DazedandConfused

we pretty easily had the 4th worse QB situation of the 4 teams in the division. NYJ may be worse off if Favre retires (again but clearly it ain't over til its over with him. The Bills had the misfortune of getting him late enough in the season that he has absorbed the NYJ scheme and built chemistry with his teammates and though we faced him late enough in the season that the old guy was probably running out of gas, he simply outplayed our team having to rely on JP when Edward was clearly better but after going out with three different injuries in his brief two years of play meets my criteria (missing PT 3 time for differing injuries in 2 years Edwards has earned the title injury prone. MI- Who would have guessed since rag arm looked done and was going to a 1-15 team but he led the team to the playoffs and the proof is in the pudding. NE- I expected the Pats QB situation to be better than the Bills this year but that was back when I thought it would be Tom Brady calling the shots after his 18-1 performance, who would have thunk it that Matt Cassel would simply prove to be a better and more durable QB than Edwards. Edwards is the starter next year, but the Bills have to go into FA with a priority of getting a QB who not only has the temperament to teach Edwards (who clearly still has things to learn) but actually we are comfortable with him starting 3 or more games next year as that is simply what has to be reasonably expected from the injury prone Edwards.

Sure there is enough blame to go around and Marv deserves his fair share. However, to me the blame he gets and deserves is minuscule compared to what Ralph gets. Senile or not the buck stops with the owner and what seems more than fair to me is that he and not Marv or even Jauron get the lionshare of the blame. Sure one is overlooking a lot if you try to forgive the GM who hired Marv in the first place, but the simple fact is that Marv was not here when Jauron was extended and that while he was here running the drafts they were two of the best the Bills ever had. On the other hand to try to bend and overlook things to let Ralph off the hooks makes one look like a smoldering pretzel after the circumlocutions required to not lay a lot of this on Ralph's doorstep.

I agree that most of us would vote for Jauron to be gone if only out of the frustration of fans who after we folded with an 0fer showing against division opponents after going 4 and 0. It what a friend of mine compares to be bitten to death by ducks. It was slow and was not pretty. Still regardless of what we would have done in fantasy land where there is no cost to letting DJ go, the problem is that even at fiscal levels which make the likely false assumption that DJ had not signed an extension or that some sort of disaster clause kicked in that allows the Bills to opt-out if we finished below .500. The problem is Ralph has not shown the ability to take even a one season hit for a fired HCs salary as he did with a foolhardy attempt to challenge Wades final year with the NFL and him apparently driving MM out of town when he seemed ready to pay MM to be HC but be stripped of virtually all power and authority. It does make me sad but not sick since I have long been resigned to Ralph not being willing to take much fiscal risk to get players that would have helped this team.

Still not confirmed as best as I can tell but still consistent with Ralph's past MO. Particularly when it comes to paying HCs who no longer work for him he throws nickels around like they were manhole covers. My guess is that DJ stays as contractually Ralph is bound to pay him a million or more for 2 years or as many as 4 if DJ signed the deal which apparently was agreed to when the team was 4-0. I cannot see Jauron showing an ability to hire an OC capable of leading the team beyond adequacy at best (8-8 in good years and 10 or 11 wins in extraordinary years) but to this point the results have been not horrendous but mediocre at best. I also cannot see it being a sustainable situation to hire an OC that any OC with a rep of success should insist on that he gets final say on O calls for the most part. Such an agreement would simply render DJ as a non-HC in the traditional make-up and it is simply a matter of time til a Jason Peters type figures out that if he sucks up to one party he can get the other party overruled. Maybe there is some odd world where DJ actually gets promoted to GM status and a new HC with O chops is hired. Possible and maybe it works. However, it probably doesn't and is simply weird. I think the Bills are hard up between a rock (an HV who has shown no ability to hire a winning OC) and a cheap place (Ralph).

That a big part of the reason it likely does not work to hire an OC with some rep to come here with Jauron. Likely no OC with some rep would take this job unless he was given pretty free reign and the ability to "go over Jauron's head to Ralph if he chooses. However, such a guarantee would so disempower DJ as to make it impossible for him to truly be considered the alpha dog of this team as an HC normally requires. It would simply be setting up a "too many cooks situation" that would almost certainly fail. Like a child who parents do not get along, a kid naturally plays one adult off against the other to get important things like desert first. If you think Mom will say no then ask Dad and vice-versa. I think the only choices may be to fire DJ or to simply stay the course. I find it hard to believe Ralph will eat the bucks after his displays with Wade and MM regarding their leaving the team. If the only choice left is DJ stays then it will be quite insane to expect a result much different than the mediocrity of 7-9. On a good day the Bills would step up and ooze into the 1st round of the playoffs. However, we would do well to do that and an SB is simply a very unlikely wish under DJ.

