hondo in seattle
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Posts posted by hondo in seattle
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he is also one of the biggest, most under-reacognised rapists of all time.
no doubt he's an all-time great at the sport, but the man should have been banned from the nfl years ago.
That's pretty much how I feel. Awesome QB, terrible human being. Maybe he's reformed now but I'd have been murderous if he did that to my daughter. Should be in the Hall of Shame rather than the Hall of Fame.
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The Bleacher Report just published their list of the top 50 players from the first half of the 2014 season.
Two Bills make the list, not surprisingly both play on the defensive line.
Mario Williams came in at #16
Marcell Dareus came in at #20.
Do any other Bills deserve to be in the top 50?
bleacherreport.com/articles/2242359-ranking-the-nfls-top-50-players-at-the-midseason-mark
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I mean mid-way through the season you control your own destiny in almost all scenarios, but I love how our's looks...
4 teams in the AFC at 5-3, and you can say all of them are 'over-achieving' 5-3.
Bills, Chiefs, Dolphins, and Browns.
We play all other 5-3 teams in the next 4 weeks (with the jets sprinkled in for some fun!). What a better way to look at it and say we do our jobs and come out of there with wins, we start taking over all these tiebreaker scenarios, and make our way into the playoffs!!
(Also - Pats looked great yesterday, but they could come back down to earth, and if we did go on a good run we may be looking at a chance for the division at that point too!!)
Getting EXCITED!!! Wish I could be at the game this Sunday!!!! GO BILLS!
We'll make it to the playoffs if we deserve to be in the playoffs. These next few weeks will be very interesting. Going 3-1 over the next quarter of the season would be a huge victory and put at the entrance to the postseason.
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Agreed. The Bills D was epically bad. From 2010 - 2012 the Bills D ranked 28th; 30th; and 26th in pts/game against. Unless you have an elite offense with an elite QB, you're not going to overcome that as a team no matter how creative you are on offense.
Gailey was one DC away from being a good coaching with a winning record. Had he a good DC and a good QB, he would have accomplished some fun things with the Bills.
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If the BIlls win, everyone will start taking us seriously as playoff contenders (including me).
While KC isn't an AFCE team, they're fighting for a wild card slot just like we are. But is seems many of the NFL gurus rate KC ahead of the Bills. Beating them causes a reassessment.
A must win? No exactly. But a big win? Absolutely.
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A lot of teams in the AFC playoff hunt were playing each other. Inevitably, some of them lost. I call it a good weekend.
It will be a better weekend when we beat KC.
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FtD... one of the most entertaining and informative posts in a while. Cool stuff.
I think any GM would come across as knowledgeable. Good to know Whaley is also likeable and down-to-earth.
Wonder how much you can infer from omissions. Whaley didn't praise Marrone much... Does that mean he's not enamored with his head coach?
Also wonder if there was a little hubris involved in the Williams signing. Being that Marrone is an ex OL, maybe he thought he could salvage Williams.
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Interesting (to me, anyways) analysis - not that Jerry is one of my favs, mind you.
Sully is always the contrarian. When other's say black, he says white.
But I'm more used to him being negative when others are positive. His defense of Hackett when everyone else criticizes our OC surprises me.
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we still score fewer than average points. i do not think our unit on offense is below average in overall skill. that makes me question the coach.
with our 43 point game 6 turnover game we bumped up to 21st in ppg, the previous 7 games had a 19.3 which would slot in for 26th.
Even with our 43 point game we are:
31st in yards per drive. 32nd in plays per drive. 32 in time of position per drive.
football outsiders ranks us 32nd in offensive drive success rate
we are 24th in points per drive despite being 2nd in average starting field position.
All true. But these are wrong stats (says the devil's advocate). The stats that matter most are big plays and turnovers. And the Bills lead the NFL.
