Magox

Both the Gaines and Williams acquisitions are both potentially solid signings. If they remain healthy at worst they will be useful rotational and depth players which as we all know depth is very important. At best we have two new starters that would represent upgrades. The team is just getting accumulating a deeper talent pool. To be honest, I actually think we now are a better team than we were a week ago. WR, RB, Edge Rusher, O lineman and Fullback are areas that they could still improve upon. There really are no glaring holes on the team. Of course the biggest determinant of whether or not the Bills will succeed is Allen's growth. As long as he continues improving the sky is the limit with the Bills.

I find it fascinating as I have been saying for days now that Cuomo and Trump truly are not that far apart. Cuomo admits his decision to quarantine everyone at once was 'not the best strategy' and that he is 'working on' release of coronavirus antibody test that will allow people to go back to work Keep in mind, Cuomo didn't shut down the schools until just 11 days ago and the Statue of Liberty, Empire state building and other famous places were open early mid week last week. They didn't even shut down the restaurants until Thursday or Friday of last week. He definitely along with Deblasio resisted in shutting down things. I'm not saying that to blame him, I'm making that point because Trump also resisted at least in rhetoric and downplaying the virus. The other point is how they view the economy. There really isn't much daylight between them. Trump will listen to his health advisers, I have no doubt about that. He will ask them to formulate a way to get people back at work with as minimal of a risk that you can REASONABLY apply. There is always a risk analysis to these sort of decisions, you can't wait until you are 100% without risk because if that was the case there would be no economy. You'd ban everyone from driving because that is a risk. You'd ban people from eating red meats. You'd ban travel. What I'm saying is that there has to be a risk analysis of an acceptable enough risk that takes into account the negative affects of the economic downturn which has all sorts of negative residual effects including health and somehow try to keep people as safe as possible. I believe we will begin seeing some parts of the country which will implement social distancing guidelines phasing in parts of the workforce within a month.

Awesome! If he remains healthy which is a big IF, he will definitely compete for a starting role and at the very least would be involved in lots of nickel and dime packages. He's a quality DB in this system.

Without doubt, Cuomo is already looking at his political national profile. And I wouldn't be surprised that there are discussions with him and his closest of closest of advisers who wouldn't ever betray him of the possibilities of becoming the Democratic nominee. He's not going to play Mr. Nice guy with Trump in the not so distant future. He will ruthlessly savage him with sky high poll ratings and him and Trump will go after each other. And with Biden becoming the melting ice cube that he is, with all these terrible performances, I am sure that there are discussions between Democratic activists how they can replace Biden with Cuomo. What I was talking about was on the substance of their decisions. Cuomo wants to get the NY economy going again as soon as he can realistically do so.

Substantively speaking, as I said earlier there is very little room between Trump's and Cuomo's outlook. They both got serious about social distancing pretty much on identical timelines and they both began speaking about phasing in the workplace at the same timeline.

So there are two arguments here, well actually three if you want to accept the progressive pols one. The progressive argument is just provide as much money as possible despite the warped disincentives to work. The conservative argument is that this does provide a disincentive to work so it’s counterintuitive, from their standpoint. Trumps and Mnuchin’s argument which I think is the most rational one is that even though it may provide a disincentive for some to not work, they think that it will be a minimal effect, it gets more money into the economy but more so than anything is that if they did it the way the conservative group wanted to that opposed it that it would slow the mechanism in getting the money into these affected people’s hands. In other words there was no way to filter out that “error” without slowing down the payments. Im fine with it.

You can make that criticism but I think most people understand that this is something that caught the entire world off guard including our health experts. The only ones who were well prepared for it were the Asians and that is because they went through to it with H1N1. We can agree to disagree but if Dr Fauci and all of Europe’s top health experts were caught off guard then I won’t hold it against anyone else for doing so as well.

