BADOLBILZ

Thanks for the content and takes. Did you change your mind on Brian Thomas Jr. or did you just slot Troy Franklin behind him because you think those teams will not see it the way you felt last week(that Franklin was a better prospect than Thomas Jr.)? Also, I sorta' expect Beane to botch his second round pick.........not been a great round for him..........but I just can't get behind drafting for positional need at safety there. They can find value at that position in day 3. Follow the free agent board Beane.......the safety position is usually stacked come mid-March. And if they aren't worth extending at market value if they pan out........well they aren't worth using early round picks on. Both of their starting safeties the past 7 years were day 3 guys and I could easily see Bullock just curing on the pine all of 2024 behind some $1.7M vet.

You're wrong.......you have only a very rudimentary understanding of the salary cap and clearly haven't done any research on the subject. It would be a lot easier to explain if we knew what the salary cap figures were going to be years in advance.........because it's just simple arithmetic(add/subtract/multiply/divide). And that is the excuse that Brandon Beane is using about the salary cap hiccup 4 years ago impacting what he can do ever since and going forward. See if you can follow this.........maybe don't spend $100M on what would amount to about $10M worth of production in free agency in 2018..........and then when the salary cap decreases by $16M in 2021 you aren't crying poor. That's what we are talking about here.........Beane thought the salary cap would increase by about $15M in 2021 and instead it fell by $16M.........a net difference of only $31M. That's 1/3 of what he wasted on that 2018 FA class. And it bears note that the next offseason(2022) the cap jumped up slightly disproportionately to an additional $25M.......so that further lessens the overall impact that covid is having on NFL spending today..........and why those who didn't mismanage their salary cap in the years immediately preceding 2020 aren't still complaining about it. Beane is in the jam he's in now simply because of bad pro personnel decisions early in his Bills tenure. He just made a bunch of absurd, overpriced signings/acquisitions. If you weren't shocked by the waste that was going on then you clearly weren't aware of the impact it has. And this on the heels of calling the previous regime fiscally irresponsible for only leaving McDermott $32M under the cap when they took over in 2017.

Probably not. But his 16.5 sacks would have been the 3rd most in a season for a Buffalo Bill behind Bruce Smith with 19 in 1990 and Bryce Paup with 17.5 in 1995..........and its the 3rd 70+ tackle and 14+ sack season he's had in the last 5 years. He is a freak of nature and we haven't had anyone with his pass rush skill since the 1990's. As great as Mario was he wasn't a pure pass rusher. And as we saw with Von Miller in 2022......if you can force QB's to step up in the pocket Greg Rousseau has a special knack for finding them.

Shackles might be the wrong word. But the game plan before Dorsey's firing was heavily predicated around avoiding using Josh Allen as a runner. Brady ran him 9.2 times per game in his 9 games..........versus just 4.8 per game in the 10 games under Dorsey this season. The approach was going to have to change whether Dorsey got fired or not. That's been the way for the past few seasons. Brady just comes out looking better for it. We shall see what Brady can do with the same early season limitations on Allen running the football next season. They aren't going to rush Allen 160 times next season just to make Joe look good again. They better get him some WR help.

Not only is that a good short term solution..........it's what's best for Josh Allen long term. We need more of the 2020 Josh Allen. Dropping dimes from the pocket.

I think we knew the problem after 13 seconds. The Bills lack a true game changer on defense. The Chiefs have one in Chris Jones........and despite the Bills dominating the Chiefs D for most of that game last Sunday Jones came up big in a big moment. It's why I wouldn't be entirely shocked if the Bills took a swing at signing Danielle Hunter in UFA if he gets there. Despite their cap issues. They could bring him in with a $2M cap hit and push his big hits down the road sorta' like they did with Von. I'm not predicting it but if they are desperate to close the deal it wouldn't surprise me. I don't see this defense taking a big step without their version of TJ Watt, Aaron Donald or Chris Jones. Ed Oliver isn't going to be that guy, IMO.

I have my doubts that they extend him. This is a good offensive tackle draft class. I can see them drafting one and going back to the drawing board with a 2nd year 3rd-4th round pick battling Richard Gouraige for the RT job in 2025. I've probably always been more appreciative of Brown's progress than most and would love for him to eventually reach his athletic ceiling and become an Andrew Whitworth type and play a long career with Buffalo.......but I question his durability and more importantly the Bills have cap issues and you simply do not need an excellent RT to win a championship, IMO.

Yeah but I think the point is that expectations of Brown were unrealistic and his progress was not being measured against other similar RT's. It usually takes experienced college lineman several years to become a non-liability on the OL. Brown entered the league having played very little in college and having played 7 man football in HS. His progression, thru injury, has been fairly impressive.

