Thurman#1

The Pittsburgh model is to be absolutely awful, go 1-13 and use the first overall pick to choose Terry Bradshaw. And then win four titles with him. Watch him get injured in his last year and only be able to play one game in 1983. Be pretty average for a few years. Draft two third-round QBs, Brister and O'Donnell. Become a really terrific team with decent QBs and yet don't draft a QB. Be very good but don't have a great QB and don't win a title. Draft Slash in the 2nd. Continue being an excellent team without a QB and continue not winning titles. Then, finally, have a really bad year, go 6-10. Be lucky enough to do this when the next year's draft is the single best QB draft in history. Have the Buffalo Bills decide not to trade up in front of you to steal Roethlisberger because it was too expensive to do so. Draft the third-best QB of the class and have it turn out to be a terrific response to the stroke of luck of having a franchise guy available when your pick arrived. Pittsburgh was wildly wildly lucky that they ever got in position to draft Roethlisberger. The Bills have had the same problem for years now in that they've never been awful enough to get a single top three or four draft pick in a year when it would allow them to get a QB. The Pittsburgh model was to be very very lucky. Not a good model to follow. Yeah, teams often need to walk before they run. But when you're working on reaching not the playoffs but the championship tier, your first priority every single year should be getting a franchise QB. Any time you have a chance to do that - as we appear to have this year - you do it, you bring in excellent scouts and you draft one of the guys they tell you fits your system and stands a good chance of being a franchise guy. You don't wait. You make all the sacrifices you need to make. Agreed that they're not ready to win it all, Tyrod or not. But they don't have a franchise QB. Getting one is mission number one right now and forever until they do so.

Me too. I love them even when they make mistakes. But we see last year differently. I have no interest in the playoffs. Didn't last year either. I want this team to be competitive for a Super Bowl title. Nothing less means squat to me. Last year's team was not good enough to be competitive for a title and frankly I wish they had lost more games instead and improved their draft position. I'm glad for people who feel this was a monkey off their back. My monkey is still there and will be till we're truly an excellent team.

Nope, not toxic. As a matter of fact, you're the one who brought up the word. The guy you replied to didn't use it. Why not dump him now? Trade possibilities, for one thing. What do they lose by keeping him and trying to trade him. They lose nothing till March 16th.

Again, keeping Tyrod isn't $18 mill. It's $23 mill. If we keep him this year, next year in 2019 he'll be somewhere else and we'll be paying yet another $5.6 mill in dead money. The alternative is cutting/trading him now and taking the $8 mill in dead money this year. Saving $15 mill on a QB who doesn't fit the one requirement our coach gave for a QB makes a lot of sense. Hope you're right about a trading partner. I tend to doubt it, but it's certainly very possible. Their threat to pay him the $6 mill roster bonus had to be a wake-up call for teams that assumed he'd be cut. He could easily be cut in March if they can't trade him of course, but that's not as much of a gimme now as it had been. It was smart of the Bills to put that out there. Thing is, the league isn't starved for QBs. the league is starved of really good QBs but Tyrod being available wouldn't change that. And this year is a very tough year for FA QBs because of the large number of replacement value guys on top of this year being a good year in the draft. Cousins is the kind of guy who is almost never available in FA, and on top of that there's whoever becomes available out of Keenum/Bridgewater/Bradford. On top of Rosen, Darnold, Mayfield, Allen and Jackson. This isn't a good year to be holding onto an FA of Tyrod's ability and trying to maximize his value in trade. Last year would've been a significantly better time to try for a trade. Last year the leading FAs were Cutler, and Kaepernick. If Romo hadn't retired he would've made things much better but once the Pats decided - or said they did - to keep Garoppolo, those were the best guys out there, Cutler and Kaepernick. With what was widely considered a bad year in the draft, though that looks now to have been a misjudgement. But this year there's a lot of choice out there for teams unhappy with their situation at QB.

Would they trade back? I wouldn't be surprised but I bet they'll be looking for picks next year and in the future at this point. They don't need more this year, really. But can they start a conveyor belt so that each year they have more coming to them than anyone else does? I'm sure they'd love to start something like that. We should be - in the long term - hoping to start working that way as well. But just as for us getting a franchise QB has to be #1 and then probably toughening the front seven the next ... the Browns are going to have bigger priorities than bringing in more picks. They would demand extra value, and would turn things down if the guys they want are there. And they're likely to be. Oh, and Cleveland doesn't need Tyrod. They've got Kiser and Kessler. Tyrod wouldn't mean anything to them. In any case, my guess is no, they'd rather have one of the top seven or ten guys, the absolute blue chippers, rather than more numbers for a team that's already got a ton of picks. Just a guess. But the Bills should ask. They should ask everyone at this point. I'm not a believer, but I'm sure hopeful about it.

