Utah John

I've been suggesting that the salary cap for all teams should be adjusted upward to compensate for state income taxes, where they apply. This would allow all the teams the same actual dollars available to pay players. Players and agents know that playing in a state with, say, a 5% state income tax, means their paycheck is 5% lower right off the bat than they could get in a no-tax state. Why should a sports team in a state with income taxes be at a disadvantage? The whole idea of parity is that all the teams have the same resources to compete, and that's not the case now. If this was sone as I suggested, the total amount of the salary cap would be greater than it is now. And the poor miserly NFL (/s) and the actually poor NHL would have to come up with more money overall. So the solution is to figure out what the total would be with the sales tax plus-up, then proportionally reduce the amount going to across the board so the total remains the same.

Allen played great in that game, but the Bills plus the weather beat the Patriots. When Hyde picked off that pass, and Allen's throwaway toward Knox turned into a TD pass, and the temperature was some absurdly low number, the Pats lost heart. They knew they were beat by the end of the first quarter, and the players on the field spend the rest of the game looking longingly at the parkas and heaters on the sidelines. This isn't to take anything away from Allen. The Bills all knew they could do whatever they wanted and so they proceeded to do just that. Allen was the death rider on the lead horse, but there was a whole herd right behind him. Whoever said the Bills broke the Pats that day had it right. The Pats lost their mojo completely and have never recovered.

It's not just the closing speed. It's that Hyde took the exactly perfect angle to anticipate where the pass would go.

I'll go further and say the Jets have been built specifically to slow down Allen. That's a very logical thing to do. The biggest gamble they've made is pinning their offense's hopes on Rodgers. Even if he's fully recovered from his Achilles injury he's still up against aging. His play was deteriorating in his last couple of years in Green Bay, and of course we never got a chance to see how he'll do in New Jersey. I'm thinking he'll try to keep doing what he used to do, and it won't work. He could turn out to be the third best QB in the AFCE, in other words the second-worst.

Just watching the game now, the announcers only gave you a small taste of what was going on. A guy pissing to put out a fire? That's gotta be some kind of record for a non-soccer sporting event.

Thanks. That makes sense. I hope he does well and plays for a few more years.

Well with our great pitching no one's hitting to left field against us.

I'm trying to find out what happened with Nyheim Hines after he had that terrible jet ski accident. All I can find out about Hines is that the Bills released him this spring and he signed soon after that with the Browns. What do the Browns know that the Bills don't? Is Hines ready to play football again, and if so why didn't the Bills keep him? The Bills didn't use Hines much in 2022 except to return kickoffs, and he did very well at that, but with the new kickoff rules maybe a KO returner is just not a high priority. As for being a running back, maybe the Bills didn't keep him because they felt (like most teams) that running backs are pretty disposable and they didn't want to try to squeeze his veteran's contract under the salary cap. So maybe this all just comes down to money, and Hines wasn't worth the difference in salary he represented. Does anyone have any other news on him? He seems like a great guy and it's just a shame that he's having to resurrect his career this way.

Looking ahead, which is where Beane spends half his time looking, Shakir will be the slot receiver for a decade. Coleman will be WR2. MVS and the others are rentals/bandaids. The Bills are in salary cap purgatory this year and did well to patch holes as well as they did. WR1 will come next year when the Bills draft a little higher (not too high, I hope) and have more cash to spend.

OK then, let's hope that's right. That's not the story we heard earlier, but I hope what you said is correct, also that the Bills' offense is a good fit for his skills.

It can definitely have an impact. Some O linemen are better at different schemes. As I said I hope McGovern excels here with the scheme the Bills use.

McGovern thinks center is his natural position but the Cowboys tried him there and he was terrible. All the hoopla about him taking that job and holding it sounds great and I hope it's all accurate because that would solidify the line, but I would not be surprised if the rookie with too many names takes the center job by early November, and McGovern slides back to LG.

"VPN is basically a service where you are routed through a server to affect you geocache for area blocked streaming" OK, so most of those words are in English dictionaries, but strung together like that they make a somewhat foreign language. Is there a link to a page with instructions for us CSL people (Computers as a Second Language)?

The Bills will certainly miss Morse. They will of course miss Floyd. Those are two players you neglected to mention. They will also miss the experience of Poyer and Hyde, even if they were both a little too slow to be all the team needs. You sound like a very hopeful and optimistic fan, and I hope you're right, but I expect the team to remain good but to take a step back this year. It's now 2025 when I think all the pieces will fall into place.

