BADOLBILZ

No and yes. ALL of the SB teams were better than this team. They were absolutely loaded. And the 1999 team was more talented too, relative to the style of football played then, than this one. That one had a wide open path to winning a SB that year......without question the best Bills defense post merger..........and they screwed the pooch not getting home field and got HR throwbacked on the road( a lot like the 2021 Bills, really). Post free agency a lot of things have happened that have gradually distributed talent around the league MUCH more evenly. It took a while because rookie deals used to be longer(1st rounders got 7 year deals in the 90's) and there were more ways to restrict movement with tags and teams didn't know how to manage the salary cap and were afraid to use guarantees etc.. And then the rules changes in 2010 to protect QB's and bolster the passing game have gradually changed the league from being dominated by a handful of elite QB's to one where A LOT of teams have franchise QB's capable of winning a SB. Which is how the competition is now better than it's ever been........at least in the AFC.

Oh man, you sure you aren't a christian? You really need to stick to football takes.

Well either way really.........Vegas ranks the Chargers as the #3 team in the AFC behind Buffalo and KC so they like their odds regardless of whether they've proven anything or not. But if what "nobody thought" made any difference then the preseason favorites wouldn't mean much. It's generally proven to be about a 15% chance that the preseason SB favorite cashes that ticket since the last repeat champion. The Bills are the consensus "favorite" this year but in some places they are given as little as a 7% chance. For comparison sake........the Chiefs were given a 19% chance at the same gaming company last year. One of the late 2010's NE teams was a heavy favorite........given a 28% chance in preseason..........so if what people think is your barometer then I wouldn't get too carried away with the Bills favorite status. The competition is seen as fierce.

You mean 2018 is the best draft of your fandom. Allen alone is more valuable than the entire 2017 draft........and he and Wyatt Teller are both All Pro's from that Bills class. Edmunds, Phillips, Taron Johnson all productive players and Neal is in his 5th year with team as well. 2017 yielded 3 very good players though. Those two drafts are proof positive that having a lot of needs makes it easier to draft well...........because inevitably most teams will reach around a better player to fill a need.......Beane is no exception. 1985 is probably the best of my Bills fandom.........Bruce and Andre both HOF'ers. Derrick Burroughs was an outstanding young player who they lost too soon. Chris Burkett was a really good WR for a few years and of course Frank Reich was a really good backup QB.

The Bengals won 4 games in 2020 and won the AFC in 2021. So no, a team doesn't have to show they can make the playoffs before they make a SB run.

Of all of the Buffalo sports franchises the Braves probably had the most personnel luck. To have an All Star like Randy Smith and HOF'ers McAdoo, Dantley and even Moses Malone all pass thru the organization early in their careers.........oh what coulda' been. And after they became the Clippers they couldn't so anything right with regard to personnel. Maybe the best thing about the Braves leaving is we didn't have to live thru Benoit Benjamin playing in Buffalo. He was the Leodis McKelvin of NBA big men.

MLB best 28-9 record after a third straight W in Baltimore, 3-2 behind Cole and Holmes, while resting both LeMahieu and Stanton. Dow note though, looks like Luis Gil is headed for Tommy John surgery so he probably won't be back in the mix until 2024 now. But sounds like Domingo German might be back after the all-star break, maybe sooner.

Good. They have a road game at Indy on November 20 that I'd like to see them win. Gotta' water down the records in that AFC south division so we don't end up with TN or Indy somehow stealing home field.

Yeah you're right I think. I'm hoping they feel that they can part ways. Really want to see another boundary WR brought in.

The 11 games played in the 12 months going back to that Baltimore playoff game where the Ravens couldn't even get shotgun and long snaps off without the wind altering the trajectory have been the worst stretch of wind, rain and cold I can remember. It's often lost on TV, but the weather was just miserable. Opening day against Pittsburgh was somehow already November quality swirling wind conditions on the field and that was a harbinger of what was to come. Allen's passing performance in that Monday night game against the Patriots was one of the most impressive performances I've ever seen. The opposing QB was having a really good year and wasn't even allowed to throw.

I don't think cutting Matakevich will save anything. I believe his agent re-structured it to make it so. He has a $750K dead cap hit on a $1.65M base salary. If it saves anything it would be the difference between $915K and the non-vet minimum..........and normally vet min is about $1M but only counts around $600K against the cap. Not sure how it works on salaries that low that are so little above the minimum.

Yeah it's the weather, IMO. Most of the poor weather conditions that the Bills face are at home. 2020 was milder than most seasons and 2021 was the worst weather season the Bills have had to deal with since at least 1997. But this has been going on forever..........not uncommon to see bad passing offense at Highmark and then for the Bills to go on the road to Miami or somewhere else without wind and look like a totally different team. It's also of note though, IMO, that the field at Highmark is crowned noticeably more than other fields I've been to. When you sit at field level it's very noticeable and I've always felt it's made accuracy on sideline throws a bit more difficult because the QB is basically throwing downhill outside the numbers rather than on a flat plane.

Last season the only thing I didn't like about the Bills chances was the prevailing attitude that the season was all about avenging the loss to the Chiefs. It permeated from the front office.......who chose to run it back........down to the fans.......who felt the season was just an annoying formality on their way back to the AFCCG. And it showed with the players..........they had problems with focusing on opponents.........got pumped up to play KC, which carried over to the game in TN.........and then from there until halftime of the Tampa game they seemed often disinterested. Fortunately they had as many weaklings on their schedule as they did.......teams whose first priority was evaluating their own roster, trying to win was a secondary consideration. It took a string of terrible losses and then Tom Brady kicking sand in their faces again for two quarters for them to realize that they needed to start playing up to the hype or miss the playoffs entirely. It was only fitting that the opportunities that they wasted lead to them getting beaten........yet again.......in KC. Hopefully the players (and fans for that matter) learned something from wasting what was probably their clearest path to a SB title since the early 90's. I expect this season that this team will be focused from day one and that the goal will be home field advantage and that attitude will not fluctuate based on how KC is playing(which appeared to be the case at times last season).

