Thurman#1

Some people find this kind of thing really funny. Not me, personally.

Hope you're right. From what I can see Phillips is an absolute masher against the run game but I don't see him getting a lot of sacks unless QBs hold the ball a long time. To me he seems like a different kind of player from Kyle Williams. Both are great with their hands and both are really strong. But Kyle has always had an explosive burst that gets him penetration where Phillips seems to get his penetration from excellent hand technique when he gets it. He's just not as explosive that I can see. We'll see, though. You could be right, and it would be great for the Bills.

Agreed. If he stays healthy and gets on the same page as his QB (and/or vice versa) he has a chance to be a very good one.

Tre White, part of Zay Jones and part of Tremaine Edmunds, right? The Bills had to throw in other assets to get Jones and Edmunds, correct?

Sure, he was mostly negative. But not totally. Anyone remember the 2011 column when the Bills had a 5-2 start under Gailey and Jerry's column was about the fact that he thought that at least that far in he thought Gailey should be one of the top candidates for Coach of the Year? He had plenty of positive columns, but yeah, a lot more were negative. But again, when you look, the bad things he was saying were mostly about bad teams. Bad GMs, bad coaches. Bills fans have been really really tolerant over an awful lot of years. I was around in his first few years when he was covering a good team in the Bills. And yeah he said some tough things, but he was more positive than negative. More negative than many Bills fans liked even back then but he said a lot of good things about those good teams. He's always been a curmudgeon, a grouch. And some people just hate that, and that's fair enough. But he's had bad teams to cover, an overwhelming majority of them. It made sense most weeks to say bad things. I agreed with him maybe 70% of the time but always thought he was a good read. He made me think. I agreed with Bucky a lot less, but I enjoyed reading him too, though to a lesser degree. Good luck to both of them, and to the Buffalo News. And the Bills as well.

Please. Nobody's saying effort and accomplishment weren't used or important. We didn't see any players falling asleep on the field. But that's not what it means to luck into something. The Ravens also tried as hard as they could and accomplished as much as we did, 9 wins. Luck absolutely was the main factor in us getting in. Yeah, we worked hard and accomplished a lot. So did the Ravens. So did all the 9-7 teams. But none of those 9-7 teams were good enough to got 10-6 or 11-5 or 12-4. So whoever squeezed in with a 9-7 would have to rely on luck. Without that luck we don't get in. That's lucking in. Any 9-7 team that makes the playoffs is lucking in. Making it with that record means you are very lucky ... very lucky that your division sucks if you win the division with a 9-7 record, or very lucky that your conference sucks if you make it in as a wild card with a 9-7 record.

Teams with good GMs and a regime that's been in place for a while tend not to have depth problems, But yeah, the rest of the league does.

Agreed that we are weak on depth. I just am not worried about wins next season. We're not likely to be good enough to do serious damage anyway. So depth isn't a big concern for me. Going into the second year of a new regime you're very likely to have depth problems. They shouldn't be unexpected. So I agree with your perception of this roster, but I'm not worried about it at this point and I find it very predictable.

"Sling the duke"?

$19 a month is for people like us. The teams pay a lot more and get a lot more data. Right, PFF aren't perfect talent evaluators. But probably a lot better than all the folks who don't do it for a living and talk about how people pass or don't pass the eye test for them. https://www.si.com/2015/01/25/pro-football-focus-nfl-neil-hornsby-cris-collinsworth-analytics "To be fair, PFF has come a long way since 2013, so much so that it’s now widely used by NFL teams and players. It’s good to see the Bengals are among them. PFF, while not perfect, is easily the best source of advanced analytics that accurately measures a player’s abilities in the NFL. In a 2015 article, Collinsworth told The MMQB 13 NFL teams were using PFF’s team-specific subscription service and in 2016 he said they were up to 24 teams. So, the Bengals are not alone in using PFF for data mining." https://www.cincyjungle.com/2017/6/30/15895074/study-details-how-bengals-advanced-analytics Two of dozens of articles I've seen about it. PFF doesn't pretend to be perfect. Nobody would. They're proud of their methodology, they think people can get a ton of value out of it, and the fact that teams buy their stuff says they're right. But they're upfront about not the fact that they aren't perfect at knowing what will happen. I don't know, it doesn't seem to me they're "building themselves an out." Sounded to me like they weren't sure what was going to happen, though their opinion was not good. Seemed to me they brought up Hackenberg because they are convinced he's never going to make it, but they don't think Allen is as hopeless as they think Hackenberg is. I didn't re-listen or anything but that's what I got from it.