There can only be one Mike Caldwell. He was a lefty and had a collection of hypnotic Jesus pieces to keep hitters off his middling fastball.

Great pass blocking at RT kinda' isn't a real thing in the NFL. He's become a better player than Jawaan Taylor...........who got paid $20M aav last offseason coming off a worse year than Brown had this year. I'm not predicting THAT kind of contract for Brown because his injury history and body type will raise enough concerns about durability..........but he's going to get PAID if he stays healthy next season...........because he's become a damn good RT relative to the rest of the RT's in the league.

Do they teach finance at Sandusky State? Unused cap dollars can be rolled over from one year to the next. So if you don't spend it in 2018 it's available in 2019 and so forth. Conversely, money wasted then is money not available in subsequent years. Which leads to having to borrow future cap space to fill current roster space. Follow? It should have been pretty obvious to any moderately astute observer of the salary cap that when Brandon Beane both combined to create what was then the largest amount of dead cap in NFL history in his first 12 months on the job AND subsequently purchased a large 2018 free agent class of unimpactful and wildly overpaid free agents.........that the lack of production he was getting for all of that money was going to lead to future cap trouble and compromise.

@Metal Man sharing the Spacehunter trailer reminded me of this one: Anyone remember this 1954 B movie being played on TV in 3D in the early 80's? It was seemingly played on a UHF channel everywhere in the country that summer and locally channel 31 in Rochester was the one broadcasting it. They ran hype commercial about this on tv for like 2 months prior during the late spring and early summer like it was going to be f*cking amazing. Where we were we had to go to the nearest Convenient brand Food Mart to get 3D glasses. That was like 10 miles downhill from the town we lived in so we took a circuitous route on our bikes to avoid death. One guy was late for our departure and tried to catch up taking the fastest route and ended up speeding out of control and going off the curb and road-rashing his face off and he was found unconscious in a ditch by a motorist. His facial features gradually came back over the next couple years but he still has about half an eyebrow missing. He also went to see Spacehunter in 3D with me.......but I digress.... Anyway, the movie was brutal. It was the equivalent of Ralphie getting the Orphan Annie decoder ring after all that hype. But it was a star studded cast and John Landis apparently liked it.

Went to see it on my birthday in 1983. It was in 3D.

I guess you are just REALLY ignorant regarding this topic. The term "Bills Mafia" was derived from angry "keyboard warrior" Bills fans attacking mainstream media members like a gang on social media. The bile directed at national media critics of the oft-inept Bills organization was to the point of being both a little scary for the recipients..........but also at a high enough volume that these talking heads saw that they could up their social media following and increase their brand value by pandering to the "Bills Mafia". Why do you think the term "Mafia" was used? Did you really believe that "Mafia means family" narrative that was created long after the fact? 😂

The main reason I like Beane is because he got the organization to go all-in on a QB draft prospect for the first time in almost 60 years. They'd never simply used their very first 1st round pick in any draft......or traded up from that pick......to select a college QB. Not even Jim Kelly had been their top pick........they hedged their bets by selecting TE Tony Hunter at #12 overall and hoped Detroit or someone trading up at #13 would select one of the QB's to help them narrow their decision at pick #14. Beane had conviction about Josh Allen. You could argue that he could have had MORE given the luck that was necessary for him to make it to 7. But at least they had targeted their guy. Other Bills attempts to find a QB were always trades of #1's for veterans(RJ and Bledsoe) or moving up from a second pick(Losman) or trading back from a first pick(Manuel). The Bills organizational lack of conviction about the QB position was the main reason for their relative futility over their history prior to Josh Allen.

1) celebrate for a couple days 2) Then go to the parade 3) buy some SB champs gear in subsequent days 4) start thinking about free agency and draft and pitchers and catchers reporting etc..

Thanks to Bills embedded we got to see Beane in action when he was making the picks. The Cody Ford pick showed his logic at work. His logic was flawed. So I assign the picks to him.

Is there a fanbase in the NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL that has gained more from "keyboard warriors" and social media than the Bills fanbase? I don't think so. Before the whole "Bills Mafia" identity was created because of Bills fan twitter outrage..........Bills fans were just a largely unrecognized collection of tribes who shared a common hostility about not getting any respect or due acknowledgement nationally for their devotion to the team. Now that we've been effectively unionized and acknowledged, the gameday experience is much less about that chip on the shoulder and rage at opposing fans and media and more about the party and maintaining the reputation for being generous etc.. See the response to the few idiots who attacked Tyler Bass. It's been an outsized reaction of positivity.

