Thurman#1

Yeah, it is. We're not going to be competing for the Super Bowl this year. And we're in cap trouble still, though a bit less so after Tyrod's re-negotiation. So yeah, we need to start emulating the successful teams that use the system effectively. Doing this means we get cheaper players so we can bring in more and have them cost less. Which is what a team with cap pressure should be doing anyway. Our moves should all be aimed more at the future than at next year. Successful teams tend to have long-range orientations, and so should we. Successful teams tend to get high-priced FAs only very occasionally, and so should we, and successful teams tend to be careful about the cap, not just shifting contracts and problems downstream, and so should we. Being careful of comp picks helps accomplish all these goal, it has you getting more picks which means higher chances of draft success, it means you tend to spend less on FAs which also increases your chances of success. And it shouldn't be done for only one year, but every single year. Occasionally it will maybe make sense not to work that way, but most years you should be gathering and hoarding picks, including comp picks. That's why the teams with the most comp picks over the years correspond almost one-to-one with the most successful teams in the league.

We have to sign FAs. But there are ways to sign FAs without losing comp picks. And year after year we ignore those rules while the Pats and Ravens and others know them bone-deep and use them consistently. 1) You can sign FAs that were cut without losing comp picks. 2) You can sign untendered RFAs anytime without losing comp picks. It's only UFAs who count toward comp picks. 3) After June 1st you can sign anyone not given a "June 1st tender" by their original team without losing comp picks. 4) You can sign ANYONE after the UFA signing period (which ended July 27th last year) without losing a comp pick. 5) You can sign guys to small contracts pretty much anytime. There's a minimum salary to qualify and while nobody knows exactly what it is, they know fairly closely. Below that level you don't lose picks. And salaries go down as time passes and players get more desperate. So it's not like you can't fill your team without losing comp picks. You can. But you have to be smart. You often see Belichick waiting till after those deadlines to sign guys exactly for this reason. Nice. And yes they will be very legitimate questions.

Honestly, it's the opposite of stupid. Comp picks, especially when acquired year after year after year directly relate to better rosters and being in better cap shape. This article says it well, "Comp picks are rewards for smart teams." Exactly. http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/02/24/compensatory-picks-are-a-reward-for-smart-teams/ "The list of teams that have received the most compensatory picks since 1994 is pretty similar to the list of the best teams in football since 1994: The Ravens have received the most compensatory picks, and they’ve won two Super Bowls. The Packers have received the second-most, and they’ve also won two Super Bowls. The Patriots are fourth, and they’ve won five Super Bowls. The 10 teams that have had the most compensatory picks have won most of the Super Bowls since 1994, with a total of 14 titles for those 10 teams. "At the other end of the spectrum, the teams that don’t receive a lot of compensatory picks tend to be bad teams: There are 14 teams that have received fewer than 20 compensatory picks since the system started in 1994, and those 14 teams have won a combined two Super Bowls." The Patriots love comp picks so much that they consistently trade for guys with expiring contracts who will draw comp picks when their contracts end. The details matter, and this isn't a small detail. Comp picks are extra draft picks. So they make it easier and more palatable for your team to trade away a third or fourth rounder if they want something because they have their regular pick and a comp pick in the same round. And comp picks are even more valuable starting this year, because they're more versatile ... as of this year you can trade them. It's not a mistake that the best teams are the ones who have had the most comp picks over the years. It's a smart strategy to care, and it's the smart teams who do it. And yes we should have made the effort, this year and every year.

Exceeded expectations? Good grief. Poor cap management. Above average trades and FAs but not tremendously far above average. Below average drafting. Poor coach selection. He's lucky to have retained his job this year. May 13, 2013. That's the day he became GM, so of course he can't be held responsible for GM moves before that. But did the constant scheme switches on both sides of the ball ramp up the speed of turnover? Almost certainly.

In our salary cap condition, of course we're not going to go after top tier FAs. In any case, the best teams rarely do, tending to build around mid-range or low-range guys to fill holes. We're a ways away.

I don't agree that it's as easy to say as that, that it's just smart. It's too early to say. If we're still winning six or seven or eight or nine games three or four years from now, it won't have been a smart move. It's almost certainly the best move to make to win the most games possible next year. But me, personally, I don't care about next year, especially. It's also likely to give us lower draft picks over the next couple of years, which could easily hurt a lot more in the long run. It's not necessarily a smart move. But it's decisive and appears reasonable. Proof's in the pudding. We'll see. Tyrod's easily the best bridge QB out there. The question is whether we should have gone with a bridge QB or rebuilt.

It's ludicrous. But it's also not what Prisco said. Where die he say Whaley was completely against it? Isn't it just as reasonable to assume Whaley was against it under some conditions? Particularly the conditions of theguarantees and the front-loaded nature of the original contract. It would indeed have been ludicrous to say that Whaley strong-armed a GM who was totally against the move, but that was a poor summary of Prisco's position.. What Prisco said was probably reaching a bit, very possible correct, but too little evidence to be anywhere near sure.

