Thurman#1

Depends if the guy was good enough to spend the money and draft pick on. In general I'd rather see them trade down.

Very nicely put.

Harvin's first deal was a three year contract actually built to be a one-year contract. $6 mill for 2015. Yeah, they brought him back for the year you're mentioning but that first deal was a bad one and the Clay deal - while I like Clay - has looked so far like a serious overpayment. And if he never got to pick his head coach it's probably because he didn't force the issue. He had a chance to do so either time. Particularly with the Pegulas and Rex, if he'd said he couldn't work with Rex, they likely would have listened, as he was the main football guy at that time, really pretty much the only high-ranking guy left.

Yes, but the trade for Hughes was under Nix's watch. Whaley may have had something to do with it, but he didn't pull the trigger. I don't hate him either, but I'm very glad they moved on.

78%? Where are you coming up with that? Or maybe what stat exactly are you talking about? It certainly isn't what percentage of teams that win the turnover battle win the game. That's closer to 65%. https://fansided.com/2014/08/12/nfl-studying-turnovers-affect-winning-percentage/ So Salfino's stat on YPA is very interesting indeed, and is more highly correlated.

You're right. From now on, no Jim Kelly threads, Bruce Smith threads ... none of it.

Fair enough. But you must've been very unimpressed with Peyton Manning too, then, yeah? First three games he went 61 for 117, 52.1% completions, 2 TDs and 8 INTs with a YPA of 5.8. Wait, Peterman appeared in four games. Lemme take a quick look ... yup, Peyton wasn't much better in his fourth game, 19 for 32, 1 TD, 3 INTs. Plenty of rookies put up early stats that are in no way indicative of what they can eventually do. I'm not convinced yet about Peterman but I'm certainly interested, maybe even a bit excited to see what happens with him, and the other two as well. Rookies are going to tend to make mistakes.

Yup, I'm coming around. Originally I put Allen's chances at around 5% in case of injuries or a huge and unexpected improvement. Whereas now I've raised them all the way to 5 - 10% in case of injuries or a huge and unexpected improvement. That is indeed coming around to reality, the reality that Allen is performing just as expected. Like a rookie who is going to need time. Peterman's chances on the other hand, have been adjusted upwards as he's clearly doing better than I - and most - expected.

It's a far more interesting question as Peterman plays well. My guess now: McCarron neighborhood of 45% Peterman neighborhood of 45% Allen neighborhood of 5% - 10% in case of injuries or a sudden massive improvement

They're both still theoretically competing to start the first week.

Yup. He was extremely snarky but really smart about it. Crass on SNS? Yeah, at times. Fair enough. I can see people being irritated by it but that's the way SNS tends to go. I'm with you, though. I rarely spend time on twitter for any reason but on the very unusual sporadic times I checked in he generally made me laugh and had a good point or two to consider, I thought. Good luck to Tim. I have been a long-time BN Blitz subscriber. I'll stick with them for now, but I've never doubted the worth of their coverage and now I'll have my eye on how well they're doing.

Yup, he's a terrific writer. The awards he's won aren't by mistake. Wonder what the story is.

"Team Opponent Points Per Game"? That's a weird title. I could be wrong but I think that's looking at how much our opponents averaged over their whole schedules. Try this: http://www.nfl.com/stats/categorystats?seasonType=REG&offensiveStatisticCategory=null&d-447263-n=1&d-447263-o=1&d-447263-p=1&d-447263-s=TOTAL_POINTS_GAME_AVG&tabSeq=2&season=2017&role=OPP&Submit=Go&archive=false&conference=null&defensiveStatisticCategory=GAME_STATS&qualified=false and click on Points per game. And try this: http://www.nfl.com/stats/categorystats?archive=false&conference=null&role=TM&offensiveStatisticCategory=SCORING&defensiveStatisticCategory=null&season=2017&seasonType=REG&tabSeq=2&qualified=false&Submit=Go That tells you how we scored our opponents scored points, showing that our STs didn't allow any scoring but that our offense allowed a pick-six and a fumble return for a TD (in the same game if I recall correctly). EDIT: The title is weird, but I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink they maybe used points scored against the defense only. But even that's a bit hinky. We had 359 scored against us last year. Subtract six points each for the two TDs scored against our offense and divide by 16 and you get 21.6875, which rounded up gives 21.7, the figure your site gives. But that's also weird because they should also subtract the two extra points. But if you do that the final total comes out to 21.5625. But they have us at 21.7, not 21.6. I don't know. Weird.

