hondo in seattle

True. Most teams have 4 safeties on their active roster. Once Hyde gets acclimated, I expected the Bills to start doing the same. And I think he'll get some reps. But I don't think he'll start unless Hamlin or Rapp get injured. If he does end up starting without anyone being injured, it means he's signficantly outplaying Hamlin and/or Rapp in practice and will therefore be a game day upgrade. Hyde won't be given anything he doesn't earn and upgrading the starting lineup is never a bad thing. Fitz has said the Lions and Bills have the best camaraderie in the league. Lots of Bills players talk about how tight they are. I doubt that Hyde's position on the team will be divisive. This is a team where players trust their coaches, believe in each other, and put the team first. And Hyde seems to be respected and well-liked.

Even with a franchise QB, sustained excellence is hard to achieve in the NFL. Few coaches do it. While each of them is imperfect in their own way, we're lucky that McD, Beane, and Josh all joined the Bills roughly at the same time. I'm 65. When I'm 95, I'll probably reminisce to my bored grandkids, "Back in the 2020s, now that was the Golden Era of the Bills, when Sean McDermott was the coach and Josh Allen the quarterback. Let me tell you..."

Considering (1) we only have 3 true safeties, and (2) Hyde was only signed to the practice squad, I'm not sure how anyone can see this as anything but a good thing. I'm glad to have him, except he'll contribute on the practice field and meeting room, and hope he gets his ring. I also hope we don't have to use him if that means someone else got injured. On the other hand, if we do have an injury at safety, I'm glad we'll have Hyde as a backup rather than some guy off the street. McD runs difficult concepts in his secondary that are hard to learn. Hyde may not be in his athletic prime but he's not likely to commit mental errors which can be killers.

Our D is limiting opponents to 6.6 yards per pass attempt - 3rd best in the NFL. It doesn't seem like anyone in our secondary is out of position very often.

This might be one of the reasons we won. The 49ers probably saw the snow as a challenge - a problem. The difficulty & discomfort weighed on them psychologically. Meanwhile, the Bills had fun.

Statistically, this is not the best team of the Allen era. And just looking at the roster, I believe the stats. But I love the teamwork and camaraderie. Most of all, I love how we're deep into the season and reasonably healthy. Injuries - the lack of them - may be the thing that distinguishes this team going forward into the playoffs.

I think he was yelling "no" in disbelief and he was very effusive in his praise of Josh during the game. In any case, I don't really care about Collinsworth. He has some flaws like all humans and some bad takes like all announcers. But I don't expect any national announcer to know the Bills as well as we do. The only thing that impacts my state of mind when watching a Bills game on TV is the state of the play on the field, not the yapping from the box.

My Filipino wife didn't understand why I was laughing and cheering at the same time. So I tried to see it from her point of view. There was no Olympic level athleticism involved. No OJ type moves. If you don't know football very well, nothing about the play truly stands out. But when you watch football a lot, it was so unlikely. At first the play looks like a dud - a poorly thrown pass that was bobbled and there were three guys all over Coop in any case. Just a bad play. But then Coop extemporaneously tosses the ball back to the QB - when does that ever happen? And then Josh breaks a tackle and dives for the pylon - a play many RBs could make but very few QBs. The bad play magically tranformed into an amazing, snowy touchdown.

I remember thinking back in the early 90s that it was only a matter of time before Kelly and the Bills won a SB. By the third loss, the nation was sick of the Bills. By the fourth loss, even some Bills fans were hoping the Bills didn't go back just to break their hearts again. It felt like someone had laid a curse on the organization.

100 years from now, when NFL historians look back on the Goodell's reign, these are the two things they'll most remember hiim for: making the season longer and efforts to grow the sport internationally.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there's another version of the Bills that just plain sucks. The GM sucks, the coach sucks, and the QB sucks. And to make it all so much worse, that team doesn't play in Orchard Park - its home is in Toronto, or St. Louis, or San Antionio, or Mexico City because someone besides Terry bought the team. I so want Buffalo to win a Lombardi and I'm grateful for all three - Pegs, Beane, and McD - giving us realistic hope.

You may be right. But as the wins pile up, I'm starting to think McD and Babich know what they're doing. Their bend-don't-break approach has given up a bunch of rushing yards, but not a bunch of points. We're 5th in scoring defense and 2nd in point differential.

It was a good speech and I fault him for none of it. But I also noticed this... he referenced 5 straight AFCE championships and making the playoffs 7 of the past 8 years after 17 years of drought. How many players were there for all that? None. But McD was. While he was giving them all the credit, he was reciting his own resume. In other words, he was subtly reminding them of his personal accomplishments. Not to feed his ego, I assume, but to reinforce his credibility to make him more effective as a leader and get players to buy into "the process" even more (or not stop buying in). It's like a pirate captain reminding his crew of all the good booty he helped them capture.

