Hplarrm

Look, real live hig quality doctors can look at an individual case with all the images, history, medical; stats and what have you and still be totally wrong about how it turns out in terms of reality.. Given this an armchair diagnosis of future medical events from a fan who undoubtedly knows as little as the rest of us about this specific case can be pretty much disregarded. Particularly if the poster claims with total certainty that the outcome is totally certain how events will turn out.. Is Stevie done? Maybe. However, the claim that he is done for sure and that it is specifically due to some alleged drop dead connection between hammy and back issues is simply stupid.

No one knows for sure outside of Merrone and EJ (and perhaps some contractual insiders in the FO). However, this never stops us from having our fact-free opinions about this. Right now I am in trust but verify mode until we are mathematically eliminated and thus I am happy to assume that it is not a chronic issue or if it is they did not know about it before the draft.

What? In the stats you nicely provide this is the first penalty free game in 10 yeaqrs. This event is NOT unheard of but by your stats I would say it is quite uncommon . At any rate the key for us is to see this game highlighted and analyzed. Whether it is simply an example great coaching or the refs calling the game inequitably this one calls for frame by frame analysis.

Thoughts?

it would seem this game should merit a serious attempt at analysis by ESPN (Jaws and whomever) as this result either is A. An example of how a team should play the goal an achieve perfection at the penalty phase of the game, or the refs really blew somethings they are paid not to blow. Either way, a little campaign to write a bunch of e-mails/letters to ESPN/Jaws/Pardon the Interruption seems appropriate,

I saws one post which flat out stated the Bills were throwing in the towel if they went with either White or a few of the other castoff former QBs. Maybe, but this same logic concluded the Brownies were throwing in the towel when they traded Richardson and then benched Weedon in favor of Hoyer. Not only was this logical conclusion wrong but it proved to be true that while many of us were counting Thursday's game in the W column when we went up 10-0 and the season ending injury to Hoyer forced them to bring back in Weedon at QB. Yep it is unlikely we male the playoffs with White or whoever at QB, there is a reason why the game is not played on paper and it is simply stupid to give up until you are mathematically eliminated. I do have grave doubts but these are still outpaced by my greater dreams and hopes!

I agree that playing the game is a better experience than not playing the game, but that is quite different than saying there is nothing to be gained from the experience of watching the game develop at the shoulder of the OC. Manuel playing is not possible. Why on earth would you possibly not look to gain all that is possible. Your one dimensional approach simply makes little sense to me in reality.

Quite frankly it near impossible to do with the Bills having no prospect of a back-up pulling a Doug Flutie after injury forced us to start him at QB as the RJ debacle wore on. However reality is what reality is and what is offered us is: 1. What unique chances for developing EJ are provided. 2. What new chances are provided for finding new QB prospecs 3, How do we think of new QB approaches. I believe this means A. Maunel has a unique chance for being up with Hackett during for 4 or so games and learning our and NFL offenses from our OC. He may end up an improved player from such experiences. B. We really have a unique chance for going with 2 #1 QBs. CW is if you have 2 #1 QBs you have no #1 QB. However, we have a chance 4 chancing a flyer like Freeman w/o abandoning Manuel. We should aggressively explore. 3. We need to look at unconventional QB approaches which gave birth 4 ideas like Wildca I'd even be amused by unusual uses of oddities like Tebow

You are right. It is simply stupid to compare Manuel after 4 games to HOFer's Jimbo's entire career as it is also flat put nuts to compare Easeley's short career to the entirety of legit HOF prospect Tasker's career. Perhaps there is a useful comparison between Kelly after 4 games and Manuel after 4 games or Easely after a couple of seasons with Tasker after a couple of seasons. Yet even this comparison is stupid for predicting the future for Easely or Manuel. Who knows what injuries will happen.

Easley has impressed so far this season (particularly after an injury plagued brief career) but give us a break with this way premature question. Tasker is a legit HOF prospect who was not only fast, versatile and smart (he singlehandedly forced the NFL to change the rules because he manipulated how one covers kicks with his smarts). Easley however has not even earned his second contract. Easley is still a contract (or two) of production away from justifiably being mentioned in the same sentence as Tasker.