You use the word anomaly as if there is something unusual about unexpected results in the NFL. Every game the 2021 Bills lost on their way to 7-6 thru 13 games they had been favored to win. The unexpected is normal in the NFL. If you don't want to be disagreed with then don't make utterly illogical statements.

Yeah, that's the thing.........there were a lot of good players from that era that get overlooked that had better careers than Freddie. Ben Williams is another DL who had a better prime than Freddie. As an aside........McDole and my grandfather were business partners during his Redskins years. I had one of those 1970's foam trucker hats with an iron-on patch with some terrible logo with a football on it that they had made up.

Claiming that a company's apparent goal is to be the best at what they do.............as if that is a possible indication that they are unscrupulous.........is grasping for straws. And that is how you were attempting to frame it. Because you don't think the grades they give are "fair". But it might ease yours and the other PFF "despiser's" minds if you remembered that all individual player stats are flawed in team sports. Not sure how this got lost on some of you..........but every play in a football game has an immense amount of potential outcomes depending on how each of the 22 players on the field does their job. But........in general........if a QB throws 35 TD passes he played well.........even if 5 of them had been gimmes on blown coverages on the first read......5 of them had been bad reads thrown into tight coverage that worked out anyway.........and 2 of them were tipped by a defender and landed in the hands of a receiver who wasn't even the target. But all hard stats look the same in the box score. It's not necessarily different with grading the play of offensive lineman.........maybe some of the plays are taken out of context like Wood and Incognito yucked it up about..........but when you are being graded on hundreds to over 1,000 snaps played in a season........ the data probably is likely to be fairly representative. If you follow other sports where analytics are a couple steps ahead of the NFL at this point........this concept is probably easier to understand.

I would hope that Allen gets at least another 10 seasons playing at the top of his game individually to win a SB after this one........so I wouldn't worry at all about his legacy at this point. For all we know he could have a long great career and win tons of games and some AFC championships without a ring and then go John Elway on the back end, win back-to-back Lombardi's 15 years from now and go out as a top 10 all-timer. Players at other positions are on much, much shorter timelines. Case in point Matt Stafford. He just won a SB and is still considered to be on the back end of his prime. Stafford is from the 2009 draft........same as Eric Wood, Jairus Byrd, Andy Levitre, LeSean McCoy...........all players seemingly from a different era. Alex Mack is the only other offensive or defensive player on an NFL roster from that draft.

The odds of missing the playoffs are "almost impossible"? This is the kind of offseason hyperbolic jibberish that makes May-August a difficult read here on TSW. The Bills had a much easier schedule in 2021 and yet they were just 7-6 and on the outside of the playoff picture looking in due to a bad AFC record after 13 games. They had lost to literally the worst team in the league........scoring only 6 points. The AFC is much deeper this year.........Russell Wilson, Matt Ryan and possibly DeShaun Watson have been added to talented rosters........the Chargers loaded up in UFA.......the AFC champs totally revamped their terrible OL........the Dolphins finished last year winning 8 of 9 and improved their roster.........the Jets roster is now more talented than the Jaguars team that the seemingly stacked 2021 Bills lost to......... There are a lot of ways to miss the playoffs in the AFC in 2022. Have you been under a rock? It's not "almost impossible". How do people so quickly forget how the NFL actually works?

Being a front runner of the most ridiculous sort.........rooting for your former chief rival.........gives you some comfort? I have family in Boston and spent a lot of time in the area visiting as a kid..........but being a Buffalo pro sports fan and rooting for Boston pro sports teams is to be lower than a snake's belly.

#1 Gabe Davis - Gotta' prove he can be a 1,000+ yard receiver because he is flying solo at WR2 now........no longer splitting some snaps with John Brown or Emmanuel Sanders at a position that's been good for 1,100+ each of the last 2 seasons. #2 Tremaine Edmunds - They can get by with him being a middle of the league MLB/ILB this year..........but he's being paid like a STUD at the position now and the light coming on for him would be very timely and potentially huge for them. I'm far from expecting it but if he started playing instinctively for a change the defense could be epic. #3 AJ Epenesa - He's not as important to their success as the first two.........but this is probably his last chance if he puts up another season like the past 2. He developed slower than expected at Iowa........he came in as an incredibly rare 5 star recruit for them and didn't even earn the starting job at DE until his junior year..........so he's a natural candidate for the "light to come on". I'm not even sure I would put Cody Ford on such a list..........he's a bust to this point. If he proves something, great. But right now he's a non-factor. Allen and Miller got nothing to prove.

Yep, and as @blacklabel noted there was a lot of concern about Dawkins after that performance. He had a chip about it. Good to keep that edge.

I'm not worried about their humility...........focus every week is the concern...........that's how a team many thought would be at worst 11-2 and a #1 seed at that point of the season was just 7-6.......lost a game to the worst team in the league.......and were destined for another road loss in the playoffs. One of the unfortunate signatures of the McDermott era has been inexplicable mid-season swoons.

Another Nestor Sunday means another W in Chicago, 5-1. https://nypost.com/2022/05/15/nestor-cortes-dazzles-again-as-yankees-cruise-past-white-sox/

Good motivation for Dion Dawkins. He's not real fond of Ingram, as I recall. Hopefully the media makes note to remind Dion of the pressure Ingram got playing against Dawkins in the opener last season. That was basically the only high point of his brief Steelers career.