wardigital

Smallness can sort of be relative. Moats doesn't look much bigger, but he looks like he knows how to use his lack of size to his advantage more. Moats also looked horrible on some plays though, so its all relative.

I think if we run for 125+ yards, and Edwards is something like 14 of 21 for 180, we will be in the game at the end. But we have to win the turnover battle and play better special teams than we saw in the pre-season. This team will live and die on ball control and field position.

Football is a very popular sport, and thus subject to the admittance of lots of yahoos into the conversation, even more so on the internet. The yahoos don't really account for a greater percentage of the posting base here than at any other forum I've ever visited. I do feel like there is a greater degree of rudeness and cynicism that is allowed to go unchecked on this board. I'm a relatively new poster, though I've lurked basically for a decade. Within a week of starting posting here, I was once challenged to what I guess would be some sort of "verbal duel" and a second time told my small number of posts meant my opinion didn't have any value. I'm not advocating moderators here, but I will say that I consider myself a new and productive poster who has been deterred by the ****ty attitudes of some folks, not all. The saying is, I'd rather be around 100 boobs before 1 !@#$. This applies to at least two scenarios in life. Good post. I feel like the whole "we're not casual fans, so we don't count!" argument is sort of weird. We post on a message board so we can't be considered casual fans. So we talk to people at games, but people who buy tickets and go to games aren't casual fans, because they don't spend the money to do that. So we talk to people who watch the games at home, but people who watch the games every week at home aren't casual fans, because they don't spend the time to do that. And then you realize that its sort of a silly idea to try and measure the "casual fan". Would the "casual fan" be reading Mike Harrington's newspaper article? It doesn't seem like a very casual fan thing to do. If the casual fan is comfortably disengaged with the team, then they aren't really important in terms of whether or not they care about the Miami Dolphins.

If Las Vegas was using some sort of ridiculously impenetrable, hard-science mathematical formulas to verify betting lines, then they wouldn't just blindly give every home team three points for every game, as surely certain teams would exhibit a greater home field advantage than others. Duh.

I think that the potential difficulty in the schedule is pretty scary. If we beat Miami in Week One, though, it won't be as bad.

The people who have expressed shock that Chan Gailey would compliment Levi Brown and then cut him kind of confuse me. Of course he is going to compliment him, regardless. There are two reasons why he'd compliment almost all of the players that go through his camp, always. Firstly, if some sort of catastrophe ever struck and two or three of our QBs went down, and Brown was a free agent, there would be a guy who would know at least the basics of the offense who could come into town. You want to keep him on good terms with the organization. Secondly, and more prominently, because it is simply the professional thing of Gailey to do. Praising Brown gives him a good send off and positive feedback that may land him with another team. It's like having a good work reference on a resume. Not only does this create good will between the organization and the player (usually), but it keeps other players around the league happy because they know that the Bills organization is not a backstabbing environment. Players like to be looked upon highly, regardless of who they are. Now if Levi Brown actually said he was pissed on his Twitter, that's his bad. He was the worst quarterback in camp, and it wasn't particularly close. The Bills have so little invested in Brian Brohm that it is not like he had to totally outplay Levi Brown on every play to earn a roster spot. It's not like he was going to be so much more cost prohibitive than Brown. I think this is really what happened: Going into camp, Ryan Fitzpatrick was very disgruntled, and it seemed like he was not favored toward making the team at all. His camp starting slow. But he always seems to have average games. I think over the course of the camp, for whatever reason, the coaching staff decided that they weren't comfortable with Brohm as the #2, and Fitzpatrick solidified his role as the #2. Brohm outplayed Brown and has NFL game under his belt with this team. Finally, the franchise determines that while Brown has some valuable tools in his QB toolset, he does not have the versatility at this stage in his career to be valuable on the practice squad. Perhaps they determined that he wasn't going to be able to run a variety of different offenses for them (maybe he struggled to learn the Bills new offense, we can only speculate). I think too many people here fall victim to the potential of unfamiliarity/newness. Brohm is apparently some great hope almost surely because we've seen little of him. Brown even more so. And believe me, I sat in my living room during the draft and just got so frustrated with not getting a quarterback in the earlier rounds. I really, really wanted to think Brown was going to be a contributor. But I haven't seen anything all summer to indicate anything other than he has a big arm. Well lots of people can throw a football real far. That doesn't make you an NFL-ready QB.

Aside from everything everyone else has said so far, Marshawn Lynch has had two 1,000 yard years in only three career seasons. He might not be playing well right now, but it is impossible to "imagine him as a undrafted guy" or whatever, because he's already shown NFL potential to be a good running back.