It's been annoying listening to Beane's excuses for the terrible mistakes with money and pro personnel in general in his first 2-3 seasons. I've made that point here probably hundreds of times since then. But I also give him some credit for cleverly avoiding taking any real responsibility for any of it. That is the way of the con-man and fans eat that confidence up and bought him a lot of runway. Smart. And it's not like it's a house of cards with him, he was just terribly unqualified as a personnel and salary cap man when he got the job and has been faking it til' he makes it in that regard. As pure executive he was immediately a great hire to steady the ship for the Pegula's. They needed that aspect of his job more than anything because they were floundering. And I think his personnel work has greatly improved with experience and I expect that to continue. But he still has ground to make up because of past mistakes.

They were probably determining PI or Illegal contact based on where the football was at the moment of contact. Whether they got the exact call right isn't really that material.........they properly called a penalty which resulted in a short gain and an automatic first down. Dorian Williams clearly looked at the receiver and threw his body into him to impede his progress toward the point where Mahomes threw the ball.

What non-Bills fans think of our fan base is something I could not care less about. What was important was that the fanbase unite and become an entity separate from the team, IMO. The group as a whole had to embrace the "whatever" of being a Bills fan the way many of us did showing up every week during the drought despite Ralph Wilson's decades long poor stewardship of the on-field product and he and Jeff Littman ceasing to run a competitive organization for the last decade+ of Ralph's life. In some of the 70's and the mid-80's when Ralph put bad teams on the field people stayed away in droves. We were passionate but the support was much more conditional. The model to me was always Chicago Cubs fans. I attended a number of games at Wrigley and was always impressed by their focus on having fun as a group as much or more than the results on the field. Their embracing of the Cubs fan experience despite 100 years of futility was the example. I just wondered for years how those of us who prioritized our shared fandom above the results on the scoreboard would get that to translate en masse. Then the whole "Bills Mafia" social media driven hokey nonsense took off we were a largely fractured group of passionate consumers. As much as I hated seeing some of the posers and douchebags that jumped on the bandwagon once Bills fans had a fun identity..........it is totally worth it. Having that distinct identity as a fan base has changed everything for the better, IMO. That's all I care about. How it impacts us.

I like Beane but the biggest reason he is in the situation he is with the cap can be traced directly to his terrible personnel decisions in 2018. He spent $100M on total garbage in free agency.........and actually paid out a ton of that even when he should have been cutting bait later in those contracts. He has gotten much more efficient on the job but it's been a gradual climb from terrible to mediocre to improved levels of efficiency. Blaming the cap situation on the cap figure dropping due to covid is a cop-out........but the truth is if he were honest about the fact that he was terrible wrt pro personnel and cap management in his first couple years there would be nothing to gain from that honesty whatsoever. Just more criticism. He has basically faked it til' he's made it.........and NOW that he has a better grasp on what he's doing he really needs to put that expensive experience to work and knock it out of the park in the next few offseasons. As I've said before, Howie Roseman wasn't always a great GM.........he grew into it. Beane needs to build off of the successes in recent drafts and the more efficient(if not always satisfying) results he's gotten in free agency. Also needs to be a bit more ruthless, IMO.

The tendency is to think that speed and quickness are the first things to go.........hence "lost a step"..........but hand-eye coordination is often the first sign of the end for great receivers. That's how it went for James Lofton. He could still get open and over the top of defenses right until the end. He just started dropping passes left and right late in the 1992 season.....leading to his release from the Bills........and the drops continued as he quickly circled the drain in 1993. More recently, TO was still a freak athlete long after he was a star WR. He could still run at the end but his hands had gotten comically bad.

Shakir surprised me but I think this debate takes us back to where the Bills were when Cole Beasley was considered WR2 statistically. Technically, he had the second most catches and yardage. By a lot. But you want your boundary receivers to be WR1 and WR1B or the second at least a clear WR2. Will Shakir become a guy they throw deep to? We haven't seen that yet. They tried him more in that role in 2022 but he struggled to track the deep ball. If you are weak on the boundary it's hard to beat teams over the top and open up the rest of your offense. The Bills were overmatched on the boundary against KC. So all 4 of the 30+ air yards throws fell incomplete. So regardless of what label we want to put on Shakir, the Bills are weak on the boundary. And those are those "island" positions that are worth the big bucks for a reason.

You can maintain "contact" from the snap thru 5 yards. Contact like having a hand on the receiver. That doesn't include all kinds of contact. An off-defender like Williams in this case can't just throw a shoulder or forearm into a receiver as they cross the field the way they did. If that were allowed everyone would do it to take away shallow crossers. It was blatant and obvious. If he just backs into the receiver without looking at him and clearly forcing a collision, maybe it gets chalked up as incidental contact. I've seen Milano get away with that before. But Wiliams wasn't nearly that subtle. Unfortunately, because for those of us at the game most didn't see that contact until they showed us the replay. At which point there was little disagreement with the call.