GrudginglyPessimistic

The Byrd man is definitely his nickname of choice by popular use (and he has even stoked its use by making his post INT celebration him flapping his arms like wings). However, even after his first 3 or 4 INTs it was clear he was gonna get a nickname and one of my offerings was gonna be to call him Tipdrill. Of his 7 INTs my sense the primary cause was 2 passes- good luck of being in the right place at the right time to INT poorly thrown balls, It is certainly the case on these throws that if the opposing QB had simply made an average throw Byrd was no where near the receiver to defend the pass (in at least one case this is no rap on him as he did seem to have the primary coverage responsibility it was simply that badly thrown. Nevertheless even if he lucked into being in the right spot, he still deserves great credit on these INTs as many defenders may well muff such an unexpected gift. 2 or 3 passes- tremendous reactions shown by Byrd on two passes that were clearly tipped and he reacted well and caught them and one which may well have been tipped and he got it. 1 or 2 passes- they might have been simply poor passes but it looked to me like Byrd did anticipate where the ball was gonna be thrown and when the QB went there he grabbed it. Its hard to know what he thought and also what the QB was trying to do but I think Byrd got these INTs not only with great hands and good reactions but with a good head also. 1 pass- simply extraordinary reflexes by this true ball hawk who was willing to go horizontal and sacrifice his body to get the ball. Regardless, he has demonstrated that lucky or not he has a combination of natural and acquired play reading ability, tremendous hands and reflexes, and a ballhawk desire which adds up to INTs. Even better a post above suggests that Byrd may well see some of his effectiveness neutralized as opposing QBs get more tape on him. I hope so because if so the Bills have won the first battle with the QBs because rather than trying to force the Bills to stop them the opponents are instead going to be altering their O to avoid the Byrdman. This will be particularly difficult against the Tampa 2 style D the Bills employ as their base D. This D is based on the D players making the same read and choosing between several coverage schemes which can be applied out of the same base D. Traditionally in our Cover 2 as best as I can tell (they do vary it a lot because you have to or you end up 0-8, I am limited in my knowledge by being just a fan, and sometimes the Bills look so bad it impossible to tell what the heck they are doing) the CBs will have outside coverage through 12-15 yards and then they let the receiver go to the safeties who cover the outside while Pos covers the deep middle on pass plays (when he reads run Pos goes in to the point of attack). However, the Bills vary this coverage by having the D play traditional match-ups and the CBs have outside deep coverage. Also they can alter it by playing more zone or more 1-1 match-ups if they feel the personnel allows them to do this (they also seem to have D packages for when the O attack is so biased to look for a player like Johnson they may assign a player to cover him all over the field. It varies or you die. Our Cover 2 when it is working well, make it tough for the QB because the D set looks the same whether the Bills are doing the traditional deep safety cover outside or whether the CBs are running all the way downfield. The QB seems to be looking for the usual traditional D tip off of how the strong safety is playing or the positioning of the strong versus the free safety to tell which way the coverage is sliding and thus what receivers are likely to be uncovered or whether he should audible to a run or to a pass. In the Bills Cover 2, the strong and free safety are pretty interchangeable and the general scheme looks the same regardless of whether you are doing a traditional Cover 2 coverage or varying it to do a deep CB coverage. If the other team is now altering their routes to stay away from Byrd it really screws around with their game plan. Also, gameplaning will not be enough to stay away from Byrd as the QB will need to make a read as he comes to the line on where the heck Byrd is likely to be. I am only sorry we do not have Vince Young this week as my guess is that if he plays like before he is very dangerous as few free-lance and improvise as well as Young. However, TN is going to install a gameplan which calls on him to make a series of complex reads then Byrd might as well get ready for some INT chances.

The big problem with Pos is simply that he cannot stay on the field consistently. While his injuries have not been diverse or constant enough to fairly label him as injury prone, one needs to seriously worry whether his forearm is just to brittle for a team to count on him to be their answer at MLB. It may be simple bad luck or it may be a brittle forearm. Who knows. All we do know is the results and the results are that two truncated seasons in your first two are not a good sign. I like him as a player he actually is fast as advertised (he can do the deep cover role in the middle of the field as we demand of the MLB in the Tampa 2 style Cover 2 we run) He is a good tackler as is indicated by his high % of solo tackles to his credit vs. assisted tackles. His shows good signs of being the intelligent guy as advertised and times his delayed blitzes quite well as shown by him registering 3 sacks in a season where is play has been limited by injury. Some folks still complain that like London Fletcher he makes contact too deep in our D backfield, but just as these complaints are reduced to whines by folks who do not realize that our bend but do not break D actually calls for the MLB not so much to play the run stuffer but actually plays back often in pass coverage or running the zone blitz for us. Poz is actually a lesser player than Fletch was (in his last year here he led LBs for INTs in the NFL, has kept his career and central role going in pretty bad DeadSkins team) and is not yet what we hoped for. The sad thing is that with the lack of depth in the LB unit and season ending injuries to two players we likely are going to need to find a quality LB this off-season. Expectations of Poz were ridiculously high and surprise he has not met them. We need some help at LB.

