BADOLBILZ

Entirely incorrect.......and intentionally misleading. I simply stated the medically accepted correlation between obesity and illness..........and that 300# NFL lineman are going to be clinically obese by definition. Both common sense. @Royale with Cheese then demanded proof that all NFL 300# lineman had underlying medical conditions. That's just internet douchebaggery...........a straw man..........I never claimed that. But also, it's not MY job to prove that obese NFL players are exempt from that which is medically accepted as true. Royale thought he could just point out that NFL players have to train to play the game to prove they aren't at risk for health problems due to their obesity........but as he stumbled and bumbled his way to finding out.......the question of whether it's fair to compare the general population to obese NFL players is too complex to argue against effectively.

Terry Pegula was a hockey fan. He thought or still thinks he knew hockey well enough to run a hockey team well. He was not a big football fan........despite living in Orchard Park for many years, including the SB years, the first Bills home game he attended in person was AFTER he bought the team. So not being as comfortable with football he was likely more inclined to hand the keys over to McDermott after his first hiring ended up as a high profile moment of embarrassment for the family.

No he ended up fighting and getting the decision against another 50 something in an exhibition after people theorized that he might be a heavyweight title contender based on that short video. But if Star doesn't work out..........get this guy on the phone Beane.........look at the feet on that 1 tech........the camera don't lie amirite? He might not make plays either but it's been said that all he does is win.

Yeah you simply aren't going to win NFLDPOY if you don't make big plays to attract attention to your play. Edmunds has played 3 full seasons.........he amazingly doesn't have ONE signature, memorable big, game changing kinda' play. Even Star Lotulelei has one of those in Buffalo. Even Preston Brown had a TD return INT against the Dolphins once.

As I said here at the time.........Donald was the best defensive player in that draft. He had been the most dominant defensive player in the NCAA as well. The Bills were in perfect position to stand pat at #9 and select a player who will likely go down as the best DL of the first 25 years of the 21st century(including JJ Watt). The reason why the Bills didn't pick a defensive lineman is because they had "The Cold Front".......a STACKED DL......with Williams/Dareus/Williams/Hughes in place. Trading multiple picks(including the next year's #1) just to move up to select a DL would have made NO sense at the time. In hindsight it would have been a good value and a great story though.......but as good as Mack has been......he has not been in the shoe-in first ballot HOF class of Aaron Donald.

The guy with the 7' wingspan hasn't forced a fumble in 42 games. He's never recovered a fumble. Just 3 career interceptions. Only 5.5 career sacks. You don't win NFL DPOY without making plays............as stated on OBL today, getting 100 tackles is nice but SOMEBODY gets a tackle on every non-scoring play. I agree that he has DPOY talent..........if he had been utilized like a TJ Watt I think he'd have been a big time playmaker..........but the position that he plays requires A LOT of instinctive play to stand out.........but with 6 seasons under his belt as a college and pro LB he hasn't shown those instincts.

His play dropped off in 2017 in Carolina. That looked like bad timing with him hitting UFA. The perception was that he was looking at a $3M-$4M per year aav kinda' short term deal. Which made the $50M 5 year contract he got even more astonishing and harkens to @GunnerBill point about Beane having a blind spot for certain declining vets in UFA. His meager gross numbers are worse in Buffalo but he's also played A LOT less snaps per game.

Aaron Donald is the best defensive player in the NFL.......a 6 time first team All Pro........3x NFL defensive player of the year..........and they wouldn't have had to trade up for him.

It's neither encouraging or discouraging to me. The fact that his head looks twice the size that it did before could mean he's just at a post-career weight goal. Or it could be construed that he realizes that there isn't much demand for traffic cones in a pass happy league and wants to extend his career as an active DT. That seems a little less likely because if he played well he'd get the same amount of money over the next 2 seasons as if he got cut. I'd remind everyone that it doesn't take much to look good in one take of a short burst of activity. Below is 53 year old Mike Tyson. "Everyone's got a plan (for social media)"

You literally jumped into this thread to argue against the correlation between obesity and illness. An association that is understood to be common sense. You couldn't comprehend the broad scope of arguing that NFL players were exempt from obesity related health concerns.........for example something like 3% of the NFL being of samoan descent........mostly big lineman.....40x the general population % in the US.........and that samoans have some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes in the world. I'm just throwing some dirt on your dead argument. You've earned it.