IMHO, the real question for the Bills in terms of achieving success under Dick Jauron boils down to whether he is going to be able to have an OC implementing the offensive tools the Bills have acquired in order to make an effective NFL O. I am afraid that the answer is that in his career, Jauron has shown no evidence of pulling this off with a consistency anywhere near having an SB competitive team. Thus, my conclusion is that failing having some real world demonstration of him hiring and turning over O control to someone who has a proven record of NFL O success, achieving anything beyond the Bills achieving more than mere adequacy under Jauron is not likely to happen. The problem is that I do not see Ralph easily accepting paying a man an HC salary to not be HC for the Bills. Particularly it would seem to be the case that if Jauron has signed an extension committing Ralph to pay him roughly a million a year through 2012, I see little evidence of Ralph showing a willingness to take the hit that firing Jauron would bring. Again if this is true, then a move by the Bills which would seem to give us any chance at a result beyond mediocrity would be for the Bills to hire an OC of such past success and give him such authority as it is hard for me to see how you do this and maintain Jauron's authority as HC. I think this is the central quandary facing our future results. I see few other options than Ralph simply biting the financial bullet and thanking Jauron for being a stand-up guy but as the odds are to achieve adequacy at best under Jauron (and more likely continued mediocrity after 3 years at 7-9) we need to go in a different direction. However, given the failed effort to gyp Wade out of the last year of his payment and Mularkey seeming to be made so uncomfortable that he resigned its hard to see Ralph demonstrating the character and cajones to cut Jauron lose.

Agreed that folks seem to be looking for some pat theory to explain why Jauron is a failure (though often these theories are simply not consistent with all the facts- for example some complain he is too conservative but the simple facts are in his first season he went for the jugular against the Pats with a 7 point lead late in the game when the Bills had a 4th and 1 for the TD but instead of doing the correct thing and conservatively going for the FG and forcing the Pats to score twice with time limited, WM forgot the down and the Bills turned it over and the Pats marched and won, likewise he went for the win even though a chipshot FG would have put us in command against Dallas and they pulled of the miracle as TE threw and INT, likewise if they had simply burned clock instead of calling an ill-JP run, they may well have won if we had gone conservative). This thread seems to imply that Jauron that the problem was Jauron avoiding fault when actually from his clear declaration that the dumb JP run was his call he has the loyalty of Bills players because he does take a lot of personal blame. The problem Jauron has is that as in the above examples Jauron simply made calls that were bad and did not work. In my humble opinion he should not avoid taking and bearing responsibility for these and other bad calls. The problem I see starts at the top where Ralph seems to have set a standard of being satisfied with mediocrity. He simply has not cut the checks to take the risk to acquire players like Tony Gonzales when this team was clearly in desperate need of a TE threat and when a longtime Pro Bowl level player would have supplemented the lack of player leadership this very young team had. Is Jauron at fault? Yep (though I doubt Ralph will take the deserved step of canning him after 3 years of the same mediocre record as it will cost him some bucks to have a coach under contract sit or have his pay supplemented when he goes elsewhere to DC), However fish rot from the head down and the buck stops with Ralph. He deserves plaudits for keeping the team in this small market but also deserves to be correctly held accountable for the record of mediocrity his teams have brought since the Polian era.

1. There are all sorts of indications (in terms of press reports) that Jauron has in fact signed an extension which commits the Ralph-owned Bills to pay Jauron through 2012. 2. There are all sorts of indications (Ralph's foolhardy attempt to squirm out of paying Wade Philips, Mularkey being made uncomfortable enough after Ralph publicly announced he was staying here despite his losing all credibility and ability to lead that he quit rather collect a paycheck) Ralph will not pay someone to not be HC after he is done at HC. Unless someone can show some indications (rather than theory that it would make sense for their to be some crash and burn clause to the extension and that somehow Ralph can can DJ without owing him for a year or two worth of salary, there does not appear to be a job opening at Bills HC regardless of the result tomorrow.

