Thurman#1

That their offenses were pretty good? Quick quiz question: what do these teams have in common? The Texans, Chiefs, Dolphins, Giants, and Lions? They are the five playoff teams whose OFFENSE was ranked lower than the Bills at #16. As did the non-playoff 9-7 Broncos and 9-7 Buccaneers. I'll tell you what else all those teams had in common. They didn't win the Super Bowl. Generally true, but I honestly don't know if our run game could improve. They were insanely good.

Because something in the future can not be predicted with one hundred percent accuracy in NO WAY means that the idea of a system for success in football is bogus. There pretty much in human interaction is nothing that can be predicted with absolute accuracy. Doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve your chances. And that's what successful systems do, they consistently improve your chances, not just in football but in life. People often say the draft is a coin flip, that it's complete chance, and that simply isn't true. If it were pure chance, there would be as large a percentage of successful 7th rounders as there are successful 1st rounders. Good teams work little tiny advantages to improve their chances.

Sure, no absolute locks. You might get the next Len Bias or your guy might lose a leg in a car accident or lose motivation when he gets a few mill in the bank. But there are near-locks like Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck. I'd go through the two horrible losing seasons of a total rebuild in a second for a guy like that. Plus it's not like if there are no QB locks that year you don't get anything at all. It's worth it to significantly improve your chances. I have no idea whether Darnold or any of these guys next year is one of those. But it's not like you only get the first pick in the first round. You get the first pick in every round. And you can do what the Browns have done and trade back and make sure you're in good position to get great picks for years. I wish we'd rebuilt this year, honestly. IMHO it would have been the best thing in the long run. Very much agreed, of course that they shouldn't reach.

It's not like the Jets are out for Darnold and nobody else. More like the best QB in the draft. If Darnold stays in school, it might disappoint the Jets but it's a long way from saying they failed.

Respect for Denver makes a ton of sense. They have two third-year guys at QB, both in a very good position to show a lot of improvement. They had nine wins last year with a second-year QB who'd never thrown a pass. This year that guy has a year's experience and the other guy probably is starting to understand what he's looking at. There's very good reason to respect them and predict a considerably better outcome than here in Buffalo this year. Heh heh heh heh.

Well, of course not. Of course how good the team is is going to have a great deal more impact on their record than projected strength of schedule. Duh. The question isn't whether projected strength of schedule correlates to wins. It's whether projected strength of schedule correlates to actual strength of schedule and how strongly. And how actual strength of schedule correlates to wins and how strongly. Plus, as Zonabb says above, one season of data says very very little in terms of proof anyway.

Yes, the Bears had a lot of injuries in 2016, as the chart shows. Rusty Jones retired in 2013. During the Rusty Jones era, the Bears overall had few injuries, even when they weren't a particularly good team. The Bills indeed went up and down but overall their injury level since Rusty left has been high.

I thought he addressed that very clearly. He's not saying that once you have a failed culture you are trapped there forever and can never ever turn things around. In fact he says the opposite, that culture can be changed. So he didn't need to address the Rams from 15 years ago. It's clear he understood that they had a successful culture for awhile but now they don't. Yes, they had a successful culture specifically in the Super Bowl era. But things started to go downhill before Kelly retired. Basically, when they had Polian they were kicking butt. Then they lost him. And again, yeah, teams do gain and lose successful cultures. It doesn't happen in a month or so, though, it takes time and a tremendous amount of energy directed extremely well (or poorly if the change is for the worse) to heal a culture. If Lombardi wanted to talk about a team that excels without a franchise QB, he could have talked about the Steelers. They didn't win a title till they got Roethlisberger, but under Cowher with QBs like Slash and O'Donnell they were terrors, an extremely successful organization. It happens a lot, but so does the opposite. Wilfork was still excellent for a couple of years in Texas till he got too old. Terry Glenn was excellent elsewhere. Mankins was excellent in TB, though the rest of the team wasn't very good. Chandler Jones had 11 sacks and four forced fumbles last year in Arizona and was generally very good. Jamie Collins was very good for Cleveland, though he was not surrounded by a great roster. In any case, you're right that Belichick finds guys who fits his system very well indeed and those guys sometimes don't do well elsewhere. I may not like their culture but you can't argue that it's not successful.