I would also vote for extending Bledsoe to be the worst individual move by the FO in the aughts, but I think it really misses the mark to declare Beldsoe a cancer. A cancer IMHO is a player who divides the body of the team player against player and.or fan against fan. Even worse a cancer seems to have the intent to play one side against the other. I think TO was a cancer in SF, definitely in Philly and to some extent in Dallas (he actively went after the QBs like Garcia, McNabb, and to some extent Romo though I think a little of that was thrust upon him by the media overinterpreting his comment). However, I do not think that Bledsoe divided anything here as most teammates were not asked to choose sides by Bledsoe or JP and most fans were pretty much in agreement to be behind and hopeful for Bledsoe in his first year when he honestly deserved the comeback player of the year award and his reserve Pro Bowl nod (if you disagree and think this was obvious then who are the several QBs who would have been better Pro Bowl picks who were left off for Bledsoe). I also think most fans and the media were pretty united in seeing the extension of Bledsoe as a bad move. Pathetic yes but no cancer there. Was Bledsoe merely playing for a paycheck? I saw no signs of that and felt he was doing his best but the problem was his best was simply not good enough. I think he is a very talented athlete who really needs a good structure to play within so that he does not need to make quick decisions as that has not been his strength. Great arm? For sure. Tough guy? For sure. He got sacked and sacked again but came back to hang in the pocket and fire the pass (and pat pat hold have his big body get whacked again). Able to see what is happening and analyze it? Yes, but too slowly as a player in a game. I think the answer to this is also yes as Tom Brady really sang Bledsoe's praises when he stood on the sideline with a collapsed lung and would dissect and talk over the plays with Brady after the fact. An SB winning QB? Nope, probably never. His mind was just not quick enough to react quickly and consistently well to being gamed by an opposing DC. However, a cancer? I just do not see it. When Brady took his job due to his collapsed lung, by all accounts Bledsoe was helpful to the young Brady and even more amazing when Brady got hurt and Bledsoe threw the winning TD in a must-win game in their 1st SB run he did not launch a public campaign for Belicheat to leave him in the starting role. He was not a cancer before he got here and never really divided the Bills and their fans like the RJ vs. Flutie squabbles. Just cause you see he could not adequately do the job did not and does not make him a cancer even if you are right on the assessment of his play.

It certainly is no proof (what outsider can really know what is in another's heart and head and actually most of us usually take a little time to discover all the demons that drive our own decisions so how can an outsider really prove anything). This is my thinking however on the situation and the facts of the case as I understand them (again with full knowledge that my understanding of the facts is in no way complete) 1. It makes sense to me that most people would be hurt, disagree with, be put out about getting fired from a job and the guy you hired gets the job (and wins an SB leading the team on top of all that). I do not know TD, he seems like a very competent guy and my guess is that he is a nice enough guy to many. Maybe he is a superior human being and simply chalks up his losing out in Pitts to the other guy winning and he is beyond that. Maybe. However, if true I would be surprised as I think it would be a pretty normal reaction to need your boss who hires you to be watchful of and provide a check and balance on any tendency you showed to operate in ways that demonstrate a never again sort of mantra to an HC you hired developing a relationship with the owner who hired you and running you out of town. Maybe this initial thesis is wrong and if so I would love to hear the thought chain and in particular see the public evidence of my surmise being incorrect. 2. The public showing of the release of Larry Centers is probably the most direct piece that us outsiders can see of there being a difference between TD and GW. GW states publicly that Centers will remain a Bill as long as he wants to. Within a week Centers is released and Sam Gash is signed. Either GW lied publicly about his endorsement of Centers (neither seems to fit his character and would be just stupid if he did), or he was shooting off his mouth about who was on the roster and had no clue as to what the truth was (pretty doubtful and even more worrisome for a Bills fan if HC ignorance was the culprit here) or most likely he strayed publicly into the GM domain and was slapped back to reality with Centers taking the financial and emotional hit. Perhaps you have some other viable explanation, but I found this episode stunning and revealing to the outside fan. 3. The whole TD approach to team building proved to be pretty bad (most would agree). I was pretty psyched when we hired TD. It was pretty bad for this fan when our GM suddenly bolted to SD and the owner was obviously surprised and had bought the mantra from the GM that he would not even talk contract until the season was over. Even worse our HC had surrendered while we were still alive mathematically (and a team with the exact same record whom we played head to head in our final games actually made the playoffs). Wade was deservedly canned but amidst the owner at best misreading his GM and having no apparent plan B was off tilting at windmills forcing the fired HC to get his last years salary he was contractually obliged through an arbitration which all who said so publicly said he was gonna lose. Signing TD seemed a goshsend in that he not only built a team which eventually won it all and almost always competed, but he took the cash of the last year owed him and traveled the league for the media seeing players and building contacts. TD seemed just about perfect and I figured the main thing the owner had to do was check any bruised feelings exhibited by TD and we would be good to go. This was my thinking going in to the TD era and please correct me if I was wrong in any of this thinking knowing what I knew then (knowing what we know now in hindsight is easy but then I was pretty psyched. My thinking revolves around trying to explain why it went so bad. 4 (Feel free to get off the bus here since now I go into fact free opinion). TD began to do a very good job on the business side almost from the word go. I remember the days not to far back in the past where when one went to the will call window, the tickets were divided into shoeboxes that looked like the came from under Mr. Ralph's bed. TD moved this team's business practices into the 20th century (finally as it was now the 21st century) and beyond as he developed partnerships with folks like Wegmans which made tickets more easily available to fans, cut a deal with St. John's Fisher which not only helped the regional strategy key to making Buffalo a larger market but brought fans the NFL experience from a nice but outmoded collegiate experience in Fredonia. Things looked good as though Mr. Ralph would give up some of his powers to the team's first time President of Football Operations (or some lofty title like that) and perhaps nip in the bud some of Mr. Ralph's meddling (which he had every right to do as the owner) which really hurt the team as he had been a partner in badly botched relationships with is last two GMs, had personally misjudged how much Jimbo had left when he made a handshake deal with him to compensate him despite the salary cap in his next contract (which ever happened but the payoff did), and other probable miscues that spelled disaster for the QB position. However, TD actually working to hire an HC who would and could not fire him seemed to me to be the best explanation for" A. His passing over coaches available who had been to the dance before (I know there were some but forget who they were) and passing over seemingly more accomplished candidates (GW was a D guru but Marvin Lewis was even more respected- John Fox had also led one unit to the show like GW and in hindsight has accomplished more as an HC than GW) but he was the GM so I was at least willing to trust but verify as a fan. B. Allowed his young offensively inexperienced HC to assemble a bunch of youngsters as ACs who also had no record of offensive success. This led to him having to fire his OC after a season (despite Mr. Ralph having to pay guys to do nothing or be out of the NFL). This made little sense or someone should have been held accountable for his major hiring error. C. It appeared GW took the heat for this one as Kevin Killdrive a former failed crony of TDs came in as OC (which turned out to be another interesting inside politics choice since actually apparently TD was interested in someone else and it was GW who pushed for Killdrive, D. TD also seemed to bring in a couple of other old offensive types to hold GWs hand (the RB position coach was a friend of TD with some former OC experience. Yet despite this assemblage of talent in waiting, the team never changed from the predictable style which got Killdrive canned with a year left on his contract a long with GW not being brought back. E. The histrionics continued with TD foolishly extending Bledsoe (we should have said thanks for one good season and sorry for one bad one and let him walk. Instead he not only extended Bledsoe but rushed JP along in a feeble attempt to create a winner. All of this happened with the histrionics of the Mularkey hiring, the firing of TD, apparent pressuring of MM out the door and Mr. Ralph led rebuilding after the deluge. I am simply looking for some series of explanation (I assume the cause was not one simple thinh) but in looking for one lead reason, the one which seems to fit what happened as best as I can tell was TD being very good at many facets of the job (great business partnerships, very good market sense and a pair of cajones to use it like the knife job he did on ATL on the PP deal and trading druggee Henry to TN for a first day draft pick. He had his clunkers to like misreading the Phat Pat situation to him going to MN for apparently less than TDs bottomline and balls of stone getting future Pro Bowler WM for a middle first round pick but proving unable to manage this child with a penis into a reasonable Pro, but no one is perfect, and some very good cap management and player assessment as TD scrapped a few old pros from the garbage pile like Sam Adams for chump change and they proved to be good. Yet, if I am looking for a lead failing for why someone who clearly has forgotten more about football than most of us can remember presided over such a clusterfrank. My candidate is the idea that he was motivated by saying never again to be run out of town by a coach he hired. I am open to other explanations. C.

