BADOLBILZ

Good shout out for those that don't follow it. Yeah HBO has an in-season hard knocks for the NFC East this year. Last year we got to enjoy the Hard Knocks around the win over the Ravens in the divisional round because they were doing the AFC North. Hopefully next year we get to see an in-season AFC East Hard Knocks. The camp version was way too easy for the Bills to skate thru without any real insight into the day-to-day when the bullets are actually flying.

What was remarkable to me was that Jackson had been healthy in 2023 and 2024 after being injured and performing relatively poorly in 2021 and 2022. I figured at some point over those 2 years he'd just get another ankle sprain and get knocked out again. But he avoided it again until this year again. For some reason the lack of durability wasn't part of his narrative but it will be going forward.

1998 wasn't just some fluky outlier dave. He was just THAT f*cking great. And his actual ypr was 21.2 because he put up 240 on 9 receptions in the playoff game. The Pendry offense was the same in 1999 but Moulds just couldn't run away from defenders like he did before and losing 400 yards on the same amount of targets mattered. It accounted for most of Flutie's decline in yards per attempt. And it wasn't because teams were forcing Flutie to throw short......quite the opposite.......they were trying to force him to throw from the pocket. Or did you forget that too? It's not like we don't have the tape. I literally have all of those games on tape and watched them probably 8-10x apiece back in that day and that, in addition to being at every home game and watching practices etc.. are how I formulated so many dead-on right takes about those Bills. What we don't have are the metrics they do now........but that's kind of what I was doing. I just find it hilarious how stat driven you are but you refuse to believe that an 8 year decline in ypc reflects a decline in explosiveness. How can you be so obtuse? 😂 As for Randy Moss having "only" 15.2 ypc at age 30 with the all-time great game-manager Tom Brady and having a higher ypc with bombers like Daunte Culpepper and Randall Cunningham.......I mean, how can you even suggest that's a good comparison? Moulds went from the limited arm of Flutie to huge armed passers in Johnson and Bledsoe and his ypc declined considerably! Most of what he lost was YAC on shorter throws from Flutie. By 2003 he wasn't running away from anyone on a short pass. He famously ran OVER Philip Buchanan and stepped on his neck in the early 2000's......but the speed and quickness were GREATLY diminished.

It's not a theory. I was there at camp practices in 1999 when he showed up with enormous new muscle development in his legs. TBD existed then. It was a topic on WGR and here on TSW. Why does a WR want to get heavy legged? He was 26 years old. Literally his physical prime.

EVERYBODY in the AFC playoffs is a problem on paper for this Bills team. It's a message board so it's fine to have these weekly (insert team is a problem) threads as the casual fans start paying attention to the rest of the league..........but this Bills team is VERY flawed. They may be favored but shouldn't be favored in any road playoff game. They don't play well on the road, they have no boundary WR's, their DT's are a very poor unit and their LB corps teeters on the play of friggin' cast-off Shaq Thompson. The other teams aren't trapped in the playoffs with the Bills anymore, the Bills are trapped in there with them. But they have a Josh Allen puncher's chance to win it all so I for one am not worrying about the opposition.

Shakir obviously just went from a seldom targeted 3rd WR option that could take advantage of defense's doubling Diggs and putting WR1 on Davis in 2023.........to a highly targeted 1st WR option in an offense where the defense has to pay zero attention to the boundary by this season. Hence his drop in ypc. Moulds 1998 20 ypc season he had 1368 yards and the next year with the same amount of targets he had 998. He simply lost a big step in 1999 due to the added muscle. Plays that he ran away from defenders on in 1998 he was getting caught from behind on in 1999. And after that the decline was more gradual but undeniable.

It's only a straw man if you assume people know that Purdy is what I pointed out he is. I don't think that's the case. I think the "perception" of Brock Purdy by many(based on his first 2 seasons on a LOADED SF team) is that he's this great, efficient, game manager QB. He's really not. You and I may know that but this board is loaded with NFL casuals who don't. Very much agree that Mack Jones is a guy who will have his moments and have a long career as an on-again off-again starter and Shedeur is likely to have a similar path. But Mack Jones went from people in NE thinking he was a worthy successor to Tom Brady to some pretty damn hilarious moments. You gotta' admit.

The biggest issue is that you don't have any perspective if you think that a guy who as a rookie playing 50% of snaps already lead the NFL in amount of run stops and puts up 7-8 sacks per year on an otherwise middling defensive line is a rotational player.

Karlaftis is the only comparable(but still lesser) run defender on that list and his career sack production has been aided greatly by the attention to and pressure provided by superstar Chris Jones. If Rousseau had the talent around him like that those 8 sack seasons would look like 10-12. He just didn't land in the situation Karlaftis did. Just look at the brief period when Oliver and Hoecht were back this season. Rousseau had a sack and a half those two weeks.

