Thurman#1

Yup. This is it. "When you study the tape you also become completely aware of the turn-downs ... the decisions he didn't make, the things he said no to when working progressions and surveying the field. "He stopped taking profits. He did a little early. And sometimes throughout the game. But he stopped taking profits, which is not OK against a good disciplined defense like the Jets." "We all wanted 'easy button' throws and quick passes for Josh Allen. They were there for him all night long and he took them sometimes. But the times he said no were pretty inexplicable. The tape doesn't lie. "I know there are some out there that want to point fingers at Ken Dorsey. People want to point fingers at the offensive line, point fingers at weapons. It was 17 that was the problem, folks. "Now, were there some moments when the offensive line and weapons and Ken Dorsey could have been better? Sure. "But all those things are way down the pecking order when it comes to things that went wrong offensively on Monday night."

You're right. I NEVER see teams breaking long runs once a year or more against other teams. It's only the Bills. And pretty much everybody else. Over the course of a whole season, teams are likely to allow one or two. I took a quick look for the Niners and the Jets last year, two terrific defenses SEA had a 50 yarder against SF. SEA also had a 60 (Walker) yarder against the Jets. This stuff happens. Yup. It's part of the cost of letting Edmunds go. He was excellent at lining them up correctly, and they don't have anyone else right now with much experience at doing so. Likely they'll get better at this as the season goes along.

This. And people would say, "What the hell is wrong with McD? He obviously isn't able to handle play-calling as well as HCing, and this is the proof. This guy needs to be fired." People unwilling to blame the players sometimes don't seem to want to change their minds.

Gabe doesn't need to bounce back. He had a damn good year last year, even though injuries greatly affected him in three or four games next year. And Good Lord, you're so desperate to spin things badly that you're willing to simply be completely wrong. You say Gabe "has more 0/1 catch games than big games," and that is complete and utter nonsense. He had zero games with zero catches and one game with one catch, and several big games despite the injury. Four games over 70 yards, for instance. The way you present Sherfield's stats shows you're not interested in the facts, you're far more interested in presenting things so they fit your narrative, both with your dumb Gabe Davis stats (has more. Sherfield already broke out. Last year. I mean, you're not wrong when you say he has 67 receptions in 5 years. But you somehow left out the fact that last year he had 30 receptions and 417 yards. And he was that productive when he'd only played 58% of their snaps. He already broke out. All he has to do is keep improving. And plenty of players keep improving in their sixth years, particularly guys who greatly stepped it up with more opportunity than they'd had the year before. James Harrison for one, though few become stars as Harrison did. But nobody expects Sherfield to be a star. Just a good solid player. Jimmy Smith is another late developer. Brandon Graham. Lorenzo Alexander. AJ Bouye. They're around. Crowder? Crowder is one of the guys you're using to show guys who we can't upgrade from? McKenzie? Good Lord, dude, your desperation is showing. Yup. It's very early and he's a rookie. It's hard to imagine them not using him quite a bit as the year goes along and he catches on.

The Raiders going to throw away their $9M signing bonus after one game? Bills going to take on $6M guaranteed this year? I like Renfrow. This wouldn't work. Nonsense. If this was true, we'd suck a lot more than we do and we have. This team was 13-3 last year. And this year's roster is comparable, perhaps even better. Yeah, it was a bad game. Blowing off steam is understandable. But do you really think Allen's going to be that bad every week? And for the eight billionth time, he's a pretty good drafter for where he's drafting. Not great. But solid.

You're kidding yourself about what Diggs thinks. And if your respect for him is new-found, it's come around way too late.

I did see it. And it doesn't do anything for your argument. The fact that a guy on the internet doesn't think they called them with situational awareness isn't a strong argument. And see my point that situational awareness includes the awareness to see that the defense is beating you up in the run game and that you're not running well. The problem was Allen playing much much much worse than he usually played. I wouldn't have minded a few more runs myself. But you yourself said you have to pass some with Josh Allen. Yeah. And if he throws that badly, you still get INTs and turnovers. It's still a better bet, almost always, though today he played so badly it was not. And my other point that if you don't turn the ball over but you also don't convert first downs successfully (and our run game was not successful) you're not going to have things turn out well. Maybe the Jets get an extra drive or three with us having a bunch of three-and-outs on runs. You're pretending this wouldn't happen, but it easily could have. No way to know either way.