So, between 1st and 4th ranked in the league? last year the team ranked #1 in scoring allowed came in at 15.8 PPG. Only the Vikings, Jags and Chargers came in with 18 points or less. The #4 team allowed 18.4, so we'd be ahead of that by around half a yard. In 2016 only the Pats and Giants allowed less than 18.2. In 2015, the Seahawks led the league with 17.3 and only the Bengals and Chiefs joined them at 18.0 or under. Yeah, I'd guess the likelihood of 15 - 18 PPG is in lower single digits. Hang on, no we weren't. The Bills allowed 22.4, which put us 18th. If you're subtracting out points not scored against the defense, did you do so for all the other teams as well?

Points allowed is a stat that relies on the performance of the whole team. Yeah, the defense gets the largest part, but it's probably somewhere around 65 - 75% of the responsibility. This is why game managing QBs are so attractive if you can't find a really good one. At least they tend not to put the defense into bad situations as often. The likelihood of scoring is wildly different based on where you get the ball. It's why field position is something that brings out ulcers and high blood pressure in coaches. Not to mention that points allowed includes points allowed on kickoff returns, punt returns, blocked punts that are run back, pick-sixes thrown by your own QB and your own fumbles that are run back for TDs by the opponent. Even though the defense has nothing to do with those plays, they'll be blamed for them by people looking at points allowed. My guess is that the defense will be significantly better than they were last year. Last year they were the 26th-ranked team, though I thought they were better than that showed. It's way way too early to guess but if I had a gun to my head I'd guess they'd leap up this year to somewhere around 13th.

Is that how it works? You take one game that fits your story and pretend that's how it all looked? OK, fine. Two can play at that. The Saints came into our home. And put up 482 yards on our defense and ran up a score so ridiculously out of reach, 47 points, that the offense didn't have the slightest chance of getting us in the game, much less winning. That shows as much about the season as did your one game example. As seems usual for you, you throw up yet another straw man argument. Just as I didn't claim yards was the "most important" as you said I did, I also didn't claim it's a "statistic in a bubble." It's not. But yeah, it absolutely separates what the defense is responsible for a ton better than points does. If the defense stops teams quick, the yards stay down. If they don't stop teams, the yards go up. Opponents can't run plays against our offense or our STs and have them affect the "yards allowed" stat. Only plays against the defense count, unlike the "Points allowed" stat where the defense looks terrible by allowing seven points if Tyrod throws a pick-six or by allowing three points if Shady fumbles and the ball is recovered on the Bills seven and the defense throws 'em back to the 20 and a field goal is kicked. Yards on the other hand are either allowed or not allowed by the defense and the defense alone. So yeah, yards do a vastly better job of isolating the units than points does. And sure Buffalo's bad offense had a bad effect on the defense at times. Know what also had a bad effect on the defense? Their inability to get off the field. The defense ranked 29th in the league last year in plays per drive. They couldn't get off the field. "How often was the Buffalo D out there," you ask? Don't ask unless you want someone to tell you. The Buffalo D was out there 175 times. Slightly below the league average of 179 times. Glad I could help you out with that. And in those 175 drives they allowed 1.99 points per drive, (23rd in the league) and 32.47 yards per drive (26th in the league). Oh, and while the offense was woeful in some ways, they managed games pretty well. That's why the defense faced less drives than average. The offense had few turnovers (8th-fewest), they burnt up clock with runs, and they ran more plays per drive than average (12th), resting the defense. And while our offense wasn't good ... wait for it ... that doesn't prove our defense was "great" and "wonderful." It wasn't. It was slightly below average, 20th, even if you throw out it's worst three games. Which you shouldn't do, by the way. This isn't a matter at which one of us will be proved right. The results are in. They weren't even good, much less wonderful. They also weren't as bad as many wanted to say. But "wonderful" and "great" they weren't. They just weren't. Not even if you throw out their worst three games - which by the way would make nearly any unit, defense or offense, look pretty good if you then compare them to the rest of the teams without throwing out their three worst games. Calling them wonderful or great is laughable. I'm sure they'd agree. Ask anyone on that defense or coaching staff if the Bills D played "wonderfully" last year.

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.