DE. Then RB and WR. Then S. It's one of the results of having salary cap problems. Lack of depth. Further complicated by scheme switches.

It's worth an awful lot, but it's not worth more than $13.3 B. If it were, someone would be paying that $13.3 B. They're not. Yeah, it would be nice if the world was fair. It's not, and worrying about that is a waste of time. It's just the way it goes in a capitalist society. Is Tom Cruise worth $25 mill a movie? Yeah, to the movie companies desperate for a big opening weekend who know that people come out to see Cruise movies, he is. Does that mean that his work has innate value worth more than 500 times the $25 K a youngish teacher might make? No, of course not, but again, the world isn't fair. If a person is so worried about this, he should probably opt out of the system, stop following football and movies and maybe move to a country that's more socialist in its values. I quoted Musashi today in a different thread but the same quote works well here (and pretty much everywhere, really). "Whatever your determination or will power, it is foolish to try to change the nature of things. Things work the way they do because that is the way of things." Exactly. In America, this is the way of things.

I find it really hard to understand how anyone could call our pass defense "excellent." We were 12th in the league at defensive passer rating, with an 85.9. And in a four-way tie for 22nd in the league in defensive passing efficiency, with a defensive YPA of 7.5. That's not excellent. I think people try to use the fact that they only allowed 3,582 yards total in passing, 6th in the league, as evidence that they were really good. But that is largely a reflection of how infrequently teams passed against us. We had the lowest amount of passes thrown against us, #32 in the league with only 511 attempts. That's why we had a relatively low amount of yards.

McDermott has turned around defenses very well indeed. But not necessarily in the first year. 2008 Eagles 3rd in yards, 12th in points, 4th in points McDermott becomes defensive coordinator before 2009 season 2009 Eagles 12th in yards, 19th in points 2010 Eagles 12th in yards, 21st in points 2010 Panthers 18th in yards, 26th in points McDermott becomes defensive coordinator before 2010 season 2011 28th in yards, 27th in points 2012 10th in yards, 18th in points 2013 2nd in yards, 2nd in points 2014 10th in yards, 21st in points 2015 6th in points, 6th in points 2016 21st in yards, 26th in points There's a lot of interesting things there, but one of them is that it generally takes him more than a year to make a real turnaround.

Gillislee was worth the money the Pats gave him. The Pats are skinflints and they valued him right. The Pats made him the 27th highest paid back in the league, the guy who outran LeSean McCoy behind the same line, scoring the highest yards per carry figure in the league. Touchdown Mike is worth the money, and more than that, the Pats had to give him more money than we had to. We could have kept him by giving him a 2nd round tender, which was $2.81 mill. Which would have valued him 30th in the league. Again, a good deal. We were in serious salary cap straits, though, and couldn't do it, which is a damn shame.

Hondo, the percentage of TDs gotten through the air is absolutely NOT meaningless when people so consistently try to use the whole offense's scoring totals to prove that the passing game is good. The percentage of TDs gotten through the air lets the air out of that senseless connection. To take your example, if the Bills next year scored 100 TDs and 37 were through the air and people used these numbers to attempt to prove that the passing game was good, they would have failed. As I've said a dozen times, the run game was terrific. I'm not arguing that. But using stats provided largely by the run game to try to say things about the pass game just doesn't make sense. The bottom line is this, the run game was great, and the pass game was substandard, as was the whole defense and the STs. You say, "So if defenses are trying to stop the pass, maybe the smart thing to do right now is run." Thing is, when other defenses played the Bills, they weren't trying to stop the pass. Does "make him play QB" sound familiar? Our run game was what other teams made their first priority, and for good reason when the run game's efficiency (yards per carry) was far and away #1 in the league and the pass game's efficiency (yards per attempt) was 20th in the league. Boiled down, I guess what I'm trying to say is as simple as this: Stats for the passing game should be used to evaluate the passing game. Stats for the run game should be used to evaluate the run game. And stats for the whole offense should be used to evaluate the whole offense. People here are trying to use stats for the whole offense to evaluate the passing game. Which doesn't make sense. As for us developing a better pass game next year, I'd argue we have to do more than get better, that we have to get a lot better. Can we do it? Yeah, it's possible. I highly doubt it, but I hope you're right. Clearly it would be the best thing for the Bills. Love the Sun Tzu reference, though I'm more of a Musashi fan. "Whatever your determination or will power, it is foolish to try to change the nature of things. Things work the way they do because that is the way of things." I disagree with significant amounts of it, but still, nice thoughtful post.

