Thurman#1

Dalton's playoff appearances were in his first four years in the league. He improved a lot in year five, just as the team around him started to go downhill. But again, no way Cincy lets him go.

OK, they're Nix's offenses too. Happy? Everything, offense, defense, etc. got more Whaleyized as the years passed under his stewardship. But things didn't get better. The reason I included all four is that you said he built a top ten offense and I simply wanted to show we didn't even have one at that time, much less one that Whaley built. Whaley wasn't awful, but his drafts weren't good, the Sammy tradeup was awful and he had major communication issues with both coaches. From what I saw, his pro personnel record was very fine. But he didn't build anything. This wasn't a team on the rise. I like your posts, Klos. I strongly disagree here but I enjoy reading your stuff. See you.

#4 in points allowed, #4 in yardage and top ten in sacks ... so you're saying that Whaley built the 2014 defense that racked up those stats, right? He's right, that is indeed bull ****. That defense was overwhelmingly built during Nix's tenure as GM. Whaley became GM on May 16th, 2013. So the starters on that excellent defense brought in during Whaley's tenure were: Preston Brown Brought in under Nix: Brandon Spikes, Jerry Hughes, Dareus, Bradham, Stephon Gilmore, nickel CB Robey-Coleman, Aaron Williams, Da'Norris Searcy Brought in before Nix: Kyle Williams, Leodis McKelvin Whaley may well have had some influence on some of Nix's picks, but it's impossible to know if or how much or even if Nix was overruling him sometimes. Saying Whaley "built" that defense is indeed ridiculous. He also didn't even have, much less "build" a top ten offense. Offenses under Whaley's tenure were ranked: 2013: 19th 2014: 26th 2015: 13th 2016: 16th

Agreed. The Dareus and Lynch trades were very alike. We didn't get enough back. And neither guy was playing anywhere near the top of his game for quite a while before the trade was made, which greatly lowered their values. Both had major problems off the field too. Both were trades that could have been avoided by the guys in question just playing well. Both played themselves off the roster, both forced the team to le them go for poor value. Both were let go partly because of contract situations. Quick note: Here are Marshawn's yearly YPA figures. Guess which came in the last two years in Buffalo: 2007: 4.0 2008: 4.1 2009: 3.8 2010: 3.6 2011: 4.2 2012: 5.0 2013: 4.2 2014: 4.7 2015: 3.8 2017: 4.3 Hard to figure at what point a team might have traded the guy for very little value, hunh? Interestingly, in 2009 and 2010, Freddy Jackson 4.5 and 4.2 YPC behind the Bills OL. Hmmmmm.

The word "big" wasn't used. And if Beane said, "I'm a Carolina fan," IMHO it would be a very minor story. I strongly agree with you that Doug Marrone left this team better off than it was when he got here. Marrone opted out, which hurt a lot of people and left a bad taste, but the team was stronger. He led them to the same record, 9-7, that has gotten such overwhelmingly good reviews this year. But then they switched systems yet again. The Sammy tradeup - not the pick but the tradeup - and the inability to bring in a QB killed Whaley. Not fighting against the Ryan selection too. And also his ending up having problems getting along with both of the coaches hired on his watch.

Heh heh heh. Absolutely. Who wouldn't trade a first round pick for the 12th best player in the league, a guy who was apparently better than Matt Stafford, Jared Goff, Kirk Cousins and Derek Carr, according to this list. We might get a 1st and a 3rd. Hey, Tyrod was better than Goff, maybe the Rams would trade Goff for Tyrod!! Tyrod, Woods and Sammy together again!! Have to say, I really like PFF's OL grades a lot.

No, we're not angry at Hotrod for disappearing in a first round playoff game. We're not angry at him at all. We're disappointed in him for playing like Hotrod with great consistency for three years. Dalton's better. Quite a bit better. Cincy isn't getting rid of him. I'm curious, though, how did Dalton screw up in the playoffs five years in a row when he only appeared in the playoffs in four years? In any case, he hasn't done well in the playoffs. How much of that is because of him? Some. And some of that is because those were his first four years in the league. He appeared to have gotten quite a bit better in his fifth year, just as the team got a lot worse around him. And how much was due to the fact that in his rookie year, the playoff team, the Texans, had the 2nd best defense in the league, and they played against the 7th the next year, the 10th the next year and the 11th the next year. Certainly that doesn't excuse bad play, but it helps to understand that he was a young player against good defenses. In any case, he's a better QB now than he was then. If you don't believe that, you shouldn't worry. Cincy isn't letting him go.

