Thurman#1

He's had 122 defensive snaps. One hurry. One sack, three pressures Five solo tackles and four assists. One tackle for loss. Two QB hits. That's the basic reason, I think. He hasn't been impressive when he had chances. He's stuck out a few times but not often enough. He looked good in camp, but hasn't shown much since.

Oh, bull####. Seriously. When you win, you don't need excuses. Cause you won. When you lose, that's when the excuses don't stand up well. Honest to God, you guys absolutely crack me up. When we win big, you say, "yeah, sure they can win big, but they can't win the close ones." The Bills go win a few close ones and now you're complaining they should have won big. There's no way to win with you folks. There's absolutely always more to complain about. It's nonsense.

So, [sigh] ... you know your headline disagrees with your post, right? And that it just isn't so? Maybe if you want to try again, think a bit, first?

Agreed it was a dangerous combo, and they had nothing to lose and were able to have approaches nobody had seen on film. It was a tough game for us and a big game for them. But IMO it's really really overstating it to say that was their Super Bowl. It wasn't. It was a very important game for them. But "players want to impress next year's coaching staff"? That's every player, every game, every year. Overall I agree. If we'd lost, those excuses wouldn't have held up. Having won, they do, they are legit reasons the Chargers were able to keep it close.

Then when he throws a lot but we lose, it's "we've got to have a run game to take the pressure off."

"Narratives against him," that's classic. It'd be hard to find a clearer case of confirmation bias. Up and down play is what's against him. We saw it again in L.A. Still an absolutely excellent QB. Simply doesn't look like the MVP this year though. He's giving you just what you asked for. He argues that he's really good but has some significantly poor plays also. You go right to "trade him." You're getting just exactly what your posts deserve.

More like from Russ Brandon.

Wow, nice pickup. 1985 - 2002. It's got to have been him. And here I was thinking he's Giannised it out of nowhere. Thanks. The 28th overall and a 4th rounder. He was worth more but in those circumstances they weren't going to get more.

Head injuries don't have to be involved. Just saw a story a couple of weeks ago about Antetokounmpo making up a story in his head and making himself believe it for motivation. https://theathletic.com/3699137/2022/10/19/giannis-bucks-nba-season/ A rookie Mamukelashvili was remembered by Giannis as having said this before his first practice with the team: “He said, ‘Yo, Giannis, I’m gonna shut you down in practice today.’ and I was just tying my shoe, but he did not know me,” Antetokounmpo told The Athletic. “It was like our first interaction, first time to meet somebody, but he didn’t know me. And he is like a kid that has so much energy, he loves to talk too much. He was like, ‘I’m gonna shut you down today. I’m going to bust your ass.’ And I was just tying my shoes. And I can see Jrue, I can see Khris was like …” "As he tells the story, Antetokounmpo pretends to look up from tying his right shoe, raises an eyebrow, flashes a disproving look at the rookie, then gives the same glance to his teammates on the left and right and goes back to tying his shoe. “They had the face (too),” Antetokounmpo recounted to The Athletic. “And I just, I didn’t say a word to him. I just tied my shoes. I did my lift, I had my vitamin. Practice started, I had one target: Mamu. And I killed him. The Bucks posted a video on the Bucks’ Instagram, social media.” https://theathletic.com/3699137/2022/10/19/giannis-bucks-nba-season/ Then the reporter goes on to show the guy never said anything nearly that disrespectful. Some of these guys just nurse stuff that they can use to give them a sense of disrespect, whether it happened or not. It sounded possible on first reading (as did the Giannis story), but with the research others have done here .... That's probably what happened. God, yes, that blocked punt. Just absolutely insane!!!!

Apparently not. That sounded wonky to me, so I looked it up. "Basically, a little bit of air removed from the ball makes it easier to kick accurately because you get more ball surface in contact with the toe," Timothy Gay, physics professor at the University of Nebraska, told NBC News. "The more air you remove the shorter the range because the ball behaves more like a mattress and less like a stiff spring, so that the kicker expends more energy deforming the ball and less giving it velocity." https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/super-bowl-xlix/pigskin-physics-whats-big-deal-about-deflated-footballs-n290466

Holy crow, hadn't seen this before. Wow, what a project you've signed up for!! Impressive! I'll follow with interest. Good stuff!!!

