Thurman#1

It's not incorrect at all that Taylor is too quick to run. You just have to add "sometimes." As in sometimes he runs from clean pockets. That's what he was referring to and it's true, and one of Tyrod's bigger problems. And he's not number one or two in time spent in the pocket from any stat I've seen. He's number one or two in time holding the ball. Which is different. Where he was when he held the ball didn't enter into that stat and sprinting towards the sidelines counts. And often takes more time than staying in the pocket and surveying the whole field. If you're referring to a stat I haven't seen, fair enough, let me know where you saw that. And yeah, you've been saying it all offseason that he wasn't forced into a contract renegotiation. Extremely unconvincingly. Agreed that his negotiations are unlikely to have any major affect on his play. However the article points out that a new offense rather than the one he's been in for two years could cause problems and that's indeed a possibility. He also points out that he had poor showing during most of the offseason workouts and that's pretty reasonable also in terms of evidence. Something must have caused that and that something might (or might not, but it's certainly possible) cause further problems in the future. It's just Vic's opinion. Opinions that he'll do at least as well as last year are also very reasonable at this point.

You're missing the point. I'm no Tyrod fan. I don't think he'll ever be a franchise QB. But whatever else Tyrod is he's our absolute best option at QB .... this year. Is there a possibility that will change if one of the other three makes massive improvements? Sure. Around a 5% chance, maybe. Or Tyrod could be injured. But what it looks like now is that keeping Tyrod was keeping our best QB - for this year at least - right here at OBD. And keeping your best option at QB on the roster is the exact opposite of what a team that wanted to tank would do.

You have to have your glass a lot more than half full to pretend that unproven players are going to be better, especially this year. You have to have your glass about 90% full, with some Old Granddad and some Kool-Aid as part of the payload. What generally happens is the obvious. Of a group of, say five guys, who are unknowns being counted on, one or so will be very successful, one or so will be very unsuccessful and the remainder will be acceptable but take some time and make the kind of mistakes that unproven guys make while they get experience. The bell curve, in other words. No pro athlete in his right mind would do what you're suggesting. For the simplest reason in the world, because it's against their self-interest. If the athletes play badly they're more likely to get cut. And the team that picks them up will decide on the contract terms by looking at the film. They stand a very good chance of losing huge gobs of cash. They will not do that. It simply won't happen. The athletes will give their all. The front office can make decisions that would reduce the odds of the team winning in the short run. Which they didn't do. If they had decided to do that, Tyrod and Kyle Williams would simply not be on this team. I'd love a two-win season. And they could probably have arranged that by cutting Tyrod and Kyle and McCoy and not re-signing the elderly Lorax. I wish they had done this, but they didn't. . Nonsense on every level. Cleveland just did it. The federal government doesn't give a crap about that sort of thing, and it's happened in the NFL dozens and dozens and dozens of times. If you're a sub-standard team - and the Bills are right now - all you need to do is get rid of your best players, particularly the older ones and particularly the QB, and you wouldn't do this if you had a top ten or twelve QB in the first place. Trade 'em for draft picks if possible. And you could also bring in new schemes on both sides of the ball to ensure the players are still thinking rather than reacting instinctually. Could the team then pick the wrong guy? Of course they could. There's no way to guarantee success. If there were, everyone would do it. There are only ways to improve your chances. And doing a complete rebuild is one of those ways. He said "put us in a position to re-up." He didn't say, "guarantee that we will be able to re-up." Doing a complete rebuild gives you a better chance. Nothing gives you a guarantee. But again, it just isn't happening. Not worth even talking about it, really.

Where you're ranked in terms of cap hit on the team doesn't mean much. Cap hits go up and down year to year depending on the contract. Means little to nothing. What means something is the money per year average number, $2.6 mill, which would've put Gillislee as the 27th highest paid RB in the league last year, probably a bit lower next year as salaries go up. That's about where he should be. Would've been very very reasonable to pay him that. But the bottom line is that we were having serious salary cap problems. We had to take some hits and not bring back some guys we would've liked to keep. Gillislee was in that group, probably with Gilmore, Zach Brown, Robey-Coleman and some depth guys. If we'd been in better shape we'd have almost surely kept at least some of those guys. This is what happens when your front office spends too much. And it doesn't make sense to do so on a team that then goes 7-9. We'd be a significantly better running game with Gillislee here. But getting the cap back into some kind of reasonable shape took priority. They're still tight but will be much better after another year of relative austerity.