Maybe you get another field goal or two. Maybe you get one or two fewer. The fact that you like the guess where we get more doesn't mean that's what would have happened. And situational awareness is good, but part of the situation was that the Jets DL was beating us in the run game. Wouldn't have minded seeing a few more runs myself, but my guess is they would have averaged less than four YPC as the ones they ran did. Five plays of five yards or more Oh, and yes there were a lot of passes, but 10 of them came on our final drive of the game that started with 1:48 left in the 4th and down by three.

Yeah, yeah. Still doesn't make your point, though. You can not - you simply can not - play as if your quarterback is going to throw balls as horrible as those throws. You can't. Especially if your quarterback is Josh Allen. The blame for the awful plays today goes to the guy receiving the ball from the center. And yet still our big plays came from passes, our first downs came from passes, nearly all successful plays came from passes.

Hint: Repeating things does not make them make more sense than they did in the first place. The pass defense really wasn't the problem. Four absolutely awful plays by Allen were. The first one maybe wasn't so dreadful, but the other three were. And while safe plays can sometimes win the game, safe unsuccessful plays can sometimes lose it.

This is also something we all forget. And shouldn't. Just because we run a play does not mean it's the one Dorsey called.

Those don't prove what you're trying to prove. When your OL isn't doing a good job of running, it's not necessarily a bad idea not to run it much. Generally, this offense is better at passing than running. Generally it's a great idea to put the ball in Allen's hands more. Not yesterday, though. Sixteen non-Allen runs and 61 yards resulting. We weren't doing it well. If Allen had simply made better choices on the plays when he made awful choices, we would have scored at least six more points and won.

Maybe. Right now it's not year-to-year, it's year to game. So far. We'll see. This is utter nonsense, it really is. The Bills are an extremely well run organization. They have more to prove, but to say they're not well run is just dumb.

Certainly not impossible. This year? I give it maybe a 10 - 20% chance.

Yup. Can't blame him. But it does say something about his values. Nothing bad, but it points at what's important to him. Here's a guy who's already made over a hundred million if I'm adding correctly. Those are the guys who sometimes give a real contender a break. He didn't. Which is fine. But revealing.

Holy crow! Oh, what a drag! Good site.

Who are you and what have you done with FireChans? IMO you're on target or very close with nearly all of this. STs absolutely matter, but certainly not as much as offense or defense. No reason whatsoever to think Davis won't be better than he was in 2020. He was a lot better in 2021 till the injury. Fair enough to think 2020 WRs were better. This is a close competition, IMO, I'm with him, if Kincaid is counted here we look better this year for pass catchers overall, and for pass catchers, 2020 Knox was not what he is today.

Don't be sorry, dude, not one bit. Plenty of wonderful people are dead wrong sometimes. Rypien absolutely was one of the best in the league for a brief moment in time. The problem was that it was a very brief moment. His falloff was precipitous. Unexplainable till he recently started talking about his concussions and the serious symptoms they've brought for him. In 1991, Rypien was elite. It wasn't even a question. The Washingtons thought they'd found their franchise guy for the next fifteen years. And he was never the same again. It was only his fourth year of play. In his second year he'd looked really good, very promising, and his third year was also pretty good but in his fourth year he broke through looking like an all-timer. That year he was 4th in yards, with only three Hall of Famers ahead of him, Moon, Marino and Kelly. But that's the least of it. His passer rating was 2nd, behind only Hall of Famer Steve Young. He was 2nd in TDs behind only Kelly. He threw for 28 TDs and 11 INTs, the highest TD/INT ratio in the league except for Steve Bono who did it mostly by taking almost no risks that year, throwing for 11 TDs and 4 INTs while throwing well over half as many attempts. 28/11 was terrific at the time, as that year only four guys went reached a 2/1 ratio, and of those four none of the other three threw more than 18 TDs (Kosher, 18/9) compared to Rypien's 28. Kelly didn't have a 2/1 ratio that year. Nor did Steve Young, Troy Airman, John Elway, Warren Moon, Phil Simms or Boomer. And Rypien wasn't throwing all safety valves, either. He was second in YPA with 8.5, behind only Steve Young. That year, with Rypien throwing for 8.5, only Steve Young, Rypien and Kelly threw for over 7.6. Rypien was great at the deep ball, took risks and made them pay off. He was absolutely terrific. And he never played anywhere near as well again. Was the team good? Yeah, absolutely. But Rypien was playing at an elite level. As for Russell Wilson? He was vastly better than Dilfer. Vastly. He was generally top seven or eight in the league year after year. Dilfer's first post-Ravens contract, signed just a month or two after the Super Bowl win, was for $8M over four years, $2M a year. Does Russell Wilson's contract look a bit like that? It does not, and the reason is the two of them were not comparable. When Dilfer signed that contract, Bledsoe was making $10M a year, Manning $7.7M/ yr and Mike Vick $10.3M /yr. Flute was making $5m /yr. Jeff Garcia $4.75.M /yr. And the best Dilfer could get was $2M /yr. Russell Wilson was very good for a lot of years, and his evasiveness and ability to escape for five or six seconds until his WRs got open used to not just drive pass rushers crazy but also drain their morale like somebody was siphoning it off. That's why his contract looks just a bit different than Dilfer's did.