Disadvantaged. Their average position of drive start was 27th in the league. Bad field position is a killer for a defense and we consistently started in worse positions than nearly any other team. Decent, with reasonable consistency. Except for those absolutely horrible three games in a row, they were pretty decent the whole year. Ball-hawking. 5th in INTs per drive. Promising. Need more horses up front, but for the first year of a new regime, not bad at all.

My tendency is to like Teddy. But I'm not pounding the table at all. But Bridgewater's stats were in his first two years. Let's repeat that, his first two years. He was still extremely early in his life cycle and he was improving quite a bit. Haven't a clue if he'll improve more, but there's a hell of a lot better chance of a guy playing better than he did when he was that young than someone improving on stats made mostly in his fifth, sixth and seventh years. Wanna put it as, "he hasn't proved more than Tyrod," and I'm all in. That's pretty fair.

This is the only reasonable change, IMHO. And it would undoubtedly cause some controversies about which version would've been correct. But would be an overall improvement, most calls would be correct.

"The Bills are trying to keep him, and it’s Brown’s preference to stay if they hit his price." Nothing wrong with any of this.

He's gone.

Compared with nobody was he broke. Compared with other owners he was less stratospherically wealthy. But that was related largely to macro-economic reasons, the U.S. economy, the large number of tech billionaires in the last 20 - 30 years, inflation rates, etc. The industries he made his fortune in also did not have a lot of billionaires come out of them. Yeah, the wild explosion in the value of teams accounted for most of his wealth. But he started out by doing very very well in a variety of areas, oil and gas, insurance, even trucking and concrete paving. He was simply an excellent business man, a guy who knew how to run businesses so they would make money.

Anytime you limit your options you run the risk of hurting the team. But at the time, more than half the teams in the NFL were running cash to cap systems. It wasn't a big deal. CBA Fan explained it best, above. Signing bonuses were amortized normally. But they didn't write any more checks that year, for all player outlays (signing bonuses, roster bonuses, incentives and salaries) than a total of whatever the cap was that year. Their actual cash outlays were never higher than the cap. Cash to cap. Smoothed out the accounting ups and downs for the organization itself. Made it much less likely they'd ever get in cap jail either the way the team looked at it, or the way the NFL looked at it. Several people above are saying that they wouldn't give normal signing bonuses that were amortized. That's a bit misleading. They were normal deals. The NFL, in constructing their salary cap situation figures for each team, looked at them the way they looked at any signing bonus, as amortized across the years of the contract. Of course, the Bills kept charts on that as well, since the NFL is the ref of the salary cap system. But teams that ran cash to cap never had cap problems with the league, their decision process rewarded decisions that kept the NFL figure low. But through a cash to cap lens, a $20 million signing bonus, since it was a cash outlay, was put down by the Bills as all against this year's cash outlay. So they would subtract $20 mill from the amount of cash that they would outlay for the rest of that year.

Yeah, he's purely expressing an opinion here. And he never pretends otherwise. Same with Carucci. And yet you're still attacking Gabriel. And not only did you attack the messenger in your first post but you're doing an excellent job of continuing here. The way to NOT attack the messenger is to talk about what he said rather than him. It's really a very simple thing.

I wouldn't mind Mayfield either.

Love your guarantee. Do the wrong thing, Bills!! Do what this guy says is the wrong thing!!! I do remeber Fitz, but he never had a season like this one by Keenum. A TD% fo 4.6 and an INT % of 1.5? When Fitz's numbers get up towards a full season and teams have the video on him, you find he has decent TD%s and poor INT%s. Same with Cassel, look at his INT percentages. I'm not sure at all about Keenum, though I tend to like him and hope he maintains this level. I'd guess that he stays close but I really don't have any commitment behind that belief. It's a bad year to be an FA QB with so many good FAs out there on top of the good QB year in the draft. A very bad year. But I still think Keenum gets a lot more than this. I could be wrong.

Their guy might be one guy. Or two. Or three. I suppose more, though I doubt it. Depends on what their scouts think. If they think three guys are gonna stand a really good chance and would fit the system they're implementing in Buffalo, then they should go with that. No particular reason to artificially limit their options. The scouts tell you what to think. You don't tell them how many good players you want to hear about. Most years it would be one guy. This year it could easily be more.

For nothing. They're probably the #1 strategy on these boards re: press reports, but as anyone who knows a thing about logic knows, the attack the messenger fallacy - used a bunch of times already in this thread - has absolutely zero logical or argumentative efficacy. None whatsoever, and yet people consistently use it, sadly. Exactly.

I would absolutely love to be in the Browns position. Absolutely love it. They're sitting pretty and look in terrific shape. And the problem wasn't spending too many picks on one position. It was choosing the wrong guys. Picking Manziel for instance, was just dumb. Now they look set to spend yet another high pick on the same position and become a consistent winner for a decade or two.

