Thurman#1

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/03/29/nfl-new-head-coaches-sean-mcvay-kyle-shanahan-sean-mcdermott-anthony-lynn-vance-joseph-doug-marrone It's an article analyzing what the six new head coaches do scheme-wise, based on Benoit's extensive film study. He then uses that to predict what those coaches might be likely to do in their first drafts. Here's the section on McDermott: "By deciding to let cornerback Stephon Gilmore walk in free agency, the longtime defensive assistant under the late Jim Johnson in Philadelphia and the highly respected Ron Rivera in Carolina has already told you how he views the game. Gilmore is a lanky, athletic man-to-man defender. Most defenses would kill for a corner like him. The Bills were one of those defenses under Rex Ryan, who preferred one-on-one coverage outside and overloaded pressure designs up front. But McDermott plays a lot more zone. On early downs, it’s eight in the box with a safety patrolling centerfield. On passing downs, it’s seven in the box, maybe with an inside blitz look, and two safeties back deep. This approach naturally protects corners; almost always, they have help from a safety over the top or from a linebacker underneath. And so instead of spending money on a pricey cornerback you can spend it on linebackers and pass rushers. McDermott’s old team, the Panthers, did exactly that by letting Josh Norman leave in free agency, signing Thomas Davis and Luke Kuechly to long-term contracts, and consistently selecting defensive linemen early in the draft. The Bills will follow this model. Almost any position in their front seven can be upgraded." The whole article is pretty good, but the Anthony Lynn and Doug Marrone sections also have some Bills relevance.

Assuming your guess is right, I think they understand that this year is likely to be a wash even with Tyrod much less without him. We're just not likely to be good this year with this lineup as we try to input new systems. As for vet backups, we're in salary cap jail. We have $12 mill left, and that's before we pay the draft class their $5 - $7 mill. And the Bills (and most teams) like to carry $5 or $6 mill in space through the season in case we need injury replacements.

Fair enough. Still, we need to talk during the offseason. It really has been shown that when people are talking about bringing in expensive high-level FAs as winning the offseason, it most often leads to losing the regular season. Clearly we didn't spend freely this year due to the serious cap situation we've found ourselves in. But I like that we didn't just push the cap problems down the road. Instead we dealt with the problems this year without destroying our situation next year. That much I really like. But I hate that they took a season when we were losing a ton of FAs and managed to not get any comp picks next year, at least as it looks now. If there's one thing they need to do to start winning offseasons in ways that will produce regular season effects, it's maximize the number of draft picks we get in every conceivable way.

Mariota, Luck, Newton and Wilson are traditional pocket passers. They stay in the pocket as long as they can, which allows the play to develop if it's going to. Yeah, if the play breaks down, they're athletic. But they don't bail out till the rush drives them out. They are pocket passers, while RGII and Kaepernick are not. Ryan is an unathletic pocket passer and one of the best QBs in the game. Derek Carr is too. Cousins is no big runner. A healthy Dalton - when their OL gets back to at least decent - looks like he's going to keep the Bengals relevant for the next ten years. I could definitely be wrong about this but I think Wentz is going to be very good for a very long time and he's no athlete. Traditional pocket passers dominate the league, but a few of them can do extra things, particularly Wilson, Newton and Jameis. But they stay in the pocket and are very effective there unti forced out.

So, LaCanfora says McDermott has growing cache with ownership, could be bringing in VPs or personnel figures with ties to the coach in the near future, and that the marriage likely isn't built to last. And then McDermott says that Whaley and he worked together on all this and neither could have done it alone, that it's been a total team effort, and that "Doug and I have had healthy conversations, productive conversations, and I look forward to doing that moving forward." And that the team will speak with one voice. And people hear McDermott's comments and say, "See, LaCanfora was wrong, and there's no problem." Really? Does nobody notice that both of those could easily be 100% true, that they are not contradictory? They are not. Did McDermott say how far forward he will move with Whaley? Did he say there will be no new VPs or personnel figures? Folks, this is good PR, but McDermott didn't contradict LaCanfora's report. He didn't say there isn't conflict. And he certainly didn't guarantee Whaley's future with the Bills will be long or filled with power.