Maybe they would start. Particularly if the team you built was as bad as it would likely be. (Not that I'd do much better, if any.) We're not GMs and the tendency is to think we could do at least a decent job, when in fact, we would absolutely botch the job. And it's a lot harder to get newer guys in the lineup when the lineup is as excellent as this one and you're consistently drafting in the mid to late twenties.

Rypien and Differ are as different as salt and Chevrolets. Rypien was a decent game manager lifted by a spectacular team and Rypien was one of the two or three best QBs in the league for a year or two until an unexplainable fall-off which we now know to have been a really serious series of concussions. Wilson I think won't be as good as he was because a lot of his success came at how spectacular he was at escaping rushes and he's getting to the age where he'll never be that athletic again. But he still could improve a ton this year. Not a sure thing by any means but possible, I think.

Yeah, probably. But not for those determined to hold to this theory, and there do seem to be many for whom it's an article of faith.

Milano is a sensational player. First team all-Pro at his position a year ago. He's not famous, so if that's what's meant by superstar, fair enough. But at his position he's absolutely one of the very best. Probably not a superstar, but that's more of a weakness in the question than in our roster. Miller, we don't know yet. He was producing like a superstar when healthy and playing for us. But fair enough that injuries play into it. If he plays like he did when healthy last year, yeah, he's a superstar. The defense was a ton better when he was in there. No way to know whether he'll play that way again, though.

We really don't "need" another superstar. It'd be great if one steps up, though. In any case, superstar is an amorphous word. Is it someone really famous? A lot of the way you get there is by winning Super Bowls. Is it getting to the top 50 or so of the Top 100 list the NFL puts out every year? In the list that came out just before last season the Bills had four guys in the top 50, including Poyer and Hyde, and the Chiefs only three. In the top 100 list that came out just before the season where the Rams took the laurels, they had two in the top 50, Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey. After their SB win and just before their 5-12 season they had four, adding Kupp (legit) and Stafford. Is Stafford a superstar? A damn good player, but for my money no superstar. Winning Super Bowls adds superstars to your team by making very good players much more famous. EDIT: Was Von a superstar that year for them? Certainly famous enough. Wasn't playing as well as he had when young, but still had great impact. Maybe. How many superstars did Philly have the year they won it all? Or the 2018 Pats outside of Brady? Was Gilmore ever a superstar? Or McCourty? Gronk at that point was famous enough but wasn't playing like a superstar anymore.

Also interesting that in the first half, with Tremaine Edmunds in the game, Dalvin had three carries for 11 yards and caught two passes for 12 yards. And zero TDs. Whereas in the 2nd half with Edmunds injured and out, Cook had 11 carries for 108 yards and a TD and 1 catch for 15 yards. As for how we did against the run overall last year, I'd disagree. 4.3 YPC we allowed, which is 13th best in the league and pretty decent overall. We played against Derrick Henry and held him to 25 yards on 13 carries. Henry's pretty decent isn't he? We held Najee to 20 yards on 11 carries. Held Chubb to 19 yards on 14 carries. Those were probably the three best we faced. Without looking, I'd bet those are some of the worst games of the year for those three. It ought to be interesting to see how the Bills do with their new MLB group.

Whoever you got, it ain't him. He didn't say anything like that. Straw man arguments don't make good points. He's right in his conclusion there, that they shouldn't be taken lightly. Not by anyone, really.