Thurman#1

This may go a long way towards documenting the fact that fans are far more subject to panic and bad, emotionally-based decision-making than they should be.

While I agree with nearly all of what you're saying here, it wasn't a "turnover narrative." It was the actual occurences of turnovers and particularly interceptions. He actually had more INTs than anyone but Sam Howell. That's not a narrative, it's a stat. Agreed on what you're saying about 3rd downs. I wonder if it's not a result of longer yardages. Teams this year started to treat our second downs like third downs, taking more risks like blitzing and hidden coverages. Did that result in longer 3rd down yardages? Not sure. If I had more time I'd try to research it.

It ain't like three quarters of the league has two top receivers. Pretty much everyone has one top receiver. There are exceptions, like the Bengals for one, but they are few and far between. The Chiefs certainly only have one top receiver to go with their Lombardi trophy. Yes, Josh is terrific. It can't be reasonably argued that he isn't. But you don't judge how good a QB is from how he does at the end of the game. It's about the whole game, it really is. A QB who does well throughout the game eliminating clutch situations entirely is doing better than a guy who does well in the clutch, allowing another QB who does well in the clutch that day from going back and forth with you and having whoever had the ball last to win. Much better to be better in the clutch than worse. Far far better still to be better over the course of all parts of your game. And when you're looking at a total of 30 or 40 minutes over the course of one season, statistical significance is quite questionable. I do think he's clutch, I think we all feel that. But how much so being determined by this look at five minutes from a few games in one season is very questionable. And so is how well other QBs did during the same type of very limited looks.

The Houston game was on the offense every bit as much as the defense. Allen was tight as a drum and gave in to his heroball tendencies. Had some genuinely good moments. And a few horrible as well. In 2021 nobody had figured out how to stop high-flying offenses like the two in those games. KC's D couldn't do anything either. If we'd won that coin flip we'd have won the game. Defenses simply hadn't figured out how to do anything much against those new-look groups. Defenses have caught up over the past couple of years and are making it a lot more difficult. 2022 wasn't on the defense, especially. The whole team played like someone slipped Ambien in their Count Chocula. The offense too. This year the D played pretty decent for the guys they were forced to play. The offense played better, but certainly not great. Took what KC gave them but couldn't really break through and make any big plays.

Nah. The DL was indeed a problem. Von simply wasn't himself after the injury. Same with DaQuan. Floyd, who's been great, was either injured or had dead legs the last few games. He wasn't himself either. Rousseau's been a damn good pick. Epenesa was solid too. Not Basham so far, that's for sure. But they've had good and bad picks. You're unlikely to get elite pass rushers when you're picking in the late 20s. It happens, but not all that often. And if your DL is under-manned, you'd better be healthy and have your LBs all ready to ... oops. Both starters couldn't go a single snap because of injuries. And it's not that Reid knows how to attack him. If he did, they'd have killed the Bills in the first half. That's not what happened. They adapted, figured out where the weak injury replacements were and still didn't run away with it. And they haven't made bad picks in the secondary. One that looks bad so far, though it's too early to say so far. Several excellent. Dane Jackson in the 7th was really good, Benford in the 6th was a terrific bargain (his injury hurt a ton). This was a defense that was gutted with injuries.

An awful lot here that doesn't make much sense. For one, you say, "No chance [Tre]'s at his best. That's both obviously purely distilled guesswork and near-irrelevant. He doesn't need to be at his best. If he's damn good he'll be worth every penny of his very reasonable salary this year. We'd save virtually nothing by cutting him. It'll be about what it's always about. Lots of things falling on the scales, including financial, physical, what we get in FA and the draft, The fact you want him gone says far more about you than it does about the situation. Second, they absolutely were a terrific defense. Before the injuries. Injuries which are unpredictable and in fact random. You're certainly right that after those injuries they weren't a championship defense. Before, they were really really good. And even with that they allowed two more points and 130 yards less to the Chiefs than the Niners did in the SB. And the Niners are a terrific defense.

