BADOLBILZ

I think you are confused about most of the moves that happened in the NFL. Most of them were because of serious stadium issues. Buffalo may have been a small market but they stepped up and built a modern NFL stadium. In Baltimore in 1984 after resisting funding improvements to Memorial Stadium the Maryland state legislature actually passed a law allowing the city of Baltimore to seize the Colts away from the Irsay family. The Raiders, Rams, Browns, Chargers and Raiders again all had similar issues with extremely antiquated stadiums. Those markets may have been wealthier but they were also pretty dismissive OR apathetic about their teams leaving at the time. The pastures haven't all been greener..........St. Louis was a much smaller market than LA and they ended up moving again, Baltimore to Cleveland was no massive windfall, and the Chargers are basically fan-less in LA. Even the Oilers downsized markets significantly to move to Nashville.

Well said. I didn't want to say it because it would have caused some outraged responses and links would have been demanded...........but moving a team is a big task and a good deal of risk. As a solo owner with no committed young heirs to help carry the ball, I never thought he had the ambition to go thru all of that. You don't just roll into some new town, unpack and set up the cash registers. His heirs didn't want to carry on the business so he didn't have the same impetus to treat the organization like a going concern the way owner's with a family succession plan do.

The size of the city itself mattered a lot more in 1959 than 1990. By 1990 the Bills were a regional franchise. While the actual population of the city of Buffalo has declined slightly since 1959.........that doesn't take into account the sprawl or the fact that the population of southern Ontario has almost tripled etc.. Overall it's a good sized tv market with an established, rabid fanbase that puts a high priority on the product.

Nah....... the NFL already had revenue sharing by the early 1960's. The greatest contribution Ralph had to promoting revenue sharing was co-starting a rival league.......the competitive pressure likely forced the NFL's last team with a regional tv deal(Cleveland) to give it up for the greater good..........and overall both league's knew the chain was only as strong as it's weakest link so they got in the habit of looking out for each other (another thing Ralph did with helping the financially weaker Patriots and Raiders franchises).

Tyrod Taylor had an 8.0 ypa in his first season as a Bill.........that is higher than Josh Allen had(7.9) in a season where he finished second in the MVP voting. Taylor regressed as the pressure to perform increased and he tried to play mistake free football. Plays like this will get you the rep for checking it down: https://www.12up.com/posts/video-mitchell-trubisky-actually-threw-a-checkdown-on-4th-and-23-vs-the-chiefs-01dwremcg5sn

That was one of the biggest complaints about him in Chicago.........he looks like a guy who could attack the whole field in practice but once the bullets start flying he starts checking it down. His Tyrod-Taylor-2017-like career ypa of 6.7 does little to dispel that notion. Not saying he couldn't get better in year 5 but I certainly wasn't putting any stock into how he looked in shorts in OTA's.

This roster would have the aughts era TSW screamin' for a first round runnin' back!

Middling, mediocre and decent + no playmakers = a contender for the first overall draft pick As for Mitch Trubisky.........look at the talent at WR and TE Miami has........or the OL and TE that New England has...........it would be very difficult for check-down Mitch to look like the best QB in the division with that supporting cast. Sorry, but you are out of focus on this take.

The Bills depth is excellent.........but most of those dudes are JAG's and rookies.........you win with difference makers. That would be a top 5 drafting team........even the Jauron teams had *some* stars. Rookie Spencer Brown.....who hasn't played in a game since 2019.....at LT in an NFL game? Who would be playing QB in week 2?

Because injuries and arrests happen..........especially the latter between mini-camp and TC. The Eagles are just waiting it out for a team to hopefully get needy at TE. Maybe they give him leave to attend the Olympics and buy themselves more time yet to let some TE blow out a knee in someone's TC.

The story with the drop in the LSU game and a few of the drops last year leave a small concern that he could have more concentration/pressure drops or "yips" in his future. I'm hoping but not assuming it's all going to be linear or even any improvement at all with him. Josh Reed's happen. Belitnikoff winner to remarkable rookie to broken confidence and pffft. You need to stay deep at WR in the NFL. They are a bit thinner at the X or Z positions than I'd like. No real competition at all for Davis job..........and one of the aspects I love about competition is that head-to-head takes players out of their own head.

I will say that at least Ralph was competitive..........if not consistently on the field at least with his fellow owners over profits. It could be worse........Cubs fans endured ownership that wasn't terribly concerned with winning for the better part of 100 years. Imagine if the Bills were owned by a local news rag........if people think the Pegula's influence what's written in Buffalo.. The moral of the Cubs situation though is that it's not healthy or even appropriate to just be grateful you have something to pay for. These owners are selling you the competitive spirit that comes with a pro sports team......it's OK to hold them to that standard. You can appreciate the Pegula's keeping the teams in town but also know that they are possibly the worst on-ice stewards of hockey in NHL history.

Al Pacino as the mod that puts this thread out of its misery.

I think it was co-created by people who didn't know how to quantify his issues and those who wanted to create a defense for him. You could always point to a bunch of times where he spent big money..........the parity encouraging system of the NFL makes it more than an accident when you end up with opportunities to get star players.........and star players will get paid. Then you could always point to embarrassingly cheap things he did...........like getting beaten by the ***** Montreal Alouettes of the CFL for #1 overall pick Tom Cousineau. Or getting players like Cribbs and Kelly poached by the upstart USFL. But it was never just about being cheap..........it was about bad football decisions and a lot of them just happened to involve being cheap.

