Grimace

Objectively, even if McGee has lost a step, his technique and decision-making still earned him a starting spot on our roster this year. Additional injuries only seem to validate your point because another unfortunate injury will further hamper his physical ability. Take away that unlucky event and he was fine. Personally, I will always thank McGee for giving me something to get excited about during years when the bills had a very inept offense. I remember fast-forwarding through recordings of Bills games I couldn't watch to skip the 3-and-outs, long Moorman punts, and opponents' scoring drives just to watch his kick returns.

A few other ideas: chug during the instant replay of a Bills TD drink when you forget what the score is drink if something important happened while you were away from the tv shot for any fake play on special teams drink whenever an announcer uses catch phrases to describe players, such as "high motor," "playmaker," "workhorse," etc. chug whenever the announcers talk about something else in the NFL unrelated to the game (if the game isn't interesting enough to hold their attention, you should probably be drunk anyway)

Execution is key. This is week 1 after an abbreviated camp and shaky preseason. Come out in mid-season form with minimal penalties, making the right reads, sure hands, decisive cuts, and solid tackling to win the game. Strategy will be secondary to shaking off the rust. If Fitz can keep the offense moving early, and Charles can be held under 4 yards per carry, an early lead will force Cassel to pass and exploit their banged up line and his weak ribs.

Complete non-story, but the caption for the photo made me chuckle. "Tiki Barber last played for the Giants in the 2006 season. Anne Frank was killed in the Holocaust."

Consider that the typical offense in the NFL has historically used a tight end. If most great quarterbacks have had great weapons to use on their offense (making each other look better), and most offenses utilize a tight end, then it stands to reason that the tight end on a team with a great quarterback is more likely to be a great player. These assertions don't allow an adequate prediction of the effectiveness of not using a tight end in an offense. In response to the OP, I'd be curious to see the rank of each of those offenses in comparison to the rest of the league for each of those years. There is little argument that Chan has been building his offense using players that weren't effective in other systems. However, he hasn't demonstrated that he can take his system, find key great players to add, and make a great offense that makes us an elite team. This will be the real story over the next few years.

Be careful that Jerry doesn't hit you with some sort of lawsuit for using his reporting style without his consent.

What was MJD saying and when/where did he say it?

Wasn't Lynch the short yardage back that got all the goal line carries?

I'm going to skip over the octopus analogy and try to extract a point from the thread. Balance becomes an issue when you're stocking talent in a way that you can't fully utilize. If we had a great defense with a mediocre offense and drafted all defensive players, we'd be putting good players on the bench while we had poor talent starting on offense. This is not the case; the offense was mediocre while the defense was terrible. A thought about talent priority: It seems wise to fill a defense with all 'good' players, so that there is no weak point to be attacked. An offense can succeed with poor talent at a position that is not fully utilized because they can create a gameplan to take advantage of their better players. Defense has to use all 11 players to react and stop the opponent. Offense is reliant on scheme and a handful of elite talent. Based on that logic, it would have been more productive to take elite offensive talent at the #3 pick this year, then focus on the draft with the remaining selections, as well as hour hopefully lower 1st round pick next year.

I love everything I've heard about this guy. Looking at this page, I was surprised to see a resume listing 3 schools and no mention of his major. It may not matter from an NFL perspective, but I see little point to mention education history without the field in which he was educated.

This smells like negotiation more than a public declaration. The motivation is not only for Donte to show interest, but also to settle the fans' minds and give the Bills leverage to not bring him back. Regarding his play: Donte had put up big tackle numbers. Most of those tackles are downfield. A major part of that is due to the front 7 not stopping the run or short pass and the nature of our defensive playcalls. I'd love to see him better cover tight ends, but the very nature of a tight end is that they create mismatches by being too big for defensive backs and too fast for linebackers. He's been good, not great. Regarding his salary: As fans, the only reason we should care about a player being overpaid is if it puts the team in salary cap trouble, preventing us from signing better talent. If there is no better talent out there, pay them whatever can be paid to keep the best talent we have. When negotiating a salary, the most important factor is not your ability; it is how much leverage you have. The quality / $$ ratio only matters to the person writing the checks. From a fan perspective, I want them to retain talent. If there is no equal or better safety to point to and say "this guy will play for less, so we're not paying you," then I want to see him signed and playing.

