Thurman#1

You're comparing Joe Flacco ... to Joe Montana? Seriously, dude? Good lord. Outside of first names and the position they play, there's no comparison there. Can't believe I'm bothering, but in the four years Tyrod was in Baltimore, Flacco's passer ratings were 80.9, 87.7, 73.1 and 91.0. He did have the Super Bowl win season, but Flacco was ripe for the picking and Tyrod couldn't do it. Beating out Montana at the height of his reign as arguably the best in history and certainly top three or four is not something anyone who wants to be taken seriously should compare to beating out Joe Flacco. Yeah, the Ravens wanted Flacco to succeed. But if Tyrod had outplayed him consistently they'd have noticed.

Go count my posts in this thread. Then count Transplants. Check that, I'll do it. Went back and counted through the last 200 posts of this thread, including this one. 31 posts by Transplant.18 by me. Almost double. He's accounted for more than 15% of the last 200 comments. Without him, this thread would've been dead weeks ago. More, in the last month or so, since July 13th - the first two pages of my "content" record - I've posted in 50 threads. About a ton of different topics, from Ragland to Chad Kelly, to the salary cap to tanking to Gary Barnidge to Dr. Omalu on concussions, etc. Now, check Transplant's. To go back 50 threads, two pages, you have to go back to April. Yeah, I have enough interest in this discussion to enter it periodically. But I enter a lot of discussions on unrelated topics. As for your other question, I'm neither a Tyrod fanatic nor a hater. I'm a doubter. Which outside of Bills fandom is by far the most common stance. There are plenty of non-Bills fans who like Tyrod's personality a ton and like watching him play as well. But not so many who don't get why the Bills made him re-negotiate to give back $10 mill and his bizarre Whaley-era contract guarantees. They understand why Beane's stockpiling picks next year in a strong QB draft and in fact think it's a smart move. A few, but not many.

Yeah, it's strange that Young didn't start but three games in his fifth year ... behind Joe Montana in his prime. Hard to figure that out. That is one sad and pathetic argument you've got there. Young was playing at a franchise level from his fifth year on, in camp, in the preseason and when he got his chance. The Niners were thrilled to see they had successfully found Montana's successor and would be able to let Montana go before his game went downhill. Oh, and the criticism you took for pro-rating Tyrod's stats in 2015 from 14 to 16 games is because he was injured and that's the reason he missed those games. Injury is a concern with smaller running QBs. And you were pro-rating quantitative stats (and therefore adding imaginary yards and TDs to his stats) so they got better by adding those two extra games that he never played in. Whereas I was using qualitative stats (passer rating and YPA), which didn't change. Young actually got those stats. Tyrod actually did NOT get the stats you were daydreaming about due to his injury. The last bit of your post maybe rescues it. Yup, Tyrod'll have to improve a great deal. And it would be far better for the Bills if he does improve a whole ton and becomes a franchise QB. It would be great to see, It's just very unlikely.

People go on about his great deep ball, but while he was terrific at throwing the deep ball in 2015, he didn't do nearly as well in 2016. He could easily look better again this year in that part of his game, or not. But it's not a given as many seem to want to imply.

Demetress ... Demetress ... Demetress!!

I get that you're about 90% joking here, but Glenn has stayed on the field pretty well. Three of his five years here, he played 16 games. 72 games in five years, that's pretty durable.

I don't see the Chiefs giving us Alex Smith. And more, I don't see us wanting Smith. I can't see them keeping Tyrod if we brought in Smith. Too much money spent at QB for a team likely to draft one next year anyway. But they wouldn't save any money by cutting Tyrod, he's guaranteed $15 mill. So we'd be spending around $25 mill this year on our top two QBs. Simply wouldn't make sense financially or tactically for us. Nor for KC since they want to win this year and show every sign of wanting to develop their rookie on the bench for a year or two. Everything else aside I'd take Smith over Tyrod in an instant. But it doesn't make sense right now, especially so late in the process. He'd have to learn the offense in two and a half weeks. Even if we balanced this out so KC got equal value, I don't see either team being interested in making that move.

The year after. If they wanted to pull a Skins-with-Cousins move and franchise him twice.

Same difference. They "won't" do it because if they do it they "can't" do something else they want to do. In this case it's an unimportant distinction. You can say, "I won't buy a soda." Or you can say, "I can't buy a soda because I only have two bucks and I want a candy bar instead." Both are correct, "won't" and "can't." Just because nobody's holding a gun to your head doesn't mean you can't use "can't." You can. You can be forced into a decision by logic and by lack of resources. When you'd like to do two things but don't have the resources, you're forced to pick one. You have to do it.

