BADOLBILZ

Yeah but Bar Bill isn't an exception. What local place has been like a Bills Backers bar? People have a misunderstanding about these local places and the area's connection to the Bills. It was much more of a love/hate relationship with the team when these places created their identities. I can remember sitting in those stands in the late 80's and early 90's and wondering how these 30-50 year olds could hate Ralph so much when they had assembled the deepest roster in the AFC and were going to SB's. It was very much an us against him mentality. Didn't change until the kids who had known nothing but winning started buying tickets in the early 2000's that it began to change. And then Ralph rewarded those suckers with a drought and cash to the cap.

It's not about what I like. The Chiefs have paid TOP DOLLAR for 3 OL from other teams the past 3 offseasons. Top of the market players, not "the other" Conor McGovern. They've drafted a WR in the second round in 3 of the past 5 drafts....each of the last 2.........and traded 3rd round value to acquire the talented Kadarius Toney........and paid MVS $10M aav to be WR3 for a 3 year run(not a 1 year flyer)...........so they subsequently have a WR corps with higher pedigree overall than the Bills despite the Bills having an elite WR1. Instead the Bills have kept 6 of their veteran back 7 together with second contracts and paid a bunch of DL.........and taken a lot more half measures to try to "patch" holes on offense. Example? Where the Chiefs have 2 rookie contract starters on the best interior OL in the league..........the Bills interior OL is considered very suspect but has 3 projected starters on second contracts. You can try to reverse engineer it all you want but the Chiefs have kept investing bigger chips into their offense right along........the Bills allowed their offensive talent to deteriorate in 2021-2022 and are now playing catch up without much cap flexibility left.

Agree.........but I'd also add that the concept of local satisfaction with Bills ownership is a very new thing. Ralph was not well liked.......and really distrusted at best.......by the age demographic that frequented local town bars in the 80's and 90's. So they certainly weren't going to paper the walls at these places with advertisements for his product. Big Tree and Danny's aren't wall-to-wall Bills either. By the time the kids of the SB generation came of age and delivered the first unconditional love for the team since the 1960's.......the team was in the drought. I think you can still see the remnants of that Ralph resentment in the neighborhoods around the stadium as well. Bills fans finally wised up and created their own identity as Bills Mafia to give us some leverage in this relationship......and the Pegula's taking over came a few years later and you can see the area around the stadium gradually becoming more Bills "themed" every year.

Yeah the Bills have thrown a bunch of 3rd rounders into the offense in recent years so if you want to draw the line THERE it looks closer.........but the Chiefs have used a 1st or 2nd round pick.....the real big chips......on offense every year since 2019. The Chiefs have clearly invested a lot more big chips into the OL. Making Joe Thuney highest paid G in the NFL in 2021. First rounder and franchise money for Orlando Brown in 2021. $20M aav for Jawaan Taylor in 2023. They have 3 WR on their roster that are 1st or 2nd rounders in the past 3 drafts. Also worth noting that the Bills have made the mistake of using 3 picks in the first 3 rounds on RB's........the Chiefs have only done so once........and those picks depreciate rapidly once driven off the lot. Cook is the only 1 of the 4 who figures prominently in the plans for their team. So I think the gap wider than your analysis leads you to believe. Beane has admittedly been careless with money though........but it's been death by 1,000 cuts by comparison........things like throwing washouts like Rodg Saffold $6M. And the Bills did invest first and second rounders in this past draft but because they had invested so little into OL and receiving positions in recent offseason they are really playing catch up at this point.

It's always been the same quality to me at both places but there is a lot more elbow room at the one near you. You can have a long lunch meeting at that Williamsville/Clarence one.......the East Aurora one the seating is so sparse that the feeling that you are costing the wait staff money by not getting in-and-out quick is palpable.

I'd flip those, if anything. Talent evaluation is a big weakness for Beane. He's not a scout, he's a suit and he's good at the executive duties. But wrt personnel his strength has just been that he's been given an unlimited checkbook. His track record in free agency is just brutal. McDermott is nowhere near as bad at anything as Beane has been wrt pro personnel. In the draft he's been better but has some clear strategic flaws......like drafting RB's early three times now and/or reaching for perceived needs in round 2. I'm hoping he gets better as a talent evaluator. Howie Roseman got better, hopefully Beane does the same.