They can take the extra 'e' often added on to "Troup" and put it in Dareus.

First of all, thank you for posting the article. Whether people agree with the content or not, it has sparked a good debate. The part I find intriguing, as with any statistics, is the information it presents and the dependencies of the data. The data shows various positions, and the average draft ranking of the perceived top 2 starters, on all the teams in the NFL in the middle of the season. The conclusion simply highlights the trends in the data, not what they mean or what contributes to those trends. The implied correlation of the results is that obtaining a player of average starting caliber at a given position will, on average, require drafting them at or above the primary distribution of picks for that position. Things to consider: Grouping of the OL into one category. This was mentioned previously. LT is prioritized more than C. Number of players used at each position. There is one K, P, LS on a roster, but many WRs and CBs. This also relates to the OL grouping problem. Number of injured players at each position. Given that the data is for the middle of the season, it would be interesting to see what the data would look like at the start or end of the season. This represents the average NFL team. If you want a 'starting' caliber player on an average team, this could be a guideline as to where you need to draft in order to obtain that player. Taking a subset of the data for the top 10 teams in the league would allow for enough of a sample size to minimize anomalies while still showing the draft location of starting players on a team that has skilled players and is built to win. The number of players drafted for a position in each round, and the percentage of those players that meet the 2-deep criteria. This doesn't change the data is it is represented, but it would be a good complement to this analysis. It would indicate the chance of success on choosing a player at a given position.

I went looking for evidence to support how the defense made the offense worse, and ended up finding stats to indicate the opposite. The offense's starting field position was 20th in the league (not great), then ranked 27th in yards per drive and 28th in points per drive. On the other hand, the starting field position for the other team's offense was 32nd. Our defense was horrible this year (bottom five in points, punts, and turnovers per drive). Taking that into consideration, the offense didn't do them any favors with field position. Numbers plucked from Football Outsiders. Stats don't mean everything and can be manipulated (ex: special teams plays a large role here), but the field position on defense surprised me.

My friends and I were busy guessing on an over/under of 90 seconds to finish the song. I picked over, and she crushed it. We clocked her at 122 seconds. Try to sing that song in your head and see how long it takes. I have a hard time getting past 45 seconds, let alone 90.

College success didn't work out so hot for Matt Leinart or JaMarcus Russell, to cherry pick a few easy names. Citing correlations between QBs that struggle in the NFL and any trait that some of them possess is misleading. Most college QBs struggle at the NFL level. The sample size of QBs that have success is too small for this sort of comparison. Consequently, a lot of people will speculate about the potential of players, and a lot of that speculation will be proven wrong later. These are the reasons that an average person is not a GM or scout, and that the first batch of picks aren't taken from the team that wins the BCS. edit: Looking back, the bluntness of that comment that came out more smart-ass than I intended. The point was that there is a reason to not put all the emphasis of player evaluation on wins, not to make an insult.

I appreciate the kind words. And bourbon. JP playing football was like having a friend who's lucky at scratch-off lottery tickets. He succeeds at a gamble play more often than most, but he relies on it so often that he ends up losing anyway. It is exciting to watch, but you don't want to give him your money as an investment plan. I don't intend to continue a tangent to the main topic, but I really liked that analogy. I agree with much of what you wrote, but this sentence sums up the topic the best.

I think there is more common ground to what is being said here than your capital letters imply. - Evans is not being fully utilized by the team. - We won the game yesterday without him against a good defense. - We need to see more games to determine if our offense will maintain the production from yesterday. Fitz made some very risky throws that paid off yesterday (the Nelson TD comes to mind). There was also a dropped interception, and a mental lapse induced lateral on the interception return that saved a touchdown. The risks that went in our favor could have easily gone the other way. It could be the difference in quality of the pass defense that made it necessary to take tougher throws yesterday. It could also have to do with Evans not being on the field to shift the coverage. A discussion over the possible trade value vs team value of Evans will be more fruitful once we've played two more games and have a better idea of his contribution to the offense. If it turns out that our receivers are all covered more closely in the next couple games than with Evans on the field, it may be prudent to rethink these arguments. The Pats* game will be better for comparison, given that the Jets pass defense can't be compared to the likes of the Bengals.

