Thurman#1

Kelsay was never a terrible DE. He just wasn't a special pass rusher. He was a good player, but wasn't a Bruce Smith or a Schobel, the last two DEs Bills fans were remembering and measuring Kelsay against. And therefore despite being a pretty good player, he was the whipping boy for Bills fans.

Cox is a DT. And DT DaQuan Jones is no JAG, not by any definition. We've got several guys who aren't JAGs even when Von is out, Ed's no JAG, nor is Rousseau, but Von's the only one who's a consistently special pass rusher. When Von was in, all of the others were better and more effective. Typical for a terrific pass rusher. Having both him and DaQuan out against the Bengals was a terrible blow. And for what it's worth, there aren't many teams that have two consistently special pass rushers. Marino's basic idea, that DL platoons are the commonest way to go these days, has been pretty obvious for a while. Bills fans who don't like them had better get used to them or find a team that won't be so irritating to them.

That's not the problem. The problem is the $14.5M cap hit this year on a guy who you don't want to extend too much. And Evans will want a major extension, one he could get somewhere, whether as an extension or a new contract. I could see it, and if he were a couple of years younger, it'd be a no-brainer. But he's not younger. Draft someone. And maybe bring in a more reasonable FA on top of that.

It's an extremely fair analysis. Dodson and Bernard are still who we have. 11 guys on the field and when one of them who is not Von Miller, goes off it affects us that much. That's huge. And the reason is that Edmunds is much more important to us than many people have thought through the years, particularly in pass defense.

Tells all you need to know? No, it really doesn't. Was Milano locked up? Yet he's now an All-Pro, after they re-signed him. And the idea that we shouldn't re-sign people because they haven't taken us to elite places is dumb. That would justify not re-signing anyone. By that argument we shouldn't have re-signed Allen. He hasn't taken us to elite places. It's simply not a good argument.

Nah. They're all important. He's a consistently very good player who's now become even better, an excellent player. He'll make a positive difference here if they sign him, but he'll cost a lot of money. Like just about any player, there's an amount that they think will be too much. If they don't get him, it really will hurt this defense this year, as they don't have any reasonable succession plan. They want to draft guys, develop them and re-sign them. He's a perfect example of a guy they should do that with, and doubtless want to. But there are financial limits.

Benford a safety? Apparently very possible. Benford, a guy who has never played the position, our next starting safety? Really really unlikely. I expect to see them bring in a safety, spending a pretty solid amount of resources on him, either cap money or a fairly high pick.

With Miami he was scheduled to make $28M in 2023 and 2024 combined. Taking a year off and coming back as a 32 year old looking for a new contract, I suppose it's possible he might do better financially that way, but I really doubt it. This is probably about what he says it's about.

Yeah, it still applies for 31 teams. And we're still looking very competitive for next year. Yeah, a few trolls. Virtually nobody else. Plenty of Bills fans reasonably say that he was part of the problem in the Cincy game. He was. He, and the entire team, didn't play well. And we have to remember that he is still recovering from a partially torn ligament in his throwing arm. Other than the trolls, are there really people out there arguing that Josh is a problem going forward? I haven't seen 'em but I don't look at every thread and post.

Josh Allen too. 48 for 81, for 616 yards and 3 TDs and 3 INTs. Obviously he sucks too, by your dumb argument. He's clearly a bust and we ought to think about getting rid of him. Sorry, this is just stupid. The fact is that the whole team played awful against the Bengals. An awful lot of it was an deep bunch of injuries on defense and the emotional effects of this whole bizarre season including Hamlin literally dying on the field came home to roost. These kinds of results are what happens when you restrict the field you are looking at all the way down to one or two games. Particularly when the whole team played bad in the second game. You end up with the typical results of looking at an extremely small sample size, which is to say plenty of freakish uncharacteristic results.

Um, no, the reality is that 1st round interior OLs have been terrific investments. They aren't common. And yes, there's an opportunity cost to picking a guard (or anything else, actually). But guards taken in the first have been excellent players at an extremely high rate. And saying Beane has been terrible in FA is just wrong. Dumb, really. Far from perfect, of course, which will be true of any GM at anything once the sample size gets large enough. But Von Miller, DaQuan Jones, Daryl Williams, Emanuel Sanders, Cole Beasley, John Brown, Mitch Morse, Jordan Phillips Goes without saying there have been some bad ones too, of course, with Saffold standing out. They shouldn't have let Kromer talk them into him. Plenty of others over the six years, but that is the way these things go. Some folks on here, not to name names, consistently argue that Beane is a poor drafter and that he's been bad at FA. Which would make it downright amazing that they're competitive for Super Bowls every year. Yeah, that's more nonsense as well. And I'm surprised how on target you are here. It is indeed bull#### that they are bad at talent evaluation. They aren't. 13-3 makes that very clear, consistent competitiveness does as well.