Ralph has shown zero desire to pay an HC not to HC for us, so unless there is some crash and burn clause that demands the Bills finish with a winning record (or at least 8-8) that no one has provided any REAL indications that this is part of the apparent extension he has reportedly signed DJ is almost certainly coming back. Ralph would paying him for nothing even without an extension as it has been said the original deal was for at least 4 seasons (and the contract market at the time seem to demand a 5 year deal) so all in all unless someone has some real evidence or indicators to show otherwise DJ will be back for another year regardless of the game outcome tomorrow.

The bottomline for me is that I was not disappointed in Hardy's performance because I agree that he did not perform but I was not disappointed in his play because I suspected he would perform at about this level. I simply do not buy into the conventional wisdom that even a player chosen in the first round should be expected to be an immediate starter or even a starter after a full year because its about 50/50 whether this is going to actually happen in the real world. Of course like all Bills fans I was bummed that we did not catch lightening in a bottle and Hardy would make us forget about Boldin's rookie performance at WR. Yet, the simple fact is that if someone were foolish enough to expect a 2nd round pick to become the answer for us at WR then they deserve to be disappointed for investing in this nice but wishful thinking. The thing I was actually disappointed in is that Turk Schoernert did not prove to have the skills to use the height of rookie Hardy that he is going to have regardless whether he performs like a rookie or not to force opposing teams to give us other options in the red zone because they were worried about covering a tall guy like Hardy on the fade pattern (something opposing DCs would need to do virtually regardless of how he performed because they would need to cover a big guy in the endzone and to do this might force them to give less attention to Evans or free us up to run patterns for the RBs or the TE. Ddid Hardy have less production in his rookie season than a Bills fan would want? Sure. However, did this disappint me. Naw, it was what I expected and I think most thinking football fans would see it this way.

I think your point is correct in that disappointment is intrinsically linked to expectations. I think the case that some folks are disappointed with Hardy's play says a lot more about how stupid folks expectations were than it speaks to Hardy not playing adequately. Fans simply over-value the draft as it can certainly happen that a second round pick can break in as an adequate #2 WR, but the simple fact is that though the conventional wisdom is that a 1st round draft pick is expected to start his first year, this is not a sure thing at all. We will see what the depth chart says at the end of the season, but a couple years back was the last time I look at the specifics and even though it was generally agreed that that years draft was pretty strong it was a 50/50 thing for a 1st rounder to even be his team's starter at the end of the year. You think Bills fans would remember that even after two full seasons Eric Moulds showed little or nothing on the field and he became a legitimate Pro Bowler and the Bills go to guy. Expecting a second round WR to command the WR position as a rookie could certainly happen it is just silly for anyone to expect this will happen though.

Agreed. It just strikes me as silly when folks develop some simplistic shorthand summary pf the situation and then conveniently ignore facts that do not fit their theory. If only it were so simple that Jauron needs to be more conservative or more radical. The complex fact is that he simply needs to right more and how he pulls off doing the correct different things at different times is actually the trick that folks need to advocate. Unfortunately an analysis which goes beyond simplicity does not fit into the attention spans needed for a radio show, the few column inches of a newspaper column, or even a look at a website where one sneaks a look while the reader is supposed to be working.

Say what? All he had to do with a lead against the Jets was go with the conservative play call and perhaps the Beast who had been great would pull off a great run for a 1st and at worst you burn clock and have Moorman do his job and force Favre to pull off a miracle. I wish he had been more conservative. Last year after beating the tar out of the Boys they drove down into the shadow of their goal posts and if they had done the conservative thing but not make the first down, Lindell puts in the chipshot and the Boys need a super duper miracle to win. Instead he has young Edwards try to force a pass and the Boys pick it off. They still needed and got a duper miracle to win the game with an onside kick recovery but I wish that Jauron had been more conservative in that game. If that is not enough, the Bills start off the Jauron era by getting a lead on the hated Pats and after failing to get a TD, Jauron decides to stick a fork in a far better team and go for the TD on 4th an one. McGahee later admits he did not realize it was 4th down and the Pats respond by taking the ball, going on a long drive an eventually win the game. Season in and season out and in his first year as well these are cases where Jauron zigged when he should have zagged and in each case making the conservative call arguably would have won the game and possibly make for very different seasons in two cases.

