Thurman#1

Hard to see with the quality of the video, and the usual caveats about highlight videos, but he really does seem like he's shot out of a cannon on some of these plays. Impressive. I hope he makes an impact.

I know fans don't like to hear it, but the News is very highly respected nationally for it's sports coverage. Fans tend not to like them because they say bad teams are bad and fans tend not to like that. I don't know Harrington well as I'm not much of a hockey fan but in the AP Sports Editors Awards, this year he won as one of the top ten beat writers in sports writing. And Skurski was in the same top ten. I think the dog tweet is pretty funny, personally, and that Harrington's response was pretty weak. But I like their coverage a lot, personally.

The most recent ancestors built for climbing trees were about 3 million years old. We weren't deceiving anyone back then. We weren't even Homo Sapiens then. And even then its feet weren't climbing feet, they were walking feet. But it was a nice post, Meanie. Glad I had a chance to read it.

If nobody liked Rosen, he'd be looking for a team now. He went #10. Plenty of people liked him, including Arizona. Throughout the process, people have been saying that plenty of traditional teams wouldn't like the guy, that he will challenge coaches and only some teams could handle that. Exactly. And the Giants and Denver both had their guys that they wanted above anybody else. Denver made a deal before the draft to trade back with Buffalo unless their guy was still there. And he was. Durability issues with Rosen? Yeah, fair enough. And that old-fashioned teams and coaches wouldn't want him? Yeah, people have said this all along. Yup, agreed.

The overall data picture tells us very little or nothing. There just isn't a large enough sample of guys from the last 15 years or so who had completion percentages below 60% and yet were picked in the top ten. Three guys? Stafford, Ryan and Allen? Are there any more? What this tells you is that he is an outlier for being picked in the top ten. Guys with completion percentages as low as that, and there are probably hundreds of them over the last 15 years, are generally not considered pro prospects. Yet Allen was, and a top ten guy besides. Why? Because stats don't tell the whole story. Because when the professional evaluators looked at his game they saw some bad signs and a lot of good ones too, and the good outweighed the bad.

The thing that makes people worry is that very few of the people on that list are from the last 12 - 15 years. That's 28 years of data and most of the people are from the first ten years or so, when QB ratings tended to be much lower. If you look at only 2005 and later, the last 13 years, excluding Allen himself you have Henne, Derek Anderson, Hoyer, Matt Ryan, Cutler, Orton, Stafford, Kaepernick and Tyrod. And outside of Matt Ryan and Stafford, that's not an illustrious group. The bottom line, though, is that situations differ, and Allen's success will have little to do with college completion percentage. It'll be about how well he sticks with his mechanics changes, how well he comes along on understanding NFL defenses, and how well he learns to go through progressions correctly and make the right decisions quickly. And likely how quickly he will be asked to play. Like DeShaun Watson last year, Allen is thought of as a developmental guy. But also like DeShaun Watson, Allen spent months working with Jordan Palmer after the season ended. This catapulted Watson forward in his development and understanding of the NFL game. It may well have done the same with Allen. I personally hope that he still sits the bench this year ... the more he knows before he gets out there the better. But if he does end up starting sometime this season, Jordan Palmer's tutelage will likely be a large part of the reason and hopefully will have him much readier than he would(n't) have been otherwise.

The o-line and Benjamin stuff is about next year. And frankly, the first year performance of a rookie QB is not worth worrying about. Even the ones who turn out to be good are often bad the first year. And Allen may well spend that first year on the bench. As for his performance this year vs. last year there are some concerns there. But comparing yards totals and TD totals is absolutely flat-out ridiculous. He threw 373 passes in 2016 and 270 in 2017. Of course he threw for much less yards and TDs. He did have some regression but using qualitative rather than quantitative stats here shows nothing. As for the quantitative problems, it's been reported very widely that he lost all of his best players this year, and that caused a lot of problems. Believe that or not, but that's most of the reason. That and what Peter King reported that "as one official from a quarterback-needy team told me, how difficult it was to scout him because he had so many free rushers coming at him consistently." 41% of the plays he was under pressure, far far more than any of the other QB prospects had. Allen 41% Jackson 36% Darnold 31% Rosen 29% Mayfield 28% Rudolph 23% That would erode anyone's stats. https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/04/18/josh-allen-draft-cleveland-browns-mmqb-peter-king Not that I am convinced about the guy. I'm hopeful but very unconvinced. He just needs to show us, it's that simple.

Nice article. Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

Why? It's not like he's been arrested. He's been fired from his job. And yeah that's been covered in the newspapers but that comes with highly public positions like his. Looks to me like that's exactly what happened. He knew that could happen if he broke the rules, and he didn't just break them he broke them extremely publicly. And then lied to his boss about what was going on. Yeah, his family will be horribly disrupted by this. But it's nobody's fault but Russ's. Assuming that this is what it looks like, that he just had consensual affairs with subordinates. EDIT: I see I'm late and this has already been discussed. But ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances and Russ took the wrong chances.

That could be the explanation, or it could be as someone above suggested, that it got too public. No longer able to be passed without notice because it was just too noticeable. Or loud enough that the boss finally heard about it. It just sounds congruous to me that the Pegulas find out about it and ask some questions. Russ chooses to lie and is found to be lying. I think Kim Pegula at that point might be ready to see the back of him. I have no evidence for that, though, it's just a guess.