Those are all factors, especially all the defensive injuries this year, but the #1 factor is this: Mahomes and the Chiefs. The only other team to knock us out caught us when absolutely emotionally deadened by the Hamlin thing, Knox's brother's death, the supermarket shooting, and on and on. Mahomes and the Chiefs were fractionally better all three times, just barely eking past us.

Barring injury or regression, hell yeah!! He was still having a few problems early, but he got better and better and better. Against DeMarcus Lawrence, you just about didn't see Lawrence all game. I really noticed that.

Nonsense. Nonsense that they "traded up for mediocre defensive players". Guys in the last four years we've traded picks for on defense are: Elam, Benford in the 6th, Baylon Spector in the 7th. Those are two very good late picks. Elam sure isn't looking good so far, but that could easily turn around, and they traded a 4th rounder to get that pick. A 4th isn't nothing, but it's not like they gave up a pick on the first two days or something. When (relatively) healthy at the beginning of the year this defense was excellent. Nonsense that they neglected to give Josh Allen adequate weapons when they got him Stef Diggs, they used their 1st round pick on a weapon who shows every sign of being a terrific player, and they used a 2nd on Cook last year who was 6th in the league in yards from scrimmage, and not a distant 6th. He was 19 yards away from 4th place overall.These three aren't adequate weapons. They are far better than that. Could they have used more? Sure. But they had better weapons than the Chiefs.

It didn't matter because the injuries on that defense absolutely decimated them. Losing a couple of guys is par for the course. But having five or six of the original eleven starters out including probably four of the five or six best players on that defense was devastating. There isn't a unit in the league that wouldn't have been greatly affected by those kinds of losses.

This team was built extremely well. Without all the defensive injuries, IMO they beat the Chiefs. The injuries just killed them.

This is dumb. Guts isn't an issue. And the fact that you think you know what his ceiling is now only shows you don't know the difference between opinions and facts. This will be about making educated guesses at the future, with infinitely more knowledge of Tre's medical situation than you and I have and trying to fit a situation with dozens of moving parts and information that can never be complete into the teams's situation, which has millions of moving parts and can never be even anywhere close to complete. Is it possible they ask him to take a bit of a cut? Yeah. Does it have anything to do with guts? Nope.

So, someone needs to get better at what they do? Wow. This is really deep. And at the same time unbelievably simplistic. You should contact Stuart Smalley. You're good enough. You're smart enough. And doggone it, people like you.

Dude, I love your name and avatar. Thanks for posting this.

Translation: I don't like McDermott. I'm sure many people care what you feel about this.

Hall has it tougher. That doesn't mean he's better. He's faster but I'd take Cook through the middle for hard yards and Cook's got better moves as well. Hall is a very good player, but I take Cook, personally.

He's absolutely a #1 back. No question. They're likely to continue cycling through #2s. Wouldn't be surprised to see Ty Johnson here again.

They didn't neglect Josh by any measure. Both of the first two picks, Kincaid and Torrence, were directly aimed at making things easier for Josh, and both turned out to be great picks.

Yup. This.

It is indeed very simplistic. Like many things that are obviously correct. And I wasn't saying saying that winning the Super Bowl validates every single decision you've made, of course. I was saying that if you take a massive risk, make a decision to break one of the standard rules of football, and it doesn't clearly work out And don't trade up and give away major valuable picks for a non-QB is one of the standard draft rules. Break it and you had better be right. Whether they were right on that trade is at best questionable, but winning a Super Bowl after making that kind of a decision puts that decision beyond reasonable criticism. Taking that risk, ignoring the rule that had been proven again and again over time, didn't prevent you from reaching the ultimate goal. The Chiefs WON the Super Bowl. The Falcons did NOT. There's a massive difference there.