Not true. You do get penalized for going over the cap. Nobody does it, but if you did it, you'd get penalized, probably in terms of the NFL not approving whatever contract or move you were trying which would get you over the cap. In any case, going over the cap has happened, and fairly recently. The Steelers and Niners have been fined for the contracts which caused the problem and if I remember correctly lost a draft pick. So that's wrong. And you're kidding yourself here, Kirby. They Bills absolutely did have to let people go. Same as the average person has to sell his car or give up lattes or his cable or satellite TV contract when money gets tight. No, the police don't come and hold a gun to their head. But they're still forced to do it. And you don't manipulate the cap. It's a hard cap as you said. You don't manipulate your cap situation either. What people call manipulation is really just kicking the contracts down the road. Except the smart teams don't do it. And if you think the fact that the cap has continued to rise means it will do so forever, you are using horribly flawed logic.

I wouldn't take this for granted, though it's certainly very possible. But if they do, they will still have saved a ton of money compared to what a healthy Sammy will/would get. But letting him go might look just fine depending on how they replaced him. Sure, for $16 - $17 mill in 2018 and around $20 mill the year after. Sammy had leverage and choice here too, even without the possibility of sitting out all or part of a season. But Sammy showed every sign of wanting to be here. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that even guys who want to be somewhere will generally go elsewhere for a better contract elsewhere if the difference is more than tiny, especially in second contracts, where guys make their big nest egg.

Kirby, saying that they chose not to sign Sammy is correct. But it is still very reasonable to think that paying what it would've cost to re-sign him would have put the team in an uncomfortable position, forcing them to not sign other people they would like to keep. Yeah, they chose not to sign him, but their unwillingness to pay him the huge money he would have received - maybe a year later but sooner or later - if he'd stayed healthy and was dominant was very likely a big factor, probably one of the two primary factors in terms of why they didn't sign him. And the idea that they haven't been "forced" to let someone go in a decade is misleading. Sure, there hasn't been a case where if they hadn't let someone go the league would have penalized them for going over the cap. But the reason that they haven't been forced to let someone go this very year is that they shed salaries like crazy. It's like saying that since a guy hasn't had his house foreclosed on and sold he must be OK financially ... ignoring the fact that he sold his car, his TV, all the furniture and broke into his 501K to make the payments. And yeah, they could have re-structured Dareus and Glenn ... same as a guy could take out a second mortgage to have extra money to pay the first. But it's not prudent either way. It's just putting today's expenses on tomorrow's salary cap, not something financially intelligent teams do. There's no guarantee that the cap will rise forever. Good teams don't make that assumption. Teams can't sign anyone they want. They're balancing the value of different guys and different positions in their scheme and how many guys they can make their eight to twelve "core" guys and a million other factors. And those decisions get harder the closer you are to the cap, and we were very close to the cap this off-season until we let a bunch of guys we might well have like to keep hit the road. Thanks to the fiscal conservatism they showed in NOT re-structuring anyone (and in letting Sammy go), our cap situation has gotten brighter.

Agreed. This is a blow to Tyrod, but doesn't kill his chances. But Sammy's contribution last year is irrelevant. He might have been injured again even if we kept him, yes, but he's healthy and the odds were very high he would have done better than 430 and 2 TDs.

Twenty-to-one shot, at best. Rather than cut him they'd trade him. They could get something for him. But more, he's a second-year guy who missed his first year, on a team switching systems. It's just not likely to happen. They'll trade him or - most likely - keep him and develop him and see how things work out.

It isn't one guy you'd be providing the info for. It would be the community. But we both know you're not giving this info to anybody, don't we? If your info would check out you would have absolutely no reason not to give it to us all and show us. That's how we know your info wouldn't check out. And knowing that, you've indeed got every reason to keep this info out of the hands of every single person reading this. After all, they might check your work. Wouldn't want that, would we?

Their actions don't contradict my opinion at all. They both took the best QB they could find. Rex might indeed have said he thought Buffalo had found their guy. Rex threw out an awful lot of wildly optimistic hot air. Their actions consist of forcing Tyrod to take a major pay cut to keep him and trading for an extra 1st round pick next year in a year that's at least so far supposed to be the best QB year in a while. You can completely believe me and still understand their actions perfectly. I've said before, Figster, I hope you're right. I just don't think you are. I'd be thrilled to be wrong, but it's not likely on this particular issue. Could happen, though, nothing's impossible.