It really is a bunch of Monday Morning Quarterbacking. I laid it out, it is a fact that the system in place was not meant to do this sort of testing at this level. That's a fact, that is undeniable. So that only leaves the question, should they have began anticipating this sort of a pandemic a month before that they did. Keep in mind, the CDC is seen as one of the best if not the top Disease Prevention organizations in the world. The idea that Trump was maybe overriding what the CDC wanted to do to prepare for this pandemic is ludicrous. Everyone was caught off guard, ranging from Trump, the CDC, WHO, Cuomo, Europe you name it. The only ones who were truly prepared for this were the Asians, and that is because of their H1N1 experience. They lived through something somewhat similar and they already had a system in place to better deal with it.

Faster, please. .. This will HAVE TO HAPPEN in order for the phasing in of the workforce to begin. If you read-in-between the lines from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Burks that they always go back to "we need more data and testing" to make any sort of determination. I agree with that, without it you cannot provide the public any sense of assurance.

Hi Alpha, Don't recall you visiting here too often in the past, good to see you here. I don't want this to devolve into a blame game sort of issue but despite Trump's verbal downplaying of it all didn't affect the CDC's and governmental responses. The CDC was in close coordination the whole time with state governors specially NY, California and Washington. I mean if we are going to be fair, then we have to give credit where credit is due. If as you say we are going to listen to the Dr's and what they say then we cannot be selective about it. Dr. Fauci said "Travel ban absolutely made a difference" and he has said this on numerous occasions. Thankfully Biden wasn't in charge at that time or else he wouldn't have done that travel ban and we'd been worse off. And let's be honest about all of this, even though I approve of the way Cuomo has handled this but him and Deblasio were very late to the social distancing. They just shut down the schools 10 days ago and the subway services are still up and the city didn't really go down on lock down until just recently. I don't bring that up to caste blame on them, I bring that up because the situation on the ground dramatically shifted at warp speed. So it's not that it just caught Trump off guard, it caught Cuomo, Deblasio and many others off guard as well. For crying out loud, this was just 9 days ago, where his health aides threaten to quit and teachers threatened to walk out.   And I know there is this thing about - Well, they should have had the testing ready and more tests should have been conducted. Dr. Fauci has made it clear, which unfortunately the media doesn't like to report it that the system that was in place was not setup for this sort of pandemic. That there are so many logistical hurdles that it made it nearly impossible to get the testing out as quickly as they'd like. When Dr. Fauci said that the testing was "failing" it was blasted everywhere. But you have to dig deep to find what he actually meant by that, which he clarified the following day.   The point that I'm making Alpha is that this is not a blame game situation here, this was something that even WHO downplayed early on. WHO was even very late to the game I just want to be clear and that we understand the facts and add some context to all this because I do think that is very important. Keep in mind, I am by no means any sort of Trump Humper, this board can tell you that I was vehemently against him and I to this day do not like the way he communicates things. With that said, I believe in data, facts, context, reason and logic. I don't think that we are that far apart. I think. If you are advocating that we wait until virtually the whole population is safe and we wait until after a vaccine, then we are far apart. But if you saying that we wait until the health experts approve of a phase in strategy well before that vaccine then we are basically on the same page. Also, it's not about just suicides. I'm not sure if you read that study that I linked but the 2008 downturn they believed caused Tens of thousands of deaths possibly over 100k deaths due to stress induced health issues that lower people's immune systems that affect people with heart and cancer afflictions. And this downturn, depending on how long we are shut down has the potential to be more devastating than that one because of the vast amount of people who are losing their jobs. More so than the 2008 downturn. Of course the 2008 downturn was more structural and most economists believe that as long as we can get back to work in not too distant future and strong government assistance that it will be easier to bounce back. In regards to the mortality rates, i saw that you cited 4% as the mortality rate. I understand where you get those numbers but I'm sure as you know that those numbers aren't the actual mortality rate. That's based off the number of proven positive test kits vs deaths. Throughout most of the world they are only wanting to test people who are at most risk and/or showing symptoms. Experts say that 80% of people who contract the disease either show no symptoms or show mild symptoms. Recent studies show that 86% of people who have contracted the VIRUS have gone undetected. . Here in the U.S the mortality rate is at about 1.25%, even though I"m sure that will rise over the next few weeks and then substantially fall after that. Germany the mortality rate is .4%. Many of the Nordic countries it's about the same. You can get more of that data here. There are so many variables to consider, and they are still learning from the disease. They are trying to figure out why Italy is being so hard hit where their neighbors Germany isn't being hit nearly as hard. I have been obsessed with this topic and for another post I can delve into those theories, which I'm sure I'll do. The bottom line for me, which I believe the health experts will approve is that there will have to be a balance that is had and the phasing in process will not have to be on an arbitrarily set timeline. It will have to be dependent on data. The things that I will want to see and hear will be: 1) What is the believed ACTUAL mortality rate here in the U.S (which means that more testing will need to be done with random sampling throughout the country) 2) Within the mortality rates - I'd like to see subsector groupings of mortality rates. Females, Males, Over 60, over 70, over 80. Pre Existing medical conditions, which pre existing medical conditions. Which records in Italy show that 99% of those who have perished had pre existing medical conditions and most of them had 3 different conditions...You can read that here. 3) What does a phasing in of the workforce strategy look like? My guess is that it will be regional with a number of social distancing policies still in place. The federal government can only provide federal guidelines. I mean, without doubt that carries a lot of weight. But at the end of the day, it will truly be up to the governors and businesses following state based guidelines.