That's not a hot take, it's a senseless take. Sammy absolutely is a team guy and there really hasn't been anyone saying he's not. And yeah, those other guys have had "multiple surgeries" after the original break. Two, I believe, which is what Sammy has had at this point. Yeah, it was always somewhere around a 25% chance he'd need a second surgery, as that's roughly the number of injured people who do need seconds. The number who need thirds drops off wildly. There's no reason to think his Lisfranc will continue to be a problem. Anything's possible, but the odds are very high against it. Yeah, something else could happen. Sammy's been injured a lot and injuries can happen to anyone. That's why they didn't sign him for the extra year. We don't know what will happen. As for White being everything Gilmore isn't, I hope not. Gilmore is an excellent player.

Got news for you. Every single man who works for you now is motivated by money. If you don't think so, that's your mistake, unless you've got somebody on the payroll wearing a Gandhi loincloth and giving away all the money he makes beyond enough for a cardboard box to live in and three bowls of rice a day to subsist on. Oh, and turning down the raises you offer him because the sheer joy of working for you is enough. That's the way it works in capitalist systems. 100% motivated by money, not necessarily. But then, no reason to thinks Sammy is either.

Yeah, I know people like you and I never have brain farts. We're just too perfect. Lewis was terrific. But remember the years when his DTs were injured and he looked average and everyone said he was done? Great player but he was in a sensational situation.

Or the top 16 in yards offense might have ... not. And again, points is a stat that has a major team component, based on the fact that defense and STs can actually score points and beyond that also have a huge effect on field position which is huge in terms of impact on scoring. Yards far better isolates the offensive unit itself. And we were 16th. The defense had an average drive start in the 23rd best field position in the league, while the offense got the ball in the 11th best average position of drive start. The offense (and STs) hurt the defense and the defense (and STs) helped the offense in terms of field position. In any case, nobody should argue in any way that our run offense was truly excellent. Not much of the rest of the way the Bills played ball was worth much in 2016. The defense was worse. But overall neither the offense nor the STs had much to be proud of. Beyond the run offense, anyway.

I have to disagree with this. You don't have to define your terms for them to mean something. You're right that it's not easy to define, but failed cultures exist. It's hard to say exactly how to destroy or save a culture, but that doesn't mean cultures don't have a huge impact on success or failure. Teams that get it right can find many ways to do it, but they do do it. In Bill Walsh's book he talks a ton about changing the culture, right from spelling out the clothes the players had to wear on road trips. And there was actually an assistant coach who didn't believe any of this meant squat and who then contacted ownership and complained that Walsh was spending too much time on details that meant nothing. But ownership was on board with Walsh, which is key. They told Walsh what the assistant had done and Walsh simply fired him and moved on with evidence management was behind him. Good things happened.