Yes a strong GM can make virtually all the key hiring and firing decisions, but even TD (who you yourself use as an example) who was a strong GM and in the catbird seat initially as Ralph gave him the keys to the car had the need to at least collaborate and essentially turn over the hiring of the co-ordinators and position coaches to his HC. We saw this clearly when TD himself stated after the canning of GW that he the team had gone against his initial OC hiring suggestion of Tom Clements but instead had gone with Kevin Killdrive. TD at the very least did not have total authority over OC hiring so this was a collaboration and the most likely other option was that HC GW essentially had total control. Like it or not, Jauron clearly is a solid guy and has earned the respect of his players. Yet, despite several opportunities he has no record of hiring successful OCs. In this case, after the strong GM TD failed miserably the Bills went to a team approach for making decisions and Jauron bears a strong dose of responsibility for team decisions. as Brandon is clearly not a strong GM at all. I think we keep Jauron as HC as it appears from all reports that he signed an extension which binds the Bills to pay him big bucks through 2011 and Ralph has shown all indications of hating to pay an HC he canned,

It will stop after he leads the team to a few more wins in cold weather like he did today. However, it is pretty clear he got a really bad start today and there is some likelihood that in addition to Turk running the offense badly that Edwards playing in what he himself said was colder than any temp he had played in was part of the problem. A couple of early passes were simply poor passes we are not used to from Edwards and the cold seems like a reasonable explanation as he got better as the game went on and he warmed up. The bad weather complaint will not stop until he does prove he can consistently be a starter for a winning team. Given the reality of his poor start this is not an unreasonable assessment until he plays like he did late in the game routinely in cold weather.

From my watching the game more years than I care to admit, I define injury prone as a player missing playing time with injuries to three different parts of his body over a short period of time. In his still brief career (a career that has seen him perform extraordinarily well at QB when it can easily take two years of play before a player leads his team to wins consistently) he was knocked out of a game and forced to the bench for a couple of games by an injured arm, earlier this year he was forced to the bench for a few games with a concussion, and just today he made a great comeback from missing getting knocked out of the game and missing a couple with a groin pull. I am sorry to say it but Trent Edwards is injury prone. Does this mean we should give up on him and get another starter to invest too much hope in? Nope. He did put on some muscle weight this off-season and maybe between a combination of developing his young body some more and learning how to defend himself (without getting happy feet or getting gunshy) and he can beat the injury issue. JP is done. We would be smart to stick with Trent and try to at least have him survive. However, we would be simply foolish and setting ourselves up for another losing season in 2009 unless this team makes it a priority to sign a vet QB as an FA who can step in if (when?) Trent goes down if he continues to have the injury prone experience he has had in his first two pro years (and while running for his life at Stanford as well). The real question I have in my mind is whether the local media which covers the Bills and a small but vocal segment of the fan base which seems to delight in ragging on these overpaid men playing a boys game to entertain us. Actually, I have no doubt that folks like WGR and Jerry Sullivan are not mature enough to deal with having two QBs from the way they contributed to dividing this town during the RJ (who was injury prone)/Flutie days and who have delighted in filling column inches and selling radio commercials using the faults of a series of Bills QBs as fodder.

The thing about the NFL, particularly at the QB position the case is rarely closed (see Vinny Testaverde who played forever and sucked most of the time, even see Jim Kelly who though he was dead as a player still was able to pry $1 million samollians out of Ralph who throws nickels around like their manhole covers). Losman has long been done as a Bills and he simply sucked on Sunday (I think nodnarb is right that self-delusion is his problem, I really think he was aware that there would be a pass rusher trying to run him down from behind when he fumbled, he deluded himself however into believing he was gonna outrun the rusher as the it looked like a pretty easy read that he was gonna face pressure from behind). However, though his case is closed as a Bill and I agree that any contract he gets this off-season will be one for rehabilitation of his career rather than primarily accelerating it, the case is far from closed about whether he is done as an NFL player. One need look no further than the real world example of Brad Johnson who was cut not once but twice as a failed QB. Because NFL QB cases are rarely closed the simple fact is he came back to lead a team to an SB win. Does Losman suck as a QB and he is done as a Bill. Yep. This has been true since last year's Jax game. However, is the case closed on him as an NFL QB. Nope. Even if he signs a contract for the vet minimum next year and make good incentives he only gets if he plays well, Losman is laughing all the way to the bank on his first pro contract. He will make out like a bandit as an FA as he is gonna get paid what a normal person gets in 10 years for playing a boys game for a year.

