JESSEFEFFER

Steelers sign the ghost of Drew Bledsoe. What could go wrong?

The day I spent there I arrived early thinking parking would be a problem, so we opened the place up. Carolina had a home game then (Cam Newton had just been in the traffic accident) and their fans trickled in for their pregame meal and drinks. I think any downtown stadium has a tailgating situation that has severe limitations ="sucks."

Tavern on the Tracks which is 7 or so blocks from BOA stadium has my endorsement. I spent the day there with my wife watching the game in which Bacarri Rambo intercepted Aaron Rodgers twice to beat the Packers, December 14, 2014. Had a great time and they were a very active group. I'd bet they would plan big things for when the Bills actually come to town. You might want to contact their Bills Backer group.

The toughest games are at home. After the Ravens game, the Bills have a realistic chance to stack wins and put the division away early again. Cleveland and Pittsburgh are easily reached away games on the back half when their fans are likely to have lost all hope of a meaningful season. Away at Charlotte is a big deal given all the connections to the area. The night games are something of a pain but that is the expectation now. The Eagles coming in so late is weird and the only minus I see to the schedule. Maybe they would like to promote it as a Super Bowl preview but it might not mean anything to one or both teams by then.

Away games at Pitt and Cle could be similar.

More Bills related names. Haven Moses and Ahmad Rashad. Add Charlie Joyner. Damn, I am getting old.

To be fair, there is a third component to the mix and that would be opportunity which can be limited by injury or the strength of a roster. I'll throw 2 names to the mix to start with. Wes Welker and Frank Lewis. I will so some more thinking over lunch.

I think I agree with the fantasy football remark that Brandon Beane made on WGR. If your WR group doesn't drop many passes or fumble the ball, blocks well for the run game, does really well with RAC, has some solid contributors to STs, has enough depth to overcome injuries and adds to the productivity of a team's historically good offense, that's a good WR room. Fantasy football doesn't care about any of those things. It cares about volume stats for individual players. Those stats often come from spending much of a season playing from behind and not from a team that is great at the RZ run game. So, they may be bottom 5 in fantasy football desirability but they can be a much bigger asset than that in terms of their contribution to winning. We had the same debate starting last summer going through to end of the preseason in the mega, 170 page "I'm really starting to love this WR room. We quietly got better" thread. And yes, the 2025 group has a chance to be better than the 2024 group.

There has always been a debate about the nature vs. nurture as to what a person ever becomes. As applied to the NFL, is it more on the culture and coaching of the franchise you play for or is it on the what the player brings to the table that defines their career. If the Bills like him in 2021, there may be something more to gain from his talent here vs. for the Jets and Browns.

I was thinking that it might be the Jets that history could demand but there should be some home playoff games I would hope.

Elijah Moore is a great example of the kind of value talent that can pay off big. He's been with the Jets and Browns and his career has suffered the consequences. He could be ripe for a short term opportunity here on the cheap. All the WR talk now and pretty much since last August has gotten many salty takes. Beane has taken a money ball approach to the WR room and it worked last year. WRs that block, don't drop the ball and don't complain about their role can get you a long way with Josh Allen as the QB.

Have you ever heard Beane yell about anything, ever? I know I haven't. That's not his style. But he was definitely combative and probably got annoyed while listening to the feed while waiting on hold and is probably very much aware of that general criticism about his drafting. In general, fans and media love the draft and some love it too much to the point of being blind to the other roster building tools. Beane is concerned with the entire roster including the practice squad and knows that this job is never done and the draft is maybe half of the process at best.

Next time Brandon is on, I predict that he offers some sort of apology as he is normally very patient with critics in the local media. It was almost like his version of Polian's "if your don't like it you can get out of town!" moment, but, in a much more well-mannered, southern gentlemanly, passive aggressive way.

Beane came at them with a "it sounds like 2018 again" meaning the criticism for taking Josh Allen. He was probably waiting on hold listening to Sal's segment and missed the conversations earlier this morning about what an improved defense could mean for the upcoming season. Seemed to suggest that the criticism is coming from fantasy football perspectives. Says he does not value WR less than the rest of the league.

He's on now and I have never seen/heard Brandon Beane so salty on an interview. He is prickly about the WR/draft conversation. Interesting interaction and not the usual Beane interview.

Scoring 30+ points a game and having an MVP QB not possible in the NFL with a bad passing game. High volume stats you cite are incompatible with a 13 and 3 team that blew away their division and had their starting QB on the sideline for ~10 quarters of game action.

That should be a word. Here's another. I had a coworker who has a hearing issue and is prone to malaprops. He was speaking to a larger size group about a quality issue and described a sudden change in an X-bar-R-chart as "dramastic." It was funny at the time and maybe he was just caught between "dramatic" and "drastic" but now that I have two teenagers I use that word often. It comes in handy.

Coaches had little to do with the failures here, imo. Multitude of players taking turns screwing up.

That first game was a logistics nightmare. Those 2-14 were not drawing big crowds and the Bills game day prep was subpar for this one. Bill Polian was supposedly somewhere in the mix directing traffic. I was stuck on Abbot Road in an NFTA bus and the driver would not let us out to walk to the stadium. Missed the whole first quarter.

He will turn 24 in September and that works against him. But, although he lost most of 2023 to injury, he was All-MAC in 2022 which says his play has been solid beyond just the last year. The lack of a senior all-star game and combine invitations is glaring. That seems almost like snubs with a message although I can't say for sure what it would be.

I'll weigh in. I think it went sort of like this and had similar consequences. The OL are the US Marines of the locker room. Not every human being is capable of being a marine no matter how they are "encouraged" to up their performance and playing mind games with people can go sideways. Martin was considered soft by the coaching staff and team and there was a concerted attempt to toughen him up. Call it constructive bullying. Who issued the Code Red? Wrong movie.

Ok. Missed that. Just turned from Fox.

If that's the shot I saw it was from Buffalo's Riverworks. Fun place.

Let's say Cole plays Kelce better than any previous Bills playoff defender. I wonder how much having brought Micah to the practice squad might have helped. That seems like the most tangible, hoped for benefit of bringing him in at that point of the season if they never intended on having him in a game.

That's it. He loves to mess with people, I assume it doesn't matter whether there is a camera there or not. Look for the video from when he did a live interview on a golf course with a local news reporter where he asked if it was a live feed and then pretended to freeze up or the video linked here. Wings at Room 40 at 1:06 Live Interview at American Century Golf