Whaley wasn't looking the other direction when Tyrod was brought in. Same as he gets the blame for EJ because Nix put him in charge of the "QB team" that draft, he gets the credit for Tyrod for being GM at the time. But yeah, the way to get a good QB is to draft one. And then another and another till you get the right guy. The numbers of franchise QB acquired in free agency is minuscule, and it's generally the result of a team drafting two good QBs (Luck and Manning for the Colts and Brees and Rivers for the Chargers). Free agency is how you get bridge guys, bottom-third starters, backups, starters who should be backups and guys who might still develop but almost never do. You know what Churchill said about democracy? "It's been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Same with getting your QB by drafting them consistently.

That's owners who do it consistently over the long term, and owners who do it to good GMs. Neither is the case with Pegula and Whaley. Disagree. Utterly. It's been three years. When you start something new, it's hard. Coming to a Plan A, seeing that it's not working and then going to Plan B, that's not winging it. It's a process of figuring out new things. He hasn't convinced me yet that he'll be a good owner. But it's really hard to acquire a totally new business like this. He's done some bad things. It's very clear in hindsight that he should've brought in a czar. But following the wrong guy is a very common problem in a situation that's utterly new. The question is whether you can adapt when you see that you've made a mistake. We'll see.

That the Broncos wanted a guy a year ago at a moment when Denver had one QB on the roster and a different head coach ... very very clearly does not prove that the same team wants the same guy later with a different head coach and two very young promising QBs already on the roster. Especially at a time when they would have to pay about eight or ten times more than they were looking at back then. When the rumor circulated that Elway had called last year in April, Denver had one QB on the roster, Siemian, who at the time had thrown zero NFL passes. Further, Tyrod had not yet signed his very expensive August 2016 contract extension and so was available for another year for a million or two. And that doesn't even mention Tyrod's regression this last year. There's no proof, but it's very likely that Denver indeed did not want Tyrod this off season. That train left the station when they drafted Lynch and Siemian played OK. There's been no mention of it this year and in fact sources said specifically that the Broncos were not one of the teams interested in Tyrod this year, those three being the Browns, 49ers and Jets. http://broncoswire.usatoday.com/2017/03/02/nfl-news-three-teams-tyrod-taylor-denver-broncos-not-among-them/ So yeah, I guess we can indeed make stuff up to fit agendas. I used to wanna date this girl a while back. These days looking at her, I can't imagine what I was thinking. Things change. Assuming for no reason and with no evidence that they haven't is imprecise thinking. Oh, and as for the Broncos fans, there was a recent poll as to who should be the Broncos QB this year here, on a site with a ton of Broncos-related polls: https://apester.com/channels/5793d9cf58871208530731eb?src=channel There were 23,000 voters. Two percent said Tyrod. Two percent! You can probably find two percent of Bills fans who still want Manuel.

He's the GM. He gets credit or blame for hiring the coaches. They're on him. If he'd gone to the Pegulas early and said he couldn't work with Ryan, they would almost certainly have listened to him. Same as he doesn't get the blame from before his tenure, he absolutely DOES get the blame for what's happened since. And no nobody blames Whaley for the failures before he was GM. But things haven't improved since. After four years on his watch the team has been consistently mediocre, has worked its way into salary cap trouble while not even being close to competing, has switched schemes consistently - the GM's responsibility - has kept extremely few draft picks and simply hasn't started winning at a higher rate. And that's the bottom line. Cracks me up how people want to say Whaley isn't responsible for what happened before he got here and that also, after he got the GM position, Whaley isn't responsible for the coaches and Whaley isn't responsible for the salary cap problems we've had to deal with this year and Whaley isn't responsible for the problems he's had getting along with all three coaches and Whaley isn't responsible for the draft picks disappearing or the scheme switches ... Christ the guy was the GM!! Wasn't he responsible for anything? (Byrd Man, I don't know if you're making all those arguments, but I see them on here all the time.) If he can't be responsible and make changes, bring in someone who can. Agreed. Any GM taking over a team that went 6-10 the year before and brilliantly shepherding them to 6-10, 9-7, 8-8 and 7-9 records clearly has proven he knows how to move a team in the right direction. I hear you that he's done some things right. But continued mediocrity shouldn't be the basis of a decision to keep the guy. Yeah, we didn't go 0-48, but Jeez, is anyone happy with what we have done? Or how many Pro Bowlers we have? While I can see an argument asking for one more year, his record so far has showed a pretty remarkable lack of improvement.