It is simply a look at the history where Ralph as shown every sign of hating to pay an HC for not being our HC (trying to get out of paying Wade for his final year when everyone told him he would lose if he appealed but he went through the time. money and bad feelings of appealing anyway and he lost, keeping MM on the job rather than paying him when he wanted him to leave and then making the situation so bad MM simply walked away) that all indications are Ralph will not fire Jauron. Its an interesting academic question as to who do you hire to replace him, but the real world question is how do we produce better results with Jauron. Those who do not think we can produce at least better and it is to be hoped adequate results with Jauron are left with the choices of taking a hike on being a Bills fan or simply whining aimlessly.

If the list is the one you gave and there are 4 Bills scoring threats that would need to be game planned by an opponent for and they would have nightmares about doing this, that strikes me as a pretty good list. How many opponents would we face who we would judge us as having four threats we may have no answer for. Not many opponents. The problem I see is that we simply do not employ the threats we do have well for the talents they have. Of these four, I think Evans clearly is far more of a threat than the non-use we have put him to. Parrish also has shown some talent as a #3 WR which he has showed as a PR guy, but we have not used him well at all in the passing game. Lynch, I agree has not shown break-away threat ability, but the awe expressed by the TV guys on Sunday if his refusing to be tackled was real and the Bills braintrust has also not utilized him consistently with the ability he has demonstrated. One can always use more talent but the Bills problem is how the talent they have is non-utilized. The big talent problem they have is there is no playmaker leader on the D as Whitner has not become the Polamalu/Sanders we want, nor is Pos the TKO (or even the London Fletcher) we want, and the DL has not generated the fear you are looking for.

I also agree that their is a core of talent and potential talent here that will profit from adjustment rather than blowing up the team. However, rather than getting some studs in FA who will be the players to put this team over the top, the adjustment that I feel we need is to pick up several FA leader types as one of the big shortfalls I see on the current team is simply a lack of on field leadership, maturity, and record of past success. The FO seemed to believe that if they had good character in the HC (which I think they have as Jauron is a high character guy whose main failing is that he has no record of winning or being a competitive threat to consistently get a team to the SB or even deep in the playoffs)they could somehow mold a bunch of youngsters into a winner. Nope, it does not seem to work that way. They did make a point of going out and getting Kavika Mitchell and the vet Stroud, but Stroud is a good player with no real record of team success and Mitchell simply proved not to be be enough to develop a refuse to lose stud player attitude for the youthful team to be inspired by. 20/20 hindsight is more perfect so these comments are made to exhibit a point rather than prove any predictive wisdom (my screename states my quality predictive analysis for this team) however, in retrospect if this team had put up more than market rate bucks to a get a proven stud like Gonzales or made the even more outlandish move of getting a past winner (though a talented knucklehead) like Favre this would likely be a very different team. The Edwards situation is interesting. I agree he is a talented player, but I define injury prone as a player losing PT 3 times in a short period of time to injuries to 3 different parts of his body. By my definition, Edwards having lost PT last year to a wrist injury, this year to a concussion, and again this time to a groin pull simply strikes me as a talented player whom one would be foolish to count on being your starter. Its ironic and horrible since who would have thunk it as the season started and after 4 games that the Bills would end up with clearly the worst QB situation of any team in the AFC East.

Baseball is life T-Shirt. Usually I wear my Tasmanian Devil Buffalo Bills T-shirt or a simple Buffalo Bills T-Shirt when Tas os being washed (though being a superstitious type, as long as the Bills are winning I keep wearing Tas- it got pretty funky after the first month of this season). However, today, I could not find Tas as it was still probably in the laundry. I decided instead of the standard Bills T to go with my Baseball is life T. As far as superstition goes it did not help us win, but after today's yucky game, I think I will be sticking with the baseball T the rest of the season.