More of the same. You're missing the point, which is par for the course for you. This isn't about you and me. It's about how people act when they're searching for truth and trying to bring value to the discussion vs. how people act when they're trying to cover up shoddy, partisan work they're not confident of. Confident people share their work and make it easy for people to check it. People who've done shoddy work try to hide it. You're obviously in the latter group. You've already done the work, you know where the plays are. In this thread, you identified the plays so very poorly nobody else could find them without extensive guesswork. If I remember correctly you identified one play - in total - as a third down where the throw was high, without identifying what game you were talking about. Out of nine games. It wouldn't be easy for anyone to find but you. For you, five minutes. Anyone else, hours and hours. And it's not just me who you're stopping from checking. Anyone here could and probably would check a game or two if you'd done what you would if you didn't have something to hide. People who still believe in Tyrod could check too. But you're obviously too scared of even their opinion to show the specific plays. Everyone reading this thread already knows at this point what's going on. You're cowering on this issue like a whipped dog. You'll never give the specific plays. And everyone reading knows why at this point.

Steve Young - Nope. Addressed it earlier in the thread. Look at his stats in his fifth and sixth years. He was still behind Montana, but when he played he was tearing up the league. It was very clear the Niners had a franchise guy waiting for Montana to leave. In Young's fifth year he only played three games but if you pro-rate his stats for the whole season, he'd have been 2nd in the league in completion percentage, 1st by far (120.8 with the next guy being Montana with a 112.4) in passer rating, and 1st in YPA. And he was doing the same in camp and preseason. In those days, it was unusual to have a 2:1 TD:INT ratio. Only two starters did it that year, Montana and Esiason. Young went 8:3. Young had absolutely proved himself well before his sixth year. Alex Smith too, though you have a shade of an argument there. As you say, he had a franchise type 6th year. Yeah, they threw him under the bus thinking they had a better franchise guy (wrongly) but it's beside the point. He'd become a franchise guy, and he's basically been the same guy ever since. Some people don't think of him as a franchise guy. Doesn't matter to my argument, because whatever he is now, that's what he was in his sixth year. Sixth year would still make my point, but it's not true. The light came on for him late in his fifth year, which is what allowed the Giants to win a Super Bowl that year. If he'd still been playing at the level he'd achieved in his first four and a half years, they wouldn't have won that Lombardi. It certainly deserves it. But IMHO the mods have designated it as the sort of off-to-the-side place to isolate some of the weirder Tyrod fanatics and genuine haters.

Dude, always go to the original story. Second stories often start games of Chinese Whispers as they re-phrase and paraphrase and add and subtract. The link to the original was right in the story. The story you're attacking totally makes up one at least one thing. The writer says, "Despite Flutie's accolades, Johnson told Sports Illustrated that he felt he should have been the team's starting quarterback in 1999 based on his stats." Go read the original story. Johnson may well have felt he deserved to start but he didn't say so in the story this guy is poorly re-phrasing. The whole Flutie / Johnson part of the original story is here: "DOUG FLUTIE, who in 1998 signed with the Bills straight out of the CFL, and then battled three straight camps with Rob Johnson, who arrived from Jacksonville in exchange for first- and fourth-round draft picks: 'When I signed it was, Well, I’ll have a chance to compete for the starting job. Weeks later Rob signs for big money. Mine was a very minimal contract, so the writing was on the wall. That’s when the goal kind of shifted to, I just hope I make the team.' "JOHNSON: 'When Doug signed it was kind of a joke, to be honest—no offense to Doug. No one in the NFL really thought much of it. Until I got hurt [in Week 1] and he got his chance and played well, it wasn’t really thought of that seriously. [Flutie won Comeback Player of the Year that season and then signed a four-year $22 million extension.] When they signed Doug to a big deal, I was like, All right, I’m out. I was over it.' "FLUTIE: '[in 1999], I had a legitimate contract now, but I honestly don’t recall any friction at that point. He probably hoped he’d be the guy to play.' "JOHNSON: 'My stats [in 1998] were better than his, but his win-loss record was better than mine. It was the perfect storm. He was the underdog; I was a prototypical quarterback with size. He had the autistic son he did commercials with—that pulled at people’s heartstrings; I was the surfer boy from California. A local radio station had this skit where they used a high-pitched voice for Doug, I guess because he was short, and I sounded like Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was hilarious. That’s how people thought of it.' "FLUTIE: 'I know fans have a tendency to root for the little guy or the underdog. That may have been all that was. I don’t know how his relationship with the fans was. I just went out and played.' "​As Flutie, Johnson and many others have come to realize: Whatever you’re told the day you sign, that isn’t always the reality when you get to camp." That's it. There just isn't a whole lot here. But if you're going to get upset, at least get upset at what the guy actually said. Me, too. Absolutely loved it.