... says the sad uncle nobody is talking to at the adults table. For the second time now, it was you who said "the SB winner." Know how many SB championships Randy Moss has? Zero. Yet another stupid argument from you. Welker and Edelman were the #1 WRs on those teams. We have a terrific WR too. Gronk was also fantastic. James Cook in 2023 with three games to go has already outproduced Gronk's best career year.

MVP of the Super Bowl? Woooooooooooooooh!!!! Gee whiz. OK, so I misunderstood your argument, but what is apparently your real argument is even sadder than what I thought. He had a good Super Bowl game, so he and his 500 plus yards that season were good? Yup, sad indeed. Again, he had five games over 39 yards, and those three were 81 yards and a TD, 79 yards and no TD, a 77 yarder with a TD and a 77 yarder with no TD. That's the guy who made the huge difference? Pathetic. Especially so when you have to try to quote Super Bowl announcers saying something that you remember them saying to back your point up. Beckham had a pretty decent season that year. That's something. But it ain't all that much that it allows a sensible argument that the Rams skill players outside of Kupp were all that good. No wonder you have to go outside of your own sad self-imposed boundaries to desperately try to scrape up an argument. Which SB did the Bengals win again?

Kupp is the GOAT what? The GOAT Rams receiver in 2021? You get no argument from me that he was insane that year and really really good generally. He was. I think you misunderstand GOAT. All terrific players you mention, though, fair enough. But so is Diggs.

This is the problem having arguments so bad that you have to exaggerate wildly to make them look reasonable. Which game was the one where Beckham looked like he was on pace to be their MVP that year? The one against Green Bay where he put up his high for the year with 81 yards and a TD? Oh, yeah, MVP type stuff all the way right there!!! The one where he got his second high with 79 yards and zero TDS against Arizona? Or the one where he got his third-highest with 77 and zero TDs against Cleveland? Oh, must be his fourth-best, with 39 yards and a TD against Baltimore. Yeah, I can totally see where you'd come up with "on pace to be the MVP," there. Lord! Must've had Stafford, Kupp and Donald shaking in their shoes. Again, that's the problem with putting out arguments so sad they need wild pumping up to even look reasonable.

Nonsense. Plenty of SB winners have playmakers no better than ours. It's only after they take home the trophy that the deification takes place. Last year's Chiefs had Valdes-Scantling, Smith-Schuster, the rooki Skyy Moore and Mecole Hardman. Pacheco was good. Of course, Kelce was terrific, but that is anything but Murderer's Row there. The year before the Rams had Kupp, Robert Woods managing 556 yards, Van Jefferson, and Beckham there powering to 537 yards.Sony Michel and Darrell Henderson at RB, and Tyler Higbee at TE. Kupp had as good a year as we've ever seen but after that their WRs were only decent. RBs and TE also only decent. Did Brady ever have terrific skill position guys, at NE, outside of maybe Gronk? They years they had Moss they never got a championship. Or in Tampa for that matter? He had Evans being all-world, but not all that much after that. Gronk put up 623 that y;ear and Godwin 840. None of those are all-world. Yeah, there are some SB winners that put together terrific groups, like the WRs on the 2006 Colts. Plenty more just have good group. Like us. James Cook suddenly looks like one of the best RBs in the league. Diggs stands up to anyone and the guys behind that are not great but they're solid and looking better since Brady took over. Our TEs look terrific. We have a good solid group and plenty of SBs have been won with that. You close your eyes and imagine Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison, but actually most SB teams are balanced. Good skill position guys, often with a terrific QB throwing to them and making them look better. We've got one of those.

Did not catch that! That's pretty funny!

What that shows is that there's a coach out there - specifically an ex-coach - who doesn't like McDermott. None of the rest of the media gets any sense that that's what the people currently think. (Look at the Buffalo Plus posting on youtube today, as one example.) Could it be more than that? Sure, but outside Dunne' sources, where is the rest of it? There have been a few guys through the years who wanted out. Quinton Spain, for instance. But what we have also seen a ton of is people leaving for more money and greener pastures ... and then coming back a few years later wishing they hadn't left and appreciating being here even more than they had. Phillips. Beasley. Shaq, John Brown. It's not all that short a list and they've proved they're not blowing smoke by coming back.

Nope, not happy with ceilinged out. But there's absolutely zero reason to believe that's where McDermott is. Just as easily he could be approaching his best days.