$13.5 mill, according to Spotrac. Too high to cut him except in case of a massive meltdown of some sort. It would cost us $4.5 mill this year AND $9 mill next year, all dead money. Total $13.5 mill. Next year it would only save us his salary, $4.5 mill.

If all they'd acquired was Myles Garrett, maybe no. But instead they've also got two 1sts and three 2nds in next year's draft. That answer about whether what they've done is worth it is getting more and more likely to be a resounding yes in the not so terribly distant future. Not with $13.5 mill in dead cap if we did it, it's not. Zach Brown, Woods and Robey-Coleman for three are losses on top of Gilmore. We don't have any LBs athletic enough to replace Zach, rookie WRs often take a long time to get going. We're going to have to prove our ability to replace Gillislee as well. Those replacements have a long way to go to prove that they're equal. And we dropped a bunch of depth as well, DL depth, and a bunch of other spots. Not that this shows we're tanking. We're clearly not when we're bringing back Tyrod and Kyle Williams. But our salary cap problems have constrained us seriously. We look weaker in a number of areas this year.

The salary cap explains the Maclin and Decker situations. If we were rebuilding we wouldn't have kept Tyrod. There absolutely is a formula there. Hard to re-create? If you want to re-create 100% of it, yeah, it's impossible, same as re-creating any formula 100%. But getting a good QB and a good coach are reproducible. Not easily but it can be done. And here are other bits we could and absolutely without question should re-create. Particularly their way of consistently acquiring more draft picks. They've then done many things with those picks, including trading them for established players at a time when their QB is approaching an age where every year could possibly be his last even though he doesn't think so. But that's the Pats, acquire picks. Do it with comp picks, do it with trading down but acquire picks. And don't be irresponsible about the salary cap. Spend money carefully on an extremely consistent basis.

This doesn't mean he isn't a genius. Folks here keep pretending we can be sure that KC made a bad trade and we won't know that for 2 - 4 years till we know what Mahomes is. I hate their cap situation but who's responsible for that, Reid or Dorsey? That would be sweet for us if they win 6 or 7, giving us even better trade bait if we need to move up. I doubt it, though. If I had to guess right now I'd bet on about ten wins again.

I disagree with this. Making these throws or not isn't a pure yes/no decision. It's a spectrum based on likelihood of good/bad outcomes. It's not like a QB absolutely knows what will happen when he throws it, not even the best. And near the end of games where you're behind, you absolutely need to be taking more risks than you'd take at times in the game when you'll have more chances later. On that play you mentioned earlier, down four points, thirty seconds to go, 3rd and eight, you absolutely have to be willing to take much larger risks than usual. You hope you don't have to but if it's your best option you go for it. You don't know there'll be any better option on 4th down. Maybe nobody will be open, or maybe a receiver will drop that 4th down pass and you'll have missed your chance on 3rd.. Clearly you don't don't throw impossible balls but if you guess there's maybe a 30% chance - roughly, of course - of an INT, you probably make that throw in that case and you would never pull the trigger on that kind of a risky play earlier in the game. Fitz was a bit worse at this maybe than most and he also didn't have extreme accuracy so on balls that Rodgers would have completed, Fitz sometimes threw INTs. But they weren't dumb plays, IMHO, just poor throws in situations where he had to take bigger risks than he'd have liked. Not that I want Fitzy starting in a Bills uniform again, ever. Wouldn't mind a bit seeing him again as a backup. He'd be a terrific mentor / injury backup for a young guy. I thought it was a shame he wasn't willing to take the pay cut after his last year and fill that role. He turned out to be right, though, he was hired several other places in hopes he could be a good starter. I never really trusted Fitzy to start, but I sure liked him personally from what we saw from outside. But every year he was the starter to me that was a very very clear signal that we should have been drafting a QB. High. If there was someone we liked. Not good quarterbacking. We can absolutely agree on that. Not bad!!

Delhomme was undrafted and earned a lot more than you'd think. Not sure but he's probably around the same area. Thought of Cassel but he was drafted at 230.

