Thurman#1

I'd take Mazi Smith. But to each their own. Me, I'm still thinking.

Yes, he has reason to be frustrated. So do 31 QBs every year. Football is built that way.

Um, no. Knox is excellent and Davis is a legit #2. Chiefs WRs are probably two #2s and three good #3s. Overall, KC's offense w/out considering QBs is better but not wildly so. Mahomes made that WR group look better than it was. More, looking back at KC's offense in their other SB-winning year, they had Kelce, Tyreek and not much else anywhere, including the line. Right now, Mahomes is #1. It shouldn't be a question. An uninjured Josh is close behind, and he has a chance to re-write that narrative over time.

I believe you missed the point when you said, "The issue of it being a weak draft is really not in play. It's about perceived value, needs of the team, and a desire to get their player especially if trading up or back makes sense." It being a weak draft is absolutely in play, without the slightest question. Yeah, it's the three factors you cited, but in weak drafts there will precisely be fewer players with perceived value and lower desires to get guys with less talent. Yes, your three factors matter, but there are certainly other factors, certainly including the weak draft. If that's your premise, it's unclear what you mean. If you mean "on the cheap" compared to the traditional draft pick chart, I think you're wrong. Players at any given pick are likely to be less better than the guys available to you at your original pick than in strong years. There aren't as likely to be as many teams as usual offering trade-ups at the value they'd give in ordinary years. So if teams aren't willing to accept trade-downs with a bit lower rewards than usual, I expect we won't see many trades. If you mean "on the cheap" meaning compared to the differential of scouting scores between the players, I'd expect things to look much like normal, but with teams that want trade-downs saying, "Hey, look at the draft pick charts, you're not offering enough," and the teams that want trade-ups saying, "Hey, we want the guy, but not that much. He's not worth a #27 in most years." I can see someone trading up for Bijan, absolutely, depending how far he falls. IMO, we'll see trade-ups and trade-downs, but perhaps fewer and for less of return for the team trading down. Some teams are desperate and think they're smarter than everyone else. It's the idea behind Massey-Thaler. We'll see a few, I think.

You're missing the point here. Weak drafts don't make teams that want to trade up say, "Well, we really like this guy and his value here, so it's a weak year, so we'll only offer 10%." Weak drafts make teams say "Jesus, that's all that's left? Yes, teams always look to trade forward and back. But the weakness or strength of a draft will always affect the number of players you want to trade up or down for and the price you willing to pay. The grades teams use aren't year-adjusted. Not every team has every guy graded the same, obviously. But the reason it's a weak draft is because in a strong year you might have - for example - 23 players with first round grades and 34 players with 2nd round grades, while in a weak year you might have, as Bill does, 12 players with first round grades. Now, not every team would say 12. Almost surely there are some differences. Some teams might say 10. Others 15. But it's highly unlikely anyone has, say 23 this year. So at 27 this year you're not going to give the same thing you'd have given last year at 27 when you'd have been getting a guy graded maybe 6.9 or 7.0, where your highest graded guy this year at the same spot is graded by your scouts as a 6.7. When your turn comes, there will be probably no players with grades about 7.0, for instance. Last year there might have been eight guys left that your team grades above 6.8. This year, zero. Your highest graded player is less talented, your scouts say, than the guy they could have traded for last year at #27. Are you going to give the same amount for a less talented player? Not if you're a smart capitalist. If you're lucky, you'll have a really different grade on somebody than the others all do. But if you do, it might be because you're wrong.

Yeah, the rules you are following there are indeed rules for mock drafts. Not real ones. And add #1 picks? Plural? When we have the #26 pick or very close in each round? Please. The mock engines are fun, but they make it easier to trade than it generally actually is, because it's more fun that way for the customers, internet draft fans. There are several draft charts, but all of them give roughly the same message on the theoretical trades here. The draft engine is giving you unrealistically high values. And why not? They want people to feel like a genius and like they want to come back. #27 680 points #59 310 points #91 136 points #130 42 points #137 37.5 points #205 7.8 points That's 1213.3 points, a value about halfway between the 11th and 12th pick. Teams that trade up generally have to give a bit of a premium, 20% or so, but there are plenty of times when a GM doesn't get that good an offer. If it were really as easy as you make it look here, teams would do it all the time, especially stable GMs along the lines of a Belichick. It isn't that easy. Belichick did pull it off a few times, but found people learned from watching and didn't want to do it anymore, particularly when the Pats picks came so late in the round. As ours do.

Reasonable if you've got it. That's simply a bad argument, that Tremaine is at fault any more than anyone else. Just as easy and ridiculou to say, "Yeah, look at all those Lombardi trophies Josh Allen brought during his five years."