They aren't trading Dalton and if they did they'd get a lot more than Glenn.

I'm not gonna argue whether the Pats have cheated. I think they have. But it's beside the point. Brady is truly great. And i agree that Giselle might've been right that year. That was a year they made the Super Bowl. And yeah, it's harder without great WRs. And most teams that win SBs are great teams, with great personnel guys, so they tend to have at least one good WR. But good QBs sometimes have some times without good WRs and many can do quite well. Look at Carson Palmer in 2009. He had Chad Johnson on the downslope and nobody else particularly good. Still played pretty well and got the Bengals to 10-6. Look at Drew Brees. He's made decent WRs look good his whole career. Look at Matt Stafford the year after Megatron left. And as you yourself said, Russell Wilson has done pretty well with pretty decent guys. Look at Flacco the year they won the SB. No receiver got more than 921 yards that year. Boldin was good but a possession receiver by that point, though I guess there's a good argument to be made for Boldin. That's who I can come up with after a few minutes thought. I'm sure there are others.

Agreed that the game isn't played on the stat sheet. It's played on the field. By 22 players. Plus special teams. And sure, there are plenty of guys who inspire the team to play better. Look at Ray Lewis. Doesn't matter. Giving a QB a win-loss record is as dumb as giving Ray Lewis one. As for the team playing different when a new QB comes in, a lot of times that's because the defense has planned for the first guy. Or the second guy's skillset is a better one for attacking that particular defense. But did Flutie make the team better in Week 15 when Johnson started and went 1 for 3 and then Flutie replaced him and the Bills offense scored 10 points and they lost and Johnson got the loss in that stupid stat? Or game 13 in 2000 when Johnson went 6 for 18 for 44 yards. But the team plays better when Flutie came in, so how come when Flutie did in fact come in during that game he went 2 for 9 for 31 yards? The team must have been playing better, right? Sorry, it just doesn't make sense. It's a team game. Teams are what win and lose. I enjoy reading your stuff even You're a good poster. I enjoy reading your stuff even even when I disagree with you. But on this subject, there's no winning. If you want to talk about this more, feel free, but I'm out of here. The point is made, and it's correct. It's a team game. Losses and wins are team results, not individual results. It's a stupid stat and a stupid idea. Period.

Matt Cassel didn't look like Tom Brady that year, he just didn't. Go look at the stats. He looked like what he was, a guy good enough to lead a team that had gone 16-0 the year before to an 11-5 record against a slate of opponents with a historically bad cumulative win-loss record. That was a terrifically easy schedule for the Pats that year. Plenty of players have gone from the Pats to other teams to perform very well. Wilfork, Richard Seymour, Asante Samuel, Chandler Jones, Sheard, Jamie Collins, Revis for a year or two. Receivers not so much. Terry Glenn was good after but I can't think of a single other one of all the WRs who went elsewhere. Brady IS a QB who has made average to poorish wide receiver groups to sensational success. Again, I'm not the one who brought up Brady. You did.

He asked, I believe, for guys with as much upside as Alex Smith. Several of those guys you list don't have Tyrod's upside, much less Smith's. Osweiler? Barkley? Clemens? Derek Anderson? Please. And I don't see any as being as good as Alex Smith, except maybe a healthy Bradford. Maybe. Better than Tyrod? Yeah, some of them. Cheaper, yeah. As much upside as Alex Smith? Please.

I think you've got a reasonable argument here, but IMHO the difference between Tyrod and Smith isn't as marginal as you're making it out to be. Look at completion percentages and YPA, two good stats to look at because they tend to show risk-taking (longer YPAs show more risk-taking) and efficiency (shorter YPAs tend to produce higher completion percentages). And I'll leave out Smith this year. Tyrod's last three years and Smith's last three before this year. Smith's Completion Percentages: 2016: 67.1% (6th), 2015: 65.3% (11th), 65.3% (12th) Tyrod's Completion Percentages: 2017: 62.6% (18th), 2016: 61.7% (21st), 2015: 63.7% (18th) Smith's YPAs: 2016: 7.2 yards (tied for 17th), 2015: 7.4 yards(15th). 2014: 7.0 yards (tied for 27th) Tyrod's YPAs: 2017: 6.7 yards (27th), 2016: 6.9 yards (26th), 2015: 8.0 yards (5th) What you see is that Smith consistently has significantly higher completion percentages and also significantly higher YPAs. Tyrod's first year YPA was terrific, but he couldn't maintain it, his deep ball accuracy for some reason dropped a lot after that first year. And again, this leaves out Smith's terrific year this year.