Sure, hard work matters. But you can hustle, work and outprepare and if you're headed the wrong way, if you're using a bad method, it just won't matter. I agree that hard work may have been an issue with Ryan, but a bigger issue is that he didn't set expectations for the players about controlling themselves and being responsible, he didn't run a smart program and he didn't face up to the fact that it was going to take time to switch defenses. Oh, and he was with a GM who he had conflicts with, a GM who in Ryan's first two years got him zero first round draft picks who could play for him and only one second-rounder. Nearly any coach is going to have a problem with that handicap, but I don't think Ryan was going to be good no matter what. In any case, culture is for real. Ask Pete Carroll. Carroll sucked in his first two head coaching opportunities. He says when his career turned around is when he felt that he was just running around like a chicken with his head cut off and responding to what was going on around him. So he sat down and wrote a mission statement on how he wanted to run his Seattle program, something he'd never done before. And voila. Makes his assistant coaches write their own missions statements too. Culture matters, bigtime. I love that Bill Walsh story Lombardi tells in this. Lombardi's running around at 1:00 a.m. on draft night and Walsh says "What are you doing, what's the problem?" Lombardi says, "Well, the Falcons did this, the Falcons did that." And Walsh says, "Hey, Michael, look. Let me explain something real quick to you. We're only competing against eight teams in this league. When the Redskins do something, or the Giants do something, you let me know. But don't worry about those other teams we're not competing against. They might win once in a while. But they're rarely gonna win." Exactly. Plenty of teams are working their butts off on hamster wheels to nowhere. Only a few teams matter and we need to become one of those teams.

The D-line looks strong ... if you look at things through rose-colored glasses. Dareus wasn't all that great last year. Will he repeat that or be a wrecking ball again? Or will a cup of urine be his downfall? Will Kyle Williams start to show signs of age? Will Hughes be what he's been the past two years averaging, what? around 6 sacks a year? Or back to his old self? How good is our other DE? We really have almost nothing to go on. And what do we have for DE depth when the starters need a breather? A lot less than we had in that Schwartz year, that's for sure. To me, what you're saying is that if everything goes almost perfectly, we could be good. But you could say that every year. Things don't go almost perfectly. And our CBs look an awful lot more questionable than they did in Schwartz's year. Plus in Schwartz's year the defense had looked pretty frightening the year before. They hadn't put it all together but they'd been immensely good at rushing the passer the year before. We aren't coming off a year where the defense looked good in any way, really. The o-line looked terrific last year but the scheme was one of the best run schemes ever, really. How will they look in a more normal scheme? Pretty good still, I'd bet, but I'd also bet they won't look as good as last year in the run game. And RT still looks pretty questionable. Hard to know what will happen there. The local media is saying what everyone is saying. And they're all saying more or less the same thing for good reason. You never know, but if you had to bet the rent, you should put it on "not very good." Yet. It's a young regime. Yup. But they've also been pretty much on target for a long long time. "Lacks elite passing skills."? And that's reality? More like reality with a really sweet little lagniappe of positive spin. Our lineup was 7-9 last year and overall probably got a bit worse, though maybe more promising in the long run with the two firsts next year and some possible rookies with potential. We aren't average in personnel. We're somewhat below. Agreed on a lot of your other points, including injuries, but what we can say is that there will be some injuries whether a lot or a few and there is very little depth on this team.