His play kinda does something for me. Not his combine, though. They were indeed on the street for a reason. The reason is they were NFL-good, but not as good as most starters except for Harvin, whose reason was injury. But I watched the All-22 for five games. Guys were open on almost every single play. As open as if we'd had Sammy on the field? No. But open. And on a lot of plays, Tyrod wasn't seeing them. You can't blame Tyrod for more than his share of the losses. But he gets most of the blame for the below average nature of the pass game this last year. And Bill, you asked earlier what options he had. He had one of the best receiving TEs in football, a guy who was consistently open and yet rarely got the ball. Also, I personally was very impressed by Walt Powell. No, not a terrific player, but his cuts were really sudden and he was open a lot. I'm guessing he'll be on the roster again this year. As for improvement, Tyrod's had six years in the league. The number of QBs in the NFL who haven't shown in six years that they can be a franchise QB who then still later go ahead and do .... can pretty much be counted on the index finger on Rich Gannon's left hand. It's probable that we've seen Tyrod's best. Significant improvement is still possible but really really unlikely.

Percentage chance of getting one of those ... 10%, probably. If we cut Tyrod we won't be that bad and if we keep him we won't be that good and won't have the money to bring in the kind of players who could make that kind of difference. Wildly unlikely. Hate to say it but the likely outcome is yet another Buffalo Bills type season, 5 - 8 wins. It would not be the goal. Assuming we have a 2 win season, and the odds are spectacularly low unfortunately, it wouldn't be the goal. It would be the method, part of the road towards the goal.. The goal would be reaching Super Bowl contention in the next three or four years. As a Bills fan, I know I'm dying for another 8 - 9 win season. But I agree that's the sort of neighborhood we'd be looking at with Tyrod, most likely.

The story says he could be looking at property in case they pick up his option. We're just going to have to wait.

Link, please.

QBR is nonsense. How do they make it? We have no real idea. It's opaque and gives more weird results than other stats and we don't know why.. At this point, the only people who use QBR are ESPN, because it's their stat, and people who find that other stats don't back them up in whatever argument but QBR does. Tyrod isn't a top ten guy. He simply ... is not. And yeah, the cap hit in 2017 is OK. But looking only at the cap hit for 2017 is like putting something on your credit card and saying, "See, it's a good deal, because the December payment is very reasonable." When looking at a contract's impact, you don't look at one year. You look at all the money that will have to be paid on the salary cap for every year money will have to be paid. If Tyrod stays one year, that will be $30.75 million. For one year of Tyrod. Which pretty much means we'd keep him for two years. So if he stays for two years - the likeliest amount for a bridge QB in this situation - the Bills will pay him $40.5 mill, total, for two years on the roster. That's franchise QB money. Bridge QBs are rare too. But that doesn't mean you pay them like you pay the ten or twelve franchise QBs. And with Tyrod's contract, that's what would happen. We'd be paying a bridge QB franchise QB money, $20.25 mill a year. I hate to say this again and again but people just don't seem to hear it, so ... here are the only QBs who receive more than $20.25 mill per year average salary, in order: Andrew Luck Carson Palmer Drew Brees Kirk Cousins Joe Flacco Aaron Rodgers Russell Wilson Ben Roethlisberger Eli Manning Philip Rivers Cam Newton Matt Ryan, and Tom Brady. There are no Tyrods in that group, and yet, that's the group we'd be putting Tyrod in. If he stayed for two years, he'd receive $20.25 million per year, and only five QBs would be with a million per year of that figure: Brady, Ryan, Newton, Rivers, and Eli Manning. Tyrod simply doesn't belong there.

Worst is that while we're staying a bad to mediocre team, we're in salary cap jail for years, limiting our potential on into the future. That wouldn't come about based only on the Tyrod contract, but it would be a major contributor, and if we do keep him, we would have a hard time fielding a roster this year without starting the typical process of re-negotiating to push the salary cap burden back and putting us in trouble next year and the year after and down the line.

Also worth remembering that the system - maximizing draft picks by tailoring FA moves to getting as many supplementary picks as possible and trading back often for more picks - is what got the QB in the first place. Brady was a supplemental pick. Everybody fails repeatedly with draft picks. Belichick no more often than anyone else. But they constantly accumulate picks so they have more and raise their odds of getting somebody good. And Belchick isn't especially bad at drafting WRs. He just doesn't use high picks on them. Not a single first-round WR in the Belichick era. 4th Malcolm Mitchell 7th Jeremy Gallon 2nd (59) Aaron Dobson 4th Josh Boyce 7th Jeremy Ebert 3rd (90) Taylor Price 3rd (83)Brandon Tate 7th Julian Edelman 5th Matt Slater 2nd (36th) Chad Jackson 5th P.K. Sam 3rd (45)Bethel Johnson 2nd (65) Deion Branch 7th David Givens That's all he's drafted in his entire 17 years of drafting. Three 2nds, three 3rds, two 4ths, two 5ths, and four 7ths, and he's gotten David Givens and Edelman out of that. Not great, but not bad either. Belichick must really like Cooks. They don't often trade high picks, even if they're getting back a lower-level pick or two as they were asking in this Cooks deal.

