Thurman#1

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.

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.