Definitely what we see here are a series of decisions which make sense as individual decisions (taking a chance to get a Milloy so as not to have to rely on Coy Wire) but in the big picture these individual "reasonable" decisions do not make any sense when there is a mistaken (or no) real overarching vision for building the team over the long term. Ironically, at the point where the decision was made to go with Milloy/Vincent short-term rather than Winfield in a long-term vision the Bills were arguably on the verge (at least statistically) of moving to the next level. My recollection (which may be fuzzy as we luckily get older) was that the Bills were coming off a bad spell linked to rebuilding and Bledsoe had QB'ed the team to an 8-8 record the year before after a horrendous record while rebuilding from the wreckage to the cap of the end of the great teams and the DF/RJ cap disaster. The next level would have been the team competing and even making the playoffs after the 8-8 record. The trade for Milloy and his teaming up with Bledsoe were the keys from my perspective to the 31-0 blowout of the Pats in the opener. However, the lack of a coherent long-term vision reared its head as opponents figured out thanks to the textbook supplied by Belicheat the year before on how to beat Bledsoe (a textbook that the Bills fooled us all -including SI which put the Pats trashing on the cover- because the Pats victory was a one-off supplied with the latest info from Milloy, inspiration for both Milloy and Bledsoe to get revenge on Belicheat, and the Pats still being in disarray as Belicheat so pissed off the vets with his mishandling of the Milloy situation they had the temerity to call him out publicly. The Bills however had dysfunctional leadership from TD on up as this team had hired the not ready for primetime GW as HC and his OC had gotten canned even on a team that had improved a ton. TD had hired Kevin Killdrive who showed no ability to change his style even when it was seizing up. It ironically was going according to plan for TD as one of his primary goals seemed to be not putting an HC he hired in a position to run him out of town like Cowher did and he seemed to motivated as much by making sure he hired an HC he could beat if it came to that (GW) and taking steps to beat down that HC when he crossed a line into TD's world (ex. the replacing of Centers with Gash within days of GW announcing publicly that Centers would be in Buffalo as long as he wanted to be. Mr. Ralph did a pretty good job finding an at least knowledgable and actually quite talented at some aspects of the GMdom on short notice (from his brutalizing of the relationship with Butler) in TD. However, Mr. Ralph completely failed to provide a reasonable check and balance for TDs worst failings and he had to be canned as these miscues stacked up. Individual decisions arguably make sense, but there is one common denominator in our 0 for a decade playoff performance and that ain't Jauron, Brandon, TD, MM, GW or even Marv.

One does not ALWAYS offer low in the negotiation. If you wonder how some players are signed within an hour of the start of the FA signing period, this is not simply due to tampering or behind the scenes illegal negotiations there is a legit negotiating tactic often called the "take-bid" which is designed to figure out what a player is likely to get on the open market after negotiations and then make him an offer near or even slightly higher than what you think the player actual market value is. You make this grand offer and then give the player a short time to sign it (often before he or his agent leave the room) and the player (or GM candidate in this case) decode whether to take the for sure bird in the hand or risk that and try to blow past his market value in the negotiation. If Mr. Ralph really wanted Butler for sure or had read the market righr and saw SD might go after him then low-balling would be exactly the wrong negotiating tactic to take and doing a take out bid that takes SD put of the equation would have been the smarter move.