You're not really using these numbers the way he talked about it. The cap is anything but a myth, and Tompsett helps make that clear. The specifics of those numbers are expressed much better this way: "This top bucket of 'absolute-must-dos,' I think all of these are going to happen. They immediately get us from $29M in the hole to $19M in cap space. We even debated that a good chunk of these preferred/likely ones are probably going to happen, and [if all of them were done] that gets us to $45M." - Tompsett Again, he says a good chunk of them are going to happen. If all of them happened, it'd put us at $45M but that's unlikely. Instead, "a good chunk of them" could happen. "I think a lot of that is going to happen." Meaning those won't likely get us to $45M but maybe somewhere close. "And then down here there's another $28M floating around in things that I'd prefer not to do, but they absolutely can do." He talks about his purpose here, saying "Hopefully this shows you that there's a lot of options out there and fans should not be anxious about it looking like $29M over the cap. We're going to be just fine. It's all depending on which one of these they want to do." So, using the $72M as anything but a theoretically possible milestone is a bit disingenuous. He isn't even saying they'll get to $56M. $45M is the number he's talking about getting near. After that there are bunch of options, options he doesn't really like. Some of which may happen, but maybe not. As an example, he talks about the option of getting rid of Poyer and saving around $6M, but then says that replacing him would probably cost more than the money you save by cutting him. There's a lot of that here, particularly further down the list. Make some of these moves and you then leave a hole you have to fill, which will then cost money. Just getting to $44M, for instance, you'd then have to replace Sam Martin and Siran Neil and would have around 35 guys on the roster, having lost guys like DaQuan Jones, Leonard Floyd, Poona Ford, Dane Jackson, Taylor Rapp, Latavius Murray, Micah Hyde and a bunch more. The cap is very very real. It's flexible within limits. But real. And restrictive.

That ain't McD. It's the Buffalo Bills who are blowing late leads. And plenty of those decisions you're calling bad aren't necessarily. They could easily have produced the best possible outcomes. He deserves his share of the blame. Blaming him entirely says more about you than it does about him. Folks like you want to give all the credit for the good stuff to Allen and the players and put all the blame for the bad stuff on Sean. Doing that absolutely destroys claims to logic and neutrality of point of view. It's not clear thinking.

We wouldn't save money cutting Knox next year. $20M in dead cap. We pay him about $10M in salary and bonus next year but about $9M of that is already guaranteed, from what I believe I see from a quick look at Spotrac. 2025 is the first year when we could legit think of cutting him without serious cap consequences. I think you're right that we now have kind of a problem because we have enough good pass catchers that it will be a bit tricky to use them all. A good problem to have, IMO. I think we'll probably play around and see how things go with two TE formations under Coach Brady and go from there with what we find out.

From league average, we're a bit off, yes, fair enough. But Dallas is a contender. Miami too. Philly too. SF. Seattle. Minnesota was too before Cousins went down. Hell, those are the majority of the contenders and several of the top tier, and all either are very close or spend more on defense. It's not as wildly unusual as you are suggesting.

Major problems with this post. First, I didn't have a list of seven. I listed Diggs and Kincaid also, making nine. Six out of nine isn't bad at all, especially when two out of the three who are gone are good players, just either a bad fit here or let go for cap reasons. Only Ford was a really bad pick of the nine. And we can probably say the same about Basham on defense. And the same or worse about nearly every team out there if you go back five years. Second, I didn't say anything about whether they were good picks. He claimed we weren't using top end resources on offense. I pointed out that that is at best questionable. If you have a point, go make it. But don't reply to one of my posts and then ignore my actual point. Oh, and Brown now is starting to look like a very solid pick indeed, no matter what some rather clueless folks want to say about a guy who was dealing with a serious back injury. And this is his third season, not his fourth. If they were complaining about his Brown's "past three seasons," that would include his last year at Northern Iowa.

Stefon Diggs came from a 1st round pick, plus a few extras. Same with Kincaid. Torrence is a high pick, as is Cook. Brown, Moss, Ford, Singletary, Knox, all top three round picks from the last five years. That's 2/5 1sts, 3/5 2nds and 4/6 3rds. On offense. $97M this year on offensive spending and $103M on defensive, according to Spotrac. Top end investment has not really leaned all that far towards defense. It may seem that way, but that's confirmation bias.