thing. At this point it's very clear he was a bad pick, but people saying that everyone knew he was a third rounder are talking out of their hat. Having said that, I agree with you that there are some real weaknesses in the Manuel-Allen comparison. Allen is indeed more highly touted.

I did go figure. And what's strange is that most of those games when he had Watkins and Woods, 10 or 11 of them, came in the first year when teams hadn't yet figured him out in that offense. You didn't miss out any hackneyed Taylor-bashing cliches. But you did hit all the hackneyed Taylor-fanboy cliches and made a good start on the Peterman-bashing cliches. Peterman did indeed play pretty poorly. Certainly worse than Tyrod. But at least Peterman was a rookie. I wish the best for Tyrod. I hope he kicks butt in Cleveland. But I'm glad he's not here anymore. And yet when Cassel had much that same team he had a Tyrod-esque year. Sure it's a team game, sure you need players and coaches. But Brady does more with less than anyone else in the league. It's why he's likely going down as the GOAT.

Not at all. Yeah, they went 10-5 with Cassel at QB. In a year when they lucked into a very easy schedule. The year after they went 16-0 with Brady.

Was Cassel really all that successful? Check the stats for Brady in that offense the year before and Cassel in his year. Was Cassel's performance in Brady's ballpark? Tom Brady 2007 68.9% for 4806 yards, 50 TDs and 8 INTs, 8.3 YPA, 21 sacks, 117.2 passer rating Matt Cassel 2008: 63.4% completions for 3693 yards, 21 TDs and 11 INTs, 7.2 YPA 47 sacks, 89.4 passer rating Tyrod Taylor 2017: 62.6% completions for 2799 yards, 14 TDs and 4 INTs, 6.7 YPA, 46 sacks, 89.2 passer rating Which is more similar, Brady and Cassel, or is it Cassel and Tyrod? Give Tyrod a similar number of attempts to Cassel and their yardage numbers would have been very close.

Brady doesn't know where he's going 90% of the time. It just isn't that easy. If it were, more people would do it. He gets a really intelligent knowledge of what his first read should be ... yeah, maybe 60% of the time. He still has to look and see if it's open or if the safeties or somebody is doing something unexpected or if the CB is doing a great job covering the route. No, Brady doesn't go through progressions every play; plenty of times he goes to his first read. Yes, he goes through progressions a lot. And he does it faster than nearly anyone else, which helps him a ton. Commitment isn't the problem. Making the correct decision before you commit is the problem. NFL defenses work hard to make you go through as many reads as possible. Offenses battle back to try to reduce the number. It just isn't as easy as you're making it out to be. Yes, well-designed offenses and a smart playbook help a ton. But it's not as if a well-designed offense eliminates QB decision-making. If only. There are ways to simplify things for young QBs. The Bills should use those ways. But given time to watch the tape, defenses will figure out what you're doing and stop you from doing it. Still, for a beginning, it's a good idea, and doubtless something they'll be looking at.

That's certainly on the low end of likelihood. But as reasonable as any other reasonable guess. Mine would be closer to five or six wins. But if McCarron is better than expected I can see that rising significantly.

Me too, and there's more. NFLDraftScout sez this about Wallace: "No Full Workout-Heel on 1st 40/Affected his 40 Yard Dash Times," and they listed his fastest 40 time as 4.45. EDIT: I see others have already posted it. But worth noting the 4.45 they list.

I actually do 'em every day. There's a pullup bar around 150 yards from my desk at work and I do a few when I come to work, when I leave and when I'm feeling beat. And I'm a bit older than Howard. Twelve years ago I made it a goal to do 10,000 during the year. Made it with a few days to spare, but it wasn't easy and part of the reason was because at that time I had to walk around three-quarters of a mile in Tokyo to find the closest bar in a nearby park. Should've bought a home bar, but I figured the wife might not have been thrilled, though she was absolutely great in supporting me that year. I had a mental map of every outdoor pullup bar or reasonable facsimile in western Tokyo. Can't do 'em now like I did then but one is an absolute piece of cake. Howard needs to get off his butt.