No, they didn't say at the beginning of the competition who they wanted to win it. No reason to do so in case things turned out differently than they'd expected. But yes, they expected and planned for Kolb to win and let Manuel develop. Sure, if Manuel had made a miraculous Russell Wilson-style leap upwards, they'd have been thrilled and started him. But they absolutely expected Kolb to win. They've said as much since through sources to writers many times. This isn't worth arguing over, it really is what they expected. That's not true. Sully in the '90s was a ton more positive than he is now. He still irritated the folks who accepted only perfume and bouquets, but they were a good team and Sully knew it and wrote it. Yeah he had some bad things to say, which makes sense when you're writing about imperfect things, but it was much more positive than it is today. And he has consistently been positive when the Bills looked positive. I remember in 2011 when the Bills went off to a great start and Jerry said Chan Gailey should be the early front-runner for coach of the year, at 5-2. When the Bills look good, Jerry comments on it. But the bunch that will only accept sunshine and roses only remember the bad things he says. And yeah, there have been a lot more of the bad things than the good for a long time, but there is very good reason for that. He's covered a bad Bills team for a very long time. Sad, indeed.

Wildly disagree. One of the major things you want in a vet backup is the ability to be a great teammate, to be a mentor / on-field coach to Tyrod and to Cardale. Cutler has shown himself not to be a team guy. He would also cost too much. It's not like we're going to be competitive for a championship this year or almost certainly next. We need a mentor/coach far more than a guy who can maximize the team on the field. We don't need a bridge guy. Tyrod is the bridge guy.

Ever heard of a thing called projection, Bud? You might look into it. And if you think only two people feel that sixteen years of no playoffs is OK and prove everything's peachy-dandy at OBD, you*re deeply mistaken.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine how anyone could think Whaley should be fired. http://publicrecords.onlinesearches.com/view/lid/77975 After all, the team's been so successful under his stewardship. Tom, if not having won world championships means you can't complain, I'll expect not to hear any more sourness from you or anyone else around here. If you can't complain as a fan of a team that's gone this many years without hitting the playoffs, with a GM with this level of success, you should pretty much never complain. And I say that as a person who has enjoyed your posts for years. Whaley deserves everything he gets and more. Clicks mean absolutely nothing to Sully. Plenty of sites out there it means a lot, but for the News, absolutely nothing. They use a subscription system. Their money comes from people subscribing to receive their stories. The News actually limits the number of stories you can read without subscribing. They clearly would't do this if they gave a crap about clicks. Pretty much all newspapers these days have switched to this system. The "it's only for clicks" argument simply is no longer relevant for most newspapers and certainly the Buffalo News. They make money when people like their writers enough to sign up for digital and newsprint subscriptions. Sully is still here because he's good at his job. Not that that means you have to like him, but he's good.

Yeah, turns out to have been a very bad class relative to most. Still some good talent, though, with Sheldon Richardson, Lotulelei, Kawann Short, LeVeon Bell, Warmack, Kelce, Warford, Tyrann Mathieu if he'd stayed healthy ...

Depends. I could spend time practicing and become the world's best clothes washer. Or lawn mower. And it wouldn't have been worth the time, especially if it took five hours per week away from a work day where I was trying to master a very difficult skill that if I ever did master it would make me wildly famous and rich. It's an interesting idea, but overall the advantages wouldn't outweigh the disadvantages, I think.

First read, then respond. I didn't say only QBs who have won Super Bowls are good enough for the many doubters out there. You either misunderstood or tried to pretend that's what I said. But it's not really difficult to see it's certainly not. Specifically, I said "There really is simply a lack of belief that he's ever going to be good enough to be part of a Super Bowl victory as a starter. " And after a year or two in the league, there was little of that kind of doubt about Kelly. Kelly looked like he was good enough. One thing that made me personally think so was his three fourth-quarter comebacks and five Game-winning drives in that one year. So no, those expectations are pretty much the opposite of "UNREALISTIC" if your QB is someone like Jim Kelly. But yeah, it's different when someone like Tyrod is your QB. In fact, I find it astonishing that anyone could ever be happy with a QB who doesn't inspire the belief that he "is ever going to be good enough to be part of a Super Bowl victory as a starter." Generally out of all the QBs somewhere around #20 in league history, somewhere around one guy wins a Super Bowl once every ten years out of all ... what ... the hundred player-years of the roughly 10 QBs between #16 and #25 over that ten-year period. If you're happy with that kind of a shot, that's your choice. But that's what concerns the large number of people who doubt Tyrod, and probably the ten or twenty people who may actually hate Tyrod or troll that way.