Yeah, being favorites means nothing. But being a really really good team means a hell of a lot. And the Bills show every sign of being a really really good team. You keep focusing in on the final game this last year, because that's what fits your narrative best. And in that game, Allen was not good. Nor was anyone else. But the whole offense, coaches and players, including Allen, played really bad, below their level. Yup. This.

Um, no. You've vastly mis-represented what Graham actually broke down. He didn't break down how ridiculously bad the Bills receiving corps were this year. He broke down how ridiculously bad the Bills pass ... in one facet of the game. And he's right. At drops they were really bad. And that's sure not good, at all. But it's also not everything a wide receiver does. It affects 6% of the Bills passes. There's another 94%.

If you'll remember, though, during that extra time that Covid provided, Brown didn't go to one of those performance places where they teach you how to run a faster 40 and a more efficient 3-cone. He went to work with Joe Staley. Staley had a lot to teach him, but he is no expert at how go faster at your combine drills. Only after the season did he leave Staley and do combine prep (and more position prep also), Senior Bowl and so on, as he talked about below. And yeah, he got those numbers at the UNI pro day.

There's no particular reason to think this. He's been used mostly for that in his first year but there's every reason to think they at least hoped he'd be used for other things. And may well still be.

Wow, thanks for all the new info, OP. None of us know how much the back surgery affected him. The Bills have a much better idea, but nobody has a perfectly clear idea in cases like this. The Bills doctors have talked to the FO. Nobody knows, but they have much more info than we do. They'd likely want to upgrade the swing tackle at the very least, and perhaps give him some competition. Nothing much to say here.

1) Would rather pay as little tax as possible. 2) Likes warm weather. 3) Likes Tua. Yeah? So? The article says nothing. Does it say he doesn't like guys on the Bills? Poyer lives in Florida. Specifically in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, according to the Internet. This all clearly adds up to the fact that he likes money and warm weather. Having friends somewhere doesn't mean he wants to play there. But he has nothing against it. Why would he? I'd say this is a nothingburger but it's less than that. There's not even a burger there. He'd be open to playing Miami. Duh. Why not? He'll go wherever everything lines up most nicely for him. Probably 90% of that will be money.

Yeah, Diggs was not a draft pick. Yeah, he was obtained by using draft picks. He belongs in the conversation here. At the very least because we had fewer draft picks to use to obtain talent after getting Diggs. That must be noted in any discussion of what the Bills have gotten from their draft haul. If you were to tell me that Beane and McDermott were not able to make the Super Bowl with Josh Allen at QB and a top 5 defense, I would tell you first that you're full of crap unless you can see the future, and second that there are too many other variables to make a statement like that, and third that there are plenty of really good teams that had trouble breaking all the way through early that then had Lombardis come their way. We are indeed heading into a season where we might not win our division. So is every single other team in the league, whoever their QB is. Regardless, Vegas has the Bills at about -300 to win the division next year. Anything's possible, but you're a lot more worried about this than most. Dolphins at +350, Jets at +1200 and Pats at +1600. Get off the waaam-bulance. This is a three-loss team that had draft picks as more than half of their starters. They've had two or three picks we can all agree were bad. So has every single other team in the league during that stretch, but certainly the Bills have what we can now all see are a few bad picks and a few more that might be. They have also had quite a few unequivocally fine picks that you folks never seem to bring up, guys like Taron Johnson, Dawson Knox, Milano, Bass and Jackson, and again quite a few that might be soon. And they have a draft handicap that none of you folks wants to talk about ... we've been good enough under this regime that we're always drafting late. Except for the triple trade-up to get Allen and Edmunds, this team has had one pick higher than #23. That leaves you with lower chances in every round. Despite that, they've put together an excellent roster.

Oh, please. This team doesn't have subpar skill talent. Josh Allen, Stefon Diggs and Dawson Knox alone get them up to about average. That's nonsense. Could we use some more skill talent? Sure, yeah, but so could pretty much every team out there. I think all of us would like to see another guy or two at WR, but that doesn't mean we're subpar now at the skill positions. And yeah, you can go back and criticize most picks in NFL draft history by showing someone good they could have picked instead. You can also go back and look at your lottery picks and say, "See, if you'd just picked 21-17-43-29-3-9 you'd have been a multi-millionaire." Of course hindsight is better, who ever said it wasn't. That doesn't mean that the GM isn't responsible for bad picks. He is. He is also worthy of credit for good picks. What is full of crap is the "but he could have had this guy" stuff. Anyone with a draft chart can play that game with 99% of NFL picks in history, including most of the good ones.