In terms of adding info to the demise of Polian and then Butler under Mr. Ralph, note should also be made of the ugly well publicized battle between Mr. Ralph and Wade Philips. Bum's kid deserved to be canned when he publicly gave up in his final season a couple of games before the Bills were mathematically eliminated (a particular travesty when Indy with the exact same record at the time Wade said no mas had the exact same record). The problem in typical Mr. Ralph MO was that he canned Wade who had another year left on his contract and then tried to screw him out of the last year's payment with claims Wade quit. Everyone in the league told Mr. Ralph he should simply pay Wade, but Ralphie forced him to arbitration who rule in Wade-os favor. Mr. Ralph deserves praise for keeping the Bills here when there were huge offers to go elsewhere, but along with this praise honestly needs to acknowledge the reality that as much blame as Jauron gets he is not responsible for about 2/3 of our being 0 for about a decade in making the playoffs. Jauron cannot do it but the calls for his head may be sweet revenge but do not speak to solving the problems which confront this team.

Yes Virginia the Bills in fact do suck. However having these 3 leave as FA is not an indicator of why they suck as each of these players left not due to some congenital lack of foresight in not extending these players but due to marketplace specifics in each case. 1. Winfield is probably the worse example of anyone maintaining that the Bills made a decision to let him walk and lacked foresight as to his skills and teambuilding. He left here after the 2003 season but press reports went into detail after the 2002 season of negotiations going on between Winfield's agent and the Bills to extend his deal a full season before he was eligible for FA. The reality was that 1. the unexpected happened as two of the vets the Bills signed to play SS (Chad Cota and Ainsley Battle) both retired after coming to the Bills camp and left us with Coy Wire as our likely SS. and 2. Lawyer Milloy suddenly and unexpectedly came on the market as an FA and the Bills used the cap room they had set aside to extend Winfield to grab Milloy. They showed every intention of showing the foresight to extend Winfield but reality saw him enter FA. Ultimately the Bills (and the rest of the league lusting after AW) were simply unable to match the contract MN used to get AW as they had a ton of cap room due to a favorable arbiters finding that multi-millions charged to their cap the year before in fact was not legally charged to their cap. 2. Williams is probably the best example though of the Bills not having the foresight to to make the right deal. They did have the foresight to want him back and they did not want him to leave. TD however had his own Bellicheatian moment and miscalculated what a vet would do when the FO plated the tough guy in negotiations over chump change. TD made an offer and probably told Williams agent that was all he could do or may have invited him to get a better deal elsewhere. Phat Pat went and signed a deal with MN which was for less money than TD would have eventually offered, but the damage was done and PW was gone leaving TD to complain publicly that Phat Pat's agent had not communicated a higher offer to his client. Yeah right. TD actually proved to be pretty good at reading and playing the market (he ripped a new one for ATL in the Peerless deal and for TN when he got a first day pick for druggie Henry, but he got schooled on the Williams deal. The problem though was not the Bills deciding to let the FA walk it was letting the FA walk when they had money they were willing to pay him higher than the contract he signed. 3. I think you also do not have the Greer/McKelvin situation totally correct. Greer actually showed good play in pre-season going horizontal against DET on one play I remember for an INT and making a heads up play for an INT in another preseason game. Yet despite these outstanding performances when the games did not count, he could not produce these results on the field despite getting starts in both his rookie year and a couple of starts his second year but he did not log an INT. His third season saw a bit of a regression as he could not even crack the starting line-up and produced no INTs olaying mostly a nickel role. ST was a very important thing on this team as Bobby April was making this a key part for a dismal team and Greer did not even earn a look at being a key position player by starring on ST. ST performance was also a key to why they chose McKelvin. The Bills really thought he was a top 10 pick who when he was available to them at pick #11 they had to look twice. Looking at his KR ability and having the foresight to see McGee might be the shutdown CV they needed if he could focus only on the CB game and give up return duty and also Parrosh was a talented return guy but a bit of a smurf on the injury front, McKelvin was a pretty obvious choice as Greer could never deliver the potential ST benefits McKelvin could and even if Greer suddenly produced well as a CB he had been inconsistent in this regard his first few years. The FO of the Bills definitely sucks (with the problems starting at the demonstrated record of failure right at the top) but letting D players pursue their contractual rights is not demonstrated as a reason why they suck based on the reality of what happened.

I agree that the FO (and actually the owner who hired them) bear ultimate responsibility for our suckitude. However, I do not think you present a compelling case that consistently bad drafting was the cause of this. I think you make the common mistake of folks who have drunk the Mel Kiper Kool-Aid of viewing the draft as if it is something which can be calculated and figured out. Actually, most of what can be calculated is done for everyone and shared at the Combine. When one adds in the variables of what a specific teams specific needs are (if you have Brett Favre you do not draft Peyton Manning) and dumb luck (injuries and other stuff) the draft is pretty much a crapshoot. The simple fact is while the conventional wisdom is a first round pick should be a first round starter, the actual truth is that only a hair above half of first round picks are starters their first year. From any given draft, there is a strong bias to those first year starters being among the first 10 picks. In the past decade the Bills have had two of those picks Williams was a clear bust (though not the worst pick in that same draft as we wasted a #4 on Williams but Det wasted a #3 on Harrington. The Bills have had their strong share of miscues in the last decade of drafting, but particularly in the last few years have gotten some contributions from several second day choices as well. Since you do not lay out several examples of other teams who did obviously better with their drafting, the misses and hits of Bills drafting points to our FO not getting it right but remains unproven or unsubstantiated for the claims you make.