Pollock compared him to Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey and Garrison Keillor in terms of behavior. "It was the same type of behavior that sabotaged Matt Lauer ..." He only mentioned the others in this way ... "Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, et al, and now ... Russ Brandon? The list of powerful men brought down by inappropriate behavior with women grew by one ..." http://www.oleantimesherald.com/sports/pollock-brandon-s-exit-wisely-staged-by-kim-pegula/article_cb7fd29e-4e5b-11e8-ad2c-3b2526f9cbbb.html He was only comparing Russ to Cosby and the criminals by saying they were brought down by inappropriate behavior. Not in terms of what that behavior consisted of.

Sigh. Two mistakes in a row for me. I'm not looking good here. Maybe I need to take a few hours off. Thanks for pointing it out, Gunner.

Yeah, assistant GM and director of Pro Personnel. There's never been any real evidence that it was Whaley's deal. Rumors have swirled, but nothing has ever been released about that. Makes sense that he was involved to some degree, perhaps a lot.

D'oh!! You're 100% right, that's what I get for posting too quickly, without fact-checking. Fits the argument I was making even better now, but you're right, I just plain blew that one. Thanks for pointing it out.

That thing we "know," according to you? We don't know it. It's a guess. What we know is who the buck stopped with, which was Nix. And no, again, the Hughes trade happened during the Nix administration. It's a reasonable guess Whaley was involved, as he was Director of Pro Personnel. Which is a position that reports to the GM.

Whaley and the Pegulas were the ones who hired Marrone. Russ was in the meetings. But yeah, once the relationship deteriorated something was going to break. Had we kept Marrone and Whaley, one of them would be dead and the other in jail for his murder. They came to hate each other. One was leaving. The worse one stayed, unfortunately. Agreed on that. From the evidence, McDermott is the best coach we've had in a long time, certainly since Wade. But IMO Marrone was the second-best. They did have a really good defence, but that defense had two starters brought in after Whaley became GM, and neither of those two was a core player or a great talent. The overwhelming majority were Nix guys, with a couple pre-Nix.

IMO most of that is justification, particularly the physical part. Every project guy has things to recommend him. Otherwise he wouldn't be picked. To me, the thing that makes me a bit hopeful is that one of his biggest negatives, accuracy problems, has already been improved with a focus on his mechanics. Again, we have no way of knowing this will stick, but especially if he isn't asked to play this year, he'll have a ton of time to groove the improvements in his habit patterns. That gives me some hope, that he's already well along the path of development. The other thing that gives me hope is that they do seem to see that giving him a year off or more should be their first and best option. If he's somehow way ahead of schedule, they seem like they might play him. I hope that doesn't happen. It's pretty much universal that he needs time. And a lot of project guys who get picked early don't get that time and it hurts them. The Bills seem willing to wait, and I think that improves his chances. I'd rather they'd picked Rosen. But I have some hope. I'm not convinced, and I think those who are are drinking Kool-Aid. But hopeful? Yeah.

Tell you what, I'll stop with the nonsense if you stop with the utter crap. If you don't think a QB is any good, you don't draft him. The Patriots ... drafted Tom Brady. The other 31 teams ... didn't. That's the opposite of luck, it's making a decision better than anyone else did. It wasn't a lottery. Nobody was throwing darts at a dartboard. It was a draft, where teams select guys. The Patriots put Brady's name on a card, and nobody else did.

You have deep confusion about the difference between facts and opinions. Sal and Leo are saying he was never much involved with the decision-making on the football side. He admitted that to them at the time, that he wasn't involved in making picks. He was always on the business side and it's pretty much universal among nearly anyone involved that he did a terrific job at that. If he was involved in bringing in Rex (Whaley should also carry a very large portion of the responsibility there), then that was a horrible decision. But even that's questionable. Yeah, he said, "Don't let him out of the building." There's no evidence on how much impact that had. Sounds like he's "retired" for good reason. If what's alleged is true, he deserves what he's getting. But Sal and Leo are saying just what has seemed through the years as the most likely thing. There's never been much or any evidence he's been involved in making the decisions. Yup, he's been in the room. No, not everyone in the room has much of an impact.

If you don't like it, don't listen. You don't even live in Buffalo and you're listening?

Info they want to control just comes out on buffalobills.com and in tweets from the team.

It isn't a requirement to be a fan that you must agree with all decisions made by the team.

Ah, understood. Fair enough. But they had two firsts and two seconds, correct? And their entire draft classes of 2019, 2020 and 2021. They had enough if they wanted, certainly enough to try. Not sure they wanted it or would have done it either, but it's all possible.

They didn't luck into Brady. He didn't walk into their camp and say give me a tryout and they said we never heard of you but what the heck. They first handled their FAs so that they would receive a comp pick in the 6th. And they then used that comp pick and drafted him higher than anyone else was willing to. That's a pair of really good decisions.

Gettleman didn't say he wasn't moving. He said he never seriously considered any of the offers. Might have ended up considering an offer for more than he received. Said he received a "very reasonable offer." Might have accepted a really really good offer. https://247sports.com/nfl/new-york-giants/Bolt/New-York-Giants-had-a-very-reasonable-offer-for-No-2-pick-117858343