Thurman#1

I don't know if I'd say "at best," but yeah, four to six wins is probably best guess. Hell, Vegas has our over-under around six, and they shade everything towards the middle. They have one team less than five at 4.5, though last year was reasonably average with five teams winning less than five games. The different sites have slight differences but we're generally considered around the fourth-worst team in terms of expectations. And for good reason. People who want to look only at players are avoiding the obvious. We're switching schemes on both sides of the ball. This hurts. It just does. It takes time and experience to internalize a new system. It often helps a bit for a game or two especially on offense because teams don't know what to expect, but once they do, teams know what you're doing and your guys don't, or at least not to the extent that players who have been in the same systems for a while know what they're doing. Guys in new systems have to think. The rushing game in particular seems to have been hurt by the switch to the new system. They still have Shady and maybe three good run OLs, but they've lost the Roman system which appears to have been responsible for a lot of their success at the run game. And opponent fear of the run game helped Tyrod and the pass game a great deal. My guess is that we'll still be a pretty good run team, but not the undisputed #1 juggernaut we were last year. Top seven would be my guess, for what little that's worth. But less fearful than last year's group and the ripples from that will spread.

Tanks simply don't exist in football, a sport where the players and coaches have salaries that aren't guaranteed. GMs sometimes do sell out the present for the future, and this is called a full or complete rebuild. Which this is not. If it had been, Kyle Williams, Tyrod and Shady would be gone, Shady traded for good value. It's a rebuild. Not a complete rebuild but a rebuild. They've made it clear that they're building for the future as their priority while still not giving up this year. As for BS, what BS? Are they saying they're headed for the Super Bowl this year? The playoffs? They aren't BSing. They want to primarily build a team while not entirely giving up on this year. But yeah, the stress is on the future and team building. As it should be.

Yep, who'da thunk it? Except pretty much everyone.

Yup, all very reasonable if you look at everything through a rabid Bills fan's perspective. For most, though, the game's at home, which is generally a three-point advantage, and we're getting around 6.5 points from Vegas. We don't look better then them in all phases to people without a huge fan's desperate needs to see things positively. We look a little bit better, but not that much.

Jets are pretty awful. I'd guess it'll be a reasonably close Buffalo win. As for anyone saying, "We will win," and "The Jets will be picking before us" ... what's that old saying about chickens and counting? Whatever it is, it's apropos

Equally, the threat of those one or two 30+ yard completions per game is hugely important. It backs up the safeties and corners which opens up the short to intermediate passing game and the run game. It really is huge. My guess is that they have guys (Powell, for ex.) who can be a threat for long balls, but nobody who will make teams worry about it consistently. But the Bills don't have one weakness right now, they've got a lot. It's what happens when you trade away picks, switch schemes and bring in a new coach with yet another new scheme. You just have to hope that they can build off this. Your post was reasonable till the last sentence. Cleveland's situation looks pretty good indeed for the future. Plenty of teams and execs know that.

Bobby Chandler, maybe. And Mini-Max Anderson. Does Tasker count? Even when they used him at receiver he was always making plays. Cribbs? Too much of a start?

Haven't seen any indications of special yet, but it's way way early. I'm still positive on the pick. He's looked pretty good for such a young guy. IMHO he looks to be a good #2 down the road if he can find a good connection with a quarterback.

Actually, we were 16th on offense in 2016 and 13th in 2015. And yeah, I'm sure you were talking about scoring, but while yards reflects almost completely offense, scoring is more of a whole-team stat because drive-start field position is absolutely huge in scoring. Not to mention that scoring includes stuff like pick-sixes and blocked kicks recovered in the end zone that the offense has little to do with. Yards is simply a better measure of your offense than scoring. Which is why when people talk about how offenses rank they are talking about yards. And surprisingly, the defense and STs scored significantly more than the average NFL defense and STs do. And they also gave the offense the 11th best average drive start, a major advantage in terms of scoring. And that same offense also left the defense with crap field position, 23rd best, which deeply hurt the defense in terms of scoring given up. We'll see. But we didn't just lose Sammy. We lost Woods and more to the point we lost the Roman blocking schemes and playbook, generally acknowledged to be pretty much the best in the NFL in terms of maximizing the run. We'd better hope that the pass game picks it up because my bet is that the run game will still be pretty good but not the absolute terror it was last year, in terms of both yards per carry and scoring on run plays.

They appear to have let Ragland go because he wasn't very athletic or fast. And that's the problem with Spikes too. The McDermott defense appears to need quick, explosive LBs. Spikes would not seem to qualify.