There's no possible way to tell if this is true beyond going through play by play. I'm sure you're not going to do that anymore than anyone else is. IMHO you're remembering what you want to remember, a very human characteristic, it's confirmation bias, something we're all very subject to. Yeah, so many variables here. We can all agree that the wide receivers weren't very good this year, I think, but the stat this thread is about has so many variables. Would short passes tend to have smaller separations? Tyrod threw shorter than most QBs. Man vs. zone. Whether the QB held the ball longer, how the routes affected things ... there's just a million variables that make it a stat that's not particularly informative as far as coming to definitive conclusions on what it means.

The data isn't actually spread out over the entirety of two years. It's mostly in his first year. To be precise, ten games in his first year, 2015, when teams hadn't figured out well how to play him yet, and only five games in that second year, 2016. And those five games in that second year, 2016, were against middling to poorish pass defenses. The 9th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 29th ranked passing defenses overall by yards, and when ranked by defensive passer rating the 13th, 14th, 17th, 30th and 31st ranked.

Steve Young is an excellent example ... but for my point, not yours. By his fifth year in the league he wasn't starting in SF due to Montana being there but he was absolutely ripping up the preseason and in his appearances during the year as well. Not his fifth year in SF. His fifth year in the league. His completion percentage leaped up to 69.6%, , his TD:INT ratio went to 8:3 (at a time in the league when only one starter had a 2:1 ratio or better), and had the best YPA in the league. He had fully and completely arrived. If there had been free agency at the time, SF couldn't have kept him. He'd have torn up the league somewhere else. And you can say that in his first year as a starter in SF that he went 5-5, but besides being extremely misleading you'd be wrong. It wasn't Young who went 5-5, it was the Niners who went 5-5 in games Young started. Wins is a team stat. And again, that's wildly misleading. The Niners team wasn't particularly good that year (1991). But Young was terrific. He threw 17 TDs and 8 INTs in 10 starts and 11 games (only four guys had a 2:1 ratio or better, and 17 TDs was very very good back then. It tied Young for 7th in the league in TDs, even though he only appeared in 11 games.). Got an insanely good 9.0 YPA (best in the NFL) and a 101.8 passer rating (best in the league). And had a 64.5% completion percentage (3rd in the league). Saying that he went 5-5 that year is extremely misleading. Young was sensational that year and he had been excellent for two or three years at that point. And that sounds an awful lot like nonsense that Walsh said it was "four years of playing time usually with the same OC, QB coach." Like if the Niners had brought in Dan Marino it would have taken four years for him to get better? Nah. Not buying it. Where is the link to this Walsh quote you're talking about saying that it takes "four years of playing time usually with the same OC, QB coach"? I don't doubt for a minute Tyrod can improve either. Very slightly. But we know who he is. Next year he'll probably find a team that'll let him start because they've got nothing better. Maybe it'll even be a Texas or Denver situation. You watch, he'll be Tyrod, with the same problems - and talents - that he has already shown. We know who he is. Tyrod's had seven years. Again, of all QBs ever, chosen early or chosen late, with one OC or many ... all QBs ever ... only one guy, Rich Gannon, didn't prove himself a franchise guy in his first seven years and then did so later. Seven years is plenty of time to show what you've got. It's also plenty of time to develop habits - good and bad - that by that time are almost impossible to break. We know who Tyrod is.

Those aren't reasons to say McVay fixed Goff. They are reasons to say he helped Goff, which makes sense. What also makes sense is to point out that Goff's improvement absolutely helped McVay. And Cousins is a good example of why QB development is huge. In McVay's first year as Cousins' OC, Cousins wasn't all that impressive. 10 TDs and 9 INTs and an 86.4 QB rating. Then the next year, Cousins' light came on and he got a ton better. Did McVay help? Sure. Was Cousins' growth as a simple factor of time in the league and time on the field also a huge part of it and probably the largest part? Yeah, absolutely. If it was McVay, Cousins would have gotten better in McVay's first year, not his second. Many rookie QBs are absolutely awful and then take major steps upwards in their second year. Breaking news: many of those QBs do not have McVay as their coach.