But Rodak neither said he was trash, nor that he should be traded right now. You're exaggerating what he said, which is likely part of the problem. What he actually said was this, "If the trend continues for Ragland through the preseason, it would make sense for the Bills to test the trade market." "If ..." "...test the trade market." How is that unreasonable? There's room for disagreement. but going nuts over it doesn't appear to make any sense to me.

So, basically he said something you don't like? And this is how you react? Got it. Exactly. It's a concern. Second team would be no problem. Third team is cause for concern. And anyone in the media saying anything bad about a bad football team is a weasel and a rat and eighteen other unpopular animals. I'm no big fan of Rodak, but there's nothing particularly wrong with what he wrote here beyond that there's room for disagreement.

I sleep fine. And he doesn't have to "be fit." He fits perfectly, as one of a host of guys who by the end of their sixth years did not manage to prove themselves a franchise QB. And out of that entire group of, what, over a thousand QBs who didn't prove themselves a franchise guy by the end of their sixth year, exactly one, Rich Gannon, then made major improvements and became a franchise guy. Tyrod fits perfectly into a very large group and a smaller but still large group of people who started off with several years on the bench and then got a chance to start and still didn't prove themselves by the end of their sixth year. And again, none of them became franchise QBs but Gannon.

It was four years on the bench, not five. And you're right, there are always growing pains. But the good ones have growing pains and still manage to show themselves franchise guys by year six, no matter what their career arc, again with the single exception of Gannon. Maybe it would have been different if he'd gotten more playing time there, but guys with college records like Tyrod get drafted as backups in the mid-rounds, not starters in the top one or two rounds. Some guys still fight through that and when they get their chance to start they make hay. I'm not quite sure I understand your question. If he becomes our franchise QB, he'll have proved himself a true exception, a very unusual guy and a very unusual case. "... Uncovered his franchise potential after his first season with the Bills"? Wouldn't even be a question, which is why I'm not sure if I'm missing your point. If.

See this folks. Classic. This is how Trannie probably thinks scientists publish each others work too. Like this: Scientist 1: I've come up with kind of a breakthrough here. I combined compound 1 and compound 2 and they produced a small explosion and a bit of compound 3. Awesome. If you don't believe it, do it yourself and check it. Scientist 2: I will check it. How much of each compound did you use? What temperature did you combine them at? Scientist 1: You're a smart guy. Figure it out yourself. (Trannie's first response to me on this issue.) Scientist 2: Hunh? I'm asking a question so I can check your work. That's the way work becomes valuable, if it's repeatable. How much did you use and what temperature did you combine them at? Did you need an enzyme or any other compounds? Scientist 1: Just go do it yourself and if you have the same results we can have a discussion. Trannie's not confident in his results, so he wants to leave himself wiggle room. All he has to do is go back and put the game times on the seven plays he himself picked out. Take him five minutes. That's what a confident person would do. Confident people make it easy to check, not hard. Shows what he himself thinks of his own numbers. They're weaker than a spoonful of vanilla ice cream in an August rain.

Agreed Boldin should help. But sitting on the bench absolutely helps a good QB who is working hard on understanding the game and working hard on his fundamentals while he sits. Aaron Rodgers was awful in training camp and in preseason his first two years. Then in his third year, still behind Favre, a bit better and then in his fourth year it came together, both in camp and in preseason. Much better. Sitting absolutely helps. There's a limit to it. The guy who has sat ten won't be three and a half times better than the guy who's sat three, but it absolutely helps. From an interview with Bob McGinn on his retirement after 38 years as the Packers beat writer: The MMQB: "You documented how fortunate it was that Aaron Rodgers didn’t have to play the first couple of years—he just wasn’t ready." McGinn: “He was a very poor player here for his first two summers and regular-season practices. Fortunately for him, and he knows that down deep, he didn’t have to play early. His delivery was a mess, bad body language, he didn’t know how to deal with teammates. He learned so much from Brett Favre on how to in some ways be one of the guys and relate, and he became much more of a leader. He was really poor and how many great players have ever had a start like that? Not that many. A lot of scouts look at that exhibition tape those first two years and he was a little bit better the third year, but not to any degree, and then he just really developed. He lost a lot of close games in ’08, but by ’09 he was playing great and by 2010 he was maybe the best in the business. And then there have been a lot of playoff disappointments and poor performances. It’s a quarterback league and all the rules are designed for that quarterback to dominate, and he hasn’t done it in the most important times since 2010." https://www.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/13/themmqb-exit-interview-bob-mcginn-green-bay-packers-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-nfl-beat-writer