I don’t know how long the shut down will be but as I mentioned even before their briefer that I thought it would some sort of phase in and it would be geographical. And it certainly won’t be a one size fits all approach. If I had to guess there will be some states that will begin to ramp up sooner than 2 months and other states beyond that. I think weather will play a factor along with the introduction of some therapeutics that will probably shorten the time period. But as I said earlier, all the federal government really do is provide guidance. It will ultimately be up to to state governments and businesses.

Trump's supporters will ride with him to the end. He needs to convince those outside of his base. Let's be honest, he will never get the hardcore leftists or the center left media establishment types or for that matter the ones who want actual order and decorum and place more value in the establishments than anything else. But there are large swaths of persuadables who are looking for direction. I think he will need to come up with a cogent plan that is data driven with the approval of his Medical team. If he can phase it in this manner, I think he will have the overwhelming support of the people.

This is the sort of vapid talk that I do not miss in PPP. But something for you to chew on how unemployment layoffs disproportionately hurts blacks and latinos But carry on. I really don't know what a gradual phasing in and guidance would look like. My guess is that Trump is using his instincts to pit himself against the media knowing that by the time they actually begin to implement this phase in that the media will be on the wrong side of public sentiment. With that said, public sentiment I'm sure is not ready to get back to work at this time. They have been shell-shocked with social distancing and 24/7 news related to the Virus. It's going to take some coaxing. And unlike Cuomo, who can in detail explain things with empathy and data, Trump will have to somehow get the communication out that there is a coherent plan that has his medical team somehow on board. I'm guessing that there is very little chance that most of the economy will roar right back. I think it will be a regional approach, areas that are showing that they have things in control will be the first to get the go ahead's from their governors. And state by state the governors will have too much pressure to get their workforce to get back to work. I would think that they will advise for the elderly and those with pre existing afflictions to be extra careful and not go out unless necessary. Which is very unfair but I'm guessing that will be on the table. And then the same jazz with the washing of hands, not shaking hands etc etc. But, truth be told, I think they will need to have some sort of data of the mortality rates. Right now the mortality rates are showing here in the U.S as 1.25%. But it's actually a whole lot lower than that. There are studies out there that show that the amount of people who have contracted the VIRUS who have gone undetected is anywhere from 500-1000%. It makes sense because they are predominately testing those who are sickest and showing the most symptoms. It would be good if they could do random mass sampling throughout the country to get a good idea of what the actual contracted infected rate is along with the other data points that they have amassed and get the actual mortality rates. My guess is that the actual mortality rate here in the U.S will probably be around .3%. Most likely for those under 60 without health conditions it will be about as benign as the common flu and for those with respiratory, heart and cancer afflictions that it will be considerably more deadly. But I think getting a true gauge of the mortality rate will play a long way in restoring public confidence to get them back to work. I also don't think they guidance from the government will be ready by Easter. I'm guessing about 4-8 weeks from now.