We were his last team. Doesn't bother me.

You're right. That's why nobody knows which players in the NFL are good. Nobody knows the play calls, line calls, route combinations and individual jobs on plays, so nobody knows which players are any good. PFF is very good. They aren't perfect, of course ... nobody is. And they're better at rating certain positions than others. But they're painstaking, careful and professional. Many NFL teams buy PFF data to use. They don't do that because PFF suck. But predicting how guys will transition between college and the pros is projection, not simply observing and understanding. Even the NFL teams themselves aren't all that good at it, though they're better than anyone else.

They're also saying that guys like Allen can have terrific NFL careers if they follow a path like Newton (the guy who our head coach and GM have history with) and Wentz have. They're saying he can be successful without improving his accuracy. And yet he apparently has improved his accuracy through mechanical improvements with Jordan Palmer. It's a question whether he'll maintain that improvement, but if he does then he should be a better guy than their analysis says he is.

"There is something to work with. He isn't Christian Hackenberg." I don't see anything bone-chilling in this whole thing. "When you compare him with the other three or four highest rated QBs in the class he's just behind them in key important areas." Yup, that's why he needs development. That's why he should sit for a while. It's worth noting. Could Beane have made a mistake and picked a bust? Yeah. Could Allen instead be a guy who with changes to his mechanics and time to pick up the pro game without the pressure of starting turn out to be terrific? Yeah, also possible. That's been the word on him since the beginning. He needs development. I do disagree with one thing they're saying, that guys like Rodgers and Brady can make lousy supporting casts look good. Not so much. Every QB needs a good OL. Without one even the Bradys and Rodgerses are going to look bad. Yeah, they can make lower-level receiving corps look good. But Allen, as has been documented, was under consistent pressure and running for his life. Even the best QBs have problems with that kind of situation. It's a universal about the position. They were right about Edmunds' run fits, he had a lot of problems in that area, but seems to be football smart and willing and capable of improving. He got better. I thought they were interesting about Harrison Phillips not being Kyle Williams II. I'd bought into that, but they make an excellent point, the styles are quite different.

Yeah, they have too much allegiance. That's probably why Tolbert's still on the roster. Oh, wait.

Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson were considered NFL-ready. Wilson was thought maybe too short, but ready. Rodgers was not ready. That's the difference. Agreed that different guys need different things. But we know what this guy needs. Everyone has told us. Jordan Palmer, who has worked with him closely specifically in working towards NFL success has said that the best course would be a year to sit and learn. And he's just agreeing with pretty much everyone else. I very much agree, though, that every decision needs to revolve around his development. Exactly right. Good point. If everyone has misread him and he's ready, great. But that just isn't the way any of this looks. This is why people didn't want him ... he needs development and he needs mechanical changes.

The D definitely looked better after that horrible stretch, even last year. But again, our schedule was pretty weak last year. And we're going to be youngish this year, IMHO. Oughta be interesting.

McCarron, maybe 75% Peterman, maybe 20% Allen, in case of injury or near-inhuman amounts of improvement

It's based on the fact that you can develop guys from the bench. That's a stone-cold fact. Mental reps count and cause improvement. Not throwing a guy in is ideal for a guy who needs to improve his mechanics, because he can imprint the correct movements. And lo and behold, Allen is just such a guy. He needs to get the mechanical movements deep into muscle memory, something you don't have time to worry about when you're game-planning as a rookie. There's a ton that can be learned when not starting. Putting a guy who's unprepared in early only makes him feel (correctly) that he's inadequate. It may be that he might be plenty adequate down the road, but feelings don't recognize distinctions like this. The three best QBs in the game, Rodgers, Brady and Brees, all spent their first year on the bench. Did this handicap their careers? Not at all. In fact, in Rodgers' case, he visibly improved a great deal from his first to his third season, all from the bench. He was awful in his first two preaseasons. It's not a waste having a guy learning on the bench.