Yeah, Brady may take a fractional step downwards, but another Pat seems to be improving to take up the slack. No, you're right. Yolo, that every year people start talking about how this is the year they start to fall apart. And my suspicion is that for yet another year they're going to be excellent. But yeah, for the first time last year and this year we're seeing cracks in the façade. I love it. It's not a big deal anymore than it was a big deal when Bruce Smith would skip half the offseason. Brady doesn't need the extra time. But it does say something about his priorities and his relationship with Belichick. And IMHO his priorities are part of what made him special and his relationship with Belichick is part of what made the team special. I would expect an extremely tiny fall-off, and that Brady starts looking at what he'll do after football. And I love to see him thinking that way.

I guess if you really really reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally stretch it you could. But which games were the right ones was actually totally out of the Bills control. They got lucky with how that turned out. They won nine. And they got lucky with how the other three nine-win teams won and lost games ... games that were totally out of the Bills control. They were also very lucky that while in 2016 both AFC wild card winners had to win at least ten games, this year the AFC was quite a bit weaker. Same with 2015. And, you know, 2014. You have to go back to 2013 to find another year when a 9-7 team won an AFC wild card. Of the eighteen years since 2000, in only six years has nine wins been good enough to get a team into a wild card slot. I think 2017 is the only year since 2000 that a 9-7 record got two teams in, and since we were the second, that makes us very very lucky indeed to be in such a weak AFC.

Yup, each time I correct you. And each time you miss the point and say the same thing. The bottom line was that four teams won their way into the AFC playoffs, the Pats and Steelers with 13 and the Jags and Chiefs with 10 wins each. Nobody had to win or lose for those teams to make the playoffs. They simply won enough games. The next group of four all had nine wins, and so it came down to all of them having to rely on other teams having won and lost the right weeks. Whoever won those tiebreakers did so not because they won enough game to get into the playoffs. What those four teams - including the Bills - did was win enough games to make the playoffs ... if they got lucky with some games totally outside their control.

Good story and a great example of the kind of thing that makes people good folks. I've always liked Tyrod as a person. Not as my team's QB, not anywhere near recently, but he's always carried himself with class with the one small exception of the racist thing, which I thought was nonsense. But one small problem in three years is an extremely high average for human beings. I'm with you, I wish him the absolute best.

Josh Allen's place is learning. Yeah, you'd have to think he'll start down the line but that's certainly not his place now. And McCarron played pretty damn well when given his shot. No, I don't think he'll be our long-term guy either, but he's certainly showed potential. Yeah, this. And the shoe contracts offered to guys who aren't starting yet are mostly the shoe companies being proactive. They want to control the guy's rights down the road if he gets terrific. Proactive deals pay less than superstar deals so you have to think about that as well. Overall, though, a guy who hasn't won the starting job yet is going to get offers but especially a guy like Mahomes was probably not getting really good offers. Still, a nice decision even if maybe an easy one depending on the offer.

It isn't the media. It's that other guys seem to be struggling less. It's OTAs, it's early, it doesn't mean much ... but yeah he seems to be struggling a bit more. Which is what expectations were in the first place. It's not Rodak's responsibility to be in anyone's corner. They're supposed to strive for neutrality and even-handedness (an impossible goal but you can get pretty close). But Rodak's coverage is about in line with the rest. I'm no big Rodak fan, but he's OK. You'd expect Allen's teammates to be in his corner, and they do seem to be supportive of all three QBs. They've got their backs, which is as it should be.

Dude, if this were a difficult challenge, I'd enjoy it. It's not. Your objection here is ridiculous. You say they played well enough that when they got lucky and the right team lost - through no responsibility whatsoever of the Bills - they were in a position to take advantage of that good luck. Luck is certainly not just a "random occurrence of something not expected." Expectations have nothing to do with it, nor does randomness. A quick look at the dictionary provides a more reasonable one. "Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions." - Oxford They could have controlled their destiny by winning more. They didn't. And because of that they had to rely on chance in a game they had no control over, not to mention the luck that the AFC had only four good teams and that their schedule turned out very weak indeed. None of which was in their control.