So, if you look at the worst of your recent history, and only the worst, things will look pretty bad? I wouldn't have realized. But no, two draft classes don't set you back five years, they set you back two years. Whaley's picks don't look good, especially so after yet another scheme switch but they didn't look great even before that. But it isn't reasonable to criticize twice for the same mistake. Yeah, the tradeup for Sammy was always stupid. But when you then go on to point out that our second pick was in the third round ... yeah, we got it, you already criticized the Sammy trade. It's not a tank. Tank is a lovely popular hockey term that has become popular among football fans but it's a poor fit. In a sport without guaranteed contracts, there's no such thing as a tank. But yeah, to use the football terms, we're rebuilding. It's not a total rebuild, but it's a rebuild. But it's not as if we were going to be good even if we'd made every single move with the specific purpose of being as good as possible this year. Yes it was. He was the GM and with brand new owners. If he'd told them he wasn't going to be able to work with Rex, they'd likely have listened.

A CB and what might be a good #2 WR and several more guys ... and a second first rounder next year. He isn't easily pleased. It's not easy to get somebody to give you two firsts for something. It was dumb when we did it for Sammy and it was smart when we got the Chiefs to do it this year, especially in a draft which at least so far looks strong in QBs early. That's nonsense. Time doesn't devalue a draft pick. Yeah, in the trade chart you usually a higher draft pick the next year, but not because a third rounder next year is actually worth less in terms of likelihood of getting a good player than a fourth rounder this year. You have to pay more next year because it's only desperate GMs in a weak bargaining position who make dumb tradeups like that. The smart teams accept those trades and get the higher pick next year. Look at Belichick who has made an absolute field day of stealing that extra value from desperate dumb GMs his whole career. The "have to win this year" guys will accept the fleecing and trade away the higher pick next year. That doesn't mean the next year's pick will be worth less in terms of what can be gotten with the pick.

First, there's no evidence Russ has any power in the football side. Going to meetings isn't power. And having your remarks printed isn't either and that's all we know ... that he went to meetings and had some reactions reported. Second, the quotation isn't bad at all. There's no particular reason to think that he meant that you have no expectations about the positions. He could easily have meant that you don't have any pre-suppositions about the candidates and you let what they say make your decisions about how good their interviews were. And I agree with the guy who said the timing of this post is strange. If Russ does have power on the football side I would totally agree that that would be awful, but I don't see any evidence.

while I totally agree that if you're going to ask for accountability you have to do so believably from the first minute, at this point, I doubt Dareus is ever going to get it. I'd love to see it, but he's had so many chances that I just can't believe he is going to ever really own his problems. Bill Walsh for one came in without a single NFL game and put a ton of rules in place for the Niners and had an awful first season. At least one coach was fired by Walsh for going behind his back to management saying he was putting too much emphasis on piddly-ass rules. Management stuck by Walsh and the coach was gone. There's a reason teachers are told not to smile till Christmas. You don't earn the right to make the rules with good performance over time. It's putting your rules in place that tends to determine what kind of performance you'll have in the long run.

Yeah, Tyrod is one of the best-known names. Having your name be best-known isn't the same as being a star. Every starting QB in the league has a decently well-known name because when you watch the offensive highlights they all start with "Taylor takes the snap." I'd question whether the Bills have stars beyond Shady and maybe (last year) Sammy. Good players, yes. I don't think "star" is the word to use for guys like Dareus or Kyle Williams or Jerry Hughes or Incognito or for that matter Tyrod. But hey, that's just me. Agreed that they're unlikely to trade Shady. But dead cap isn't the reason. If they traded him, they'd get hit by $7.875 mill in dead cap. But they'd also save $6 mill in salary. A cap hit of $1.875 mill wouldn't stop this deal. But no, I don't think it's going to happen anymore than you do.

That is some extremely poor journalism by O'Shea. Silva says he "expects" the Bills to "listen to offers." And O'Shea, whoever he is, reads that as, "is looking to trade." Pathetic writing on top of abominable reading of what his source actually said.

So ... what you're saying is that if he'd been healthy, things might have been different, right? Thing is ... he WASN'T healthy. He's shown no ability to stay on the field or to consistently be at the top of his game when on the field. Yeah, if you ignore that things look better. But it shouldn't be ignored. It's a huge part of the picture with Sammy.