I had faith you'd find the obviously slippery slope in your illogical arguments. All the hand-wringing about me simply applying the common medical assertion that obesity puts one at a higher risk for illnesses/disorders was absurd. You immediately jumped to the assumption that all 300# athletes were too fit to be compared to the general public..........but of course ignored the fact that there are 10-15x the % of 300# people on on NFL team versus the general population...........or that the risk factors are higher for african americans and 69% of the NFL are african americans versus just 13%-14% in the general population. Sickle cell can cause heart failure/death......and HAS on the football field....... and that is exclusively an african american affliction. The numbers also apply for things like diabetes and kidney failure.

FIFY

So what is Star's responsibility in the "less than 50%" of snaps where the offense doesn't assign two blockers to him? (mind you, he only played 44% of the defensive snaps to start with which was less than "part timer" Lorenzo Alexander) This is where the rubber meets the road with the defense of Star as "misunderstood". When the 1 tech doesn't draw a double team it is his job is to get off his block and make a play. Which he doesn't do. As I said........Marcel Dareus earned 1st team all pro and put up 10 sacks as a 1 tech. The position is not to be confused with NT. If what Star provided was so important they would have tried to replace him with a reasonable facsimile thereof.........not Justin Zimmer. I guess your argument is that he is just so unique they couldn't hope to find someone to do what he does.........which would explain why he had to take a pay cut and his contract was set up to make it easy to move on from him after the 2020 season(we know how that worked out).

All winter Tompsett was talking about Star possibly not playing and the need to draft his man-crush Tyler Shelvin to fill the 1 tech spot.........so I guess call it an attempt self deprecation. The part about being afraid to tell the Bills he's retiring? If someone said that.....well that narrative never made any sense. All he has to do is show up and not violate the terms of his contract and collect about $10M over the next year and a half........whether he is effective enough to even make the the roster or not.

Thank you, because the presumption here is that he is always or near-always double teamed......which was not the case. The 1 tech alignment lends itself to double team blocking by attacking the gap between the guard and center........while the 3 tech alignment is designed to create a one-on-one matchup by putting the DT on the outside shoulder of the guard.......a position where it is difficult for the center to reach and where it's presumed the tackle is otherwise occupied. What good is a traffic cone DT who can't get in the backfield if he isn't absorbing two blockers on nearly every snap?

None of this counters the point that I was making that you jumped into the thread to argue against. That clinically obese people are generally considered to be at a higher risk to have underlying medical conditions than those that are not. The fact that it's typically the 300# plus guys that are dropping from heatstroke when doing team workouts illustrates the obvious...........they are likely to be in the least quality cardiovascular shape of any players on the team. Doesn't mean they can't ride a bike or dunk a basketball............just that they are at higher risk. And as it pertains to Star Lotulelei.............the point is that MANY obese players could have claimed they had underlying health conditions. Most did not. For most, taking the $350K was to take a big paycut and/or risk losing their career. For Star, his other money was guaranteed. Jon Feliciano pointed this out right after Star opted out. The skepticism from Feliciano about the reasoning for some opting out was pretty obvious by that otherwise unnecessary tweet. There is no factual basis that we are aware of to presume that Star was at a greater health risk than A LOT of other 300# NFL lineman.

Yeah, the idea that Star was constantly drawing double teams and tying up blockers was incorrect. @thebandit27 would often point this out when he was still posting here as well. It's a fact, it's not something that should require backup but there are a lot of folks on this board that felt like Star was very good at forcing doubles......when in fact a good guard had little issue taking him out of the play with no assistance necessary. $10M per is a lot to pay for a player like that. At the time of that Browns game they were in the midst of a rather bad stretch of playing run defense. I remember seeing Wyatt Teller single block pancake Star on one play inside the redzone in particular. The notion that he was a force at the LOS is a misty water-colored memory. But we do tend to see this with injured players........Harrison Phillips was deified when the Bills run defense struggled in 2019 after his injury. Then Star got the nod in 2020 and now Phillips is living in the shade.