We ... are ... grossly ... overpaying ... for ... Tyrod. Someone gave Osweiler $18 mill a year. Did that mean that we should give Tyrod $20.5 mill? Or did they wildly overpay Osweiler? Clearly the latter. And if Glennon gets a deal for $14 - $15 mill a year, first it's a ton less than Tyrod would make if they picked up his option and second, the fact that somebody might overpay for one guy doesn't make overpaying for another OK. Tyrod is a bridge QB. He shouldn't be paid like a franchise guy, and yes, $40.5 million guaranteed for two years on the roster - his most likely term - is franchise QB money. Glennon is also a bridge QB, though not as good a bridge guy as Tyrod. $14 - $15 mill would make him the most expensive bridge QB in history. And will almost certainly look like a terrible deal in a year or two. Also worth remembering that some teams have an awful lot of money available under the cap to throw around if they want while we have very little and still can't even come close to fielding a roster of 51 NFL-ready players.

Yeah, tank's a stupid word for it. It implies the wrong things. It's a full rebuild that people are actually referring to. Players and coaches don't tank. They can't. It's diametrically opposed to their best interests. Fighting your way through a rebuild, though, can be something that can help your career in the long term. Seems plain at this point that they aren't doing a full rebuild. But they look like they're rebuilding in some areas where it makes sense, like getting the salary cap in order, switching systems, which is a process that usually sets you back for a year or so and often means some personnel who fit the last system don't fit the new one. And so on. So yeah, seems like a partial rebuild is in the cards.

First, there's plenty of evidence. It might be evidence you're not willing to accept, but it's been reported again and again from different reporters with different sources that this has been going on with Whaley. His behaviour has shown it as well, on many occasions. Second, you're misreading the story. It didn't say that they want to cut him. It says they don't want to pay him. People want to avoid, deny, ignore and take every other way people pretend things they don't like don't even exist that the contract isn't a huge part of this. But it is. He will impact the Bills at a franchise QB level if they pick up the option and he stays the length of time he's most likely to stay, two years or so. They don't want to pay that contract. The story doesn't say they wouldn't keep him if a re-negotiation makes it more reasonable to keep him. But doesn't rule it out either.

I don't like what's said. Therefore it's the media's fault. Again, yeah, it's the media. I'm sure the approach of the decline on the Tyrod decision has nothing to do with it.

Ouch.

If you can get Tyrod to re-negotiate - and not just change the cap numbers but actually lessen the front-loaded nature of the contract and/or lessen the guarantees - then it's a reasonable path. If he won't do that, one year for $30.5 million or two years for $40.5 million simply, all of it guaranteed if he's on the roster in March of each of the two years, .... absolutely is too much money for a bridge quarterback. Most particularly so on a team in serious cap trouble due to GM cap over-spending.

Agreed. And your emphasis is in the right place. Down the road a year or three ... exactly. When we might possibly be good enough if things go well to start challenging for a title. And I agree Tyrod isn't it.

You're right that the cap number isn't bad this year. But cap number this year is simply not the problem. The very high guarantee is the problem, that and the front-loaded nature of the contract. From what we've seen from each side, I'd guess the negotiations, at least unless somebody eventually backs down, go like this: OBD: Look, the cap numbers aren't the problem. The problem is the front-loaded nature of the contract and the guarantee ... if we keep him for one year it would cost us $30.75 mill and if we keep him for two it would cost us $40.5 mill and those numbers just don't work for us. Tyrod's negotiator: We'd be willing to change things so the cap numbers go down for you. OBD: Um, I said the cap numbers are NOT the problem, the problem is the front-loaded deal. Tyrod's negotiator: I hear you. We are totally willing to work with you on making the cap numbers more reasonable for you. What we're not willing to do i accept less up front. OBD: So you aren't willing to address our concerns. Again, we don't care about the cap numbers. Tyrod's negotiator: Yeah, we're completely willing to be fluid on those cap numbers. OBD: Uhhhhhhhhhhh.

That isn't the question. It is one of several questions. Plural. One of the other main questions is whether it makes sense to pay Tyrod Taylor the amount he will receive based on his contract as it is now written. Another would be whether Tyrod's group is willing to work on changing the parts of the contract that the Bills actually have problems with. So far they haven't, and there's been no grounds for agreement from what we've heard. Perhaps one side will make some concessions as deadlines near.

Put them in a pretty good spot to be good, maybe even really good, over the next couple of years..

Cutting Taylor and signing some journeyman QB who can win us five games while saving us maybe $25 - $30 million bucks would make a lot more sense than keeping Tyrod, spending the extra $25 - $30 mill and winning seven or eight. Five games would have us drafting around third or fourth.