Not gonna happen. The Bills will be good this year but not quite as good as they've been the past few years. Would Bosa make the 2024 Bills better? Sure. Would Bosa put the 2024 Bills into the Super Bowl? Nope. Beane is attempting to get through the end of the core group that nearly got the Bills to the Super Bowl (13 seconds away) without the team falling apart, and positioning it to improve substantially in 2025. Tying up huge money in an aging player is what burned Beane a couple of years ago, and he's not making the same mistake again.

Who cares? Two consenting adults.

We all think he SHOULD be but when voters consider him five years after his retirement they'll see no Lombardis (boy I hope I'm wrong about that, but that's how it is now), no All-Pros, no Pro Bowls, no MVPs. His stats will be very good but by then who knows how the league will have evolved, and maybe there will be a dozen QBs who have better stats. People remember Cam Newton (the closes comparison QB I can think of) but not nearly as impressively as people regarded Newton while he was playing. Hope for the best but prepare for disappointment.

I could do without knowing his favorite Japanese snack choices. Too much time was spent on all that. As for the workouts, it's interesting that he got together with Moulds, who would be in the HOF if he'd had a decent QB throwing to him. I always thought Moulds was a dedicated, talented professional, and it's fine that Shakir is being guided by him. And anyone who thinks they could step on a football field and do what Shakir does, should ask if they could match those workouts for agility, speed, strength, quickness, and balance. Josh Allen started out with the Bills with terrible mechanics, and he spent offseason time for at least two summers working with Jordan Palmer, and the results were of course incredible. I don't think Shakir was deficient when he got to the Bills, but if he can improve even a fraction of the amount that Allen did, he's going to be great.

My biggest complaints at Sunday Ticket are first that so many games are being played on days other than Sunday so they're not included, and that means contracts with other streamers -- and second that YouTube sucks compared to DirecTV's system. The NFL cash-grabbers are breaking the golden goose they've built for themselves, just out of greed.

Running backs are like the IT guys at most businesses. Good ones are a dime a dozen, while really special ones get paid. They have a wide range of duties and they're expected to be good at all of them. And most IT guys move to another job in a few years (although they leave because they developed skills, while RBs leave because they're used up).

OK, April and not March, you're right. It's still chilly and gray in Buffalo, when every where else has flowers and sun and spring, and Buffalo is still 40 degrees. It's right next to an ice cube the size of Ohio so it's not that surprising, but April in Buffalo (when I lived there) was always the most frustrating month.

There's a theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but come on, don't any of us know what Buffalo looks like in March? If the draft were held in June, when Buffalo's weather and appearance are glorious, that would be great. But do you really want hundreds of thousands of people to come to Buffalo and see piles of dirty snow, cloudy skies, mud where there will soon be vegetation, and cold rain or snow? I know that Detroit just did this, and that Detroit's weather is similar to Buffalo's. So how many of those people who visited Detroit asked themself if they'd ever want to go there again, let alone live there. Detroit is very nice in the summer but that's not what those people saw.

The Bills are all-in on going against the grain of what other teams are doing on offense. Most teams are focusing on QB/WR pairs and paying a fortune for them, and so most defenses are focused on stopping the pass. The Bills are building a huge set of TEs and WRs, and look to me like a team that's going to balance passing and running, trying to wear out smaller defenses. For this purpose, the Bills are not putting a huge pile of cash in anyone's pocket except Josh Allen's, and that makes perfect sense to me. Beane had a personal rule of not buying expensive FAs, instead building through the draft and smart trades. He broke that rule with the Von Miller signing, which was a direct response to the 13 second game's failure to get to Mahomes. That looked good until Miller got hurt (the Bills beat the Chiefs in the regular season when Miller pressured Mahomes and he threw an INT to Taron Johnson) but it's since blown up in their faces. Now it's back to Beane following his own rule. He's building a roster with a clear plan in mind, not the same plan as other teams are following, and that's probably going to work out well.

I'm sorry but I view this as a distraction from the task at hand. Steveson is clearly a powerful man with good awareness of leverage and positioning, but there are a thousand things to know about playing any position in the NFL, and he doesn't know any of them. Maybe this is just a squirrel for reporters to chase, instead of asking endless repetitive questions about experience at WR or whether McDermott or Babich will call defensive plays.

I have no idea what that really means. He's been on three different teams -- did none of them play the way he thought they should? And if not, what did he try to do about it?