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This offense is a product of Marrone's scheme and philosophies. He's ultra conservative so that's how we gameplan on offense. Or at least that's how it looks like we gameplan. Perhaps Hackett is limited to what Marrone wants to do. We don't really know. All I know is that I'm not going to try and convince myself that our offense and production is good because it hasn't been. Marrone inherited a pretty solid offensive line and a top 5 running unit and both units have regressed significantly since he took over.
I've criticized Hackett a lot over the last year and now I'm starting to believe that Marrone may be the problem.
Here's a curious thing... Marrone learned how to run an offense from Sean Payton. Payton is far better coordinating a passing game than a running game. Marrone - along with this protege, Hackett - seem likewise better at coordinating a passing game than a running game. That was obscured last year by all the turmoil at the QB position. But seems clear this past few games.
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Like most Bills fans, I’m not a huge fan of Nate Hackett’s performance thus far.
But let me play devil’s advocate today and assert this: Hackett is a good at coordinating a passing attack and competent-but-hamstrung at coordinating a running game.
Passing. In Kyle Orton’s best year as a starter, he notched a 87.5 QB Rating. His rating under Hackett so far is 104.0. In three years with Chicago, Orton passed for 161.2 yards per game. In his time with Denver, he average 248.1 yards per game. With the Bills so far, he’s averaging 282.0 yards per game. Under Hackett’s tutelage and in Hackett’s system, Orton is enjoying the very best year of his career.
Rushing. The Bills are averaging just 98.9 ypg this season and fans want to see more power sweeps, counters, and so on - not to mention screens. But many of these plays require talented, agile OGs which the Bills lack. 3.8 ypc and 99 ypg is acceptable, if not brilliant, performance for an OC working with this interior line.
Big Plays. Brian Billick, former SB winning coach, has written a couple articles over the years about the importance of the “Toxic Differential.” He explains:
It has long been a proven adage that if you have a plus-2 turnover advantage on your opponent, you will win the game 80 percent of the time. If you have a plus-2 explosive-play advantage, it equally leads to winning about 80 percent of the time. If you have both of those, you win close to 95 percent of the time.
Under Hackett, the Bills offense is producing a lot of big plays (35 explosive plays by Billick’s count) while not turning the ball over a lot. Combined with the ball-hawking skills of our defense, the Bills have the NFL’s best Toxic Differential. Interestingly, Seattle led the NFL last year.
I don’t believe the Bills lead the Toxic Differential rankings in the highly competitive NFL by accident. Understanding the importance of the Toxic Differential, Hackett’s scheming and play-calling are designed to produce big plays for the Bills while limiting turnovers.
In sum, given the hand he’s been dealt, Hackett is doing an admirable job as an OC.
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I really wasn't trying to paint Billick as unintelligent, I was just trying to say his grasp on statistics probably isn't as strong as he thinks (I could be wrong). I've worked with many accomplished people that I consider to be intelligent (physicians, engineers, even CFOs paid to analyze numbers) and I am always a bit taken aback when I discover they don't fully grasp basic probability. Is there a correlation between successful people and aptitude with probability? In my experience, not a strong one (I'd estimate an r-squared of .3
)I don't, however I can give you an example of a guy talking out of both sides of his mouth. Yesterday Billick told us the Bills were atop his toxic differential list (predicting success) and today he predicts us to miss the playoffs. Maybe I'm missing something?
That is interesting. He says the Toxic Differential is predictive and then predicts that the team with the best Toxic Differential in NFL won't even make the playoffs.
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Some guys are late bloomers.
I hope this isn't just some temporary thing with Orton and he can sustain this level of play for a long time, if not improve upon it.
I also hope the EJ eventually blooms and becomes Orton's capable successor some day.
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I plan on using my gift card to purchase a RG and then donating it to the team. Anyone care to help me with this purchase?
Great idea! I'm in.
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Super Bowl coaches aren't exactly known for their mathematical acumen. Plus, there's a reason Billick is in the booth and Marvin Lewis is on the sidelines, but that's going off topic.
