Thurman#1

Yeah, wouldn't mind that at all, if doable.

If that was going to happen, why release him? This gives everyone a shot at him. Clark won't miss using that to his benefit. No comp picks for guys you cut. Contract has to expire.

Yeah, this is why I hope Bijan Robinson is still there. He'd incentivize a team to trade up. He'll likely be gone, but I'd love it if he's still there and we could trade back. But all it really takes is one team to fall in love with one guy who's still there. This happens all the time. Could easily happen this year.

Bijan Robinson would be the perfect guy to trade down from. There are a bunch of guy who I'd like after trades down but until we know where the picks are, it's hard to say with any degree of reason. Just for gits and shiggles I'd say Mauch, Schmitz, Wypler, Bergeron, Michael Wilson, Zay Flowers, Josh Downs, maybe Mingo, Jayden Reed, or Christopher Smith. Not in order.

Me too, but pretty sure we're not the only ones to think this. It'll depend on the doctors reports. He's not going to fall to the 7th. Not unless the knee is an absolute ruin. That's Voorhees, not Vorhees.

Jeez, no. He'll cost too much. Great player, but we don't have the un-needed resources to get him, on the trade side or the salary side for a guy who would be a one-year rental for $10.5M or else a major drag on the cap for a major last contract for Henry, for a team that will throw the ball among the highest percentages in the league.

Nicely put. I can't fully understand those who disagree. It's the process, not the result. Guess it depends on what you mean by gimme. 85 - 95% chance, probably. Two 9-8 teams made the playoffs in the AFC this year. Barring a major Josh Allen injury, we aren't missing out on 9-8. Or 10-7 for that matter. Mostly likely not 11-6 either. It's not a mistake that Vegas has the Bills as huge faves for the division. They're right. That's what the bettors think, in huge numbers and for good reason.

I looked two pages ahead and nobody had answered you. Sorry if I missed it. Once any bonus money has been paid to a player, there's absolutely nothing that can be done. The team that paid the money must account for that money on their cap. Depending on what date the guy is traded on, you can fiddle a bit with which years the dead cap money must be accounted for against the cap. But it must be paid by the same team over this year and next. The only exception is a Barry Sanders type of situation where the player retires before the end of the contract and the team can sue to be paid back. In a trade, guaranteed money is different, as money guaranteed in the future will be paid for by the team receiving the player in the trade. That team would take over the guarantee. But no, once bonus money has been paid, the team that paid that money is liable for it. There is no way around that.

Can we retire this dumb old trope. There are a million things a GM can say if he doesn't want to be positive that really are coach- and GM-speak and have no real meaning. "He always gives 110%." "I want him on my side in an alley fight." "He's a tough son of a gun, great attitude." A million of them. No, he wouldn't be rude about the guy. But yes, he can, will, and has indicated dissatisfaction with guys on this team in public statements. Not rudely or personally, but yes, he has no problem politely saying they aren't happy with them. Remember his comments about the TEs before the 2021 season? "We just never really got that position," Beane said. "At the end of the year, I thought we did a little bit, Dawson started to get his groove. But it was never where the opposing defense was like, 'man, we've got to stop their tight ends from going off.' So we'll into look to that group." He's got no problems with being politely harsh. So when he goes out of his way to be positive, the reason is real simple. It's because that's how he feels. Even if what you feel disagrees.

I don't think it's GM-speak. In fact, he doesn't use much GM-speak, it's a great thing about him. If he can't talk about something he says so. He likes Davis, expects improvement. It only makes sense. But yeah, more WRs also make sense, and he talked about getting dangerous skill position guys as well. Particularly at slot. McKenzie didn't have the year they hoped, Beasley didn't have the month they hoped, and Crowder isn't under contract. They only have two receivers under contract for 2024. Sure, they need to draft / bring in some more receivers.

If Bijan Robinson is there at 27 we should do cartwheels to the phone and trade back. It does seem a bit unlikely, though. I don't get the sense that the values most folks have reported so far will not change quite a bit in the next couple of weeks, nor that our needs won't look fairly different after FA. I see why people are interested. I just don't think things are clear enough for me yet. One other thing is that from what I see if the values are more on target than I sense they are, I'd rather see them trade back a bit and acquire more picks. But I often want that, and so far Beane has not done a lot of it.

Yes, very much so.

We've got that team. Have had for years. Matt Barkley won a game in 2018. The problem isn't winning without Allen. It's winning tough games without Allen. And realistically, KC can't do that either with any consistency. That's my opinion on it. Anyone should feel free to disagree on that too. If you want to lose your QB for the season, you ought to try to do it with about four games left and a damn good record, letting the backup lose a few games get warmed up, letting your coaches figure out how to use the backup as well as possible so they get it by the playoffs. That's the Brady-Hostetler-Foles way. You get a chance to figure out what he does best but defenses haven't seen enough film to figure out the best way to take him away.