Nor was Peyton Manning. No such thing as a lock. It wouldn't be a wild gamble whatsoever. It would be a thoughtful, intelligent, considered gamble. If they do it. My guess is they will if they can, if the one or two guys that they are - you'd have to guess - specifically interested in are available. They likely got those picks specifically to get a QB if the situation was right. They won't be bankrupting their future even if they're wrong.

Nice post.

While some of your arguments make a lot of sense, Daboll isn't thought of as a bad OC choice. Just the opposite, he has a terrific reputation as a smart guy with success in a lot of places, including Alabama and New England. Nobody's going to hold a bad year in KC with Matt Cassel as the QB against him. Nobody. Our bridge QB will likely be signed before the draft. He won't know if or when we will draft someone. And teams that will bring him in could all draft someone. The bottom line is this, it'll depend where the chips fall. There are so probably gonna be so many good FA QBs available this year after Minny makes their decisions that it's an unusual year. There isn't usually a Cousins out there for FA QBs to compete against, nor such a number of good draft QBs that teams like the Giants, Denver, Cleveland etc. might or might not be committed to. It's gonna be a bit of a tough year for FAs, even pretty good ones. They're not gonna be able to sit back and take only the best opportunities. And the problem with Tyrod is he isn't a good bridge. He just isn't. A good bridge QB allows you to input the offense you want to run after the bridge guy is gone. Tyrod doesn't do that as shown by the tidal wave of "we need to change the offense to fit Tyrod's skills" choruses last year. That's not who you want as a bridge. As a backup or a team that believes in him as a longer-term starter, Tyrod's style would be a good match. As a bridge, no. As a bridge on a team that wants to run a system that requires a guy who can throw from the pocket, emphatically absolutely decisively no. The last thing you want is a guy who'll cause you to spend $23 mill in cap for one year's service and then make you change the playbook if you expect him to have success. The very last thing. You may well be right that we end up with a cheap bridge guy rather than an expensive one. Very possible. But it could also happen the other way.

Love seeing that great old memory again. But yeah, the Sammy thing was a huge failure. I guess you can argue that the shot wasn't the miss, the assist (the trade) was. Fair enough. But overall a huge failure. Not a lot of question about that at this point.

We have a large amount of cap space in 2019 largely because we don't have anybody really under contract. Once we start to construct a team we'll see what our space actually looks like. Right now we have no idea. It's like the guy in October saying "Man, my budget for next year looks fantastic. I haven't committed to spending almost anything. I'm gonna save a ton, ignoring the fact that his present lease runs out in December, he hasn't got a place to live, a car, any insurance ... Sometimes a lot of future cap space is a fantastic thing. Other times it just means you haven't begun to make commitments to people yet. That's what it means for us. Leaving off guys like Tyrod and Wood, who are still listed but will actually be gone, here's what we have under contract: Cordy Glenn Jerry Hughes McCoy Charles Clay Micah Hyde Jordan Poyer Shaq Lawson Hauschka Tre White Patrick DiMarco Ducasse Andre Holmes Zay Jones Dion Dawkins Adolphus Washington Matt Milano Nathan Peterman That's not the core of a team, it just isn't. Don't get me wrong, there are a few more but the guys above are the ones who we'll be building around. For the record, here are the rest: Marcus Murphy, Tanner Vallejo, Keith Towbridge, Breon Borders, Nordly Capi, Conor McDermott, Brandon Reilly, De'Ondre Wesley, Xavier Woodson-Luster, Cory Carter, Jason Croom, Malachi Dupre, Aaron Green, Rickey Hatley, Josh James, Marquavius Lewis and Adam Redmond. So if you look at this whole group, do you see an o-line? A D-line? An LB corps? A QB? WRs? I certainly see our starting safeties and maybe a TE if they continue with mostly a one-TE attack, if they stay healthy, but beyond that? The reason we have a lot of space is because we don't have a team yet for that year. You look at who Philly already has under contract for 2019 and you're like, dang, that's a very good team already. Not us. We just don't know who we'll be.

Yup. But that's what low-cost FA is for. Fill the holes with cheap to mid-priced journeymen. Then build through the draft. Personally, I don't expect much next year. We're not likely to get so lucky with an easy schedule and the tough teams all being faced during the worst streaks of their seasons. I don't see success next year. Just a chance to continue putting together the team that should start to look good soon.

Yeah, you were indeed putting out a dumb stat for my arse, a completely irrelevant stat which had zero to do with anything I'd said. You misread my post, got irritated, refused to admit it and now your panties are so wadded up you're discussing me with other people and actually agreeing with Transplant. I've said again and again i"m not especially a Siemian fan. Just think in many ways he's a better option than Tyrod, as are many others. You just misread me and now your ego's all involved. Fine, guess I know who you are now.