I don't care that you don't care where a team starts. It's HUGE. There's a chart that shows the possiblity of points at each yard mark of the field. When you start a drive at the opponent's 20, your likelihood of scoring a TD is around 50%. Good field position is gigantic. http://phdfootball.blogspot.jp/2013/06/field-position-and-scoring.html http://www.drivebyfootball.com/2011/06/our-expected-points-model.html I don't excuse the defense giving up 34 points in that game. But that 49ers defense was terrific. Let me repeat, ""But his scheme is likely to win a Super Bowl only if nearly every other phase of team play is really really good." That's what I said, and it stands. Sensational defenses both years the Niners made the conference championship. The rest of that SF team gave them two terrific drive starts in the SB. Without that they're not even competitive. That team was spectacular all the way around. How did Roman's scheme do in 2014 when the team wasn't as terrifically talented? The defense drops to 10th in points - still pretty good but not great - and they go 8-8. Yup, good point. If the run game is your specialty, you need to have the lead a lot. You will have a hard time coming from behind. That means you need a good defense. And you need short fields often and you need the lead so the run game's clock-burning tendency helps you rather than hurts you.

Clay would lose us $2.5 mill. He might be a cut but probably not for the cap. More for injury / scheme concerns, if it happens, which I kinda doubt. Incognito would save us a bit of money, but if he's a cut it won't be because of the cap. Glenn would cost us as much in dead cap as we'd save by not paying him. We'd save like $100K. Lorenzo Alexander would save us about $2 mill. McCoy would save us about half a mill. I could see a trade where they get something back, but not a cap cut. I don't see anyone being cut for cap reasons, really. Lots of cuts, of course, but for other reasons. He'll be very expensive for them to re-sign. I can't see the letting Keenum go, but Keenum's a UFA and Bridgewater also isn't signed for next year. Can they keep both guys? It'd be seriously expensive. They might have to let one of them go. And I'm with you, if Bridgewater is available I'd like to see the Bills work to bring him in.

Agreed that Wanny was bad. But the thing that killed me about all those moves was the constant switch from 3-4 to 4-3 and back. You keep doing that and you will make good players into bad ones and you'll shed guys who then play well elsewhere. But though Moats, Mario, Carrington, Searcy, and Dareus played elsewhere, there were no world-beaters in that group after they left Buffalo. Just decent players. I just wish they'd have picked one scheme, 4-3 or 3-4, and when they fired a DC, they had then brought in a different DC who could at least have coached the same personnel lineup even if there were tweaks and differences between the systems. Instead they went back and forth and back and forth. It's where the Rex move killed us. We moved from a very successful Schwartz 4-3 to a system that needed different guys.

What did I say? Oh, yeah, "But his scheme is likely to win a Super Bowl only if nearly every other phase of team play is really really good." Yup, that SF team is a perfect example of that. I was absolutely correct. People forget that during their late comeback they had two drive starts inside Baltimore's 25 yard line. That was huge. One at the 20 and one at the 24. Ten points off that. The defense and STs put them in position to win that game, and they still couldn't quite do it.

But Roman isn't the DC in Baltimore. Assistant head coach and tight ends coach. He's not the guy primarily responsible for the offensive system there. That's Mornhinweg. They're 14th in points per drive and 24th in yards per drive. And that's with the best average drive start field position in the league. The defense and STs consistently put their offense in good positions.

Roman did a pretty good job covering up for a lot of weaknesses. He schemed brilliantly. But his scheme is likely to win a Super Bowl only if nearly every other phase of team play is really really good. He's a bit Paleozoic.

After that ... Zay Jones will be a second-year guy. He could easily improve. It wouldn't be all that difficult to bring Matthews back or to bring in another guy like him as a free agent. Clay should be back and whoever's next will probably have the good luck to be throwing to Shady as well. Once you've got your #1 guy, it's a lot easier to get by with complementary guys. As for your Pats remarks, how did Deion Branch do after he left New England. Ben Watson? Ben Coates? Amendola's never managed 700 yards in a season, not in his whole career. As for Gronk and Hernandez and Coates and Watson, I said WR. It ain't a mistake that when you tried so hard to find good pass catchers in NE, you ended up with a lot of TEs. And by the way, before he came to Buffalo, Clay was considered one of the best receiving TEs in the league. Then he got here and played with Tyrod and disappeared. Agree with Randy Moss and Cooks, but how many years of Brady's career did he have those two. Edelman? Yeah, maybe, but I'd like to see him on another team before I committed. He's a guy who just fits the system up there. The point stands. You brought up Brady as having good WRs, and in fact, through most of his career, he hasn't had very impressive WR groups at all.

Agreed. It has gone off the rails, and I've been a large part of that. It was a very interesting OP. Great job, TwoAndFourteen.