I do not think that is the Bills policy at all though. They pretty clearly seemed to have every intention of resigning Winfield the year before he hit FA as the reports in Bills Daily and in the general media I saw were that negotiations were moving along between TD and Winfield. The Bills had set aside $4-6 million annually under their cap which they had for extending Winfield. They were negotiating with each side moving toward the last minute when pre-season ended to get the best deal they could. However, unexpectedly, Lawyer Milloy came onto the market when Belicheat misread how far he was willing to go. TD, who had seen his plan A and Plan B at SS, Chad Cota and Ainsley Battle both signed with the Bills but retired after carting their old bodies to training camp. The Bills were left with a plan C of starting Coy Wire at SS and TD allocated the $ set aside for Winfield to sign Milloy (at least according to reputable sources like Winfield who lamented that these were simply the breaks). In addition to the clear desire to sign Winfield except cap circumstances intruded, I think few and now no one disagrees with the decision to not sign Clements to the biggest contract ever given to a defensive player that the market required for the 9ers to get him. There was some understandable whining that Marv should have not given away the right to tag him if we did not want to give him a huge deal, but not only has time proven that not signing him to a huge contract was the right move. but actually in the short term we gave up nothing in terms of $ for a year of relative peace. Greer also was a player who never really was good enough in his early years here to force his way into the starting line-up as several other Bills like McGee, Williams, and even Ellison have done. He also has been adequately replaced with FA signings like Drayton, so I think this was a good choice as well. I do not see clear signs nor has there been some declaration by the Bills of there being an absolute policy not to resign CBs.

IF Kelly has a group which can generate the capital to get this team (a big IF) my sense is a key to him making the acquisition is that the NFLPA as arguably the majority partner in the enterprise called the NFL (the latest CBA grants them 60.5% of the total revenues of the league and clearly they were recognized as a partner in the CBA after the NFLPA threatened to decertify itself and the current CBA arguably makes them the majority partner) has a strategy of having groups of employees eventually become the team owners. It clearly is not your grandma's NFL anymore with the individual owners like Halas (whom Ditka once offered that he through nickles around like they were manhole covers) are dead and their final remnants like Mr. Ralph will be dead sooner rather than later. Team owners ran kicking and screaming from living in a true free market when the NFLPA threatened to decertify itself and like it or not there is going to have to be a new ownership model. Efforts at corporate ownership has been tried but for the most part have failed so it is doubtful these sources of capital will be the basis of a new model. Individuals with large capital bases like the Dan Snyders or Mark Cubans also present an option, but they seem to offer little potential beyond the outmoded Mr. Ralph and Halas family models. The NFL employees who now have parleyed their talent through the NFLPA into growing pools of assets may represent a different model of employee and former employee ownership which might be the basis of a new NFL ownership strategy. I hope it does.

The main reason is that it would be totally misguided as an attempt to improve this team's performance this year or in the long term. TO pretty clearly is not the cause of the Bills current offensive and team feebleness. To attempt to focus on him and any problems with his attitude as the cause or even the first step to be taken in rebuilding or improving this team would be so misguided as to make the problems worse. The media might buy some of this as it would certainly help Sully and the Buffalo Snooze sell column inches and WGR sell commercials around the dead air it call commentary, but if anything it would divide this team as a chunk of players might agree but a chunk would see it as looking for a scapegoat. In fact, if anyone has a problem with TO and his attitude or play then their legitimate target should be the FO that acquired him. TO was well known as bringing rancor to a team and well known for not only scoring TDS (as he did today) but also missing passes (as he did today as well though how much you want to blame Fitzy for a poorly thrown fade pass in the endzone, Fitzy for joining Owens in a horrible miscue on the INT, or Jauron for not demanding his players practice together on Friday- you tell me). TO is at worst a symptom and not the cause of the losing ways of this team. The problems have led to the Bills going 0 fora decade and again like it or not its tough to blame TO for about 9 years of that (and also tough to even blame Jauron for the vast majority of that. If this team were just that close and merely adjusting player attitudes would put them over the top then focusing on TO MIGHT be a sane move (if one laid out the steps you are going to take from this plan A to get to some Plan M or Plan Z move that works) but the one reason why you would not bench the only player to score a TD today is because it would be such a misguided non-strategy that it would be nuts to do.

The amusing thing about this post is the description of American football as like watching paint dry is exactly the same phrase I have heard American football fans use to describe what watching soccer (or world football) is like. There was a great Simpson's episode which was built around world football coming to the US and a contrast presented for laughter of two announcers (the US announcer droning on describing one pass and then another and then another and the foreign announcer with great excitement describing one pass and then another and then another). When it comes down to it watching virtually any sport is like watching paint dry (I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out, baseball which I love is the ultimate paint drying experience compared to either American or world football). Ultimately the sport comes down to the rivalry and the tradition embodied in the game really cam make it a marketable product. The actual factors which may determine how well American football can be expanded overseas probably has more to do with how other countries view America during and after the Barack Obama episode than the nuts and bolts of the particular game. Again NFL owners will want to go where the money is. The money is going global and so too will the NFL regardless of whether the author of this note, Homer Simpson, or whoever finds a particular game to be like watching paint dry. Ironically, this is one of the better hopes for the Bills staying in Buffalo. The market is not going to be found in the particular stadium or municipality, the market and the money are eyeballs to get the networks to ship real money to the team owners. The team owners are not the individuals of the bygoing and bygone era of the Halases or the Wilsons. This type of owner is dead or dying. What will happen in the future for the Bills is going to be determined by the wishes of 70% or so of the owners who have an absolute veto or who is in fact a QUALIFIED highest bidder for Mr. Ralph's estate.