I don't understand your argument. You'd rather not have satellite than have to "waste your time" in court protecting your right to have a satellite dish? There are lots of people who would want football (or some other form of programming) bad enough to view it as advantageous to protect their rights in court. If that's not the case for you than you probably just don't care that much about whether or not you have a dish, but some do. There's nothing wrong with that. Let's be honest, if any landlord is going to make your life "difficult" by following the law, that landlord is a tremendous !@#$ and deserves to be litigated against, if for no other reason than there should be a public record of the landlord being a dictatorial ass for future tenants to see. And then, also, at the end of the day, you get your dish.

I've gone through on Pro-Football-Reference player-by-player, and not a single player fits the criteria that we know about DIE HARD if everything he has stated is true. We know from him that he played for them from 1967-72, and from another poster who re-posted a link that DIE HARD claims to have been a "Season ticket holder" since '67. It is easy to consider that he thought of himself as a "season ticket holder" from 67-72 while playing for the team, but that would basically mean that was the end of his playing days. This means we can reasonably deduce that 1972 was his last season, as it would be highly unlikely for him to own season tickets to the Bills while playing for another team. Dick Cunningham is the only one who is particularly close to these parameters, except that he played for two more teams in 1973. There are a few other players who had a couple of extra years after '72 with other clubs, but the farther we get down that road, the less plausible it is that DIE HARD was a season ticket holder all that time or an actual player. Now it's possible that he didn't have season tickets in '73 and then got them in 74, and just decided for the sake of convenience to close the gap when writing his post, but I don't know exactly how possible. I think it's probably the most likely that he is a former player who once-upon-a-time told a bit of a fib (or was mistaken) as to how long he's had season tickets. It's also possible that he isn't actually a former player and just used that for dramatic impact when making his very excellent points about board civility. I think it'd be less fun if he just came out and said who he was. Investigating this stuff is a hoot.

The reason all these guys love the Jets is become this isn't really about analysis, they're mostly all writing the "who has entertained me most lately" articles. It's pretty clear the Jets won the off-season. They signed a bunch of over-the-hill but prominent name guys and one trouble maker who is a somewhat special receiver. They made the AFC title game and the writer's forget they nearly missed the playoffs three weeks earlier. It doesn't mean much. How many times have the Washington Redskins signed every breathing human being basically, won the off-season, and then crapped the bed come the regular season? It also doesn't mean the Bills will be bad or good. It just means that whatever they are going to be, they built the team in a really boring way. No one wants to talk about the undrafted rookie WR who runs great routes and could leap frog like 8 other guys on the Bills depth chart, even if that meant the Bills were a slightly better team. It's much more exciting to talk about the multi-million dollar, multi-pro bowl future hall of famers who are probably way past their prime but have name power. Success in the regular season will change all of that. It wasn't too long ago that we were reading/watching stuff about how Trent Edwards knew all along that he was the best QB in his draft. NFL media has a remarkably short memory.

Weren't you the one on the Sal's after hours show last night saying that a National Football Post report that Marcus Easley wasn't injured as bad as suspected should be taken lightly because it wasn't reported by someone the caliber of Adam Schefter? Teasing, but really -- can't have it both ways.

If based solely on performance in Camp and pre-season, I'd flip Nelson and Stevie on your list. Stevie has earned his shot but Nelson has been impressive. That said, here is my prediction: 1 - Evans 2 - S. Johnson 3 - Roscoe 4 - D. Nelson 5 - Chad Jackson 6 - Naaman Roosevelt 7 - James Hardy 8 - Donald Jones Hardy has gotten a lot of leeway because of his draft position, but he's probably been the worst receiver we've had all camp. Worse than Jones even. I can see him making the team over Naaman based simply on his pedigree, but in my opinion he should be cut.

Oh my.

He seemed to get overpowered turning the corner a lot in the beginning of the game, which would speak to his being undersized for a pass rusher. But he's improving a little, anyway. I really wish he would stop diving on people after the play, its going to result in a lot of personal foul penalties that this team can't absorb.

Excellent points.

I voted "Not a Chance", though I think there is at least a small chance, just not a good one. I didn't want to call you insane, see. The Bills schedule is a big thing working against them. I think they will make improvements this year but they might be harder to see because of the gauntlet of a schedule the team has. I think they're a potentially 9 win team playing a schedule that probably makes them a 6 or 7 win team, which with a few likely injuries will probably make them a 4 win team. This will drive lots of people insane, to have another middle-of-the-pack season or worse season, but it is what it is. Unfortunately, this rebuilding process has not really started with any sort of depth.