1998 was the outlier because that's the only season when he was GREAT. Like deserving of being mentioned with an all-time great like prime Randy Moss level great. It was incredible to watch in 1998 and tough to watch his fall-off thereafter. He went from that level to being a lesser version of Joe Horn in the early 2000's. When I think of GREAT Bills players who were limited by their circumstance I think of Bruce Smith playing RDE in a 3-4 his entire Buffalo career. It drastically tamped down his sack stats.....and still he's the all-time leader. By contrast Reggie White got to play LDE and in a 4-3 his entire career. Far better situation to rush the passer. White was great too but he got to face RT's while Smith was tasked with an Anthony Munoz, Richmond Webb, Tony Boselli and later Orlando Pace and Walter Jones(both of whom he beat like a drum late in his career in a 4-3). He'd probably have had 50 more career sacks in a 4-3 and probably more if he got to face RT's. Moulds is not a sympathetic character. He made no effort his rookie year when the Bills had a SB contending team and when he finally stopped being in the news for crime on a regular basis he gave us a brief season of the greatness that could have been and then took it away with his own bad decision making.

Sure but original Brock Purdy has 32 TD's and 19 INT's over the past 2 seasons combined. In SF that may work........Shanahan and McVay are at the top of the game right now........but that level of quarterbacking isn't going to get you far most anywhere else. Hence, point.

Mack Jones wasn't bad either. Until there was some tape on him and people felt they had to take him seriously. Then the comedy ensued. All that matters is whether a QB is the solution for a franchise. We may not know that yet but he certainly doesn't have the physical tools to presume much at this point.

EIGHT STRAIGHT SEASONS his yards per catch declined. That's not just a f*cking assertion. 😂 You can't get anymore statistical proof than that. I get that it hurts some of y'all feelings to hear that Moulds wasn't as great as you fantasized he was.......but it's just a fact that his explosiveness declined and it's not like he turned into some technician in the meantime. The Bills fed him relentlessly until the wheels fell off........this is not a player who suffered a bit for lack of opportunity. Suggesting otherwise is what "doesn't hold up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny". The period when Moulds played was not loaded with great QB's. There were a lot less players like Allen, Mahomes, Burrow or Lamar who could will their teams to SB's. By comparison, what Moulds had wasn't half as bad as people make it out to be. Guys like Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson, Kerry Collins and Jake Delhomme took teams to SB's in Moulds career. The Vikings had a string where they went to the playoffs for 8 times in 9 years with 7 different starting QB's. Truly ELITE QB's were much more rare. Not having one was anything but a bad break.......it was THE NORM for top WR's.

Yeah you were ignorant of the FACTS that constitute my argument. Instead you think your fact-free "feels" argument outweighs the proof/facts. I'm sorry if you think your fact-free opinion entitles you to spew snark and not get a valid criticism in return......but it doesn't. Eric Moulds was a heavily targeted WR for his entire Bills stay. There is no guarantee that would be the case with the cerebral QB's who dominated the day instead of just having to play with the elite escapability of Flutie or the elite passing arms of Johnson and Bledsoe. Moulds was not saddled with guys who couldn't get him the ball. That's a fact. Some jackass even suggested that Alex Van Pelt was holding him back when that was the period of time when Moulds was being an idiot on and off the field. His first 2 seasons he was a worthless burden on the franchise and was in danger of being cut going into camp in 1998. If you watched him doing dumbass *****(like at the end of the Chiefs game in 1997) and looking like he'd never played the WR position in those early years you'd know. But so many of Moulds biggest defenders on here were little kids at the time and didn't know he was too busy choking out women and dodging child support to get his act together in 1996 and 1997. And when he finally did in 1998, he promptly let his obsession with body building undermine that huge progress by 1999. 1998 Moulds was literally on-par with prime Randy Moss as the most explosive playmaking WR in football.

If he was still the same player why did his yards per catch drop ever season for EIGHT YEARS? Seriously, there is no conversation until you explain why that FACT happened if it wasn't due to becoming a less explosive WR than he was in 1998. You refuse to address that proof because it's overwhelming evidence of decline. His production was elite in 2002 though. But so was Peerless Price's production! Because Drew Bledsoe, while a very flawed decision maker, was a GREAT passer of the football and would hurl the ball to them whether they were covered or not. In 2003 Eric Moulds had 780 yards in 13 games. Not elite. Your obsession what "what could have been" for him that season is only matched by the lack of perspective. The week prior to that groin injury that sidelined him for a couple games he had a woeful stat line in Miami of 2 catches on 7 targets for 30 yards and Bledsoe was 10-25 for 98 yards and two interceptions. The 2003 Bills offense, sans Peerless Price and with a new version of Josh Reed who couldn't catch the ball, was figured out and destined for failure. The truth was, if you can recall, that the dynamic Gilbride offense had begun to drop off in the second half of 2002 despite being largely healthy. They had 2 hot "fools gold" games to start 2003 and everyone thought "who needs Peerless Price?". They escaped with a win in the Bengals game where he hurt his groin but Bledsoe struggled while forcing the ball to Moulds 15 times. The high flying offense was dead.