Who are you pissed at? It shouldn't be the Bills as though TD certainly made a bunch of errors he deserved to be canned for, not signing Winfield was not one of them. He clearly had every intention of extending Winfield a season before he hit FA as the Bills were sitting on a bunch of cap room about the size of a nice extension for Winfield but a pretty sweet deal for the Bills compared to what the market later deservedly gave to him. Milloy suddenly hitting the market was a surprise to everyone (Bellicheat most of all apparently) and given that both our plan A and plan B retire (Chad Cota and Ainsley Battle both signed and then retired) getting Milloy was expensive but a much better option than going with Coy Wire at SS with no back-up. Once Winfield hit the FA market, the rules worked like they were supposed to and NYJ seemed to be on the verge of outbidding us. While one might be semi-reasonably pissed IF the Bills had let Winfield go to a team we would face twice a year, there was simply no way mathematically possible for us to match the Vikes offer. I think it was due to an arbiters ruling and a couple of other factors the Vikes actually had to spend a bunch of money and allocate it to the cap or they would be in violation of the CBA. The Vikes were clever in the deal they offered Winfield in that by a freak of timing of the arbiters ruling no team was in a position to specifically match their offer to Winfield as it did not take the traditional route of allocating the contract over several years salary caps but allocated to the cap upfront in the first year. In theory all of this should be academic as either with the single year or multi-year cap hit the upfront allocation is roughly the same. However, the Vikes arranged the contract so no one could match it without taking a roughly $12 million cap hit for one salary. I think its hard to blame the Bills because the market simply beat them regardless their choice and that they made a good faith effort to extend Winfield a year early but failed to do this deal for pretty good reasons. It just doesn't strike me as upsetting the way we lost Winfield. TD seemed to be setting him up to and Winfield and his agent were pretty clearly negotiating an extension for him the year before he hit FA. Both sides seemed to be doing it the way it is done in that TD was likely to get him for a lot less than what the FA market would give him, but Winfield would almost certainly take the bird in the hand of huge dollars rather than ridiculously huge dollars in exchange for signing before he faced another grueling NFL season. A season where if he got hurt badly he might lose it all. The two sides were grinding it out until the last minute as good negotiators do, when suddenly and surprisingly Lawyer Milloy hit the free market cause Billicheat tried to roll him. TD used the cap room he had set aside for Winfield to get Milloy. Given that the alternative after Cota and Battle both retired that we would have had to go with Coy Wire as the starting full safety going after Milloy was the right move to make. The full season saw not only Winfield survive but he played quite well and was gonna get a big offer from the market. I thought it was bad but I was not pissed at the Bills when NYJ outbid us

I do not think TO has been an attitude problem for us at all this year. Nor is this surprising at all as the TO MO in the past is that in his first year at all because he is busy being a good teammate and winning the hearts and minds of fans. He actually has played a positive role on the field as he still attracts dts which make it much easier for Evans to work as he gets one of ones. The problem we have had has not been TOs attitude but the FO and braintrust being so screwed up they had to can the OC in the week before the first game. If Singletary was gonna make a difference it would not be by jumping to the same conclusion as Sully and various legends in their own mind reporters at ESPN that Owens needed to be throttled, it would have been in getting a real OC to manage the O for him.

My recollection was that it was pretty clear that TD was hanging on to money under the cap with the intention of extending Winfield a year before we would have been forced by FA to do this. Media outlets reported that contract re-negotiations were moving forward but several events happened which remade the Bills priorities. 1. The Bills had a gap at safety but planned to fill it by by attracting vets, Chad Cota and Ainsley Battle to compete with Wire for the SS job. However, both Cota and Battle decided to retire after coming to the Bills camp and it became clearer that Wire was not going to do the job. 2. Bill Belicheat completely mismanaged contract talks with Lawyer Milloy and refused to take even a small reduction in his base pay and come crawling back to Pats camp. TD jumped all over the sudden surprising availability of Milloy (with the result being the Bills handed the Pats their heads in the first game of the season with Bledsoe armed with the most recent Pats thinking and plays from Milloy) and Bellicheat got public holy heck from the Pats players). Unfortunately, there was another bidder for Milloy as the Bears had an opening for a starting safety and plenty of cap room. TD made his typical huge takeout bid to win Milloy but did so at the cost of extending Winfield (who not only received a FA offer the next off-season it would have been difficult for the Bills to match, he also reneged on his verbal desl with NYJ and then took a huge upfront money deal with MN no one could match. I think it is hard for anyone to rationally claim the Bills should not have filled the hole they filled with Milloy (are you really gonna argue Coy Wire should have started for us at SS that year) or blame him for paying what he had to pay to get him since there was another bidder in the market. I also think it is just factually inaccurate for anyone to claim the Bills foolishly gave up on Winfield as a failure because he did not make enough INTs. He was a tackling wizard and a shut down cover guy for the Bills whom we relied upon heavily in our D. He was the pivotal player in one game (I think against TB where he simply took the the TE they relied upon heavily out of the game with two tackles behind the line for 5+ yard losses. In a game against KC, the Bill actually put the CB man to man on TE Gonzales and shut him down. Winfield did not produce INTs but he was a stud for us and the Bills gave all signs of trying to sign him if we could have gotten a sweetheart extension done before the market put him out of reach for us.

Agreed that the right call was made on Clements. In fact Marv made the right call in guaranteeing Clements he would not franchise him as he bought a year of relative labor peace without Clements throwing the same hissy fit which worked out quite well for Peters when he faced down the FO and they caved in and gave him what he wanted. Mr. Ralph does not deserve any grief whatsoever for the way Clements was handled. He has tons of personal errors he and virtually he alone seemingly made to screw us up and lead the way in making us 0 for a decade in making the playoffs. These screw ups go back to the firing of Polian, a bad misread on how much Jimbo has left when he made the handshake deal with him and a series of goshawful mismanagments in terms of Butler, Wade, TD. GW, Mularkey, Brandon, etc. Mr. Ralph deserves praise for keeping the Bills here when there were clearly more money to be made elsewhere, but the costs of him screwing up all over the place have to be acknowledged by any rational person.