Oh, and it's generally accepted that the Julio Jones trade was a success. And that's questionable. There's a very legitimate argument that it was a failure. Julio is a terrific player, there can be no reasonable argument against that. But did they give up too much? In 2010, Atlanta went 13-3. They felt they were only a player or two away and made the Julio trade. The next year they went 10-6, despite Julio putting up more than 900 yards. The year after that, 13-3. The year after that, 4-12. That was followed by 6-10, 8-8 and finally the one year they made the Super Bowl but lost to the Patriots in Jones' sixth year. A lot of their problems in those years came down to a lack of good players ... players who might have been on the team if not for the Julio trade. If they win that Super Bowl, the argument's over. But they didn't. Lombardis justify just about any tactic. But they lost. Was the difference between Julio Jones and a replacement guy acquired after #27 or in a trade worth all they gave away? Questionable. Yeah, not agreeing with me makes plenty of sense a pretty fair number of times. But calling Beane "horrible" is disagreeing with anyone with a brain cell count in the triple digits or above. It's dumb.

If it tells you that, it's a clear sign that you shouldn't be handing out opinions on the internet Beane is by no means a horrible GM. Anyone who thinks so is to be pitied. He's traded up for Josh Allen, Shakir and Kincaid, among others. He's not perfect at this. Nobody is, absolutely nobody. But he's damn good.

No, we're not in win now mode. No more so than any other year. Just because some fans feel that way every year doesn't mean the Bills should. We should go into win now mode when Josh hits 36 or 37 years old. Oh, and saying we "need an elite WR to put us over the top" is absolutely and completely ridiculous. Where is the elite WR on KC this year? Or last year? The fact is most SB winners have either one or zero elite WRs. That's a fact. And more have zero than one The reasonable answer to this question is that it would depend on the price. If we get a terrific bargain, sure. But realistically, we're not going to get a terrific bargain. So, no. A small tradeup of some kind? Sure, go ahead. But we have got to come out of this draft with three or four good players. You don't manage that by trading away most of your best picks.

While I largely agree with everything here, when teams run two safeties deep, the middle is absolutely one of the places teams go to hit a weak spot. They try to exploit the seam between the two, as well as the sidelines. Having said that, you're dead right that teams have put huge amounts of effort into stopping Josh from throwing deep. As for your question about looking at the stats for deep right and deep left and so on, it's easy to look at that kind of stat with NextGenStats and you're right, some teams are weaker in some areas than others, as you'd expect. So many things might affect that, from QB habitual preference to having a stronger receiver on one side, but I'm sure that's exactly what you're pointing at here. Here's Josh's "QB Grid," as they call it. https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/single/qb-grid/team/2023/week/josh-allen/ALL529264 And Mahomes' https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/single/qb-grid/team/2023/week/patrick-mahomes/MAH401939 Mahomes' QB rating was worse, though this is again probably only between the hashes. Here's the page with all of the QB grids for quick comparison. https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/list/qb-grid Oh, and Tyrod had bad numbers in the deep middle. But also the intermediate middle, which gets a lot more throws. That really did allow teams to allocate less resources to that large area and make things tougher elsewhere. Plus, Tyrod had this problem consistently throughout his career. Josh was much better to the deep middle in other years. He was excellent there in 2022, for example, according to the same QB grids. https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/player/josh-allen/ALL529264/2022 Josh had a hard time with long balls this year. He overthrew a lot of them, where in some other years he was terrific.

On Wild Card weekend they went 1/2 on those. I also wonder about what is meant, precisely, by "middle." My guess is that some people mean between the numbers and others between the hashes. Maybe others attempt to divide the field into equal thirds. The guy in the article is probably referring to between the hashes. It's easier to quickly check that way. In week 3, Allen hit one that went 26 air yards and was in the middle of the field. (NextGenStats). https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/single/pass/team/2023/3/josh-allen/ALL529264 In Week 5, he hit one that was 45 air yards in the middle third was completed. Week 10 21 yards in the middle third completed but not within the hashes. I also think this isn't really a fair comparison without looking deeper. If one guy threw 20 passes to the deep middle, 80% of which were between 20 and 25 yards long, and another guy threw 20 passes to the deep middle, 80% of which were over 40 yards, the fact that the first guy was more accurate than the second doesn't mean he's a better thrower to the deep middle. It just means he threw passes that were easier to complete than the 2nd guy did. It's an interesting stat. Worth a further look, probably, but I don't have more time to do that.