A frequent point on this board is how Gailey has a history of making the most out of the QB talent he has available. The evidence for this is a short collection of players with niche skills that don't have the whole package of abilities to thrive in an average NFL offense. The draft is our opportunity to stock our team with talent in the way that will make our team more successful. If our offense can be (at a minimum) competitive with moderate talent, and our defense has been struggling to be mediocre for most of the season, wouldn't it make more sense to stockpile the defense with talent? We don't know that Chan's coaching style will lead to proportionally better results by adding top-level players. It could, but he may also simply specialize in making the most of less tools. If the defense needs high-end well-rounded talent to be successful, that's where we should put it.

I wonder what he could accomplish if he was plugged into the backfield in Green Bay.

Within this thread, I haven't seen anyone make the claim that Roscoe was a great selection. Recent draft history hasn't yielded the results we'd all like to see from our first rounders, and not just in performance and physical attributes, but also in position (DBs and RBs galore). Building a solid team should done through smart drafting. Building a solid team also has to occur through holding on to the talent that we already have, and upgrading where possible. If Roscoe can be more productive than the player behind him on the depth chart, and his signing doesn't prohibit the team from acquiring other productive players (hit the salary cap / no roster spots), then there is no reason to let him go because he was overvalued years ago. The same goes for Whitner, Spiller, and Bell, whom you mention above. Ideally, I'd like to have a pro bowl LT, SS, DE, MLB, and WR. Until we win the lottery, our goal should be holding onto the players at the top of our depth chart and filling the bottom of it with players that could take the starting jobs from them. Draft rookies or find better free agents, and no one will care what happens to past underachievers. Until then, there's no reason to cut the current players.

I can't decide if I should laugh or bang my head on my desk. The combination of the two is making my co-workers look at me funny.

When someone does something off the field to earn public discontent, it doesn't matter if their position is "water cooler guard" on the worst team in the league. Its true that we'd be hearing about this for weeks if Brett Favre said it, but the clear lack of malintent and speedy apology plays more of a role in keeping this out of the media. This is a half-step above a non-issue. After reading many of your posts, I have a hard time telling if you're of the mindset that you're somehow better than most of the people you encounter in life, or if you just enjoy being the center of attention.

Tell me what I'm missing here. We didn't add a quarterback through free agency that was better than our original 3 QBs before cutting Edwards. I would think that if a free agent of significant talent was available and fit the mold (and willing to come to Buffalo), we would have brought him in and rearranged the depth chart accordingly. Now cut one existing QB and add Brown. Is there any free agent QB that would break into that depth chart? Considering that we've already played 3 games and no other quarterback in the league (other than Edwards) knows the system, Brown has a significant head start on any other young prospects. That limits the chances of bringing in a marginal improvement talent-wise. It seems like bringing back Brown was the reasonable decision.

The thing that makes it easiest to downplay racism is when claims of it are made inappropriately. There might be merit to this topic (I'll leave that alone), but the examples of fans animosity toward Jason Peters and Marshawn Lynch destroy this point. On-field complaints about the two players seem small compared to other players of their timeframe (Kelsay, Whitner, Ellison, Pozluzny, Green, and Hangartner to name a few). The origin of dislike for these two people is based around a conflict of values. A person with a perceived high standard of character doesn't like the idea of a player sitting out practice and preseason over complaints of what they view as extremely high salaries to try to earn more money, only to come back before serious income penalties incur as the season starts and games are missed (damaging the team more than their bank account). Likewise, multiple scuffles with behavior issues that have legal ramifications can understandably lower a fan's esteem of a person.