Utah John

It's a trap game if the Bills are looking ahead to their NEXT game, against the Jets, and failing to prepare adequately for this week's game. If I'm the Vikings, I'm looking at this week's game as a chance to get the season back on its rails by beating an inconsistent opponent at their house. The Bills are probably figuring they're going to reel off six straight wins (MN, NJJ, KC after our bye, Miami, NJJ again, and Cleveland) which they have the talent to do, but how many times have we seen this movie before? They could be 9-3 after all that, but more likely they'll be 5-7, and Marrone (or at least Hackett) will be replaced.

Orton is pretty good, which is hugely better than EJ. At the rate EJ was self-destructing, he would've turned into a pile of smoking ash after one more bonehead play. He needs to be sitting and watching, like the plan was all along, to be ready to take over in a year or two. Orton is better than merely competent. He makes a lot of difficult throws requiring precise touch and accuracy, and not that many poor ones. He's a good ball handler, just as you'd expect with a veteran. Before the season we all figured the Bills just needed neutral play from the QB, not having net damage done, with the offense's skill positions and the D-line giving us the edge. Turns out the O-line is really bad, bad enough to stop our running attack but interestingly not bad enough to stop Orton. Hmmmm, maybe this is something else he deserves credit for. So looking back at the preseason equation, it turned out EJ was a large negative, and that clearly cost the Houston game. But we don't just have neutral play from Orton, we're getting positive net results. Over 300 yards against Detroit, and 299 against the Pats. Pretty darned good.

Hogan hasn't bounced around. The Bills picked him up based on his athleticism. He played lacrosse at Penn State for his fulltime college career, then played one year of football at Monmouth. Got some experience but realistically has always been a project. But, so far he's turning out really well. Excellent ST work, athletic enough to get open. As he gains experience running routes and recognizing defenses, he's all upside. He also is not a complainer, whiner, etc. He looks like he could develop into Steve Tasker v2.

I think Williams is just frustrated with the role he's got. He was still growing up in Buffalo when the Pats started beating the Bills all the time, and I think he wanted to play in this game even more than others. What's going on now is adjustments following the injury to Easley, which means Hogan is needed on STs. So Hogan is the guy after Watkins, Woods, and Goodwin. If Williams was great on STs he'd probably be playing.. Instead of a fifth WR the Bills put in three TE sets, which makes sense considering the rotten play from their guards. I don't think this is meant as a slap at Williams at least not very much.

Many of us will remember a Bills-Pats game when Bledsoe was still their QB. Close game, the Bills had the Pats stopped and were in position to win, the Pats complete a pass that's far from a first down, and one of the Bills players reports hearing one ref tell another one, "just give it to them." First down, Pats. Pats win. What's the relationship? That was Walt Coleman's crew too. Ralph was so mad about this he tried to get the league to stop assigning Coleman to Bills games. Welcome to the big boy league, Mr Pegula. Deposit funds here, and bend over there.

Spikes isn't a cover guy. He's there to smash RBs, and that's really important against the Pats, to take their power run game away and make them one-dimensional. Gronk is the only receiver they have with really special capabilities. Stuff the run, double Gronk, and make Brady uncomfortable with our front four.

Sometimes a band-aide is all you need. The team was built this year to expect only weak play from the QB. Anything beyond that is for this year a bonus. From the looks of Orton, he's a competent, middle of the pack capability, which is far beyond what EJ was doing. Whether Orton is better or worse than Fitz, we'll have to wait and see. At least for now, he's a lot cheaper than Fitz.

Then we did what we're supposed to, win at home. Need to finish 6-2 at home, or better, and 4-4 on the road. The path to 10 wins either includes winning on Sunday or upsetting Green Bay in December. Six home games left, NE - MN - KC - NJJ - CL - GB and all are winnable though NE and GB are tough. We have 5 road games left, NJJ - MI - DE - OAK - NE, and should win NJJ and OAK, getting to 4-4 on the road. So if the Bills lose to both NE and GB at home, they need to pick up one more road win, probably Miami, which is realistic but always tough. EJ costing the Houston game will really bite if we drop another winnable game and settle for 9 wins. Or if it turns out 10 wins doesn't get us in. For all the one game at a time guys, sure I get it, but it's important to understand what's at stake this week.