I am sure that is what Trump's team's suggestions will look like as well. A gradual phasing approach. Trump doesn't do nuance, he talks about things with a sledgehammer and since the country has been told ad nauseum to continue social distancing and then he comes out with his Two by Four that the U.S will be back in Biz soon it sends shock waves. But in reality, he and Cuomo are most likely not that far apart, just that Cuomo's approach comes one from a bit more of empathy and factual data to make his case. But again, they really are not that far apart because if you can get past the bluster which I understand is hard to do, Trump has excellent instincts and decision making and he is someone who listens to his advisers. His job is not to go along with what his advisers say but to listen to them all and as commander in chief to make the best decision possible. I certainly hope he makes a good decision here and doesn't steer the country in the wrong direction. This without doubt will be his most consequential decision. With that said, all Trump can do is provide Federal guidance. Ultimately it will be the governors and businesses that make the decision. Don't get me wrong, federal guidance will be a powerful tool but it is the governors and businesses decision. I haven't even read any of the other threads. I can just imagine, I can generally understand what is going on in the threads and get similar information in the comments section from news outlets on social media. Just a bunch of vapid back-and-forth. Don't get me wrong, we have some very good posters here but lots of it is just ughh.....

There needs to be a national dialogue about this. Unfortunately with the way Trump oafishly says things and the way the media likes to cover the minutia of his words as opposed to the substance of it, it is nearly impossible to have that dialogue. At some point, the country will need to begin phasing back in the workforce. We just need to know what the metrics that they will be looking at, how a phased in workforce would look like and what the risks would be? The economic cost of a protracted downturn is mind bending, but there is a human health component to it as well. The 2008 downturn according to studies caused over 12,000 suicides and Tens of thousands of indirect deaths due to added stress which lowers people's immune systems that makes those with heart and cancer afflictions specially at risk. This DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A BINARY CHOICE! - It does NOT HAVE TO BE ONE OR THE OTHER. There is a responsible way to decide when we can begin this and how it would look like. For those of you that are interested in seeing this Harvard study on the impacts of protracted unemployment to people's health you can read that here.

If you listened to the end-of-year presser from Beane and read in-between-the-lines you can see that Beane is very high on Johnson's prospects. The kid has great measurables and we saw some of that promise in the preseason. As long as he improves mentally which I believe he will then I think there is a better than decent shot of him becoming a regular rotational player who will make some game-impacting plays.

No

I’m ok with rolling with the same line again. Continuity on the offensive line is a typical hallmark for good offensive lines. Ford was a rookie and most rookies struggle at the tackle position. I think they will improve upon last year

Trust the board. The Bills have that luxury. Feels nice to have a competent Front Office.

I guess they lost their "all-in" bet.

Is the Cold Front report credible?

I think the key word there is "up to" which could mean less guaranteed with performance based escalators

Yeah, $9M would be too high. But I don't think $5m is his market value either. I'm guessing he is more around the $7m a year range with performance bonuses that could get him up to $9m.

I wouldn't be upset if they did this but I just don't think it's necessary. With that said, this would be considered an "all-in" move at this juncture. I just hope it wouldn't be for above $9M a year.

This is what I've been saying. He finished the year strong and showed up when it counted for the Bills. This idea that the Bills will just drop him all willy nilly I think is premature. Unless the Bills have a better option I just don't see it. I could be wrong but having Murphy as a solid rotational player makes sense. The Bills are not in a salary cap crunch and there is absolutely very little reason to drop him unless you have someone else better to replace him with. Maybe they draft a DE and he becomes expendable or maybe they find someone else in FA. But as of right now, as the team stands I don't see that as happening.