Thurman#1

Not like we had a choice at that time. Lynch averaged 3.8 and 3.6 YPC in 2009 and 2010. Everyone knew he wanted out of Buffalo and it was his 4th year. Nobody was giving us anything significant for him under those circumstances.

Then the point was off-point. The reason there are no dominant teams is because it's early. Later in the season there will be dominant teams. Every year people say anyone can win the Super Bowl if you make the playoffs. Every year there are a bunch of teams that make the playoffs as complete fodder teams with no chance outside a couple of plane crashes. And those teams lose. The same will be true this year. The better teams will get better as the season goes along. There will be a very small group of very good teams.

Bad comparison. Our offense last year was 16th in the league. Our defense before Ryan came on was 4th. That ranking - 4th - was a lot better reason not to change than 16th was. More, the main goal isn't competing for the playoffs this year. It's consistently competing for the Super Bowl. We have no idea yet how that will work out. It's a long-term thing. The Bills offense wasn't particularly good last year. The run game was excellent but the offense was acceptable, not good, 16th in the league. And yeah it'll be hard to compete with Tyrod struggling to throw over 200 yards a game and getting sacked a lot. But the record shows that's Tyrod. He's likely to average just around there. More if he throws a lot, maybe, but nobody seems to want that to happen.

That's cherrypicking the list. When you look at the list that that stat presents, it's good QBs at the top and bad QBs at the bottom. Like pretty much every stat, there's an exception that proves the rule, in this case Rodgers. Doesn't mean it's not a very useful and telling stat. 4th quarter comeback leaders for the last 50 years (career) are, in order ... Peyton, Brady, Marino, Unitas, Elway, Montana, Favre, Manning, Tarkenton, Roethlisberger, Testaverde, Brees, Moon, Stafford, Romo, Ryan, Bledsoe, Fouts, Krieg, Rivers and YA Tittle. That's a very strong list. The list of the same stat for active QBs is also overall very strong at the top and weak at the bottom.

The winning teams do strive for 190 yards per game passing? Seriously? We must have 26 winning teams in the NFL then, because that's how many average 190 yards per game. Heck the top nine teams average 250 and up. Including KC and the Eagles, the winningest teams in the league. The teams averaging 190 yards passing per game or less are the Raiders, Titans, Bears, Jags, Bills, Ravens and Dolphins.

Dude, absolutely nobody ever has said that you can't win a single game with numbers like those. And a single game is what the Giants won. Of course you can win a game or two. Hell, we've won seven and eight games, so don't pretend you're countering something anyone has actually said.

The Super Bowl? Good lord, dude. This is confirmation bias. I want a thing to be true, so I imagine it, so it starts to look natural inside my head so it seems possible and reasonable. The Super Bowl will go to one of the six or seven or eight best teams, as always. Probably four or five of those teams simply play consistently at a higher level. The rest are opportunistic enough and have good enough defenses and QBs that they can play inconsistently through a game and yet consistently win. We aren't one of the eight best in the league, Auras are the thing you find about your favorite team when you can convince yourself it's there.

Open receivers. That he didn't throw to. I know that's not the answer you want to hear but it's still the truth. Plenty of open guys that he didn't go to. And you're overstating it that he did fine in our wins. Our wins this year have been due to terrific defense and an offense just scraping by. Tyrod hasn't had three fine games. One fine game and one pretty good one and one average maybe. You certainly can't blame all our offensive problems on Tyrod but he's been responsible for his share. Yup. I predicted that we would miss Roman and his scheme more than people expected, particularly in the run game. And that's indeed how things have turned out. Remember how Roman was hated here by Tyrod fans in particular? And how Dennison was going to be the savior because he'd worked with Tyrod before and understood his strengths and was going to use them and we'd see a major upturn?

Hunh. I've always been extremely impressed by Tyrod as a person. Not as a quarterback but absolutely as a person. Seeing he thinks this makes me think a bit less of him. I'm disappointed to see he feels this way. It's not a big deal. But it's not a good look either.

That would be "if", not "when". And guys often make huge leaps between first and second years. Peterman could be one of those guys. Or not. Way too early, though, to assume he won't. Not to mention that teams sometimes draft new QBs. It's certainly not impossible they keep him, especially to give someone more time to develop. If it happens, people will most likely say what they're saying now, and with good reason. 27th best in combined running and passing yards. Yup. Talks a lot about Tyrod barely fitting into the normal range, which for him goes from 6th best to 29th best. Those are the "average" guys for him. To repeat, 29th is within average range for this guy. He's got a point that a lack of turnovers should be to his credit, very much so, but that a lack of explosiveness in situations where we need aggressive play should be counted against him, the two sides of Tyrod's coin. I just find it hard to take this writer very seriously when he keeps referring to 29th best in the league as average and only 30th as below it.

Wow. And at the same level of importance of breaking news, I hear there are earthworms in the ground and that airplanes fly.

I get why people worry about the playoffs, due to the drought. I don't care about the playoffs. I care only about when they become genuinely competitive for a championship. I can imagine them sneaking in for a one-and-done as fodder for the good teams. I doubt even that will happen, but I'd give them a 20 - 25% chance, maybe. Means nothing to me, though. The offense just isn't good enough. Too much pressure on the defense. I'm really surprised and pleased with the D so far, though. They just don't have the personnel across the board. I'm willing to wait if they improve the roster as time passes and become a team good enough to threaten for a Lombardi down the road.