For coaches and players there is no such thing as a tank. None. McDermott will be working as hard as he possibly can to win, knowing that a coach's future job prospects rest on how good his team looks and he looks coaching them. Will Beane maybe have to crush a smile when they lose a close one this year? Yeah, maybe. But not McDermott. This is very logical. If one example of something didn't turn out well, it clearly proves that ever doing it under any circumstances is not a good idea. Oh, and there is no such thing as tanking in football. Rebuilding, yes. Tanking, nope, because the coaches and players have far far too much on the line to not do their absolute best.

Yes, they did. That draft pick wasn't Justin Gilbert. It was the right to pick a player at #9 that the Bills traded away. The fact that Cleveland blew that pick doesn't mean we would have. We might easily have used that pick to snag Shazier or Aaron Donald. Or Ebron. Or Beckham. Or Zack Martin. So yeah, Cleveland made the smart trade and we made the dumb one. They then used the draft pick poorly. But if someone steals your money and then gambles it away in Vegas, it doesn't make it OK that they stole your money in the first place.

Come on ... people blame Sammy? Only the nuts and wackos. As for the rest of your post, though, it comes down to "I don't like hearing about this." And you'll just have to deal with it, same as the rest of the world has to deal with stuff they don't like. It's just life. It really was a bad trade from the first minute it happened. And there's extreme doubt about your statement about OBJ being a failure here. Very doubtful. Sammy's big problem is that he wasn't healthy. Beckham has been consistently healthy and available. Yeah, we'd have thrown to him less than the Giants did. But if you look at the stats, guys like Woods had better catch ratios than Sammy, whereas Beckham was destroying the other WRs on the Giants in that stat. If Beckham were here he'd almost certainly still be a tremendous success. Yeah, he'd have smaller gross stats, but he'd still be doing what he's done for the Giants in terms of qualititative stats. He'd still be thought of as a tremendous success. And we wouldn't have had to trade away three picks to get the pick to get him, we'd only have had to use the one. It wasn't a good move, that trade. As for tanking, it basically doesn't exist in football. Rebuilding does. And while we're not doing a full rebuild, there's a large element of rebuilding in McDermott and Beane's plan. Yup, and the good teams - the teams that have consistency in management - love that future firsts are undervalued that way. They take advantage of that whenever they can to get first round picks in future years.

I don't see it as a black eye at all. Boldin came in saying he was here to win a Super Bowl. Then he looked around and saw what the team was capable of this year and realized that wasn't happening, It was worth a try for the FO. He'd have taught and developed the young guys and played good ball as well, but probably the work he'd have done with the young guys was what they'll miss. It was a good thought, but you can't control stuff like this. Oh, you're guessing what he'll say tomorrow? I didn't get it. OK. Um, "It's a shame, they'll miss him, but not all that much. It'll give the young guys a chance to get some work."

I wouldn't. They were 19th last year. But I agree, I don't see huge improvements this year. The line looks good but other than that we look OK and have little depth.

Yeah, 2018 is starting to maybe look like they might have a strong defense.

Odds are very high against it. First, unless a team is in desperate need from something like a starter suddenly going down, a team that wanted him would just wait till after this year. It's late for him to start at the beginning of the season for a team that acquired him now except in cases of absolute emergency. Second, from what we've seen Yates doesn't look like he'd make anyone comfortable as the #2 if Peterman went down. Third, Peterman is completing around 50% of his passes. 51.1%, to be exact. He's doing better than Tyrod in the games but he isn't actually playing all that well yet. He has a ton more to learn before you would probably want him starting even if he was better than Tyrod. Fourth, Tyrod's $15.5 mill guarantee will partly be paid by the team which traded for him (the salary and the $1 mill guaranteed on next year's roster bonus) but that would still leave us paying for $7.5 mill, his entire signing bonus. That's not nothing. They'd save the salary and the roster bonus, but unless they got quite a good pick, they'd want to justify taking that $7.5 mill hit by keeping him. Even if they did start Peterman (very doubtful), Tyrod would be a great insurance policy in case they're winning (no, I don't think they will either, but they seem to be trying to keep that possibility open). Tyrod's performance in the preseason is still fairly understandable as he picks up a new offense. But it won't raise his trade value. Honestly, I'm a major doubter of Tyrod. I think we pretty much saw what he is in the last year and a half or so, which I believe is a top 32 QB who will never be a top 16 or so starter, and top 16 is around when people want to keep you. I wanted them to rebuild this year and let him go. Once they signed his option, though, I think it pretty much sealed things about keeping him for the year. IMHO unless the offer is higher than expected, he's a Bill for this year anyway.

If they didn't want him, they wouldn't have guaranteed him $15.5 mill. Seriously, not going to happen. If they were going to let him go, they wouldn't have picked up his option.