BADOLBILZ

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I suspect his allegation is more of an "I'm a well known PED cheat myself........so I know a cheat when I see one".

I am fine with apple pie but not with Perry's vanilla frozen yogurt on it. Tuna is known to be dolphin safe, which I dislike. PFF is dolphin neutral.

Thank you. That's all I can ask for at lunch. That and no f*cking tuna fish.

You say "apparent goal" like it's some insidious plot. What company doesn't have the objective of being accepted as the best at what they do? As a football fan we don't have to like services like PFF or FO but is it not a step in the right direction to be evaluating player performance on an individual basis? That's exactly how the league actually works........players are evaluated individually on an ongoing basis.........so why is it at all unsavory for an independent scouting service to offer their version/opinion of that same process? And this branch of the conversation started because R2 said he despised PFF before any allegation of bribery.............an as yet unsubstantiated claim of taking bribes wasn't even part of that equation.

There is some significant real estate between just not liking something and despising it. I don't like Perry's frozen yogurt........I think they allow uncultured milk to end up in the product.........but I don't hate them for making it or anyone else for liking it. It's just a product...........like PFF. It's on you to know the different meanings of words in the english language, not someone else to understand your misuse of them.

Yeah I think for good reason Lewan simply dislikes having stats associated with his name..........prefers the lesser standard of "perception" to having to execute well every down like positions with more statistical analysis. He's a very inconsistent player. But of course he used stats to start a twitter beef with Shaq Lawson back in 2019 after the Bills beat the Titans. Pointed to stats to show that Shaq was a bust. Then Jordan Phillips pointed out that Lewan was suspended for PED's etc..

Talk about going out of your way to find something to feel contempt about.

Tough 3-2 loss last night to CWS. Bad approach at the plate against Keuchel........they have had a lot of trouble with him over the years. Most perplexing thing in the organization last night was the Yanks Tampa team striking out 24 times in a 1-0 loss. And it was against 3 different pitchers, not Randy Johnson 2.0. Despite a bunch of top prospects, Tampa is really struggling offensively for their new manager(a hitting coach) Rachel Balkovec, the first female manager in pro baseball. Gonna' be awkward if they have to replace her after the season but they have a bunch of freak athletes in that lineup and they simply aren't producing.

Not a bad idea to determine if Jenkins is capable. He's from the area so if they needed him on short notice and/or for just a couple weeks it's probably not the business decision for him that it might be for a guy from Texas or Georgia.

The Make Believes turned out to be pretenders again.

How does that make him a priority over Byrd? Because he didn't have a big charity like every modern NFL player can afford to......... because he was working as an auto technician in Buffalo to make ends meet in the offseason? And Byrd is an actual born and bred NY'er........a rare thing.........and from an area of the state where allegiances are split and there is room to make inroads. It's inexplicable why he is not on the wall. We all love Fred Jackson........except @Freddie's Dead of course..........part of our group is seated right next to where his family seats were. His MIL has shared a tandem snuggie with our chef Gianni O .............but you really aren't making any kind of point...............you are just pulling out a straw man to support your recency bias.

Other than the NFL.........what sport isn't struggling to appeal to your audiences? So the average age of NBA fans is much younger..........it's a much easier sport to follow casually and that's their level of interest because they are busy being the workforce and then enjoying their youth.......as they endeavor to avoid spending money. When you get older and have some equity..........it's easier to sit on the couch at night and follow a sport that plays every day. That's just life and economics and that's a big driver in the average age of fans. Even when I was a kid I remember people who didn't follow baseball until they retired and then they were at Dodger town in Vero Beach every day in spring etc.. It's a sport that fits people who like/need a routine. As for people leaving games early...........each MLB game is much lower stakes because they play 162 so leaving early isn't that big of a deal. It's a different sport. And fwiw regarding the quality of this article........the author says that MLB instituted a pitch clock a couple years ago to speed up the game and it didn't work............in other news the NFL made 50+ yard field goals into 4 pointers. Totally made-up sh*t. A pitch clock has been instituted in minor league baseball and has cut game times by 20 minutes, though. Pitch clock is next year in MLB. I'm not here to tell you MLB doesn't have watchability and pace problems and could learn a lot from the NFL..........which has wisely not allowed traditions like blocking and tackling to get in the way of progre$$. It's about entertainment. MLB needs to speed up their game and make it more about action and athleticism..........they know that........but it's been a struggle forcing change because of the powerful players union and the huge money they continue to generate. It's easy to see that $$$$$ and think you don't need change.