KC is a good organization with a great QB. So is Buffalo. The notable differences between the two are how they allocate their assets first and the combination of Reid and Spagnuolo's experience second. First, they surround Mahomes with better talent than the Bills do, by investing more into that side of the ball. Indisputably so. And Reid was the NFL's biggest playoff choker of the 2000's for the first 20 years of his HC career. In fact, his teams have still been upset in the playoffs 3 times in the last 6 years. But with the talent at his disposal on offense and Spags SB winning coordinator experience coaching up their relatively modest investments on D, Reid has been able to focus on fiddling with his play sheet a lot more instead of the game management that he has always struggled with when playing with closer or inferior talent margins on offense. Winning a SB finally has made him look like a genius and makes people forget him blowing so many playoff games in his career.......including AFC title games at home to NE and Cinci in the last 5 years. And forget that he was 2 games under .500 in the playoffs after his first 20 years. I'm not going to argue that the Chiefs aren't going to become a dynasty because winning SB's is how you judge that and they are 1 win away from that distinction.........but they haven't manhandled the competition so let's not get carried away with the praise either. They won 2 closely contested SB games and got blown out as a prohibitive favorite in that span. Impressive but hardly the Steel Curtain of the 70's or the Cowboys of the 90's. As far as Allen running the ball 7-8 times per game..........Cam Newton had a 5 year sample too. He used to bounce back up and laugh after every hit like nothing hurt him. His career got cut short. QB's don't take the level of punishment over the long haul that Allen has endured the past couple of seasons and not have it shorten their careers. It's gotta' revert to 2020 level at least........where he can run but can get down and not have to get 6 yards per rush attempt. I'm not saying I am looking forward to a lot less athleticism from Allen because watching guys like Tom Brady or Joe Burrow play the position is as to watch paint dry. Boring AF by comparison. But there needs to be a medium. Mahomes is right there. About half as many rush attempts as Josh.

Yeah if Josh Allen doesn't have to run 7-8x per game for upwards of 40-50 yards to keep the offense on schedule and remain top 2-3 in the league.........then they will have likely solved the problem of not-good-enough weapons around him. The organization says they want him to take less hits but they don't say let's just punt the ball once or twice more per game instead. The last two seasons he's had to run more......and extend those runs......in order to keep the chains moving and maintain the kind of offensive pace that they established in 2020. By comparison, Patrick Mahomes has had better weapons and/or a better OL and runs about half as often.

You've had worse takes than that......but that one is pretty bad. First of all........he never approached a 2,000 yard season. Only had 2 seasons over 1,000 total yards from scrimmage in his career. And CJ was playing in the "all-22" era and what was abundantly obvious to anyone willing to watch was that he couldn't process the play calls and was just running to what he perceived was daylight on every play. Steve Tasker let the cat out of the bag during a telecast his rookie year when he said CJ wasn't playing because he couldn't process the play calls. Since most Bills fans thought guys like Willis McGahee and Travis Henry were total idiots they didn't really understand just how big the difference that there was in intelligence between Spiller and the average RB. That's also why CJ didn't start at Clemson until his senior year despite backing up a non-NFL RB James Davis. Coaches don't want to live and die by players freestyling. On the plus side, many of his big plays were just total nonsense run choices where the defense followed the blocking, presuming that was where the ball was going, and CJ just ran the wrong way for a big gain. Total idiot move drafting him by Buddy and Chan.......but what Chan Gailey coaxed out of him was a miracle. I still remember TSW talking about how good CJ was going to be in Sean Payton's more complicated offense. Hilarious.

How did you not know that Andy Reid had been to championship games with Philly? Just unbelievable level of ignorance for someone so invested in the topic. By definition.......Dopey = Idiotic = very stupid = lacking intelligence or common sense. Ignorance isn't always the byproduct of being "dopey" but it definitely tracks in your case.

Not having home field and a first round bye in any of these seasons has been very detrimental. Just because they lost at home in 2022........after a brutal year with, once again, no meaningless game and bye week to re-charge at the end..........doesn't mean that the regular seasons just don't matter. In fact, if they had finished with the #1 seed last season they'd have had a bye week......not sustained injuries and been rested........and likely would have been playing the grass-green Jaguars in the divisional round instead of the bad matchup against Cinci. We see teams play far below their standard at points in the playoffs and escape and then get their act together and win the SB. Tampa in 2020 narrowly beating Washington in the wild card round and KC in the championship game versus Cinci this past season. Never having that #1 seed and that first round bye matter. In 6 of their 9 losses the past two seasons they've failed to reach 20 points and a common theme has been the lack of playmakers around Allen on offense. Trying to say it's not an issue because Gabe has had 3 very good playoff games out of the 7 he's played is by no means definitive proof that the Bills don't have a problem receiver 2. It's just box score scouting.

Maybe........but if the alternative is to target Davis 100+ times over 17 games........well, we know that that lead to a lot of interceptions and a very poor passer rating. Again.......we need to keep our fingers crossed that somebody on the roster turns into a better option than Davis.

@HappyDays has thoroughly answered your question marked sentences. But to your last point........ The problem has shown up in the playoffs.........but not only there. It's easy for some to forget that the 21' team failed to earn home field advantage over KC(despite beating them in KC in the regular season) in great part because Beasley fell off greatly and they had also lost the explosiveness they'd had in John Brown during the first half of their 2020 season..........which was the high point for their receiving corps and a place in time where some Bills fans still think they are for some reason. They've had some horrible, inexcusable, damaging regular season losses......Jacksonville in 21' and NYJ in 22' in particular......... where they needed someone other than Diggs to step up and make plays in the passing game........clever defensive gameplans that allowed the far inferior teams defenses to dictate terms to the Bills offense. And in both games they also called on Gabe to catch an important pass late........and he instead spilled those catchable balls on the turf. Gabe has NOT been good enough. The only argument against that is if someone thinks Gabe is going to be much better. I don't know how anyone can have watched him play week-in and week-out and expect that. It's not realistic.