Hope you're right. I'm with 4_kidd_4 and need to see the baby, but maybe you're right. I've stopped relying on guts in these cases. Most Bills fan guts at the time thought Donahoe was the GM to take us to Lombardiville. Me too. Same with Gregg Williams as the coach. I loved how no-nonsense he was. I stopped believing guts about then.

Dude, I wasn't implying that or anything like that. You didn't just miss the point, you selected a new point out of thin air and assumed it was mine. Of course it considers passing, sacks AND scrambles. That's what I said. Take a look: Get it? Since passing DVOA already includes sacks ... when I was talking about their adjustments and said "if you include scrambles past the LOS" I was of course pointing out that the second stat includes passes, sacks and scrambles. So -for the second time - of course adding Tyrod's scrambles to his passing DVOA is going to make him look better than it makes most NFL QBs look. We all know that's the strong part of his game. Whyncha try reading carefully next time before you get your panties all sweaty and in a bunch.

Heh heh. If America eats less and exercises more, we gotta real shot at losing weight. Yeah, um.

Not really buying this much, Happy. Mostly I don't think these tell us anything we didn't already know. I'll try to be more specific. ARGUMENT ONE: Whether or not a sack destroys a drive is dependent on a lot of things that don't especially say much about a QB. A sack on first down, for instance is a lot less likely to destroy a drive than a sack on third down. Does it make a QB better that he got a sack on first down rather than third? A ten yard sack is more likely to destroy a drive than a one-yard sack. Does it say anything better about a QB that he gets sacked for one instead of ten yards? Or did he just have a more convenient escape route in that direction? I don't think that's even slightly clear. This article is slightly interesting for it's own sake - in terms of what Klassen is saying about sacks and how they affect drives - but it doesn't say much that helps evaluate QBs or boosts Tyrod's evaluation upwards either. I'm not a big Trapasso fan, honestly. But here's his conclusion to the whole article, "While Tyrod will probably always be near the top of the league in sacks, a proven track record of being able to rebound from those quarterback takedowns better than any team in the league is vital. Technically, it means a sack isn’t as damaging to the Bills as it is for other teams, which gives Buffalo’s offense a clear leg up on the rest of the NFL." Hunh? So Tyrod gets sacked near the top of the league and probably always will be up there? So his 42 sacks are OK, but we're supposed to be happy that the Bills very small percentage of converting on sacks is three or four plays higher than the other NFL teams? That's the big conclusion? What that is saying is that Tyrod gets sacked a lot more than other QBs but that the Bills do good things anyway on a larger percentage of those drives. And that gives us a leg up? That's very questionable. First, these stats were team stats, not QB stats and Tyrod's sack percentage (8.8%) was quite a bit worse than the percentage for Bills QBs (7.09%, 4th-worst in the league) and around 10% worse than any total team (ARIZ was worst with 8.08%). Put another way, Tyrod had 42 sacks while the 16th-rated QB had 33 and the 17th had 31. So Tyrod had about 9 more than average even though he didn't play all 16 games. Assuming the Bills had converted at a league average rate (16.01% according to the Klassen article) rather than our very fine rate, how many fewer conversions would we have had? Around nine. Not a lot positive there in terms of improvement of results. It's an interesting article about how sacks kill drives. Doesn't make Tyrod look better at all. ARGUMENT TWO: This seems to me to show that Tyrod was very good at running the ball. And that that is also true when he's under pressure. I would have guessed that. The stat addresses the fact that if you include scrambles past the LOS, the DVOA (really a whole offense stat, not an individual player stat, as Football Outsiders not just admits but publicizes) improves. Yeah, I would have expected that. I've never ever been concerned about his scrambles once he gets past the LOS. I'm worried about his pass game. Not Tyrod's run game. I know that's excellent, and I think we all do. This also doesn't change anything for me. ARGUMENT THREE: Yeah, it's a new article but that stat has been around a while now and we've been arguing it for months. It's great that he threw 10 TDs under pressure. But that means he only threw 7 when he wasn't. Seventeen total. It's great that he (the offense, really, in the scheme, with the play calls, yadda yadda yadda) performed so well when under pressure. But that's only part of the game. Agreed that RT was a real weakness, but these days very few teams have as many as four good OLs, as we do. I'm hoping that things improve at RT this year, however that happens. I don't see how this puts any dent whatsoever in the criticisms that running isn't as important as passing.

