Thurman#1

It could easily end well. But will it?

You're a walking example of confirmation bias. Those reports weren't "this guy isn't that bad I swear" reports. Those were the sensible replies to those reports, which were actually, "See, I felt he made a bad play proving he sucks" reports. You were very involved if I remember correctly. Haven't a clue how he played with the Bears. Did you watch the whole game? Oh, you didn't? Yup, more of the same. You saw something that confirmed your previous bias (of course, because that's what happens, it's what confirmation bias is), and so youI'll be sure post even though not fully informed, because it makes you feel good. Kinda sad to still be trying to tickle your same little spot over and over, even though he's not even on the team anymore.

Taylor is great. He'd make the team a bit better. Not nearly enough better to make up for what we'd have to give up to get him. Assume he averages 5.3 YPC, two-tenths of a yard better than his career average. That's less than a yard a carry better than we're getting from our RBs now and last year. Say he gets 250 carries. That would be a bit over 200 extra yards over the course of the year. Not even close to worth what we'd have to give up. As Warrior9 pointed out in the post just above this one, how many great, highly-paid bell-cow RBs have SB rings? It's been . It's a misallocation of resources. If we were going to bring in a really good player by trading away major draft resources and spending salary cap money we can't afford and stay in good cap shape ... for God's sake, make it an RT. Or another excellent young pass rusher.

Fine. What's the ratio? 30/20/40? With the remaining 10 for number of delay of game penalties? Remind me, where did the Bills rank last year in rhythm in the NFL? Were they 22nd? 17th? You're doing an excellent job proving my point. It doesn't exist except as a vague generalization, basically meaning consistently successful.

Sorry, remind me, did he say they played lousy in "every big game except play off games with Baltimore and NE, and bumrush games"? Or did he say in "every game"? That's right, he said it was in "every game." Nonsense. And the fact is the D was a huge factor in that Colts win in the playoffs. Huge. The Colts got the ball on their final drive with 2:30 left, down by a field goal. Plenty of time and a great chance. And couldn't move the ball against our defense, ended up throwing a hail mary from the 47. Forced them into a 13 play slow, unproductive drive, it was absolutely excellent play. And now you are doing the same thing, throwing out hogwash as if it's true. The Bills aren't "completely unable to stop the run, year after year." That's utter crap. All you have to do is look at how Jacobs did yesterday to know that's simply not true, nine carries for -2 yards. The Raiders went 15 carries for 55 yards, 3.7 YPC. But you don't have to stop there. The YPA stats show year after year we're good against the run. 13th best last year, 11th best the year before. Bad in 2020, 6th worst, 13th best in 2019. We're actually generally above average at run D. Nah, he's a great coach, genuinely great. Not elite. He's still got things to prove, but he's absolutely top 5 - 7 or so.

Which one? Release time? Drive time? Play clock management? Exactly. You don't know. Nobody knows. It's subjective. It's one of the things people say when teams are consistently moving. The game has rhythm because of the play clock. For teams that are succeeding or failing. It's one of those things that feel right and sound right but don't really mean anything. Yeah. Thing is people hated Daboll's play-calling too. He was loved widely around the league and there was a large group here attacking him every time something went wrong. Nobody like to attack the QB or the players. The OC is traditionally the scapegoat. It's how it all works. There is such a thing as bad play-calling. Can't remember the guy but one of our OCs around 10 years ago was found to be consistently going run-run-pass like 80% of the time. That's moronic. But beyond absolute predictability, good plays can be botched by bad execution and bad plays can be saved by bad execution and it's execution that's more generally to blame for bad performance. Oh, and beating bad teams happens often. Beating them by 28 points is pretty rare. Holding even bad teams to 10 points is terrific play. Scoring 38 yourself? Not common. It was a great game by the Bills. The last one was pretty awful. We shouldn't forget how awful Allen in particular played in that game. But this game was terrific.

Sorry, man, just flat-out untrue. "every" big game? Just a dumb lie. Season games aganst KC are huge games. So were all the playoff games they've won last few years. So that's just dumb, said for effect. Yes, they haven't won a Super Bowl. That puts them, each year, in the same boat with 31 other teams. That's because rhythm is subjective. People generally start talking about rhythm when a team is successful. It doesn't really mean anything much more than successful with consistency.

