hondo in seattle

Speaking of meaningful stats.... The Bills are 3-0 in games I've attended. I'm going to Arrowhead tomorrow.

Thanks Zero. I just moved to KC three months ago and this gives me a great idea where I should eat next. I've already been to your top 3 BBQ places - all great. Looking forward to exploring the rest of your list. I haven't had great Mexican here yet but will try your suggestions.

First Bills game I'll see in person in 10+ years and I'm gonna be rained on. Figures. Good news... I've only seen the Bills play 3 times live - they won all three.

Bills 31, Chiefs 28 Both defenses have trouble stopping the opposing offense - ours just has a little less.

Mahomes - his four INTs, including a pick 6 - are going to decide the game.

I hate rap. I loved this.

Power rankings are an interesting idea. Win-Loss records can be deceiving because of strength of schedule and other reasons. So let experts go through all the data and rank the best teams. Cool idea. The write ups are interesting and informative sometimes. Well, we rarely learn anything new about the Bills but I do sometimes learn something new about the teams I don't follow. In the end, though, power rankings are just someone's opinion. So I don't get too excited when the Bills are ranked high or disappointed when the Bills are ranked low. My own evaluation of the Bills is what matters to me. All the way up until game day when the only thing that matters is the scoreboard.

Beane knew Allen was better under pressure all along. That's why he's built such a porous offensive line.

Beth was good. Knew what was happening on the field and could competently describe it. Voice sounded dramatic or excited at appropriate times. I don't get all the negativity.

Zero, thanks for stopping in and sharing your insights. This will be my first live in-stadium Bills game in 10+ years. It's good to know the 'enemy' a little bit before I show up in Arrowhead. The Bills lost to your guys twice last season. The Chiefs might be in our heads a little. And while the Chiefs have some flaws, so do the Bills - starting with the OL. It'll be fun to get heckled at the game - more fun if the heckling comes during a Bills victory.

I agree with pretty much all of this. The salary cap forces GMs to prioritize. And Beane focused on the skill positions in the passing game. He also picked up a couple of decent 3rd round RBs. And he's brought in a truckload of offensive linemen on a budget over the past few years and kept the best ones. You're right, our OL depth is actually pretty good even if our starting lineup is far from great. I've always thought if I was a GM, I'd want a couple Pro Bowl quality lineman and then some cost-effective JAGs. We have mostly JAGs right now with a couple maybe above average. As you say, none of them are elite. I want a couple elite guys to protect our $258 million dollar man. I'd guess Beane wants the same but things just haven't fallen in place either in free agency or the draft. I hope he makes the OL a bigger priority this upcoming offseason.

While some folks were talking about OL continuity during the offseason, I was thinking about acquisition. Beane's doing a great job overall but I had really hoped that he would upgrade the offensive line. This line is a bunch of journeymen that aren't good at pass pro and - based on what we saw last year - even worse at run blocking. I'm with BubbaT and really hope we upgrade the line next year.

I went to college during the disco era and have hated popular music ever since. I'd rather see Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison & the Doors... Now that would be a halftime show! Maybe they could add Kurt Cobain for the younger crowd.

Agreed. I wish Motor would never drop a pass and Moss would never lay a football on the field, but they're good complementary backs. Both are willing blockers. Both are capable, if not spectacular, runners. They're talented enough that most DCs won't sell out completely to stop the pass - though Spagnuolo did in the AFC championship game. Like Jabott, I think Daboll needs to be smart. When defenses are making passing hard and running easy, we need to run - aggressively. Otherwise, let Josh light up the sky. The era of the running back expired with a whimper.

There's no way of actually knowing this but I don't think Tom would have become as great as he's become without Belichick and his coaching staff. But at this point, yeah, Brady doesn't need Bill anymore. But let's not fail to mention the good coaches and players that surround Brady in Tampa. Brady does need a good supporting cast and he's found one. Bill, like any HC, needs a good QB and he has not found one. Since he also functions as the GM, that's squarely on his shoulders. In fact, it's his fault Brady left.