This is about the league enforcing expectations about what a team is supposed to get from its community. If Buffalo gets away without a new stadium every 30 years, and comfy suites for the visitors, other teams and cities won't feel like they have to provide them either. $1.4B provides a lot of grace period, and I don't get the feeling the Pegulas are doing this to make money. They have more than they know what to do with and want to help the community. God bless 'em. A lot of the other owners are out to make a buck.

If your glass is half full of Kool-Aid, you don't have a problem. Go Bills!

Whatever. He's a good receiver and I'm glad the Bills didn't have to cover him and Johnson at the same time. He can say what he wants. I didn't really like the Bills carrying Schwartz either.

My only complaint about Fox announcers is that they don't know that much about AFC teams. The announcers for the Bears game made mistake after mistake. My guess is the announcers this week will know the Pats pretty well and won't know squat about the Bills. Ah, but so what, it's still football and the Bills are playing for first place in October. Life is good.

My problem wasn't with Ralph Wilson, it was with the organization he set up to run the Bills. The worst part was the penny pinchers who prevented the Bills from spending what was available under the cap to build depth in the roster. Jeff Littman, glad to see you leaving. Also bad was Ralph's poor personnel hiring practices and then his demolition of the effective management team he had that built the SB teams. For many years in the 60s and 70s, the Bills front offices were terrible. Lousy drafting, bad coaches. We got lucky with Polian, Butler, and Smith. And then Ralph drove them all away, leading to another decade plus of lousy teams. Ralph was a generous man who cared about his players. There were stories about how he helped injured players get on with their lives after leaving the game. He was just not an effective owner when it came to building a strong competitive team and maintaining that level.

The Bills lose to the Bears and Lions without Watkins. 1-4 would feel a lot worse than 3-2. Granted without Watkins our 1st rounder would probably be another 6-10 pick. As it is the 1st rounder the Browns will get will probably be no better than 20th.

In a game with two strong defenses, I think it's better to kick off to start the game. If the other team can't move the ball, it's stuck with poor field position and you get good field position as a result. Which is what happened to the Bills, you might have noticed. It took most of the first quarter before the Bills could get anything going. I was really surprised when I found out the Bills won the toss and elected to receive. It could have been a difference maker for the game. Fortunately the defense played great and the offense got good enough.

CJ is a great back ONLY when his wheels are balanced and he's got performance tires. Fred Jackson finds ways to excel regardless of his bumps and bruises, but he's just a better footballer than CJ. Gailey found ways to get CJ in the clear and that worked well. The O line now, especially the interior O line that needs to pull in front of sweeps or screens, is really bad this year. For this reason I think Hackett might actually be doing pretty well, designing game plans that avoid disasters from our weak guard play, while keeping the defense honest by rushing a lot. Against a great defense like Detroit, there wasn't any room. Against weaker, slower defenses, there could be a lot of room around the corner for CH. Of course CJ is aging. I don't know if CJ might have a lost half a step since Gailey departed, but he doesn't look quite as shifty. Still really fast of course. He ran the kickoff back 102 yards in 11 seconds, while making a cut near the start and then slowing down at the end, wearing full pads and a helmet. That'll do. But when he has to make people miss he loses a lot of his speed, more reduction than I see with other backs or what I remember his first year or two. Generally RBs who rely on speed and quickness fall off the cliff younger and quicker than powerful, tough, thinking RBs like FJ. Look how quickly Chris Johnson became so ordinary.

The run defense is doing very well, but consider most opponents had weak O lines and was using backup RBs, so maybe it's not time to send Schwartz's sainthood application in to the Vatican just yet. Let's at least wait till Thanksgiving. The Bills actually have the #1 rushing defense measured in YPG allowed. 71.0. Seattle is #2 at 72.3. Sounds great (and it is great) but that often means teams opt to pass more. I'll feel better when Gilmore and McKelvin cover better, and both Williams safeties tackle better. Who's gonna cover Gronk? Does anyone know if Kyle Williams will be back to face the Pats? The Pats have gashed the Bills before and probably will figure they can do it again. It would help a lot to get KW back.