It's perfectly fair to compare the two, they've led very similar career paths. There are, of course, other great sportswriters who don't think too highly of Posnanski (Buzz Bissinger -- but he hates virtually everyone on the planet) As for trying to do something -- I'm not trying to do anything. Just having a conversation! If you review some of Jerry Sullivan's earlier work, say, from 90 to 97ish, he writes much more about basketball and other sports less critical in the area. In those pieces, he seems to vary between positive pieces and criticism. But his coverage of the Bills and Sabres has almost always been from the negative tilt. Which is fine. I don't think it makes him a very good writer, but it's fine. I actually could probably pull some Bills articles from Sullivan from the Super Bowl years, replace the names, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between what he wrote then and what he writes today. So it's possible that he doesn't like the NFL very much, but I also get the sense that he's sort of lost some creative control or capability over the years. His extracurricular writing for the News is not anywhere near as frequent as it used to be. I do think his point about the Linebackers is a good one, but, as always, I think the way he goes about writing it is pretty bad. Maybe that's the only way he knows how, I dunno. This is something I get behind. I have my criticisms with the way Jerry Sullivan conducts himself professionally, but my goodness, Mike Schopp makes the man look positively peppy.

I don't see what it would hurt to put him on the roster during training camp and pre-season and give him a shot. There are men who have been charged with murder in the NFL. It's not like the team would be tied to the guy if he sucked. Nothing really happened after the Eagles signed Vick. He was booed for a couple of weeks and then the masses got distracted by some other shiny thing.

It's not that he turns a blind eye to the Royals ineptitude, it is that he is a better writer than Sullivan. As the previous poster suggests, Sullivan was a curmudgeon far before the Bills had a sour decade. That's not his fault. There are lots of media who make their money off of being sour and controversial. But it makes them lazy and bad at their job, usually. There really is little in the way of productive conversation coming from this at the moment. I sort of just get the sense that you're trying to be exasperating for its own sake. I don't really know if you even have a point at this juncture. If you don't know who Joe Posnanski is, that's all I need to know. He's a fairly common name in sports writing. I'm just here to discuss things, I don't care whether or not I'm right or if I learn something. I'd rather learn something. Reading back, I don't even understand if you had a point about the NY Times piece, other than to be combative and contrarian. I think you're getting your rocks off establishing themes on an internet message board, which is a shame. It seems like if you invested as much energy into other things, you could be a really productive individual.

And it should be noted that there are sports writers in comparatively small markets who absolutely bring it on a daily basis. Joe Posnanski tears it up in Kansas City, in a city with the Chiefs and friggin' Royals. If Sullivan was ten percent as talented as Posnanski, he wouldn't have to draw reactions by throwing hand grenades out for columns every week.

Right, it's my opinion that he's not any good. I never said he wasn't allowed to have opinions, and I also never said that wasn't his job. I said that he was bad at giving them. That he is boring, and that his prose sucks, and that he writes from a sour place, which isn't good for the quality of his writing. It would help for you to understand my position if you reviewed the posts I've made in this thread once more to know where I am on the subject. I don't think its the case that if he wasn't any good, he wouldn't last this long. There are writers that go decades on purely fabricated or plagiarized stuff before being given the boot. Longevity isn't a sign of competence (John Guy? Modrak? Darcy Regier?) in any profession. I can't believe you're defending him this much, either.

I don't agree with much of what Lv-Bills has posted in this thread, but I do agree totally with the idea that there's no need to sign up with his real name. People are pointlessly vicious to each other here, and guys like wawrow get blind sided sometimes just for being who they are, which is unnecessary. I totally agree with the idea that the Bills LB is probably the worst in football, or at least very close to the worst. This has nothing to do with whether or not Jerry Sullivan is good at his job, which he is not. Well, first of all, this isn't an "either/or". We don't have to hate one or hate the other. We don't have to hate either even. And there is plenty of quality coverage of the Buffalo Bills that occurs, some of which is conducted on this very web-site. I don't hate Jerry Sullivan because he's critical of the Bills -- there is no one more critical of this team than myself. I hate him because he's bad at his job, and not particularly interested in ever getting any better at his job.

Like I've said. There are many instances in which I believe that Mr. Sullivan either denies the facts or ignores them -- so no, I don't think that he does #1. This is a matter of opinion. You seem to think that he's working strictly from facts. That's fair enough. I respect that. I don't. Others don't. You should respect that -- and if you can't, frankly it is no one's fault but your own. I'm not interested in getting in a pissing contest with you. Though I would suggest that you not even think of such a thing. You are not a toddler, so do not act like one. If there is some sort of internet muscle you want to flex by being facetious and condescending... by all means... but you aren't gaining any victories from having the last word or being the most ridiculous here. I'm about to go have dinner with friends and enjoy the evening. I am a happy person, and I won't be moved one way or another by whether or not you declare yourself the victor of a "pissing contest". Seriously: Grow up. We have different opinions. If you are of a sound and reasonable mind, perhaps you might try respecting that, instead of viewing everything as a threat.

one abou John -- Fair points. This is all, of course, a matter of opinion. Whatever you or I say. I would suggest though, that Wilson has gone about this in such a way as to not sacrifice the respect of a large chunk of his readership, or to do with the topic as maliciously as Sullivan. That probably also lends him some more leeway. Hammer hard, get hammered hard.