I think the mistake you make in your logic is that you seem to equate the Bills having a lower level of income with Ralph being desperate for income and chose to ignore the value of the team and more importantly Ralph's personal value. Ralph may choose to be desperate for income (its his right as an American) because someone else makes more income from their NFL team. However, the absolute value of the Bills and actually the income that the CBA pretty much guarantees the Bills provides no reason for him to be desperate for income (unless he is losing so much money on his construction business and other holdings that he is personally desperate for the Bills to generate income. The NFL set-up embodied in the CBA basically controls the major cost (player salaries) while also delivering a huge income stream (the major source if income are checks from the TV networks. If Ralph is desperate for more income it is his choice. it is not something inherent in the economic system which is the next best thing to a printing press in terms of generating cash. In fact, the Bills have remained in Buffalo specifically because Ralph has not been so desperate for income that he has chosen to pull an Art Modell, Georgia Frontiere, or Al Davis and simply move the team to a higher bidder. Ralph is old enough and fortunately for the Bills his heirs have shown no interest in running this product to produce the highest income possible so he has not been so desperate for income as to move. However, understanding this situation it becomes clear that Ralph deserves credit for what he deserves credit for (keeping the team here and being a sportsman rather than simply a businessman) but he also deserves blame for what he has done poorly (while he deserves credit for picking Polian, Marv, Butler and the football guys who built a winner, he simply has made bad choices from his handshake agreement with a player forced to retire, his mismanagement of the Butler situation, how he handled TD, Wade, MM, etc. This has little to do with the stupid choices of WNY politicians and alot to do with a bunch of bad choices by Ralph which are simply the reality along with the good choices he made.

It actually sounds like this post is arguing the opposite of its initial words. Coaching is essential but it is not the biggest issue. Quality FO management starting with the team owner hires the coaches and this is where like it or not the Bills have failed. Ralph has provided ONE essential element in that he has kept the team here. However, he has failed miserably since the best Bills days when he: 1. Failed to get along with Polian who demonstrably went on to win an SB 2. Made a handshake agreement with Jimbo and failed to acquire a replacement in the draft or FA for a player who demonstrably was done. 3. Failed to manage the Butler situation to a reasonable conclusion and got rushed into hiring TD as the season approached and the turnout demonstrably proved to be disastrous. 4. A big part of the disaster was that though things can work with a TD built team to win an SB (see Pitts) this actually happened with TD being reined in and supplemented to the point he got the boot, Ralph demonstrably failed in that he seemed to turn the keys to the kingdom over completely to TD and he ended up having to boot him after a couple of fatal errors with bad HC hirings and mismanagement. Like it or not, Ralph did do one ESSENTIAL thing in keeping the Bills here and we need to be grateful for that, however, he did not lead the team to the promised land by doing the other essential thing which is quality longterm management of the team. A fair reading both gives him credit for the essential he did well on and the essential he failed miserably at.

While I do not find the games unwatchable with JP in there (as a longtime Bills fan the game will always be on or taped if the little woman has me doing something unavoidable) its probably even worse as I find the games far more ignorable once we fall behind. Whether I like it or not, the game only requires semi-attention as the first half drags on and then after the hope of the start of the second half and a hoped for adjustment, the snacks and trips to the bathroom simply demand more attention. Even worse, when Edwards is in there, the game becomes like watching the Indy 500. Its exciting, but suddenly the realization comes that part of the excitement is simply waiting for the likelihood that there is gonna be some incredibly flammable car crash as he goes down with a concussion, groin injury, or wrist injury. Don't get me wrong, an injury is desperately rooted against, but I am forced to admit that with the loss of PT 3 times in a little over a season of play to 3 different injuries, Edwards simply meets my objective qualification as injury prone. The Bills have selected and managed us into a situation where the QB position seemed deep to one where we legitimately are looking for the 2009 version of Brett Farve come the off-season. Its sad.

I totally and completely agree with the obvious statement that if things happened differently they would not be the same (basically the difficult stance you are upholding with your argument). What I disagree with is the argument I was responding to that the exact nature of the difference if Lindell had made the two chipshots was that the Bills would be 8-4 right now. Its a stretch to even argue that the Bills for sure would be 7-5 if Lindell had made the two FGs in the SF game. Its an even bigger stretch to somehow argue that Lindell has shown some great failing as a player because he went wide right on a 40+ kick that we would be 8-4. Could be, but its is a huge leap of faith to claim we would be. I guess faith is all we have left.