First of all, is this metric actually predicting anything, or is it just telling you what happened? Let's say I told you, "Teams that score more than 40 points and commit no turnovers have a 99% chance of winning -- you'd be hard-pressed to find any controllable statistical combination that has quite the same rate of predictive success." You would probably sarcastically laugh, "No kidding." I haven't really predicted anything, I've simply told you teams that score a lot of points and don't turn the ball over win games. We all know that. Billick is essentially saying the same thing - get turnovers and then score (explosive plays). In the end it's not telling us anything that we don't already know.
The key word here is "controllable." Can you really control and predict turnovers for a game? For a month? For half a season? Seattle led the league in turnovers last year, this year they are struggling to stay in the black. Our 2011 Bills stormed to a 5-2 start primarily based on turnovers. When the turnovers dried up, well...you know the rest.
I think you can win the turnover battle consistently if you have the elitest of the elite QBs - a Rogers, Manning, or Brady. Is that really telling us anything? Get a top 5 QB and you will have success? Not exactly a revelation.
For the record I predict we will have a negative toxic differential for the month of December. Any guesses why?
I really doubt a Super Bowl winning coach, even an unemployed one, is quite as unintelligent as you seem to think.
I think what Billick is arguing is that a team with a good Toxic Differential is likely to beat a team with a bad Toxic Differential. The bigger the differential, the more probable the result. So Toxic Differential is predictive.
There are so many metrics in football, football coaches have long been trying to find out which ones matter most. While some posters on this board love QBR and PFF ratings, I doubt if these are used much by coaches. According to Billick, and he would know, coaches do look at turnovers and big plays because they are meaningful - more meaningful than many other stats.
You make an interesting point about turnovers because they have a rather random nature. You can't control them but as a coach you can influence turnover numbers in a number of ways. Given their importance, you need to.
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While I'm a proud member of the Hacketts Critics Club, I've been wondering about this all year.
What I want to see as a fan is an offense that can move the ball - by ground or air - consistently all game long. Think early 90s Bills.
We obviously don't have the talent for that yet. But maybe what Hackett is going for instead is an offense that produces big plays and doesn't turn the ball over.
I've also been a sometime critic of Jim Schwartz. I'd like to see more blitzes from him and more creative defenses, a la Rex Ryan or Mike Pettine. What he gives instead is a no frills Steady Eddy D.
I doubt if it's coincidental that the Bills excel at the Toxic Differential. Billick says the Toxic Differential is widely used because it has high predictive success so I'm sure Marrone et al. use some version of it.
In highly competitive environments, people don't excel by accident. They excel because they have a plan.
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Nice find!
We all suspected that watching Kyle would be a good learning experience for EJ. It's good to get confirmation. EJ seems to be studying Kyle closely - not just Kyle the player, but Kyle the leader.
Kyle's own evolution as a QB makes me hopeful for the current Bills with Orton under center but also for the future Bills with EJ under center.
"What has happened to EJ, some of what Geno Smith is going through, it happened to me early in my career... There is always a lot of stuff you could worry about. If you let yourself do that, that is when you get into trouble... I'm throwing the ball better now than I ever have in my life. I'm thinking in games as well as I ever have.''
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Nice post!
Orton's sacks are worrisome. I'm not sure how much I agree with Papazoid that Orton goes down like a feather and doesn't see the sacks coming. He's certainly not the most elusive QB ever. Nonetheless, he seems willing to stand there waiting for a guy to come open even as the pocket collapses around him. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. I'm guessing his patience has resulted in more yards in completions than it's lost in additional sacks.
Obviously, if we had better protection from our OL, we'd have fewer sacks, even with a comparatively immobile QB. We'd probably also fewer sacks if we had a running game, and a screen game.
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Maybe my expectation are low because the announcers don't typically bother me.
I know they're not going to know as much about the Bills as we do. I just hope the play-by-play guy calls the action somewhat fluently and the color guy provides me a bit of new information about the other team.
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Puzzled by this - Jay Cutler was in Denver and Chicago Fans had no chance to crush on him until the Bears FO swapped Orton and a handful of draft picks (2 1sts and a 3rd) for Cutler.