Oh, man are you ever right. And is that a good wakeup call for me that there are things I need to do more than I need to do this. Outtahere. Oh, man are you ever right. And is that a good wakeup call for me that there are things I need to do more than I need to do this. Outtahere.

https://mattwaldmanrsp.com/2017/09/26/the-nfl-lens-separation/ Waldman's tape breakdowns are generally terrific. He knows what he's looking at, shows good tape to explain and communicates well.

Alex Smith has averaged 10 wins a year the last six years. Andy Dalton has had 10 or 11 wins four out of the last five years. Roethlisberger's Steelers have averaged over 10 wins per year for the last ten years. Luck had the one horrendous year but other than that he's averaged 10 wins. I mean, you're right that it's teams that win games, not QBs, and that few teams are all that consistent. But if you put "franchise QB" into his original statement instead of "10-11 win QB," it looks like, "A franchise QB makes that throw immediately," which is a pretty reasonable comment.

Nope, Alex Smith had an excellent 6th year in the NFL, the year they lost the conference championship to the Giants. Pretty much the only guy ever to go from non-franchise guy before his sixth year to franchise guy afterwards is Gannon. Agreed he's having his best year now, though.

If Tyrod wanted Thomas to push upfield he was asking Thomas to do something he couldn't do. Thomas's goes straight out a few yards, looking over his shoulder to his left back at Tyrod. He turns around not by twisting back around so he gets a look upfield. As part of disguising the route he turns his body back towards Tyrod and then cuts to the outside. He never has a chance to look at the safeties and see what's going on upfield of him. For all he knows a safety or deeper LB is honing in on him from downfield. The furthest Thomas ever looks downfield is getting one look directly in front of him as he cuts to the sidelines. Where the guy posting that video clip says, "This is where I want him to throw the ball," that's where he could have altered the route, simply by throwing the ball downfield a bit. Thomas would have adjusted to go catch the ball. In any case, just throw the damn thing right then when he's open. By the time Tyrod waves, the LB has caught up again and Thomas is close enough to the sidelines that the ball couldn't be fit in there anyway.

You're right that nobody should ever say that Tyrod doesn't throw over the middle. He does it a lot. Short. A ton of his throws have always been over the short middle. Any argument implying that he doesn't throw to the short middle a lot is simply wrong. At least in his first year, though, he threw about five-sixths of his deep and intermediate passes to the outside thirds, making him more predictable. I went through every single pass of his first year. It's the deep and intermediate middle third that he didn't get to often back then overall, though more often some games than others. As your chart shows, in the Cincy game if you define intermediate as 11- 20 yards (as ESPN does, so that Transplant does too), he threw one pass there out of the four he threw to the intermediate and deep zones. Both the TD pass and the INT were in the outside third (your chart very conveniently allows that to be quantified). One out of 37 is very low for anyone. But since he only threw four passes of eleven yards or over, his percentage of those four to the middle third was reasonable. In the Jets game you show here on the other hand, he threw there three times out of seven intermediate and deep balls, a high percentage for any QB. Great chart by the way. Very cool.

You're making more and more sense here. Do you have a fan club I could join? :-)

I think this is reasonable. Shouldn't take us more than four or five years to bring in four competent to excellent OLs who fit the bill. I live in Japan and am actually a sumo fan. Who did the not-real-convincing trick photography on that? The real sumo guys look big enough. Maybe they could bring in Mainoumi.

A receiver complaining about targets? Wow, next thing you'll tell me some actors are temperamental.

Yup. Scoring is much more of a team stat than people like to admit. Yards isolate the offense and defense much better.

They have the ammunition to win maybe 9 games now. Maybe. Wouldn't mind them trading Shady, but what they're actually doing isn't tanking. No such thing in the NFL. There are such things as complete rebuilds and we aren't doing one. From my point of view that's unfortunate, but it's the way things are.

Which is potentially huge. He's also put us on a better financial footing. We were still in some cap trouble looking down the road. With Sammy and Darby gone, less so. Good post.

It adds up fine building for the future. Banyard is a spare part, unlikely to be here when the future arrives. But yes, there'll be a lot of mixing and matching, which is what happens as teams (hopefully) settle into one system and start bringing in young guys who fit it and phase out the older guys. Our oldest guys include lots who won't be around for very long, guys like Tolbert, Humber, Shareece Wright, Cedric Thornton, Ryan Davis, Those are five out of our ten oldest. Our talented oldsters look likely to age out of the lineup in the near future, particularly Kyle Williams and Lorenzo Alexander and McCoy, though if they can somehow keep playing young they might be kept. They guys on this team 27 and over are, in descending order, Lorenzo Alexander, Kyle Williams, Mike Tolbert, Ramon Humber, Shareece Wright, Hughes, Cedric Thornton, Shady, Ryan Davis, Charles Clay, Micah Hyde, Leonard Johnson, Dareus, Deon Lacey, Jordan Mills, and Jerel Worthy. That's not exactly the core of the team. You'd hope Hughes, Alexander, Hyde ... how many more would be around for much time? Dareus if he straightens up and plays up to standard but I've stopped thinking that's likely. Clay if he stays healthy and they can make his contract more reasonable?