What matters is how they related to their peers. McNabb was considered a top 5 QB and the second most athletic QB(to Mike Vick) of that 5 year period from 2000-2004 while usually playing with a bottom 5 receiving corps that tamped his passing and efficiency stats down. In 2000 he was the runner-up for NFL MVP and in 2004 he was even better. He wasn't some pedestrian QB. I'd like to say Allen is BETTER relative to his peers.........but either way the distance between McNabb being top 5 and however we view the similarly "overall-game-over-passing-efficiency" style of Josh Allen isn't THAT much different. From 2005-2007 McNabb started getting hurt regularly and missed 15 games over that period but he was still one of the best QB's in the league........and with poor receiving talent around him. He got kind of a raw deal in Philly.

The Chiefs have done both for Mahomes. The greatest common thread in Andy Reid's career failures was actually not having enough WR talent around his QB. Easily the greatest criticism of the Eagles organization while he was HC there. And it continued early on with the Chiefs.......so for about the first 18 years of his HC career that was mostly the case..........the one season he had an elite QB with an elite WR at the time was when his Eagles acquired TO, and subsequently, McNabb played like an MVP and they went to the SB. That all changed over the course of 2016-2018 when Kelce emerged, then Hill and then they gave Sammy Watkins that 4 year $64M deal. They stacked the room and won a SB in 2019. Even now they have Kelce and two second round picks from the last 2 drafts and a 1st rounder from 2021 that they acquired in trade in their receiving group. So yes they have more invested in the OL but they still have more invested in terms of capital and draft picks at receiving positions than the Bills have as well.

I think people tend to view Donovan McNabb very differently in hindsight...........he was a lot better in comparison to his peers than people remember. He regularly finished around 8th in the NFL in passer rating despite one of the worst WR groups in the league year after year. His leading receiver in 2003 was Todd Pinkston with 575 yards. Yikes. Josh Allen finished 8th in passer rating with Stef Diggs at his disposal last season......for comparison sake. In 2004 they finally gave McNabb a WR1 in Terrell Owens.........and he finished 4th in passer rating and the Eagles advanced to a SB. TO didn't even play half of the next season and then it was back to WR purgatory for McNabb and the Andy Reid Eagles. And when Reid went to the Chiefs they famously went an entire season without throwing a TD pass to a WR. Reid got too much of a pass for not having SB caliber QB's............and not enough scrutiny for demanding that they put talent around his QB's. The latter part of his career they have valued offensive skill talent much more and that has yielded greater results.

They grew back..........but this time nothing sticks to them

Oh, Dopey........so hopelessly dense you are. Now that he's not a Buffalo Bill I am glad Zay is good at letting things go.........it bothered me when he was doing it as a Bill though......

I don't think McDermott and Allen winning a SB together in the next few years would be a particularly surprising break with history...........that's a threshold just waiting to be crossed. Especially with the depth at the QB position in todays NFL. Now Andy Reid not winning his first SB until his 21st year as a HC.........with all the #1 seedings that he squandered along the way............that is such a crazy anomaly that it will never be matched. 30 years from now when everybody playing currently will be ancient history........that fact will be a real bit of stunning trivia.

Whether dropping passes gets him down or not has nothing to do with what I said. I said he's still dropping them passes. Does he really think that anyone reading that story needs to be told that he's "been" on the "drop a touchdown pass" side of things. 😂 It's spoken like the dropsies are in the past tense for him.........when in fact, he was the worst ball dropper in the National Football League this past season.

I mean.......it's Promo

Yeah we remember that you were always telling us how good we all had it during the drought and that we should be ashamed of expecting any actual success. True story. The drought was your baby now you are calling it ugly. For shame!

Or it could just sound like I am telling it like it is about a Bills draft bust. That bad choice on draft day still resonates with the organization even now because they passed on some much better receivers while also trading up to get him and since then they've had to go the veteran route (or 2 GS by UDFA Robert Foster) to fill every other starting WR role from then until Gabe got his shot(and disappointed) in 2022. Maybe being the worst ball dropping WR in the NFL is a great success story when you are an upstart, low expectations team who snuck into the wildcard round after being terrible for most of the first half of the season. But if he repeats that with Jacksonville eyeing the #1 seed in their soft division this year........I suspect the story will be "we gotta' replace this guy if we want to advance any further".

First of all 10% isn't "a bad drop year". It's as bad as it gets kinda' drop year and he was at 10% in both 2020 and 2022.........so both seasons post "fighting for Jesus" or whatever it was that he said when he was trashed that night. And you're right they should have just left the "horrific night" out entirely. "Inconsistency can't keep Zay Jones down" alone isn't particularly compelling though.