No. It's not. If you have to recover an onside kick to have even a shot at winning, that's indeed garbage time. Your team shouldn't treat it that way of course, but that's what it is. Your team has almost no chance. When that's your situation, the defense is going to be playing prevent, and your offense will absolutely have a chance to get some yards if you pay for them with time and taking risks. Garbage time. Inflated passing stats. So, sure there's a thousand-to-one chance you can win if the ball bounces almost exactly perfectly right several times. But it's wildly unlikely. And what the defense will do in that situation is back off and allow you short passes if you can deal with their rush game. This ... is what is called ... garbage time. QBs can inflate their stats with good-looking yards and results because the defense doesn't mind you doing it as long as you aren't completing long passes. Garbage time.

Yeah, thank goodness we disregarded it when he said it looked like Tyrod and the Bills would re-negotiate a new deal. Enough with the "attack the messenger" stuff. Seems like the most common form of argument on the internet sometimes and certainly on Bills boards, the whole "I don't like the idea, so let's attack the writer" nonsense. That's probably the status quo ... if you like what's reported, you discuss it and believe it, and if you don't like it, you blame the media. I personally wouldn't mind a bit if Whaley loses power. He doesn't seem to me to have done enough to still be here.

You wouldn't get much more than that. Ten to twelve is a very small jump. And #10 isn't anything you can really "hold for hostage." If you say we're not giving up the #10 unless you pay us a ton, they'll hang up and call #11. Sure, sometimes teams pay too much, but it's generally for the #1 or #2 pick. Quick question, if you're the Browns, do you make that trade? Nah, me either. Granted. But if they're that sure Trubisky really is a top ten guy, they'd be getting him by trading back from #1 to #4 or so. It's not impossible, but this "the other guy will overpay" is the standard assumption on here when trades are proposed, and it's actually pretty rare and therefore all the excitement leads to nothing. People always assume that the Bills can get what they want by giving too little and that when we trade down teams will give up too much. And what usually happens is that both ways the trade goes pretty close to actual value.

You're wildly overestimating what we're likely to get in trade here. Going down from #10 to #20, whether it's in one trade or two, is about 450 points in difference, which is maybe a 2nd and a 4th. Could we get more if someone is absolutely desperate? Sure, but it's not what you count on when you're planning things in advance. Generally, though, I'm all for trading back if we can get reasonable compensation. I'd love to see them try to get a pick for next year, personally. The reason next year is better for QBs is that - at least right now - it seems there are likely to be one or two good enough to go in the top five or so, which will be far too early for us to have a chance at them. When we decided to reload rather than rebuilding, we pretty much gave up any shot at getting a top five guy, unless we do something radical like trade this year's first for a next year's first plus some extra. That would maybe put us in position to get a high pick next year. Or he is. Let's not pretend we know. These are all opinions. They didn't think Russell Wilson was the right QB either or Carr and plenty of others. That's a reasonable opinion you've got there, but it is indeed an opinion.

With $4.45 mill of that contract guaranteed, it is very unlikely that Goodwin doesn't make the roster. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

Kick the tires? Money, for a start. We've got very little cap room left and still have real holes to fill. Also, Peterson's getting older. The team that gets him should be a team ready to compete this year, and that's not us.

Not me. The needs elsewhere are too big. 2nd TE just can't overshadow our four or five major needs. No. If they cut Clay this year, they would actually pay around $4 mill more in dead money than they would be saving by cutting him. Next year it will be exactly even, $9 mill in cap hit vs. $9 mill in dead cap. The only way we get rid of Clay is if something happens and he simply can't play, a serious injury for example. And watching the All-22, what was obvious about Clay was that he was open consistently. Over and over again. It's a nice idea, but IMHO it doesn't hold up. Clay is 6'3" and was open a ton but didn't get the ball much the past two years.

The imaginary round. Seriously, our new coach is a guy who builds around character. Someone will probably pick him, but I'd guess it won't be as high as the third. Fifth, maybe?

The Bills only have 73 guys signed. They will be adding about 20 more before camp.