The Bills played against a great defense today, with a weak O line. The interior of our O line couldn't do anything against the Lions. The inside running game was really tough, and none of the Bills backs could get wide against the fast LBs and DBs. So Orton stood in and made more good throws in one game than EJ has in four games. He hit Goodwin on a deep pass where he dropped it in, and he hit Sammy (hitting defined loosely, which is OK in Sammy's case) with tight, direct spirals. Against the Bears, EJ put up ducks twice which our WRs skied to pull down. That could have gotten two receivers killed, but fortunately didn't because the guys were so wide open they had time to leap and get back down. But neither chance was necessary, if EJ could just throw an accurate pass beyond 15 yards.

Early in the game, the Bills lined up to punt, and the Lions had 10 men rushing the punter and only the return man back deep. The Bills' gunner was wide left, all alone. How hard would it be for the punter to hit the gunner on a 15 yard crossing route? No one to cover the guy, no one to break up an easy, soft pass. And only one player, the punt returner, to beat. I don't think I've ever seen 10 men rush on a punt, and might never again, but it would be smart to have a fake punt check ready to go at all times.

I think he's a potential fill-in for Easley on STs until Easley recovers. He might even play Sunday if the Bills think he's in shape.

I have to disagree with those who say that benching EJ means his career with the Bills is over. This just gets him back to where he should have been all along, on the bench watching an experienced QB runs things. After a certain point of proficiency, a person learns best by doing along with coaching. Prior to that point however a person learns to fail, and that's all EJ was going to do by playing, keep failing. He doesn't get it. But that's OK, a lot of 1st-3rd year QBs don't get it, and then they figure out what's going on and become good professional QBs. This detour is actually the straightest path to EJ being successful in the long run.

When Watkins declined to expose his body to a brutal hit to reach for an off-target EJ pass for minimal gain, people gave him grief. Woods went ahead with the catch this time, got clobbered, and actually hurt the Bills because the completion kept the clock running. These guys all want to be successful. They think, correctly, it's their job to run the correct route, get separation, and catch the ball. But time and again, no matter how well they do their job, the ball isn't where it needs to be. This isn't college, where a superior athlete WR can dominate college-level DBs and where a QB has a much wider space-time volume to hit. This is the NFL where most times the ball has to travel through a very narrow range vertically to get over LBs and then down, and get to a nearly exact spot, at nearly the exact right time. It's amazing really to see a professional QB achieve that level of accuracy, and then to be so good that people assume he'll do it right over and over. Yet, that's the job, fella, and if you can't do it your WRs are entitled to get frustrated. Not that they should act out and embarrass their QB publicly, but they do need to get the point across.

It's really hard to win year after year the way the Patriots have done. The secondary key is Brady, but the real key is Belichick. He might be a dour bore, and may have cheated from time to time, but he's also an amazing coach who's held that team together year after year by taking the players available and figuring out how to win with them. But parity being what it is, sooner or later the late draft picks and regression to the mean are going to pull down the talent level to the point where even the hoody can't turn what he's got into gold. I thought the time to overtake the Pats was last year, when they had no WRs except rookies and tricksters, but they still won, helped in large measure by poor competition in their division. This year they still have no real threats and WR, the O line is old and crumbling, the aging defense is getting gashed, and Brady might be thinking about how nice it would be to travel with Giselle. If the Bills can get competent QB play, the time for an empire change could be at hand.

It's less important how Orton did against Detroit, than what Schwartz can dial up against his old team.

Let's see if Orton can play pretty well for this year and maybe even next year, while EJ figures things out and gets past the failure label people want to stick on him. THEN let's see what EJ can do. There's no reason not to draft QBs in 2015 and 2016 -- some GMs say you should draft a QB every year -- rather than hoping EJ is eventually ready to go; but EJ could be ready to go in a year or so, and he has some of the attributes you want in a starting QB. Like I said earlier, this just takes EJ back to where he should have been all through 2013 and this year too, sitting behind a veteran QB and learning the game.