Maybe I should have said that a battle of RBs 'seemingly' favors them. The 49ers are ranked 7th in rushing so far this year versus our 18th ranking. They average 4.9 ypc versus our 4.3. On the statistical surface, it does seem they're the better running team. Then again CMC isn't fully recovered. The cold winter weather combined with injuries to their star QB and star RB doesn't bode well for San Francisco's offense.

With the weather being what it is and Purdy having shoulder problems, it seems like this will be a game of opposing RBs - which favors them. But Josh says screw the elements: Offense: Shakir Defense: Milano (playing far more snaps than almost anyone expected)

I like rivalry more than I like irrelevance. But I like dominance more than I like rivalry. I'd be perfectly happy to see the Bills continue to beat Miami game after game.

I don't watch much non-Bills football but I watched the second half of both those games and thought the same thing. In each case, I was rooting for the team that screwed up. I like the Lions well enough but I was tired of the hype and wanted them to come back to earth a bit. And as a potential Bills opponent in the Super Bowl, I wanted to be reassured that they're vulnerable. And, obviously, I wanted the Chiefs to lose for seeding. An amazingly dumb way to lose games. Hopefully, I've now exhausted the entirety of my bad juju and will have a good Sunday.

Bills 27 9ers 17

Reportedly, the players were angry in the locker room at the end of the game and near the point of mutiny. Keenan Allen, for example, said, "I feel like we did enough as players to win the game." Whether the wasted clock was more the HC's or QB's fault is immaterial at this point. When the coach loses the locker room, he's done.

Hindsight is 20-20 as they say and we all know it's a "passing league." But Barkley is an elite talent while Jones is a mediocre, easily replaceable QB. I know Jones had that one "good" year but it's still puzzling to me and many fans why they chose to pay him. I'd like to read the transcripts of their private conversations.

An aquaintance who worked as the finance manager of a dealership shocked me when he told me how much money he makes. Dealerships can be highly profitiable and GMs can make a very good (6 figure++) income. Though nothing like football money.

@machine gun kelly, that's a tempting offer. I first starting learning the joys of Chinese food about the same time Vince Ferragamo was taking snaps for the Bills. And way back then, my favorite dish was Kung Pao chicken; I rarely ordered anything else. The spicier, the better - within reason. You're lucky to have a Chinese wife. Americanized Chinese food is okay but authentic Chinese food is awesome.

Accuracy is a funny metric. To me, it means putting the ball on target. To statisticians and many fans, it means a high completion percentage. They're not the same. And in either case, context matters. Inaccurate passes (including picks) can be caused by many things: the QB just throwing a bad ball with no excuse, the QB making a bad decision, the QB being under duress, the receiver running a wrong or slopping route, the ball being tipped at the line of scrimmage, weather... Completion percentage is effected by all of these but also by things the QB can't control such as scheme, play-calling, wideout separation and talent, the ability of the offense to run the ball and take some pressure off the QB, and so on. Allen has responsibility for some of accuracy problems his first few years but his completion percentage was also adversely effected by other factors such as a porous offensive line, bad scheme, imprecise route running, and so on. To say it differently, I don't think Allen was personally as bad as some of his bad day/year stats say he was. One thing that frustrated me is how often Allen threw picks because he was on the run needing to make a play. It's hard to blame a guy for making a risky throw in an adverse situation when we desperately need to get some yards. In fact, if you could do a game theory analysis on score, down-and-distance, and all that, some of Allen's "bad decision" picks probably weren't bad decisions at all. He made low percentage throws because that was the best hope we had at the time.

When I think of San Francisco's signature dishes, I think of both Cioppino and clam chowder in a sour dough bowl. The problem is that I don't enjoy seafood. In any case, the San Francisco food scene is about so much more - including good (i.e. delicious, authentic) Chinese food. With roughly 500,000 Chinese people in the Bay Area, Chinese dishes legitimately represent San Francisco just like Polish dishes fairly represent Buffalo. So I've been thinking about dim sum. But making fresh, authentic dim sum at home is hard and frozen dim sum just isn't the same. There are great dim sum restaurants not far from me but dim sum doesn't really travel well. So now I'm thinking about some spicy Szechuan food like Chongqing Chicken which is one of my favorite foods on the planet. Then maybe some sliced pork in chili oil for variety. And spicy szechuan green beans for a veggie. If I was condemned to die, I'd probably have szechuan for my last meal.

This might be my second favorite Bills game of all time! (Though I didn't remember we won on "wide-right.") 1000+ yards of offense... Lots of scoring, turnovers, and other big plays... And the Bills won. What's not to love?