When the Bills took OJ with the first pick of the 1969 draft, it was the fifth time that decade that a running back was the overall top pick. One other top pick was an OT who was going to blow holes open for RBs. And two were defenders who were highly talented at making RBs miserable. Only one QB – Terry Baker - was taken first in the NFL draft in the 60s. The 1960s still revolved around the RB. In contrast, in the 2010s, QBs were the top pick 8 of 10 years. A running back hasn’t been the first player chosen in the draft since Ki-Jana Carter in 1995. Thanks to changes in rules and the evolution of schemes, the NFL is more and more a passing league. And that familiar trend is likely to continue for years to come. Passing will be even more important five years from now than it is today. Beane and McDermott know this. And, look, of course they’d love to build a team that's strong in all areas: running, passing, stopping the run, stopping the pass. But the salary cap presents real limitations. So, clearly understanding the trajectory of the game, Beane and McD built the Bills with one thing in mind: The Pass. Offense. McD recruited Daboll, a guy known to excel at passing concepts but not so much at running schemes, to coordinate the offense. And if you look at our offensive linemen, almost all of them are better at pass pro than road grading for RBs. Which makes sense when you think about the immense amount of money and draft capital we've spent on our QBs and wideouts. Heck, even our backup QB is a former 1st round draft pick and Pro Bowler. Our RBs, on the other hand, are third round after-thoughts. Our O is built to pass. Defense. It always strikes me as odd when people refer to the Bills as a 4-3 defense. The Bills are a Nickel D. We employed the Nickel an astounding 91% of the time last season – the most in the NFL by a wide margin. In fact, it was the most in the hundred-year history of the NFL. One of our LBs – Milano – is a converted high school safety who excels in coverage. When we drafted the other LB, Edmunds, there were arguments about whether he should play inside or outside. And I get the folks who didn't like Edmunds on the inside. He's hardly a MLB run-stuffing thumper cast from the same mold as Chuck “Concrete Charlie” Bednarick or Dick “Stone Maniac” Butkus. He’s a more of a finesse player – better at covering than tackling. In fact, Edmunds is exactly what McD and Frazier want for this defense of theirs that doesn't utilize inside and outside linebackers in the traditional sense. Our D is built to stop the pass. So the next time I throw the blue cheese – never ranch – at the tv because Daboll just called a pass on 4th and short or Edmunds didn’t shed his blocker and didn’t violently obliterate the ball carrier in the backfield, I’ll remind myself of this simple truth. The Bills are all about one thing: The Pass.

Being an old soldier, I liked the M1 tank. I even liked Mitch's attempt to be motivational. But the humor was, um, humorless.

The anti-Belichick crowd looks at Brady's impact on Bill's W-L percentage but completely ignore Bill's influence on Brady. Brady was a mediocre 6th round draft pick that Belichick and his staff taught how to prepare, how to dissect defenses, and so on. Bill isn't Bill without Tom. Tom isn't Tom without Bill.

Great coach. Bad GM.

Diggs. I think Allen and Digs get their mojo back.

My two cents say that your two cents are wrong. I'm not into chakras and rarely one to be attracted to alternative medicine but I've tried "dry" (fire) cupping. The effect was profound - it made my painful back feel so much better. And my experience speaks to the very heart of empirical science. Test something. Can you see/taste/hear/feel/smell a result? That's empiricism. I employed the empirical method and found that fire cupping works at alleviating pain. And, actually, this should be no surprise. Dry cupping involves fire near your skin. The effectiveness of heat therapy for muscle pain is well established. Maybe the vacuum effect helps in some way too - I don't know. You say that "all studies by credible sources" say cupping isn't legit. This is emphatically not true. I would think, for example, that the Berlin Hospital is a legit source. They published a peer reviewed study in a medical journal that concluded wet cupping resulted in a "highly significant decrease" in pain in patients suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. American Pain Society. "Cupping Therapy Alleviates Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Pain." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 June 2009. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616190512.htm>. Here's what the Harvard Health Review had to say about cupping: "Does cupping work? A number of studies have examined this question, but unfortunately don’t seem to have convincingly answered it. In fact, a 2015 review of the evidence found that cupping might provide some relief for chronic neck or back pain, but that the quality of the evidence was too limited to draw firm conclusions." www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-exactly-is-cupping-2016093010402 My guess is that as more and better studies are done, dry/hot cupping will be found to be effective at pain relief.

Since you brought it up... I'm not sure who's the best TE I've ever seen play. But the best TE combo was, without a doubt, Gronk-Hernandez. Individually, each was supremely talented. Together, they were a terrifying force. It defies probability that a team could find two TEs this talented in the same draft.

Thanks for your service! Okinawa must have been a great duty assignment. I've heard stories... Northern Virginia is a beautiful place. Seems like a great place to live. Any good Bills Backers bars? Being a Bills fan in Korea was pretty lonely but I found good Bills clubs in both San Francisco and Seattle. Once, when the Bills were still wallowing in mediocrity, we had 100+ at a Bills Backers bar in Seattle for a game, all of us decked out in Bills jerseys and shirts. Very cool to see.

My Colombian ex could have gone to med school but chose not to. She wanted to combine Eastern and Western medicine and didn't feel like the traditional MD program/job would allow her to do that. She studied physical therapy in university but also got certified as a chiropractor. She was also licensed/certified in several other western - and eastern - medical arts. This allowed her to take a more holistic approach toward her patients with a variety of medical modalities at her disposal. Until I got surgery, no MD was able to help me with my back as much as she did. Not even close. The MDs would shoot me up with cortisone and hand me a list of core exercises to do. Useless. But la colombiana would do chiropractic manipulations. Then acupuncture. Then ventosaterapia - hot cupping. Then massage therapy. All that made me feel ten years younger - at least for a while. "Brilliant" people do sometimes go to chiropractor school. It's not just the backup plan for kids who don't have the grades to get into med school.

In the Steeler game, we saw DBs knocking Bills receivers off their routes. We also saw Steeler DBs anticipating routes rather than simply following/covering the Bills receiver. They seemed to know our playbook almost as well as we did. When I first watched the game live, I was giving all the blame to Josh and the offensive line. But the more replays I watched, the more blame I assigned to Daboll.