People like you should ask themselves........how are you advancing a discussion demanding that there is a difference between "one-cut" and "straight ahead" when the alternative explanation for trading McCoy was "it was because he was black and Chip Kelly is a racist". Philly got rid of McCoy and added two high profile black RB's. They also controversially got rid of All Pro guard Evan Mathis.......caucasian. It was a load of BS from McCoy........who just resisted adapting to the style of run game that Kelly wanted to run. He did the same thing his first season in Buffalo before finally admitting to himself that he was leaving those yards on the table and running it like it was drawn up in 2016.

Yeah, the Dareus mistake was egregious though.........he had earned that big contract.........the problem with that deal was solely not having strong punitive clauses for misconduct for a repeat offender. NO WAY Ralph and Littman let that contract happen. That was a careless rookie owner mistake. Ralph wasn't "cheap" by nature he was "mercurial" by nature..........which periodically included penny pinching tactics like "cash to the cap" as an excuse to horde cash during the drought.

No, I just need to learn not to argue with the ignorant.

Pegula gave Dareus the big contract. Dareus' agent Todd France was a former Pegula-owned company employee.........which is how Marcel got the sweet terms that didn't penalize him for misconduct. I gotta' make a point on that because there is no way Wilson's shrewed lieutenant J. Littman leaves Ralph that exposed.

Ralph doesn't need anymore props..........he stashed away $20M-$30M per year at the expense of the roster during most of the drought to fund his expected inheritance tax for his family. He couldn't get good help in the front office or in the coaching staff for the last decade because of the LONG record of bad treatment and meddling with the likes of Knox, Polian, Butler and Phillips in the past. He was always mercurial but he and Littman basically stole from a generation of Bills fans and our kids during that drought.......and then the value of the franchise exploded and thanks to Pegula paying top dollar all those ill-gotten gains from the drought could be put into his charitable foundation to make him look like a saint. The foundation does great work, that's where he gets his props and it will likely be operating long after everyone whose expense it was funded at is long gone. But Ralph deserves props from Bills fans in the same way that Bills fans deserve to be listed as co-founders of his foundation.

Only if you don't understand the difference between McCoy and a "one cut runner". But if you want to instead believe the alternative........the McCoy generated narrative that he was traded literally because Kelly wanted to get rid of all the black players.........well be wrong and look ridiculous and racist all at once. It would be nice if we had more people with EITHER common sense OR an understanding of the game........you don't need both to know that McCoy was wrong.

He was excellent but he was probably the biggest individual beneficiary of Daboll having a great year calling plays that really caught teams off-guard. Davis had a bunch of blown coverage TD's. I think that's why he doesn't get as much credit for his extraordinary yards per catch and TD numbers. Teams will be more prepared this season, like they were in the playoffs, so everyone is going to have to add to their games just to get back to where they were offensively. That's a tall task when your top 2 WR both had career years but they have a very hard working group between Allen and his receivers.......and the OC has a chip on his shoulder after getting passed up for HC jobs so there isn't a reason to necessarily expect less.

Well, technically I guess Moses Malone is the most renowned NBA player to play for the Braves. McAdoo was actually the best player in the NBA for a stretch while with Buffalo............Dantley had a longer prime and was a great scorer but he was more of a one-trick pony and almost all of that happened elsewhere. The Braves had to be the most personnel-lucky of any Buffalo franchise in their brief history.

When Matt Barkley and Logan Thomas were the consensus top 2 QB's in their potential draft class(I believe 2013).........that was more because one had numbers and the other had measurables.........but neither had both. That's a recipe for a really bad early mock. I tend to look at the first round of summer mocks as more of an early round outline..........most of the players will go in the first few rounds.........some will go early like they were projected to though so "meaningless" might be a bit too broad of a term. Go back to Matt Miller's pre-2019 season mock and he had Chase Young and Justin Herbert and Jerry Jeudy in his top 10. He also had AJ Epenesa in there too though..........I think Rousseau was a better prospect than AJ at similar stages.........AJ was a slow developer who had just started to put up good numbers to match his 5 star recruit hype........Rousseau was a transition from offense that proved a quick study with HUGE production.

Some people look at the team like it's their local high school.........amateurs playing for free for the honor of the student body and alums. The reality is that it's a VERY privately owned business.......selling an expensive-to-maintain product that demands a lot of it's fans in exchange for the right to suspend disbelief and imagine that it belongs to them. You and I see the team thru the reality lens. It's a product, we have a right to expect top results from an expensive product. There's nothing we can do about it either way, but the objective of the sport is to be the last team standing every year. Until that happens, there is obvious and literal room for improvement. Pointing that out doesn't have to be "hate". By contrast, people who take great offense to high expectations for the product tend to be living full-time in the suspended disbelief state. So we end up arguing reality with a lot of Cosplayers.

The proper answer is "I was wrong". Funny how people think it's OK to address me with snark but get VERY offended when they get it back.........it's like the "Bills mafia effect".........except I'm not a paid talking head on ESPN that has to tolerate your "mean tweets".