BADOLBILZ

You don't have to be "afraid" of a player to recognize that you need to defend deep against a guy who put up 1250 yards, over 17 per reception with an average depth of target over 14 yards in 2023. Prior to that teams had begun squatting on the short to intermediate stuff and daring the Bills to throw deep. The combination of a lack of a proven threat, Allen not being in sync with Hollins on deep balls early and Coleman having a very slow start made their passing game toothless against Baltimore, Houston and NYJ. And Cooper did make some key plays. They likely don't hand KC it's only legit loss of the regular season if Cooper doesn't come up big downfield in that game. The harbinger of concern became how little separation Cooper was getting when he and Allen were connecting. As has happened with older Beane acquisitions like Emmanuel Sanders and Leonard Floyd they got diminishing performance as the season went on. The prior season with Flacco, Cooper was getting a step beyond those defenders when he blew up down the stretch. Cooper is one of the more explosive WR of this era. I think he has the second most 200 yard games all-time?

Yeah I'm just sharing relevant national content from a person who uses data to form his opinions. Mister Salty likely thinks Aaron Schatz is an ESPN panel talking head. DVOA is a highly regarded statistical tool. The fact that it's just yet another example of an argument that doesn't really support Beane's notion that it's idiotic to think the WR room is of any concern isn't shared by people who are providing unbiased opinions based on data. Nobody claims it's definitive proof, just more content in the appropriate topic. WR is not the only concern.........banking on improvement over the prior years performance from literally every defensive free agent signing is a sketchy proposition. As is relying on early round DL talent to make a big difference in year 1. But on paper WR looks weak AF relative to other top contenders.

FWIW: From today's ESPN+ article on teams biggest remaining need by Aaron Schatz (formerly football outsider and creator of DVOA): Buffalo Bills Position of need: Outside wide receiver Keon Coleman had a quietly efficient rookie season. Although he missed four games due to injury and had only 29 catches for 556 yards with four touchdowns, Coleman ended with an excellent receiving DVOA of 11.4% -- ranked 30th out of 91 qualifying receivers. The Bills added Joshua Palmer in free agency; he's a useful player with an average DVOA and back-to-back seasons of at least 580 receiving yards. But there's no clear No. 1 option and very little depth behind Coleman and Palmer. The next three receivers -- Khalil Shakir, Curtis Samuel and Elijah Moore -- are slot options. The third-best outside option is probably seventh-round pick Kaden Prather. The Bills should consider bringing Amari Cooper back, if just for depth purposes. General manager Brandon Beane might be OK with the wide receiver depth, but it's not optimal.

Gabe Davis was a failure as a WR2 in Buffalo and a disaster as WR2 in Jacksonville. Bad hands, a route tree that got figured out quickly once they handed him the job, a propensity for mental errors that resulted in a ton of interceptions and critical incompletions in key moments after he became the starter. Wrong way Gabe. On top of that Gabe Davis finished his career in Buffalo injured and left Jacksonville injured. You act like he's healthy in his prime and hasn't put two straight years of sh!t on tape. If it's hard for you to understand you haven't thought it thru. What they need are WR1 and WR2 types. They failed to get that done but in lieu of that the logical thing to do was to draft someone on day 2 or early day 3 to develop on a 4 year rookie contract so they don't have to keep overspending for Curtis Samuel and Josh Palmer types in perpetuity.

I get a kick out of the people who always insist that whatever sh!tty seats they have are the best place to watch the game from so this thread has been fun. Virgil had a particular area request but people gotta' chime in about areas he's not interested in. "Endzone is best" 😂 But the reality is that the closer to midfield is obviously best for seeing the whole field.........and since the front row in the new stadium is about 12' off of ground level as opposed to like 5' it is in the current stadium.........there are no more of those badly obstructed lower seats where the clowns that ham for the camera but can't actually tell what's going on on the field sit. So @Virgil if you can get halfway up the lower bowl and between the 30's that's a great seat for being able to see the whole field and have horizontal and vertical perspective etc..

Not sure if this was @Billsfed1's intention but the exercise really underscores the fact that none of Beane's acquisitions this offseason project as difference makers in 2025.