That sounds good, but there are plenty of exceptions. Belichick may be the best coach in NFL history, unfortunately. But he has a ton of turnover. He wants and gets a certain kind of player. The Pats went 5-11 in his first year though they'd gone 8-8 the year before under Carroll. He didn't coach guys who didn't fit his system so well that the team kicked butt. He brought in guys who fit his system. And it took him time. Pro Football Reference lists 55 guys on the roster of Carroll's last group, the '99 Pats. In '00 in Belichick's first year, they list 65. Guys gone from Carroll's roster: Terry Allen, Mike Bartrum, Terry Billups, Vincent Brisby, Chris Carter, Rico Clark, Ben Coates, Ferric Collons, Vernon Crawford, Damon Denson, Ed Ellis, Jerry Ellison, Heath Irwin, Steve Israel, Shawn Jefferson, Jeff Kopp, Bob Kuberski, Marty Moore, Sean Morey, Zefross Moss, Todd Rucci, Bernard Russ, Chris Sullivan, Lamont Warren, So 24 of Carroll's 55 were gone. And they won five games. 43.6% turnover and Belichick didn't coach the guys on the roster to greatness. He changed everything and input his systems. The next year, 2001, they list 61 guys. It's easier to count the guys who WERE on that 1999 Carroll roster than those who weren't. The survivors were: Drew Bledsoe, Troy Brown, Tedy Bruschi, Terry Glenn, Lee Johnson, Ted Johnson, Tebucky Jones, Ty Law, Willie McGinest, Lawyer Milloy, Brandon Mitchell, Marty Moore, Rod Rutledge, Adam Vinatieri, Damien Woody. Only 15 of 55 remaining. And only the highlighted guys were starters that year, though McGinest missed most of the year, maybe due to an injury or something. Belichick didn't so much coach the leftovers to greatness as he did bring in a group that fit his schemes. Not that I'm saying McDermott is the new Belichick. Just that even very good coaches sometimes have major turnover and don't do that well with guys left over from the last era.

The stats are two years old but still very relevant because they show that roster turnover is high for everyone. It's from a reddit: "Which teams have the longest average tenure? (League average is 2.263 seasons, between the Ravens and Colts.) Packers: 2.918 seasons Patriots: 2.882 Bengals: 2.861 Steelers: 2.628 Chargers: 2.506 49ers: 2.488 Falcons: 2.467 Cowboys: 2.455 Seahawks: 2.360 Vikings: 2.329 Saints: 2.329 Eagles: 2.324 Lions: 2.312 Ravens: 2.280 Colts: 2.241 Dolphins: 2.231 Texans: 2.227 Panthers: 2.211 Bears: 2.194 Jets: 2.192 Redskins: 2.176 Bills: 2.158 Cardinals: 2.156 Rams: 2.082 Chiefs: 2.071 Titans: 2.063 Broncos: 2.051 Raiders: 2.025 Giants: 2.011 Browns: 1.909 Jaguars: 1.853 Buccaneers: 1.568 All of my raw data comes from Pro-Football-Reference's yearly roster listings, which I think includes all players that were on a gameday active roster for at least one game in the season." Turnover is high for everyone. It's the nature of the game that guys at the bottom of the roster have always had extremely high turnover and it's harder to hold on to guys at the top of the roster in the salary cap era. Especially when you're close to the cap. Gilmore's a good example. I always remember the joke from Seinfeld, "you're basically rooting for the clothes." It's more so for teams with new coaches and schemes but it's really true for everybody. We won't know how much turnover there's been till the roster firms up after camp, but we're likely to be somewhere around 70th percentile this year with the cap issues and the new regime.