It was only a few nuts and fruits going that far. Few said get rid of them, plenty said they sucked. The true haters and overreactors will wait quietly or the next chance and wildly overreact and hate again. It's their nature.

That's a good thought. Yeah, free play. Nah, timed right and in regular punt formation, nobody is blocking that.

It really was smart. Easy to defend now that we've seen it, though. Get everyone down and in their stance seven or eight seconds early. When you see the guy run, just don't snap it till he either runs Offside, stops or runs behind the D line. You can counter it that way without even moving personnel. But they can also just move someone to get in the way. He's brilliant. Let's admit it. But the importance of the head coach just simply isn't as great as the importance of a great QB. An awful head coach can just kill a team. But a great one isn't all that much better than a very good one. Look at Andy Reid pre-Mahomes vs. now. We still should give credit where credit is due, though. Great idea by Belichick/ his ACs.

My feeling on this? Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn't you? They've gone from a consistently mediocre team to extremely competitive every year.

Can't tell you, Bill, sorry. There's no obvious "Download" button to click, that much I can say. I'm still trying to figure it all out. One irritating thing about NFLPlus, though, is that I can't watch live games on computer. Only archived. You can watch live games only on tablet or phone. I don't have a tablet and am not interested in watching games on a tiny phone screen. I don't mind so much, as it's 2:00 a.m. here now. I'm headed for bed. I'd love to have watched the first quarter, though, but you can't do it.

It may not be true, I can't speak to that. But it's what they're telling me. And yeah, it puts the nail in the coffin for me. Sounds like some of the others here are saying that's not true in other countries. But the Japanese DAZN are saying it, so either they're wrong or it's at least true here in Japan. I'm still confused about it. I'm on NFL+ Premium now. Plain NFL didn't have enough access for me. As long as you don't have the audio/video synch problems I have with archived games, you hopefully should be satisfied. Good luck with it. EDIT: And CheshireCT is right about not being able to watch LIVE games on computer. You can listen only. If you need to SEE live games, you have to have a tablet or phone.

It's you, so I heard you out. No, he bears virtually nothing in common with an average QB. Yes, he throws too many INTs. That's bad. But it's not the one thing you evaluate QBs on. Y

Can't blame them too much. It was chaos. But yeah, that was a trip. If called they probably would have gotten the FG anyway and won the game with it. But it's a shame.

Please. Ridiculous. All those teams last year that handled him well last year were facing last year's Wilson. He might be much better now. Or not. But it's a good bet he's at least somewhat better. Not to mention that all those teams prepared for a Zach Wilson-led team. The Bills prepared for an Aaron Rodgers-led team and handled the difference on the fly. The D did an excellent job. It's only one game, but it was an excellent game. Oh, and equating the INTs to punts is nonsense. That sometimes works but in one way, field position. But it's much more harmful to a team than a punt is. INTs, particularly those two horrible ones, are giving up a chance to hold the ball, rest the defense and score when you still had that chance. Punts happen on fourth down. These two INTs were both awful, for defense and offense. If they had happened on 3rd and 22, OK. But they didn't. On the first it was 3rd and 8. Allen had three options on the play all the way out to the left there. He took by far the worst. He could have run for a first down, he had Knox open by two or three steps and stacked on top of the CB on a go route on the left side and there was no way the safety could have gotten there. Two excellent options and he took the third, throw to the guy who was running towards the safety. In doing so he gave up probably point and time on the field, both of which would have helped the defense. The second INT came on 2nd down. 2nd down on the Jets 41. Equating this with a punt is just stupid. It was absolutely a much worse outcome for the Bills, both for the offense and the defense. That "punt" gained 21 yards of field position to the 20. If it had been a punt, it would have been an awful one. You say you don't care about the turnovers? That shows more about you and your biases on the subject than it does about the defense. Those TOs changed the momentum and handed points to the Jets and took opportunities and time away from our offense and gave all of those to the Jets. 13 of the 16 points the Jets offense scored came DIRECTLY off those turnovers.

Not enough evidence yet. Fine so far. You take responsibility for everything as a leader. But that certainly doesn't mean it's actually your fault. The idea's ridiculous. If you taught the guy how and when to do it and he didn't do it, it's his fault, regardless if you try to accept responsibility as leader.