Yeah, if the Bills reach the playoffs again this season this will basically be year 3 of Joe Brady's "everybody eats" in the playoffs. The formula has worked at regular season intensity. It's even been very good at home against vastly inferior competition in the wild card rounds. But when the competition is legit and the game is on the line will Josh Palmer be getting open against that Chiefs or Ravens CB when they are playing like their life depends on it? I suspect not. That's when the difference makers do their thing. When push literally comes to shove the Bills top WR's have got shoved on their a$$ and Palmer totally fits the mold physically. Palmer is not exceptionally fast. He's not exceptionally physical. He's played just one playoff game but was rendered totally ineffective. He caught 2 balls on 6 targets for 30 yards despite playing basically every snap. That's why the Bills should have been all over DK Metcalf. He is playoff tested and proven. Big, physical, fast. Traits that still play when the opponent is giving 100% effort and intensity. As for Mack.......he played the most snaps of any Bills WR with 66%. So he was out there in all situations. Also had their highest passer rating when targeted at 118. Palmer is getting the Sharty-Sherfield effect........a lot more credit for his outlook than his track record warrants.

So you think gelling is going to turn Palmer into what level of producer though? I mean, I wouldn't be "shocked" if he averaged 50 yards receiving per game over 17 games but I think that's probably the higher end. What's "most likely" is what I always say with these free agent signings..... that they finish with a season not far from their career norms. Look at Mack Hollins. Despite all the PT he got receiving the most snaps of any Bills WR......he put up just 378 yards. His career range is mostly 200's with a high in the 600 range so falling in a bit south of 400 tracked.

Yeah using this kind of data removes the vague "feels" aspect that vastly favors the unfamiliar. Sharty-Sherfield syndrome.

Yeah I think it's very unlikely that Palmer is "great" though. Because he has already played 4 years in the NFL and hasn't showed any inkling of great. You don't see many WR's go from his type of production for 4 seasons to stacking up "great" seasons. Coleman, on the other hand, showed flashes of big play ability until his terrible finish down the stretch. 19.2 yards per catch and 18.8 yards per target. Ideally, for the Bills(and Beane's draft hit/miss ratio) Coleman elevates to being the top boundary WR for the Bills this season.

Agree with the friend. I saw most Steelers games last year and there was a BIG decline in general impact from Watt in games than in seasons prior. I was really surprised at the end of the year that his counting stats had him in contention for DPOY. Then I saw that he had played the most snaps of his career. That's basically why he got 11.5 sacks. 935 snaps. I'm not directly comparing the two as overall players.......but Von Miller had 6 sacks on 279 snaps and Bills fans were not impressed. Watt's stats were STUFFED by lot's of low juice snaps.

Based on passer rating when targeted in 2024(pro football reference) 108.8 Khalil Shakir 93.9 Keon Coleman 88.2 Josh Palmer 84.7 Dalton Kincaid 79.3 Curtis Samuel 44.5 Elijah Moore (191 of 192 NFL pass catchers) I don't know that there is less subjective way to rank them. They have different roles in a passing game. Passer rating basically measures the juice derived for the passing game when you are targeted. I think that's also a near ideal scenario for how many targets they would hope these guys earn in 2025. Knox only had 35 targets so I deemed the sample size(and projected usage at half the targets of Kincaid) was too small to rank him but he was at a decent 94.4. As noted, Moore was one of the very least effective WR's in the NFL last season. He ranked 191 of 192 qualifying receiving targets. Brutally bad. Shakir(47 of 192) is the only one of these guys who ranked top 100 in the NFL last year. 🤢 And for people who want Palmer or Moore adjusted for having different QB's..........that's not really the way it works. There were more than 70 receiving targets who had a higher passer rating when targeted than Allen (101.4) and Herbert (101.7) had as passers. Obviously Shakir is not better than Allen. The Bills targets beyond Shakir are all players most teams would want to be 3rd to 6th options in the passing game.

Yeah, DK is on another level than anything the Bills have but the rest of that room is washed up Bob Woods and some nobodies. Does look like the Bills are going to go into another season without any WR on the roster who'd ever put up even 900 receiving yards in any NFL season after going most of 40 years where they always had at least one WR who had put up at least 1,000 at some point in their career.

I think it's more likely that Diontae Johnson and Martavis Bryant were just washing out. Both had already been providing diminishing returns with Pittsburgh and were passing that 26 year old male physical peak age where the players who aren't taking care of their bodies start declining suddenly. Pickens is 24. Johnson and Bryant were at their peaks at that age. You know what WR teams really should avoid? Former Buffalo Bills. Bob Woods is the only one of like 20 I can remember that didn't disappoint or just continue to suck elsewhere. That goes back to your point that Pittsburgh finds WR talent. Buffalo does not.

Antonio Brown. Did I miss all of the other Pitt WR's that didn't do well that would make acquiring a Pitt WR a cautionary tale? Plaxico Burress immediately put up 1250 for the Giants and went on to catch the game winning TD to beat the undefeated Patriots in the SB. Emmanuel Sanders played tremendous in Denver. Mike Wallace had four 800-1,000 yard seasons after he left Pittsburgh.

