Thurman#1

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.

I'm doubting it'll be quite that predictable, but yeah, that could easily be one of the most popular base formations, if not #1.

Do you know what a straw man is? Go look it up and come back. Agree or disagree, that wasn't a straw man. The idea's dumb. You were saying he was finally; a top 5 MLB/ILB last year? Fair enough. Maybe. Certainly very close if not. He did improve, and he wasn't top five before last year. Just top ten or so. Probably top five in pass defense, which is the big priority in football these days. He may have gotten hype, but he's always been very good. Not to mention very important to the play of the team. Whenever Edmunds was out, team performance dipped. I don't much care how he does with the Bears. You might be right. Or easily wrong. Whatever. In the Bills scheme the middle of the field has seen few passes completed there for the last five years. Few targets even.

I don't find this funny. More incredibly sick. Most likely on the part of both of them.

You weren't asking me, but no. One team in the last five years scored 32 or over. One. Mahomes' Chiefs in his breakout year of 2018. And they didn't play half their games in the city of Buffalo. Nor did they do that in a 17 game season, which it is my guess will turn out to have depressed points per game (it already has, but two seasons aren't probably statistically significant) from fatigue and extra injuries.

Don't see any evidence of a change in strategy. Their picking offense has been specifically mentioned as a result of what was left when they picked. Which it virtually always is. The focus on this team is the offense and the defense and the STs. Just like always. Their concerns seem to have been OL, pass catcher, DL and pass rush in particular, and youth at safety and LB. And replacing Singletary with more of a banger.

Yeah, I saw that. It seemed very reasonable.

Yup. Believe I saw over the past five years in total, they're number one. Right. That's why the Bills were 13-3. All of their guys look the same. You're totally seeming to make sense here as long as nobody pays actual attention.

Being heard better in the middle sounds too simple, but it's not, it's key. That's most of the reason it's the MLB or occasionally a safety who plays in the middle and close on a huge majority of teams.

Maybe, maybe not. You assume the main problem is one thing and you assume Kirksey would improve the situation even not knowing the scheme. Either or both of those might be wrong. Nah. We fans endured a lot of years being told by you massively boring folks telling us that you had no idea why everyone wasn't grabbing the pitchforks the way you were. And yeah, you're right, the defense was stout. And a lot of that was because Edmunds was a lot better than you folks were willing to see. It really is that simple. Edmunds didn't get $18 mill ayear because he was a "pedestrian producer." The idea is stupid.

The idea is nuts. Name five teams with four HBs on the 53 where one of them is not primarily an STs guy. You're trying to put together a roster for a game that nobody plays anymore. On a team that will absolutely be far more of a throwing team than a running team, which is as it should be, because taking the ball out of Josh Allen's hands is nuts.

No, we really do not.

The correct answer is this ... the length of his career. Or his career as an excellent QB anyway. Sometimes QBs have a year or two at the end when they aren't the same guy, like Roethlisberger did. Before that happens to Josh, the window will be open. That's what having an elite QB does. You start each year knowing you've got a chance to be competitive for a Super Bowl.

I would totally disagree. If you can say that right tackle is most important, it would only be because we're pretty confident left tackle will be OK because Dawkins is there. I'm just a smidge less comfortable saying that than in years past, but he still appears to be head and shoulders above any other tackle on the roster. If you move Dawkins to right, then left tackle becomes an even worse weakness without him than right tackle is with Dawkins at left.

Cha-ching!! Not to mention that the Niners had guys listed on both of those best lists, though it was a different guy. But that makes them an honest and effective franchise according to these agents, despite the votes likely getting split. Lotta nonsense in BADOL's post there. Just confirmation bias. To be successful you can be trustworthy or you can be less so. Being trustworthy does make people more likely and happy to work with you, though. It can bring in FAs who might not otherwise sign here, it can greatly assist in negotiations and Beane has an excellent record of getting guys to sign at good values to the team. Probably a good deal of that comes from being trustworthy about what the player will be getting in Buffalo. Beane doesn't have major weaknesses. Small but real ones? Yeah, sure, as absolutely everybody does, but he's overall excellent. This is shown by the extreme success the team has had under him. Few teams have such excellent W-L records in the last five years, and that's the basic thing you want a GM to be working on and the best way to judge him.

He's drafted better than average. He's been a good drafter, particularly factoring in how consistently they've drafted late. Not great. And in many other areas he's been great, but not in drafting. But better than average. https://www.si.com/nfl/2023/04/14/nfl-draft-ranking-best-and-worst-teams-at-picking-players#gid=ci02bc99ec7006253f&pid=1 https://www.the33rdteam.com/category/nfl-draft/which-teams-have-been-best-at-drafting/ https://nypost.com/2023/04/22/five-year-nfl-draft-analysis-ravens-are-no-1-as-giants-jets-both-rise/ https://www.runyourpool.com/articles/2023/04/27/5-best-nfl-draft-teams-of-the-last-5-years/ Only spent about 20 minutes looking, and there just aren't many articles that are recent, don't go back way before the McBeane era and rank the teams over the years rather than just one year. Of the ones that I found, all of them list the Bills pretty high. There's a good reason for that.

Man, that's some serious spin there. You must feel dizzy. Yeah, it only takes two or three voters. But if only one or two teams get more, it's because you're good. Roseman does stick out there, but there's plenty more to be taken from this. Including that Beane is one of the best overall according to the agents, which is important. Not surprising. Everyone thinks Beane is one of the best.