He does mention Harris in the 2nd paragraph and says he pointed the article towards the top financial commitments. Harris comes with only $1.7M for one year, so fairly legit. And yeah, I subscribe and think it's worth it. I love longer articles myself, if they're not fluffed out, and the Athletic articles have a ton of interesting content, IMO.

You're probably right that it wouldn't be as severe as what happened to LA. But yeah, it would start in on crippling the future. Have you seen where our cap is for next year, 2024? Even right now we're projected at being about $17M OVER the cap. Already!!!! Add in $40M over this year and next year for Hopkins and things will look a lot worse. And yes, we can do renegotiations. Which will simply add on to what we owe the next year or two. That's all these renegotiations do, is borrow money from our future cap years.

Yeah, Elam did have a good first start. Then teams figured out that he was as yet a liability in zone coverage and used that to make him look consistently bad. He learned all year how to improve himself and yeah, he had a good game against Cincy. He looked like he has figured things out and gotten a lot better. I'm expecting to see an awful lot of him next year and mostly liking it.

Possibly so. But if the Rams had had a young Josh Allen as their QB rather than an old Matt Stafford, that decision would have been catastrophically dumb. We have 12 - 15 years to be competitive. We'll win one or more. The Rams only had another year or two. It was still a desperate risk for them, but when your window obviously ends extremely soon, desperate risks that greatly handicap you in the future make more sense.

And there's always a wildly entitled fan so spoiled, so desperately believing they deserve special treatment that they are willing to deceive themselves that a 13-3 season (in a season when one of their teammates died on the field, when there was a mass shooting, two blizzards with multiple fatalities, the first time in history when a team has had three away games in twelve days) followed by a playoff win and a playoff loss with almost half the defense out or injured ... is equal to "eating a plate of poo." Easiest male Karen demonstration in the world.

A chance? Yeah, sure. But IMO if they don't bring in further competition there in FA or the early rounds, it will likely be a failure. But anyway, your draft was thought-provoking and interesting. Thanks!! I didn't agree with it all but I liked it.

Wait, IronMaidenBills is done with making excuses for this team? Wow, call the media. Oh, not only that, but IronMaidenBills refuses to believe otherwise? Holy Moses, alert Schefty. Nobody but you cares what you think. We care what the Bills should do. And as of right now, they should look at your recommendations and run the other way. And your final question there is weak weak sauce. You ask what will their excuse be when Beane fails to win the Super Bowl. That's just stupid. It's just as weak as someone asking you what your excuse will be when we win a Super Bowl. How long does Beane have to fail before I put him in the hot seat? Another stupid question. I don't put him in the hot seat. Nor do you. And so far he hasn't failed. He and McDermott took a team that had missed out on the playoffs for an eon and got them in five out of six years. A team that had crested at mediocre for nearly two decades and they've been competitive for a Super Bowl for three consecutive years. That's not failure. Disappointing? Yeah. Failure? No. It's just not. There may come a point. If it happens, it's likely to be quite a while, barring some huge collapse of some kind.

Brandon Beane is on the hot seat? Good lord, dude. No, he's not. Yeah, he's under some pressure, as is every NFL GM. On the hot seat? Only in your mind. And no, you don't "have to" take the kind of big swing that will seriously handicap your ability to handle things in future years. They took their big swing last year with Von Miller. Clearly you define "sitting on his hands," as not doing exactly what some guy on the internet named IronMaidenBills demands you do. Here's a hint, though: nobody else defines "sitting on his hands" that way. He's not sitting on his hands. He's just not doing what you want him to do. Some fans want to take a big swing every year. That's not something you have to do, especially if your team is good enough to seriously compete right now. And this team is. It's not a mistake that Vegas has us as in the top two to win the AFC and the top three to win the SB.

"We proved that we couldn't outscore Cincy"? No. They didn't prove that at all. We proved that we couldn't outscore Cincy on a day when the whole team, including Josh Allen, played their absolute worst. We scored 10 points. Ten points. That wasn't because the roster wasn't good enough. They had a crappy day. We didn't have another game all year under 17 points, and the only two other games under 24 points were division opponents who know us really well, the first Jets game and the Miami game when it was 126 degrees on the field.

Really? You're citing Crowder as an example, a comparison for Allen? Ridiculous. Crowder's last four years before coming to the Bills: 2018 9 games played 2019 16 games 2020 12 games 2021 12 games David Allen's four years in the league: 2019 16 games 2020 16 games 2021 17 games 2022 4 games Yeah, great example there. If it weren't for the fact that their histories and play times are vastly different, you could almost say that they were similar. They clearly aren't. But you could almost say they were if you didn't mind being quite wrong.

Since Allen came into his own, 4-3. Pretty good, though certainly we all wish it was better. So, 55-21 regular season record building off a rebuild, and 4-3 in the playoffs in the last three years. Among the best. Again, wish it was a bit better, but still quite good.