I certainly did not see it coming. He was really bad last year for Jacksonville..........but for a team to eat $20M on a mid-level contract like that is a drastic maneuver. I figured they'd give it one more try and hope that the trash he put on tape was just a fluke. Apparently didn't take them as long as it did for Beane to realize he was a disaster as a WR2.

Like I've told you before, I call out your BS because you have potential to be much more than a checker-playing thumb fisher. When you hyperbolize and gaslight and lie it undermines your effort and keeps you at the kids table of the discussion. The casual Bills fan wants the answer to the Bills playoff woes to be one simple thing. It's not. They need to be better wrt personnel and coaching on both sides of the ball in the playoffs. Their WR room lacks difference making talent. To a lesser extent, but notably, so does their pass rush. Their young OC's have been out-coached 3 years in a row by savvy veteran DC's in Spags and Anarumo. Their defensive coaching has not been able to throw curveballs at KC or Cinci in the postseason the way Spags has. However..... They've thrown 6 significant personnel chips at the pass rush this offseason. Brady is more "seasoned" after twice falling prey to Spags. And they've brought in respected defensive minds from very different systems to hopefully address the lack of variety on D. It might not work but those are moves that should yield improvement. All they've done to address WR is replace Cooper and Hollins with a couple of 500 yard veterans who haven't produced as WR1's or WR2's at the NFL level. Let alone be difference makers. Moore in particular has horrible analytics. Coleman and Kincaid *could* improve but they were just terrible late last year. If they were defensive players they wouldn't be getting handed jobs back with little or no competition like they are now. The failure to address the WR issue is glaring. Beane knows it's the area of need he hasn't done the most at. That's why he is testy about it.

They can't go back to the mistakes. They already are taking a risk bringing in Moore.......who had 8 INT's thrown his way when targeted last year. Gabe was good for 6 in both 2022 and 2023. Jacksonville got the whole Gabe experience last year. He had some killer drops, errors and then would catch a TD after the game was out of hand and pad his stats. That's why they ate $20M.

He's "too" a lot of things that aren't good. He doesn't have professional level hands, he is not a good route runner and he was consistently not where Josh Allen expected him to be. They didn't "improve" the WR corps last offseason but they got rid of a lot of interceptions when they let Gabe go. Those turnovers were critical to regular season performance. You are still going to get beaten deeper in the playoffs without difference makers but we did see the difference not turning the ball over made during the regular season.

I had heard that Gabe was in Buffalo yesterday from an attorney friend........I don't know why, maybe it was just an event or something but then to hear he was cut today I half expect Beane to offer Wrong Way Gabe $6M or something to come back. He always finds a way to overpay former Bills.

You literally said it was a fact that the 2024 Bills were the 16th greatest offense. There was no context behind it, which is the first indicator that something is subjective and not fact. Then said your fact was a subjective take not a fact as if you hadn't lead with "facts". Shystie. And like I said........you claimed they had the "most points" in the AFC playoffs without noting that they played one more game than anyone else. THEN you said that you had stated points per game. That was a lie. Shystie I didn't dispute that the Bills scored slightly more per game. But it's ridiculous to take pride in a 2 game sample size versus a 3 game sample size when the other team literally outscored you in one of those games. Just clownish attempt to manipulate an argument(which wasn't with me, btw, you were trying to pull your BS on someone else). I am just pointing out that you are full of sh!t and regularly, intentionally use false information in your arguments. I called you out. As I often do. And you don't like it. So peace out TO YOU, shyster. 😂

Yep. Allen has had his moments where he's made mistakes in the clutch. But when they've failed in the clutch it's WAY too often because of the pass catchers. The 2023 loss to KC was largely on Allen and Brady (with an assist to Chris Jones) for foiling their idiotic play call after the 2 minute warning. But Allen made the play this year. If Kincaid just catches that arm punt it may go down as one of the greatest plays by Allen, recovering from being fooled by a great call by Spags.

It matters because when put in context.........they scored the 33rd all-time most points per game in the 5th highest scoring year ever........what that tells you is that it was NOT a historic offensive season. Not even the Bills best offense ever when you consider the point differential versus league average. That was the 1975 Bills. Your point about the Bills scoring the most points in the AFC playoffs doesn't account for the fact that they were the only team that played 3 games. I mean you can't even pick a lane. And after insisting your stats....err "facts".......were definitive proof that poor defense deserves all the blame for the team not advancing to a SB then you suddenly are asking for subjectivity on your facts. 😂

Shame on you @Mikey152 for fake-claiming a lie from Kirby. Brandon Beane himself has literally bragged about scoring 7 more points per game with Cooper as a defense for trading the 3rd round pick.