Carucci says he "remains too quick to run." Exactly. You say "Carucci is suggesting that he gives up on pass plays too quickly," and if he is indeed suggesting that, he's correct. He does give up on pass plays too early, that's what you do when you leave the pocket before you have to. That doesn't mean that he gives up on the idea of passing necessarily - I agree that he's generally looking to pass when he's scrambling, but yeah, once you leave the pocket and start sprinting, the play design is blown and it's pretty much back to sandlot ball. That's what Tyrod does too often, leaving clean pockets and reducing the play design to irrelevance. It's one of the four or five consistently mentioned problems that Tyrod has. Fair enough if you were talking about time he held the ball. He does indeed hold the ball a long time, but that does not tend to be because he's generally hanging in the pocket a long time. Sure, it's possible that the new offense could be better for Tyrod. But that's not the way the odds would suggest as they put it to it's first tests under live conditions. First year offenses - and defenses - tend to have trouble while they get used to the new scheme, form new habit patterns and so on. If consistency weren't better, people wouldn't try for it and consistent teams wouldn't do better than teams that switch. And in fact, that's what happens. There are teams that break that pattern but in the first season and particularly early in the season having a new scheme is absolutely more likely to cause problems than improvement. You haven't seen where this is coming from, that Tyrod had a bad series of workouts? Seriously? Jeez, Shaw, you must be one of the only ones. There was a ton of it, although they did mention that the last day at minicamp he looked better than he had the previous five workouts. "Taylor, for that matter, also wasn’t that sharp – although his best practice by far was the final one Thursday." http://buffalonews.com/2017/06/15/jay-skurskis-top-10-takeaways-bills-spring-practices/ "His issues with accuracy were absolutely a topic, both here and with other media members on the beat. Those who watched every practice would tell you the same. Here's the thing, though: The Bills don't have any other options. " http://buffalonews.com/2017/06/17/jay-skurskis-bills-mailbag-tyrod-taylor-talk-stephen-hauschkas-job-jeopardy-much-faith-sean-mcdermott-brandon-beane-pairing/ "Through six workouts that the media has been able to view during the spring offseason sessions, the best day we’ve seen from starting quarterback Tyrod Taylor was saved for the last day of school ... This was a good sign for Taylor, especially considering that the other five workouts we’ve seen has featured him really playing at an average to below average level." http://www.wkbw.com/sports/bills/joe-b-7-observations-from-buffalo-bills-minicamp-day-three-61517 "The Bills' first-team offense struggled in the red zone on Wednesday. Not only did Watkins fumble, but Taylor threw an interception to Jordan Poyer on an off-target throw to tight end Charles Clay. " http://www.newyorkupstate.com/buffalo-bills/index.ssf/2017/06/buffalo_bills_minicamp_2017_tj_yates_bounces_back_and_10_observations_from_day_2.html "Overall, here's how the numbers on the quarterbacks broke down on Wednesday: "Tyrod Taylor: 12-for-19, INT, 4 sacks TJ Yates: 16-for-21, 2 TDs, 2 sacks Nathan Peterman: 9-for-12 (Excluding 2 spikes) Cardale Jones: 1-for-3, INT "You read that right. Yikes. "The first-team offense failed to score with Taylor. The second team shined under a veteran pose from Yates." http://www.thedailynewsonline.com/bdn02/video-story-uphill-battle-underway-for-bills-qb-cardale-jones-20170615 "There's no sugar-coating it. Tyrod Taylor looked terrible during the Buffalo Bills' penultimate spring practice on Wednesday at New Era Field. "But two important qualifiers must be applied. First, it was just one practice. Second, at this time two years ago Taylor appeared just as ineffective and confounded while learning a new system, then Greg Roman’s. Taylor, of course, wound up beating out fellow veterans EJ Manuel and Matt Cassel to win the starting job by late August. "But Taylor had a really bad day passing on Wednesday. Rick Dennison’s play-action-based system ought to suit Taylor, but the seventh-year NFL passer looked unsure too often and struggled mightily to hook up with receivers on Dennison’s requisite, favoured batch of simple, short, perimeter throws: Outs and comebacks. "Far too many times, if Taylor wasn’t late to fire, he was inaccurate outside the numbers. Unsmooth, at best." http://www.torontosun.com/2017/06/14/sammy-watkins-looking-mighty-fine-at-bills-camp That's like five writers saying the same thing. You say you saw "NO quotes or comments attributed to anyone who actually saw the off-season workouts saying anything at all like that." You must not have been looking.

They do pick a lot. We started to do that sometimes the last couple of years too, and bunch formations as well. It was successful and we didn't get called much if at all. Pick plays work and not just for the Pats.

We were very tight at the time. The reason we have a very small amount of space now is that we took extreme measures to save money. Including not tendering Gillislee at the higher level among other penny-pinching moves. Which to be clear, was smart. Past Bills regimes would have re-negotiated some contracts to free up space but at the same time would have moved the salary cap problems on into the future. Instead, McDermott and Co. bit the bullet and took their medicine. Me likey. But it cost us, and Gillislee is only one of the ways. Maclin, for instance may well have been another guy our cap issues affected this roster. And we are a team with very little depth this year and the cap is a lot of the reason why.

More motivated? Sure, reasonable. More secure and confident in his situation? Not so much. And both of those could matter, or not. Probably not all that much would be my guess but the reasoning structure is fine.