Yes, we made the playoffs with Preston Brown at MLB. We went 9-7. That doesn't mean we played defense tremendously well. We were the 26th ranked defense, 18th in scoring allowed. They weren't awful by any means. They were better than the offense, but still not all that good.

Sorry, man, doesn't make sense. At all. We DID fight Mike Tyson in his prime. We fought the team that beat the Bengals in the Super Bowl, the Mike Tyson of the NFL last year, the Chiefs. And we kicked ... their ... ass. And as for the Bengals "being well on their way to blowing us out" in the real season game ... again, sorry, that's utter crap. They were ahead by four. In the first quarter. You thinking that is "being well on their way to blowing us out" says a great deal more about what you are desperate to show than it does about reality. Complete crap. The first shovelful is that you say the Bengals were "driving with ease again." That's ridiculous. They had had two plays on that second drive. Two plays doesn't mean squat. They were at midfield, having started at the 35. They might have had a successful drive. Equally, though, they might not. Two plays isn't "driving with ease again." It's maybe at best having successfully started a drive. The second shovelful is even thinking that they were "well on their way to blowing us out," as you said. By that definition, the Browns were "well on their way to blowing us out." What happened? We won. Patriots were also ahead of us 7-3. What happened? We won. Bears were also ahead by 7 and then by 4 and moving the ball easily. What happened? We won. And in five other games this year we were behind but came back. Sorry, but this is just dumb. Being behind by four in the first quarter with the other team at midfield isn't in any way a giant probability of "blowing us out." Your hunger to pretend it's so doesn't make it so. That early, the probability of a win for Cincy is probably around 55 -60% Unlike the playoff game, we were still very much in it and the offense looked solid. In the playoff game, our first drive was a three-and-out. Second drive? A three-and-out. In the canceled game, our first drive was eleven plays long, going from the Buffalo 25 to the Cincy 7. Two totally different starts, despite your clear eagerness to pretend the two games looked alike.

Or not.

Yes, absolutely. Guys like Fletcher Cox, Chris Jones, Quinnen Williams, Jeffery Simmons and Dexter Lawrence. It appears likely that two or three DTs are going to get contracts somewhere in the neighborhood of $25M next offseason. And there's a reason for that. They're worth it for the havoc they cause. Hargrave got $21M/ year. He's worth it too. Guys like that give coaches sleepless nights.

They did drop off a bit near there when Von Miller was inured in game 8, the first game after the break. They never looked to have nearly as effective a pass rush after that. But the team overalll played well the last half of the season, especially considering all the injuries on defense. Most of the season was after the bye week. Ten games, during which they went 8-2. They were much much worse in the Bengals game than they'd been all season. Ten points, they scored there for Pete's sake. Ten points and 325. Their next worst scoring total was 17, and beyond that 19 in the 120 degrees on the sidelines in Miami game. And it's not like Cincy was a sensational defense. They ranked 16th for the year. They're good, not great. We just played awful in They went 8-2 and won one playoff game. He's right. The dropoff (beyond the effects of the loss of Miller) didn't happen there. It happened in the Cincinnati game.

Yeah, that's the way it looked to me, even as the game was going on. Sure, the coaches weren't without blame. And yeah, the defensive injuries hurt a ton. But the players just didn't play well enough. Even Allen. As you say, there were a few exceptions. But not many.

Nonsense. We're every bit as good of a roster. And that's not an excuse. It's blaming themselves. That's the opposite of an excuse. Taiwan is simply saying what a number of players said that day, that they had an awful game. That it seemed they just couldn't play their best, that they ran out of gas. None of them said that was OK or acceptable. But a bunch said that's what happened. Taiwan clearly agrees in the Dunne article. After the game, we heard this: --------------- "It was emotionally draining for obvious reasons, you guys all saw that," OL Rodger Saffold said. "I just kind of feel like we were tired. Guys were exhausted during the week and our coaches did the best they could to try to modify the week to get us back to stuff. But it was just uncharacteristic things that were kind of happening. So, I have to kind of put that into a factor, not as an excuse. This team has been fighting for so long and fighting through all this adversity, you run out of gas at some point." ---------------- "Guys just continued to fight and fight and a lot of it motivated us and just at the end we just ran out of gas," Hyde said. ---------------- While not pointing to it as an excuse for the playoff defeat, WR Isaiah McKenzie, TE Dawson Knox and OL Rodger Saffold said the emotional toll of the season caught up with them. When Allen was posed with his assessment on his teammates' point of view, he concurred with them. "I can agree with that statement. I don't know for me personally. But, again, you gotta play your best against really good teams, and we didn't yesterday," Allen said. It clearly said that there is more behind a paywall. In what was there, it looked like Dunne was the one asking for a philosophy change, not Taiwan. So I'm with you that it was a bit frustrating getting less than what was teased. That's the modern world, though.