IMO the Jets did a good job but it wasn't a schematic thing. Not much to clone. Allen did this to himself. Mental mistakes.

Don't think there was one. Several, IMO. Without question the elbow injury. Breaking up with his girlfriend, or maybe more specifically whatever moment their relationship started going downhill. It's hard to say what the new girlfriend brings, but probably the old one brought stability and reminders of a damn productive attitude in offseasons past. That podcast Bussin' the Boys showed a different and less productive Josh. I was really depressed seeing that. Not so much Dorsey being here, but Daboll leaving. Mostly stuff like this is more complicated than we want to believe, not so much the effects of one thing as a change to the process.

I don't know about you folks, but the old International Game Pass had the same problem for me. When I came back to the states I could never use my International GamePass. Had to go to sports bars, which was OK unless I was busy and wanted to watch archived. I hated having to get up early on Sunday to end up at a sports bar downtown and find parking and walk there for game starts at 11:00 a.m. in Denver because of the time zone. Really nice atmosphere at the Buffalo sports bar but people get there early so unless you're there really early you get no seat. I didn't want to have anything to do with VPNs until I got one and found it much easier than I thought it would be and really useful. Costs me about $10 a month but I can watch all kinds of stuff I couldn't get without it. I love BBC net content, but couldn't watch much from Japan. Now, no problem. I can watch US Netflix, UK, any country, really. I'm a Longmire fan, and that isn't on in Japan but I'm loving it on US Netflix. Lots of stuff like that.

Indeed. I'd write if anything gets organized. I really like the old International GamePass. Coaches film. Good video. All games archived so you could watch at your convenience. Occasional glitches, but generally no problem. It was really good.

GEEZ, the alternatives SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Here in Japan, DAZN haven't communicated well. They obviously have Japanese people answering the English emails. And their English is good but they often have problems with precision. So it took till today till I finally figured out what they have here, at least according to their emails. I cancelled the service, so that's all I can rely on at this point. (PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS IS WRONG, as for instance, Bill found the Brit version had services their service people did not even know about. I'm now starting to have issues with NFLPlus. Geez!!!!) You can watch complete archived games. But this only becomes available 24 hours after the game. Which absolutely sucks. You can watch games live, but here in Japan, again, the Sunday afternoon 1:00 and 4:00 games start at 2:00 am and 5:00 a.m on Monday morning (an hour later when daylight savings time ends. The Sunday night games start live at 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, right during the work day. Can't do that. The Monday night games are also at 10:00 a.m. but on Tuesday morning. So live is generally impossible for me. And for the next 24 hours they say you have only a choice of a 40 minute highlight package with most of the game's plays but nothing between plays, or the typical 6 - 10 minute highlight package. Both of those absolutely suck as a way to see the game for the first time. Or wait 24 hours and then another few for the workday to end and don't come to TBD, don't open my emails, tell everyone you know who likes football for 24 hours that you don't know what happened so don't give any spoilers. So I signed up for NFLPlus and used a VPN. Unbelievably frustrating experience. The picture was good. But for the whole second half the audio and video were unsynched, so that you could hear what was going to happen 7 - 10 seconds before you could see it. Jesus, that experience also bit the large one Hopefully this was a one-game thing. NFLPlus says the problem isn't on their end. Have any of you overseas folks come up with any better alternatives yet? I can almost never watch live. I WANT TO WATCH ARCHIVED GAMES, as quickly as possible after the game, with good video quality. Any ideas?

Yup. Four turnovers. Those TOs ended four of the Bills eleven drives. And directly resulted in 13 Jets points. Horrible.

Nah. I mean, granted, the reactions are always over the top after a bad loss. That's not just a Bills fan thing, it's a human thing. Every team's fans do it. But no, these reactions are simply NOT over the top. They aren't. Saying we should look for another QB, that would be over the top. Saying this shows that Allen isn't very good, that would be over the top. But saying this was an absolutely awful game by Allen ... that's right on target. In the bullseye. It's anything but psychotic. It makes total sense. It's seeing it the way it is. I'm sure there are a few posts that are over the top. There are always a few nuts and flakes out there. Most of this reaction is completely legitimate.

Four catches last week. Did I miss Dorsey trying to knock the ball out of his hands?