OK, if that's your point, I withdraw that particular objection. But I'm afraid I have a different objection. Which is this: there's a reason they rank teams offensively by how many yards they get rather than how many points they score. And the Bills were 16th in offensive yards. They did not provide the defense with good field position. Last year's offense made the defense look worse and the defense made the offense look better. The offense had the 11th best average drive start field position in the league while the defense had the 23rd best. Yards far better separate offensive performance from the defensive and STs performance. Whereas points have a much larger proportion of responsibility for the whole team. Both yards and points are important but yards better isolate each unit from the others. Oh, and I'd also say, "good enough"? Good enough for what? Good enough to make the playoffs? Yeah, probably, as a fodder team. But to be competitive for a Super Bowl victory? I don't think the offense was good enough. To win a Super Bowl with that offense, I'd argue you would have to have an absolutely sensational defense and a lot of luck and good timing besides. I have no objection to calling the defense bad. They were. But the offense wasn't as good as some Bills fans believe. Ask around the league where they rank and you'll find tend to find people ranking them 16th, not 7th, and thinking that's a pretty reasonable representation. We fans who watched the games might argue we know better and crank them up a few spots but I don't think too many reasonable non-Bills-fan observers would say they were the 7th best offense in the league.

I'm not arguing that Tyrod wasn't a contributor. He certainly was. But the bottom line was that the run game was the best in the league and the pass game was sub-mediocre. That's not all on Tyrod, but a lot is. If you're going to give the QB credit for running yards, you can't give him credit for all the passing yards. It's certainly not 100% Tyrod's yards when he throws, say a screen pass to Gillislee who fakes a guy out of his jock and scores a 45 yard touchdown. So I'd say that stat you're trying to use is also a bit simplistic. He's not responsible for 63.6% of their yards, not unless you're willing to say that Sammy Watkins is responsible for zero percent of their yards. Why wouldn't we run in the red zone? I agree. And that's the point. The run game was really good and the pass game wasn't. Why not run in the red zone and out of it? And you're assuming that all the running TDs came in the red zone, and that's not true. Oh, and a QB generally ought to have a higher QB rating in the red zone because it's gonna tend to be easier to get TDs there than elsewhere on the field. It's also true that in the red zone he completed 60% (40.9% from inside the 10) and had a 4.8 YPA.(2.2 inside the 10). And the nature of red zone passing attempts surely affects those numbers too. Not sure that particular stat (and I like passer rating) should be used in that kind of a split. People keep wanting to say that we had a lot of offensive TDs and therefore the passing game was good. And this doesn't logically folow, especially when you have such a terrific run game.

If Gilmore were the only argument here, it would make sense, as it's hard to say whether they wanted to pay him that much. It's not only Gilmore. It's Gillislee and Zach Brown and Robert Woods and Robey-Coleman and depth guys like Douzable and others on a team with very little depth. They needed to bring in safeties as they just didn't have anyone there. That used up most of the cap space they felt comfortable with using. Now what happens if we lose an LB to injury? They can bring in a journeyman but don't have anyone as good as Brown and aren't likely to get one. They're hovering close to the area they want to be in to have money available to bring in a cheap guy or two before camp if someone disappoints or when the cuts happen and still have enough left to keep their usual amount for in-season injury replacements. How can you say absolutely none of those decisions was primarily about cap? Those are exactly the difficult choices being cap hamstrung forces you into. You keep one guy so you have to let go one or two more. Even if you have poor depth and would like to keep him. I don't pretend to know how much Overdorf was responsible for, though my guess is it's more than most think. Fitting stuff under the cap if you know the salary range to shoot for isn't all that difficult. It's nothing someone with a bit of business or law background couldn't pick up with a few months to study. The difficult part I'd assume is the negotiations and probably other parts of the job I know nothing about. I have bad feelings about the guy but may be totally wrong. I'm willing to believe McDermott and Beane know enough that if they keep him around after a while to watch his performance it may be because he does a good job.

Well, first, they're not top seven, they're in a three-way tie for seventh. But that's a quibble. Here's the main point. For the third time now, I understand that they're top 7 in offensive touchdowns. And that's huge if you're looking at the performance of ... wait for it ... the offense, the whole offense. See how that works? Offensive touchdowns are produced by the whole offense. Whereas .. and here's what you missed the first two times ... when you are trying to look at how good the pass game is ... you look at what the pass game produced. Not what the run game produced. See how it's kind of an equivalence? The offense scored a lot of TDs. Because the run game was terrific and scored a bunch of TDs. Whereas the pass game was substandard and did not score a lot of TDs. And now the architect of that terrific run game, Roman, has left and is in Baltimore. This is cause for worry that the run game might not be as good next year. All is said to pee in your Cheerios was thank goodness for the run game that scored all those points. They covered up the poor performance of the pass game. I didn't say anything implying that the whole offense didn't score a lot of TDs. I understand that it did. I merely pointed out that it was the run game's doing, that the run game scored almost 2/3rds of the Bills TDs and that no other team had less than 50% of their TDs scored by the passing game. Don't know why stone cold facts like this would make you angry. Unless of course you're trying to use a measure of the performance of the whole offense to come to unwarranted conclusions about a mere part of the offense. So again, the offense scored a lot. Can't argue with that. But it was overwhelmingly the extremely good run game (scoring 29 of our 46 offensive TDs, 63% when no other team was above 50%. Can't argue with that either.