You would think so.........but it doesn't really change anything if they don't use all of the cap space in 2021..........they can just roll the unused cap room over anyway.

There are some re-structures that don't require the approval of the player. It's just accounting. This may be one of them.

I thought you were "done", scarecrow? Nope, just more of the false narrative claiming that I am saying obese people can't be athletic or powerful. This guy is NOT an NFL lineman: Here's the latest from AHA about obesity: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000973

300# accountants ride bikes too..........when you live in a place like Miami that is flatter than piss on a platter it's actually less work than walking. Feliciano does motocross

He did have rare arm strength. Also important to note that there weren't "as many" players with high end arm talent entering the league then as we see now. You can see a marked improvement in the talent entering the league at QB in the 6-8 years after the 2010 rules changes.......and subsequent growth in QB contracts. It's become physically and mentally easier to play the position.......the TD/int ratio's are absurd nowadays....... and I think more players and their families are deciding to keep top young athletes at QB when in the past they might have played a less dangerous sport to get their scholarship and/or potential pro career. If a guy like Josh Allen chooses baseball instead of chasing that franchise QB dream he may have never made it past the college or low minors level as a pro.

Meh. I've always been a "take the next best QB in round 1" every year and you will ultimately come out ahead proponent.......but I was quite down on Mallet by that point. When you don't have a franchise QB.........you miss every shot you don't take though. Had the Bills taken an outrageous reach and selected Mallet rather than Dareus or Aaron Williams etc...would they have been much worse off? Nope. Even all of the future HOF'ers taken early in that draft likely wouldn't have moved the needle much without a franchise QB. I think we'd come to accept that as truth after watching Buddy Nix put the cart before the horse on draft day but maybe now that we have a franchise QB we may lose sight of that. Had someone here on TSW the other day point out that Paxton Lynch was the next QB taken after the Bills pick in 2016.........questioning my theory........without noting the fact that that by 2018 the only player left from the Bills entire 2016 draft class was Shaq........and he-gone after 2019. Both teams had bad first round picks.....the Broncos drafted later in each round and came out of that draft with All Pro safety Justin Simmons........the Bills got nothing to show for their draft. Point being.........the tendency is to look back and be like "wow, I can't believe somebody wanted to draft that QB.....WHAT a waste of a pick" and then totally ignore the fact that the actual choice made didn't have much impact on the fortunes of the franchise either.

Agree that everything points to them focusing on pass rush impact over stay-at-home types like Star. The actions ever since Star opted out have spoken loudly. I don't think Phillips was an outstanding pass rusher in college though........I watched him a lot at Stanford and yeah he had a couple 7 sack seasons in a pass-happy conference.......but he was really just a very active run defender at the LOS. I think fans often confuse the 1 tech responsibilities with those of a NT. The NT is literally just trying to tie up blockers by lining directly over the center(who is prone to be off-balance) and forcing the offense to choose which guard to use to double him. His job is to go thru the center not around him. The 1 tech's job is to shoot the gap between the guard and center and EITHER absorb the double OR get into the backfield. Marcel Dareus was an all-pro DT with double digit sacks mostly playing the 1 tech in Schwartz defense. Nobody considered him just a space eater. It's a position where the right player can still make a lot of plays. Phillips is a 1 tech DT. He isn't a true NT........but the Bills don't play an odd front and Star isn't a NT-capable player either. Even when strategically positioned as a 1 tech to FORCE double teams Star was still often single blocked. Neither are truly massive. What was nice about Phillips pre-injury was that he was getting off blocks and making tackles........a trait that Star lacks and many fans just assume that is by design because they think he has the limited responsibilities of a NT.

Be that as it may.........it's irrelevant to this branch of the conversation. Nobody is claiming that every 300# player or person is equally healthy. Being clinically obese....regardless of how you get there........ puts you in a category that is generally accepted as being at higher risk for a number of health concerns. It's not more complicated than that.