I'd love to see them playing him Week 17 only. That would be great handling. Many have indeed said he should play earlier. Most of those are Bills fans. The draft folks said over and over he shouldn't be picked by a team that would play him early, that he needed a year or maybe even two of development. That's what the posters on this board said as well, and was often used as an argument against picking Allen. Only since he became a Bill have folks on here suddenly wanted to see him early. Playing a guy too early can really hurt him. There's certainly a chance he's a lot better than advertised. It's not likely that he'll be good enough to be intelligently and carefully played early this year. Even his own QB coach, Jordan Palmer, thinks he would be much better off being sat this year. If he does play, I only hope that it's a cold-blooded thoughtful decision, arrived at only from watching him and seeing where he is and what would most benefit him. Fan pressure and owner pressure should have absolutely zero impact on the decision.

Complete nonsense. If they're still at this level four or five years in, yeah, it'll be an indictment. But after one year of play, two drafts and two FA classes, only one of which has worn Bills blue in real games, it's very reasonable indeed to have an area or two that's been missed. Particularly when the last regime left them nailed against the lid of the salary cap. They had a ton of areas of concern. Of course they couldn't address all of them as well as they would like to have. It's still very early days.

You're right, I missed the Titans. Point still stands, though. Seven teams go 9-7 and only two get lucky enough to get in the playoffs. Both of those not particularly good teams were lucky enough to come from the AFC. We were 9-7 in 2014 too but weren't lucky enough to have a weak enough AFC that year. And if you didn't hear anyone saying the Titans were lucky it's probably because nobody in Buffalo gives a crap about Tennessee. They were lucky. Pretty much any team that's 9-7 and makes the playoffs is by definition lucky. They were either in a very weak division or a very weak conference. And it's beside the point that Baltimore was another team not really good enough to make the playoffs and we happened to fulfill the conditions to make the playoffs better than them. If they'd made the playoffs, they'd have been lucky. The Bills weren't lucky to beat the Ravens. They were lucky there wasn't another good team in the weak AFC. Did you even read my post? We weren't just lucky to have a very weak schedule. We also got lucky even within that. Atlanta lost Julio in our game, they're 10-6 and three of their losses come in a row right when they have to play us and one of those losses is to us and another to the Dolphins. We got spectacularly lucky to get them right at their weakest. Same with the Chiefs, exactly, a 10-6 team that we caught during their only a three-game losing streak when they also lost to the Jets and the Giants, and again we get them right at their weakest. It wasn't a little lucky, we got very lucky. But pretty much any team that makes the playoffs at 9-7 is getting lucky.

Of course they did. How many playoff teams this year got in without winning 10 games? One out of twelve. Us. The year before? Two out of twelve, one of which won their division with a 9-7. The year before that? Two out of twelve, both by winning their division, the 9-7 Washington and Texas teams. The year before that, 2014? One out of twelve, the 7-8 Panthers who won a horrible division. I could keep going but in the last four years, two teams have managed to get a wild-card birth without winning ten games. Of course we were lucky, wildly lucky, actually, to be in a weak AFC. And further lucky to have a really really easy schedule and luckier still that when we were scheduled against good teams we ran up against them when they were having losing streaks. We weren't a little lucky, we were very lucky.

He may be crusading. I haven't followed him and have no opinion on that. But he still raises a reasonable question. Yes, there's no way to know the answer. But in fact there's no way to know the answer of any question about the future. Still no reason not to ask questions and discuss. That's what we're here for. The reason people don't like it is that it's a somewhat negative question. The same question phrased positively would have raised not a single eyebrow here. Not one. Is anyone getting angry when people post the stories saying Allen's throwing well in OTAs, or that he's picking things up quickly in the QB room? Is anyone angry when in those threads people get excited and say, "I think we've got a winner here. Anyone agree?" Do we see hordes of people jump on those guys and say, "Hey, cut it out, you and your positive agenda. We haven't seen pads on and it's way too early to pose ludicrous questions like that?" Yes, it's too early to know. Probably will be for the next two or three years minimum. But it's not too early to ask questions.

Enough with the Roethlisberger comparisons here, or rather the 2004 Steelers comparison. The 2004 Steelers were the #1 defense in the league. In yards AND in points. They allowed opposing QBs a cumulative passer rating of 68.0 that year. This allowed them to lead the league -by nearly 80 attempts - in rushes per game while still winning a ton. 618 rushes, while the Broncos were 2nd with 534. Yes, the Steelers did a terrific job with Roethlisberger. But the reason they were able to do so is that the rest of the team was absolutely sensational.