I disagree with this observation and if you want stats that indicate (stats really PROVE very little but they can be good indicators) if you look back at the massive number of tackles which Fletcher logged for this team the vast majority of them were actually solo tackles. If he was getting run over and needed help there would be a higher proportion of assisted tackles and of he was just getting run through there would not be so many tackles to his credit at all. My observation was that the more valid complaint about Ftech's tackles was that he initiated contact to far back in the D backfield which to me was more of a problem with how the DC used him as he was called upon to be on our primary pass defenders (a role which saw him lead all LBs in the NFL in INTs his last season here) and use his speed and ball hawk ability to cover WRs over the deep middle in the Tampa 2 style D we employed. In general the run D when he was hear was actually pretty well known for not giving up a ton of 100 yard games to some very good RB opponents and the long runs we see this year when an RB breaks through our DL and then blows through the second level to peel off 60-70 yard runs has already happened several times this year and was a rarity if non-existent with Fletch patrolling the MLB slot. My sense was the reason we let Fletch go was because the FO braintrust decided to get rid of all the older Bills and set their own tone. In some cases like TKO/Clements this worked out in terms of what he had left and what we had to replace him in other cases like with Fletch we are still looking for a more reliable MLB.

Its interesting that that the park you mentioned as Dunn Tire and NorthAmericare is now Coca-Cola Stadium. My guess is that national corporations are likely willing to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of getting their name displayed in 16 times a year in large regional broadcasts of which roughly twice a year they are gonna be Monday night or other evening football broadcasts. One of the marketing rule o thumbs is that individuals are so assaulted by advertising that a person needs to see a name and message three times before it even registers (most of us have had the experience of seeing a great commercial and mention it to friends who then ask who it was for and we have no clue as we have not seen the message the three times required for us to link it to an image). Due to this, marketers seem to routinely now want to plaster there name in a whole bunch of places I have few doubts that Ralph could get a significant load of bucks from selling the naming rights. Perhaps not the hundreds of millions Mr. Ralph would need to make this total more than a gnat on the back if the approaching $1 billion corporate leviathan he has total ownership over with no debt to speak of, However, the total would easily eclipse what many Bills fans will earn in their lifetime. I think the corporate naming of everything also is pretty disgusting to me. However, my disgust at the overnaming that also sees Coca-Cola Parks in Allentown, PA (home of minor league iron Pigs) and in Johhanesburg S.A. does not mean that I am in love with naming parks as monuments to rich guys who are still alive. Ralph Wilson Stadium which the Bills play in (and also this complex is home to the Ralph Wilson Training Facility come off as a set of multi-million vanity plates. If Mr. Ralph was really interested in paying tribute to someone who did something real and gave up something important for our society as a whole then he should lead the charge in stripping his name off the stadium and change the name to Bob Kalsu Field. Otherwise this is less embarrassing than MacDonald's Field but only a little bit less embarrassing.

I think you are a bit harsh in your assessments. I think folks who see them developing into a quality OL in 2010 are probably be doing some wishful thinking but I think your views are probably simply the other end of going to far. I think a more reasonable middle course assessment would be: Bell- definitely back-up quality at this point. Has shown some extraordinary talent so far but potential simply means you are not there yet. Only needing a full year of playing to bring him up to the level we want seems like wishful thinking as he needs to improve not only his physical side (simply needs to put on some more muscle but do so without losing speed- this means adding muscle rather than just merely weight and this takes time) and on the mental side (way too many false start penalties should be reduced over time, 2011 is a more reasonable timeline for him to develop into a starter at the level we want. LeVitre- also at back-up levels at current look. However, does show some promise but definitely not a sure thing and in fact if he suffers the not atypical sophomore slump 2011 may be a reasonable aspiration for him to achieve the levels we want. Calls he has had for holding a couple of times this year show he may be a bit overmatched and one wishes his learning could have come in practice and pre-season rather than a trial by fire trying to prevent Trent from being concussed. Hamgartner- true he was a back-up for the most part prior to this season. but from backing up at a number of positions in his time he has learned the whole offensive blocking techniques that increase his ability to call blocking assignments at C. This backup actually forced his way into the starting line-up half the Panthers schedule last year. He actually has proved to be a not unreasonable choice to be C on an OL with basically zero pro experience. With 7 years in the league he can last a few more years as well, but it is doubtful he will be more than good when what this team wants and probably needs is a excellent OL in the Kent Hull mode who arguably is an HOF caliber player. Hamgartner is good but not great. To declare him a back-up though is too harsh a judgment Wood- His viewed as better than LeVitre because while LeVitre may become a stud, Wood shows signs that he will be a stud. His demeanor and the leadership ability he has shown as a rookie are outstanding. Like LeVitre he clearly needs to benefit from playing more. However, though Hangartner is young enough to play center for us for the next few years, the way the Bills braintrust sings his praises we may see the two flip roles next year. Meredith/Scott- its a bit harsh and probably incorrect to declare them out of football soon. OL players simply are too valuable and develop to slowly for this to be true of players trusted as starters today. They are certainly inadequate starters but the bench is a more likely destination for them than unemployment.

1. What were the keys to the strategy used by Cleveland to beat the NFL? 2. What is Congress in the process of doing to the health insurance industry right now regarding antitrust? 3. What threat is idiot Maxine Waters using on the NFL right now on head trauma issues which is clearly not a reality (she is simply one lightweight constant carper in only the House) but has gotten her some national attention and is not being simply dismissed either? These answers all include pulling antitrust exemption. I am not arguing this certainly will happen (so no need to simply dismiss this strawman as invalidating the whole issues) I am simply stating this is a strategy which will be used in a worse case of the Bills moving and that the assumption of the worse case some foolishly make needs to at least be reined in by potential reality. Simple statements that the team will be sold to the high bidder and that the high bidder must move are just incorrect when stated as a certainty. It is exactly the fear of competing in a free market that a pull of the anti-trust exemption would force on the small markets and all the owners that sent them running and not walking to give the NFLPA 60.5% of the total gross receipts. This fear and the fact that the team owners make more money with stability and labor peace giving them 40.5% of the current stability than having 60%+ of the lesser money they get in the free market. There will always be threats and tussling (as there is now where the team owners have exercised their right to re-open cap negotiations (which ultimately they will settle for 41.5% of the total receipts rather than the 40.5% they get now or something like that). Reality is just a lot more complicated than the silly doctrine some blather on TSW, I am just offering alternative blathering which I think it would be irrational to claim is what is going to happen but also irrational to claim it is no possibility or that the threat will have no effect.