Those aren't staggering numbers. And TE is a perfect example of why. What you need is enough players to play well. At TE we've run a one-TE system and we've got one who's really good. They're fine there. WR, too. We've got Diggs at WR. The fact we didn't get him by drafting him is beside the point. Nolan put these numbers together not to say that on the face of them they are good or bad. Doing that just doesn't make a lot of sense. Those numbers, if high, don't matter if the position area sucks. Nor does it matter if they're low if the position area is in good shape. Nolan's use of those numbers, as a thought experiment to predict which position areas might have succession issues in the future, is valid and thoughtful. Whereas just looking at the numbers and deciding they're good or bad is not. The NFL isn't a draft-only league. There are a lot of ways to bring in talent. They're interesting numbers. Not staggering whatsoever. They do indeed look to have had an impact, but they don't have a perfect congruence with areas that have problems now or look to in the future. RB, for example, has had a lot of draft investment, but might easily need another body, especially if Singletary gets a higher-level offer than we're willing to give.

Wouldn't make sense for us, of course. But this is the danger of flying too high into the cap space. You sometimes end up having to give up players who based on ability you would much rather keep and put on the field. The Rams are really lucky that they won a title in their one real shot. It was worth it for them, but a lot of things had to come together just right and a lot of luck besides for that to happen.

Yeah, fair enough. Same is true of Mahomes and the Chiefs, of course. Any really good QB really. My God, you're some kind of savant on missing the point. Vegas doesn't pretend to tell the future. Grading them on whether they hit in hindsight is completely misunderstanding what they do. They're about making strong guesses about the future and ranking likelihoods. Most particularly in predicting how the masses of people will bet. They're sensational at it. And again, anyone who thinks that a team doesn't have a chance to go all the way just because they had problems in the playoffs for a year or two simply doesn't understand how the world works. Some teams win their first time. Others take some time. Saints, Steelers, Giants, Colts, Ravens, and on and on and on. You said "Any reasonable football fan can see the Chiefs and Cinci are far better teams than the Bills." That Vegas line tells you that you're absolutely wrong on that. Fans are betting on the Bills over everyone but the Chiefs next year. You're far more of a miserabilist than the huge majority of fans. Fans has confidence they get it done. The reason simply being that that's the likelihood, that they have a good chance to get it done. Far higher than your befuddled suggestions of the Jets and the others. As for your last sentence there, what you're claiming is a fact is - in fact - an opinion. And not an especially bright one.

How do you so consistently miss the point? Yeah, a competent head coach takes charge there. McDermott did. The fact that he did it in a way that you don't happen to like is far beside the point. And the idea that a CEO would have been fired after a season like the 2021 Bills had is simply butt-stupid.

You're very clearly wrong that Gabriel Davis wouldn't be missed. His skillset has allowed him to be a consistent threat, a guy who gets open with great consistency. It always cracks me up how people who don't like him say that he only makes catches when he's really open, not getting that getting really open is a skill, one that he's really good at. He's a guy who makes contested catches often when called on to do so (I listed 8 or 9 yesterday, if you missed those catches it's simply because your confirmation bias isn't letting you see them). Won't be elite? Well, yeah, but the idea that a team only needs or wants elite receivers is deficient thinking. There's always room for guys who can And Davis will absolutely get #2 money next year. That's what happens to #2 recievers. And Gabriel Davis is a #2 receiver. But no, the thought that #2 money is $15M a year is just clueless. High-level #2s, maybe, but #2s can be had significantly cheaper than that. $15M a year is basically 26th in the league. That's very low #1 or more likely very high #2 level. The #32 highest WR AAV salary is $10M per year, two guys, Russell Gage and Valdes-Scantling (Spotrac). We don't need an upgrade for Gabriel Davis. Should we bring in some new guys, hopefully a high draft pick included? Sure. And Davis is pretty likely to be there with that guy. Very possibly for years. They are almost certainly at least discussing giving Gabriel an extension this offseason. That doesn't mean it will happen, but he could very easily be here for years. Simply, he's a productive guy, a #2 who probably has more upside. Agreed about McKenzie.

And yet more absolute utter dopiness and wrongness from you. Vegas has the Bills with the second-best odds to win next year. Well above the Bengals. None of the Miami, Jets, LA and the Jags that you claim are "right there maybe better" are even close. The highest is the Jets at +2500. There is a reason to think that the Bills are more likely descending than ascending, that reason being that you're a miserable sad whiner, about to break out into "Waaaaaaaah. Waaaaaaaaah."