Yup, Time Won't Let Me and this one are probably my two favorite time tunes.

"We'll look at various ways to bring in playmakers." Nothing about the first. "We'll always look, whether it's free agency or the draft to add guys who are very good with the ball in their hand." He didn't say what you thought he did. He didn't talk about what he'd do in the first round. My guess, TE in the first would be somewhere around a 1% chance. Not completely impossible, but damn close. But I would guess they'd pick one up somewhere, FA or draft. They've brought one in the last three years, and not one made the roster. They want one, but how much are they willing to spend in resources?

Um, no. Beane's right and you're wrong. Ja'Marr chase was obtained with a #5 pick, and we've never had one that high under Beane / McDermott. Even when we traded way back in the first round one year to get a good pick the next year we still didn't manage to get up to #5, only to #7. And what we did with the #7 was pretty spectacular. Anyone who thinks the Josh Allen pick, our highest, was a miss is several light years away from being able to even smell a clue, much less actually get one. The Bengals had #5 for Chase and #1 for Burrow, without trading up. The Bill had to trade up for Allen, Edmunds and (unfortunately) Ford and still didn't ever get as high as either of the two natural picks for Chase or Burrow. And yeah, you can make things look as they are not if you only look at the other teams best picks and several of your team's worst. It doesn't show anything about the Bills, though, only what you are desperate to show so you only look at limited pre-selected facts. The year they got Burrow and Higgins they had #1 and #33 and so on, while we had #54 and #86 as our two highest picks. You can argue that they also got Diggs for the 22nd pick, but though true, it doesn't support your argument about better use of picks. That was terrific use of the pick, but it's not surprising that strictly in terms of draft they did better than us with the #1 and #33 than we did with the #54 and #86.

Unfortunately, yeah, that's what people do today. They passively aggressively insult the other person while pretending to apologize while actually not doing so.

Two FA OLs? Yeah, sure. Reasonable. "Two top O-line free agents"? Nope. Can't see it, myself. Too many other needs. And plenty of other ways to address the problem. I'd expect them to draft someone fairly high, as you suggest. I'd hope it would be in the first two rounds, three at the outside. And I'd guess they'd bring in maybe another lower-level FA OL.

Dude, this is just stupid. You do realize that what you have done there, in that post, is precisely the scapegoating that you're whining about, right? Yeah, there will be a scapegoat. There absolutely always is. But it isn't McDermott who needs one. It's the folks like you on the boards who need someone to blame. Clearly you would like the scapegoat to be McDermott. But scapegoating is only a sign of poor thinking. It's fans - the ones who don't get it - eager to grab the pitchforks and head for the castle screaming for the head of Edmunds or Oliver or Frazier or McDermott, whoever today's patsy is that you've decided on with about a half second's thought. Waaaah. Waaaah. It's McDermott's fault!! Waaaah. Waaaah. Jeez.

Our back 7 with White at his current level of post-injury play? And Poyer limping around? With Jaquan Johnson playing 34 snaps, Dean Marlowe 41 snaps, Dane Jackson 28 snaps, Cam Lewis 13 snaps, and Elam (though he actually played really well for a rookie in that game) 49 snaps? Certainly healthy our back seven is better than theirs. Without question. But it's a legitimate argument that KC was better than that patchwork back 7. Looked to me like Cincy got lucky to run into an injured Mahomes who also just wasn't having a good game.

Yeah, as long as you throw out the other three regular seasons of games and the playoff games in those years where they were good, and you only include the two against Mahomes when we didn't have a single really effective pass rusher and the one against Burrow with a wave of injuries putting most of our best players out or shades of themselves, including DaQuan and Von gone ... yeah, as long as you only look at those, it doesn't look good. You're also throwing out the big picture. You're going out of your way to cater to your confirmation bias and only look at things that lead to the conclusion you're looking for. It's one of the best blueprints for flawed thinking that humanity working in concert have ever found. The offense wasn't nearly as injured in that Bengals game. They sucked too. How come you're not raving at them? They were pretty healthy. Of course analysts are saying they may regress. That's true every season. Are Cosell, Bucky Brooks, Florio or Sims predicting they'll regress? Can you produce some links showing that?

Indeed.

Yup.

The thing about the playoff problems is that we didn't have playoff problems. We had three games in the playoff problems. All three of those games were without Von Miller or any serious pass rush. Without the wave of defensive injuries it would very possibly have been an entirely different game on that side of the ball. Of course, the defense wasn't good against the Bengals but the offense was absolutely horrific. That was probably Frazier's fault too.

Yeah, look at how that flexible Niners defense did against the Eagles. Sometimes good defenses have bad games, most particularly when they suffer from many key injuries.