espn.com Look for the splits. I don't know. They just were. Ask the coaches, maybe. They thought it was their best chance with the personnel they had, maybe? The reasons don't matter to me, personally. What matters is that their percentages for whatever reason were very close to the same across the four quarters.

He did get them to play hard and smart, I think. I didn't like his extreme conservatism on things like punting and game management, but yeah, they played hard. But while you could say they were rebuilding, it's a stretch, as they were in years four and five of that rebuild. And what McDermott is doing isn't rebuilding, it's reloading. If it were a rebuild they'd have gotten rid of McCoy, Kyle Williams, Tyrod, Incognito and any other guys who are too old to be around and contributing three and four years down the road. That doesn't mean it's not a major project they're working on; it is. But it's not a rebuild. I wouldn't be so quick to judge on Bortles, but I agree that what Marrone said here was totally reasonable, particularly for a new coach trying to set a tone.

Yeah, but come on. The reasons that these two teams ended up with high run percentages was widely different. Here are how the two teams looked at run / pass percentages, divided by quarter. Falcs, by quarter 1st Quarter - Runs 94, Passes 131 … 42% runs 2nd Quarter - Runs 102, Passes 161 … 39% runs 3rd Quarter - Runs 109, Passes 139 … 44% runs 4th Quarter - Runs 113, Passes 102 … 53% runs OT - Runs 3, Passes 4 Bills, by quarter 1st Quarter - Runs 101, Passes 97 … 51% runs 2nd Quarter - Runs 129, Passes 146 … 47% runs 3rd Quarter - Runs 107, Passes 106 … 50% runs 4th Quarter - Runs 144, Passes 119 … 54% runs OT - Runs 11, Passes 6 The Bills were roughly the same quarter to quarter. They simply wanted to run more. Whereas the Falcons passed at much higher percentages through the first three quarters and then burnt clock in the fourth quarter because they were way ahead. The Bills didn't have the problem of being way ahead in a lot of games last year. And this is why. Good teams tend to be ahead and run more to run out the clock in the fourth quarter, which lowers their passing percentage from it's natural early-game numbers. That's not how it was for the Bills. And the four teams that made the NFC and AFC championship games were ranked 4th, 13th, 14th and the Falcons were 27th and I showed why. On the other hand, the four teams that made the playoffs with high run percentages (excepting Atlanta) were Miami, Dallas, Kansas City, and Seattle. One playoff win, Seattle over Detroit. It might not fall that evenly most years but without research I'd guess that it would tend to fall that way consistently, though with exceptions. And building a team on a template that tends to on the ceiling have one-and-done as opposed to a template that had all four of the top teams is not a wise move, I would argue.

Yup. Thank goodness for the run game that scored almost 2/3 of those TDs. And again, not a single other team scored less than 50% of their TDs in the pass game. It may indeed reflect on Tyrod. Though the coaches may well have something to do with that. But perhaps that was in understanding of who their QB was. Beside the point, really. It really is very rare for teams ranking so low in the league in run percentage to win titles. It happens, but pretty much absolutely everything else has to fall perfectly. If he'd argued that we had to be in the top three teams in the league in attempts ... but he didn't. When teams rank that high it's generally because they're way behind a lot and trying to catch up. I very much agree with you that you don't have to throw it all the time. So, we're never going to talk again about any statistics of any sort except for Ws and Ls? Is that correct? People tend to make this argument when they'd rather not talk about the stat being discussed.

You mean that the Bills D was bad? You get no argument from me there. But some people want to put all the blame on the defense and none on our below average pass game. Woh, nice pickup. I looked at that page and totally missed that. Holy cow, that's a huge difference.