Again, simply saying that it will be sold to the highest bidder does not tell the entire story. It is clear that the rule is that all owners have agreed by contract when they bought their franchise from the NFL (AFL ownership went under NFL rules with the merger that any new owner MUST get the approval of about 70% or so of the existing owners. It is a pretty good bet that the owners will generally vote where the money is. Though Mr. Ralph's estate might benefit most by selling the team to the highest bidder be it Madonna, Michael Jackson's estate, Idi Amin, or Rush Limbaugh, the NFL has the right (and Mr. Ralph has agreed contractually with the authority of the whole over the individual team owner as seen when he voted against the current CBA but his principles were overridden) to say who is qualified bidder with a pretty stiff burden to be met to get approval. We just saw that with a fairly minimal effort of the NFLPA saying boo the big bucks which Limbaugh brought to the table was simply brushed aside. The big money in this case is not going to be found in the 1/32 if the transfer fee each team owner is going to get from the sale and move of the team. The big $ come with the limited antitrust exemption which Congress has granted to the NFL and also the NFLPA who are majority owners of the NFL since the CBA awards them 60.5% of total revenues will have to be satisfied with any winner of an auction by Mr. Ralph's estate in order for them to win approval as an owner. My guess is that the NFLPA will not care (unless part of the Jimbo organizing strategy is to put together a group which clearly is led by former players who buy he team and set a standard of groups of increasingly rich individual players who can put together bids such that the current workers employ the salary cap to generate enough wealth to allow them to eventually buy out all the current owners). However, my guess is that Chuck Schumer, Gillenbrand, and a substantial part of the WNY and upstate NY House delegations will move to yank the antitrust exemption if the Bills are gonna leave NYS with no team that plays home games in the state. Even, Cleveland which along with Detroit are even poorer cities than Buffalo and with similar troubled leadership forced a franchise out of the NFL with threats to antitrust and my GUESS is that the same thing can happen here. The big money for owners is not gonna be found in mere transfer fees, the big money is going to be in keeping the team here most likely.

One can interpret what he actually said anyway one wants. One can pull a single quote and build a theory from that quote and ignore the context. However, I think the most relevant thing is to simply view the tape of the entire interview which one can find in the Buffalo Snooze article or on the Bills website. If you do not have time for the whole thing I would pull this from the BN article: > Owens said the team has every right to be feeling upbeat despite the ugliness of the past two wins. "Any time you play this game, a win is a win," he said. "I'm sure the teams that we beat ... they can tell you that this team has no quit in us. We're going to fight to the end and we're going to find ways to win. That's what we're doing. < I think that summarizes where he is on this and I as a Bills fan am happy to see him take this approach.

I wouldn't apply that word to describe his non-productive performance. The word bust is generally associated with mistakes by the FO (true in this case) in picking a player who did not have the skills as advertised or scouted (Owens does seem to have the skill set of a likely future HOF player in the declining years of his career). Mike Williams was a classic bust as he never showed the desire to apply his skills. Owens however has not been a classic bust as though the results are horrible, they seem to be more easily attributed to the Bills having such a bad Noffense that they fired the OC just before the start of the season. Owens really has played like a rational person would expect (not that we fans are rational. He has drawn double teams which really have given Evans one on one coverage he never got last year. He is far from perfect and each game he has a bad drop or two as he has throughout his career. He actually has far exceeded expectations of those who stupidly thought he would be an immediate cancer (Owens MO has clearly been he is a great teammate his first year and saves melting down and dividing the team until his later years after he has won the allegiance of some teammates and some fans). Bust is also a word I do not think it is smart to apply to him as just as a rookie needs 3 seasons before one rationally judges him, one should clearly wait at least half a season (and a few games more likely) before one can declare him a bust. So the basic answers are find a term that applies better and wait a couple of weeks at least before you apply it if you want to be accurate (though there is no expectation that as a fan you would be rational and folks like Jerry Sullivan and WGR make their nickels by jumping the gun and declaring him a cancer even before the takes the field.

Not so fast to poo-poo Congress using the anti-trust exemption threat as leverage over the NFL as there is a not insignificant chance that this may be the tool which keeps the NFL in Buffalo. Even an area run by idiots in Cleveland (which actually is one of two towns ranked worse off financially than Buffalo) were able to force the NFL to put a franchise in Cleveland when Art Modell cut and ran to big bucks in Baltimore. When Ralph moves to the great beyond, and the team is likely put up for sale, the NFL retains a veto over any new owner who must get approval from 70% or so of the existing owners. Those owners will almost certainly go where the money is but an individual owners 1/32 of the transfer cost is small potatoes compared to the restraint of trade which the NFL and its arguably majority partner under the current CBA, the NFLPA make big bucks off of due to the anti-trust exemptio, When the NFLPA threatened to decertify itself and force the team owners to work in a capitalistic market, the team owners ran and did not walk to give the NFLPA what it wanted (when the new CBA was negotiated, Upshaw stated up front that the players must get a % of the total revenues of the league which began with a 6 and 60.5% of the total revenue is what the workers ended up getting). At any rate, if the Bills were likely to move out of Buffalo and thus leave NYS without any team playing home games in the state (both NYG and NYJets play their home games in Jersey) one can bet that Schumer. Gillenbrand and the entire WNY and upstate NY house delegation will threaten to strip the anti-trust exemption as leverage to force the NFL to require any approved new owner to keep the team in Buffalo. Threatening the anti-trust exemption may well prove to be a Buffalo Bills fans' best friend.