I'm happy as any Bills fan should be at the QB play this game. I can even go with the "don't mind a couple of sacks, provided the ball is protected" camp.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is Orton's history. He was thrown into the fire his rookie year after Grossman was injured. He didn't do so well or look so good, even though the team won and went to the playoffs - he had the lowest QB rating in the league. The Bears were so impressed they demoted him to 3rd string for the next 2 years behind Rex Grossman and Brian Griese, and when he finally got the chance to start again in his 4th season, the Bears were so impressed they sold the house, the furniture, and Orton to obtain Cutler.
Please don't misinterpret- I'm not trying to take a thing away from Orton's current play, and I hope it continues! Just bear in mind that it's NOT simply "wrong place wrong time". The Bears did not have that much "man crush" on Grossman or Griese, Orton simply couldn't beat them out his 2nd or 3rd year. He looked like you'd expect a guy who played 14 games and had the lowest QB rating in the league to look. Orton had a significant chance to start early on in his career, on a team that would have been happy to anoint him a starter, and wasn't able to take advantage of it AT THAT TIME.
If he continues to do well here, it will be an example of a QB who needed time to develop, got it, developed, and then found a team willing to give him a shot, not a guy who always had the goods and never caught a break.
Which is a story worth bearing in mind for those who want to declare EJ irretrievably broken and a bust after 16 games.
Good post.
If you look at Orton's stats over the years, although there are some ups-and-downs, it's clear that he got better with time. His last year starting for Chicago was far better than his first. His stats with Denver were far better than his stats with Chicago. In limited action, his stats in Dallas were better yet.
http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/O/OrtoKy00.htm
I hope all this suggests two things:
(1) Orton's good start with the Bills is not an aberration. He'll continue to perform well with us. Hopefully, he gets even better as he masters Hackett's offense.
(2) EJ might still turn into a good starter someday.
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I was panicked about our QB situation this preseason. EJ didn't look ready. And we didn't have anyone else worth mentioning. Going back in time a little farther, I was hoping we'd draft another QB this year.
I'll admit I'm feeling pretty good now with Orton as the starter and EJ as the developmental project.
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I find it amazing that someone actually started a thread on this after the Fitz debacle.
I was surprised when we extended Fitz. At the time, I was amazed how Gailey found a way to work around Fitz's weaknesses and capitalize on his strengths. But I wondered if it would last or if NFL defenses would catch up to us. Now we know.
Orton is a different case. I don't think Hackett is making Orton look good so much as Orton is making Hackett look competent.
It's only been four games, but I would consider extending Kyle if he continues to play at this level. Heck, he's 7th in the NFL in QB passer ratings right now. If he continues at that level, why wouldn't you extend him???
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In fact all you folks who find so much to B word about after win...shut the pie hole for a day or two. They won..You finally have a real QB (till he's knocked senseless). The Bills are staying put till Bon Jovi is in a Nursing Home drooling on his uke. November and Play Off talk is realistic. Play Offs? What, Play Offs?
Hackett has had to deal with a crappy draft pick QB and now working with a career back up guy who's just doing his preseason warm ups. The line sucks (that's Marrones baby) and Spiller sucked, Jackson is hurt.. He's not doing that bad and we don't know how much play calling is Marrone.
Let's all enjoy this moment and dream of a cold winter day in Foxboro where the Bills get sweet revenge!!!
Now that you've admonished people, I'm sure they'll all behave differently now.
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vick at least looked better running the ball, but at this point, what good does it do them? Crazy situation up there.
It didn't look like the Bills were ready for Vick to be under center. Contain broke down often. I think the Jets were the first team to break 100 yards rushing against the Bills and Vick lead the way with about 70.
Sanchez Starting QB for the Eagles with Foles Out 6-8 Weeks
in The Stadium Wall Archives
Posted
Yeah. The Fire-Rex movement could gain some currency if Sanchez plays well. Especially given the frustration with Geno and Vick.