Thurman#1

I don't know much about Lynch, really, but I think you're underestimating Siemian. Siemian went into his first NFL action, in his second year, and came up with an 84.9 passer rating. And it was behind an OL that wasn't doing him any favors. He could be a good one. Still too early to say, but he did well for what a young inexperienced guy he is, a guy who wasn't exactly a first-rounder either. I think they're gonna be pretty good. But I'm no Nostradamus. We'll see.

Exhibit B of why doing a total rebuild makes a great deal of sense in the NFL is the other apparently very good QBs who'll be available. And Exhibit C would be what Cleveland did last year, drafting a sensational defensive difference maker and still having a ton of draft capital and being able to take a very reasonable flier on Kizer because of all the capital they have. Rebuilding isn't a guarantee. But it raises your odds. A lot if your talent is mediocre and you need a QB and difference makers.

Saying pretty much any QB in his second year is hopeless doesn't really make sense. Lynch and Siemian both have a reasonable chance to be good. Having two young guys with some promise is a very very good thing for them. It certainly is a bold prediction. I'd urge you not to bet the rent on it. Or even a bologna sandwich. They still have that defense. 8.5 is the over for them. And 6 for the Bills. Just saying. Respectfully disagree. They're promoting from within and probably will be using most of Phillips' system, and the new guy was supposed to be a serious up-and-comer. If they were switching schemes, I'd agree. It doesn't look like they are.

We'll see. I think you're being very optimistic indeed. They were 9-7 and they didn't get worse. I do like that we get them at home, that's a big advantage against Denver.

Automatic loss, no. Quite likely loss to Denver, yeah, I think so and so do most. Siemian was average, I'd agree, but in his second year in the league. He's likely to be improved and so is Lynch. I agree that Wade was a loss, but IMHO not a huge one. They have the personnel on defense to yet again be very very good. And they promoted from within which means a scheme change will not be necessary.

Pro Bowls - as an alternate - mean very little these days. When they held it in Hawaii guys wanted to go but these days guys discover dangerous cuticle injuries that prevent them from playing. Can't speak for Gugny, but I personally want him to be a top ten to twelve passing QB. Because teams with guys like that behind center are overwhelmingly the teams that win Super Bowls. That's how much better I want him or the next Bills QB to be.

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.