The difference for Byrd right now is that he can be selfish and risk little personally as the franchise deal leaves him set personally for life. However, to play would be a selfish move because if he negotiates a long term deal not only him and his parents but also relatives past his cousins and beyond would also be set. The irony here is that the manly thing to do is to not sign until he gets a career deal because if he signs the big contract his immediate family plus are the winners. If he "manned up" as some demand and signed he would actually be doing the selfish thing as he would be choosing his teammates over his close but still fairly immediate (aunts, uncles and cousins) family. I have no problem with either choice but playing and risking a multi-year deal would actually be quite selfish and pretty unmanly IMHO. Its his choice though.

If the Bills win against Cleve we certainly sellout the Bengals game. If we show well even if we lose we probably sellout (the team has extra days between games and the fans deliver), If we lose badly we deserve empty seats (but under 10K left the Bills may still sellout as Mr. Ralph has the desire but not the talent as a decider the fans deserve).

Even worse is that some making this point then use Carolina as the example but excuse me did we not beat them a couple of weeks ago? They can argue vainly but fruitlessly when it comes to reality that yes the Bills were at home and yes it was by a point with last minute heroics but the fact is that Carolina is no no brainer example of building a better team than the Bills. In fact I prefer the bills over the Carolina approach and choices as bad as some of our choices demonstrably were.

Also D impressive was that they held the Panthers to "mere" FGs after the Panthers O got the ball deep in Bills territory. Manuel and the O get deserved credit for putting up the winning drive, but IMHO the game winning drives were the D holding the Panthers to FGs. .

is that he is demonstrating special ability (compared to other young QBs I have seen over the years or even so far by Geno Smith so far this year) to recognize defenses and how plays are developing. An interesting raw # to me is that Manuel has only suffered 1 sack in two games so far while QBs like Smith have suffered far more. Perhaps this is because the Bills OL is that much better than the Jets or others (the fact we have done pretty well rushing the ball points toward the blocking being generally solid). However, my sense is that while our young OB has been adequate or better, another factor in the low sack # is that Manuel is doing a substantively good job at recognizing where the D is rushing from, analyzing the match-up between the opponents' rushers and the Bills assigned to protect and shown fairly good pocket sense (one of the bad fumbles against the Panthers though was on Manuel for failing too sense the passrush was not gonna sack him but was close enough he needed to protect the ball better and he did not. This mistake however strikes me as the exception to him looking good at directing the offense. Another good sign I have seen has been a few almost ridiculously easy TDs. The final throw to SJ for a TD last week came after a blown coverage by the Panthers and the usually great route running by SJ left him virtually alone in the endzone. In the first game Mauel lofted an easy strike to Woods for a TD. Yep, the Bills made it look easy (for example compared to a great loft of a throw for a TD to SJ last week which showed extraordinart\y timing between these two players and great touch in making the throw. Yet, it is just these types of "easy" throws that Bills QBs of the recent past (post Jimbo) the team often seemed to blow with lousy play calls, lousy QB throws, poor fight for catches et al. Manuel has a long way to go before anyone credibly dubs him good to go (or even a consistent winner as one win does not even adequacy make). However, one does not have to look very far to be very impressed with Manuel after two games and a mere one win (in fact I much prefer and give credit to posters who overclaim greatness from this rookie over the poor analysis shown so far by some on the board who sre not impressed by Manuel so far. He is no where near great yet and arguably not even considered adequate at QB until he actually accomplishes something like leading the team to the playoffs, however, so far so good and in the real world his play so far has been very impressive admitted warts and all!

He would be playing ball as he certainly would sign a contract that gave him everything he wanted to sign a contract.. The more likely good question is whether he would be playing for the Bills as the MO under the Ralph/Brandon regime is set by how they negotiated with Byrd's agent Parker on the Peters deal. Parker did an excellent job IMHO for his client in that the Bills ended up participating in getting Peter's demand for a long-term deal as rich as anyone signed by other LTs. This is exactly what Peters got but the Iggles and not the Bills ended up signing the checks. If I was Parker I would advise Byrd to hold out for a similar gift as the Bills FO (Brandon, Overdorf and Mr. Ralph are exactly the same people even though their HC has been changed. Actually the way the game is played has shifted a lot in the direction of making the having a quality S of much greater import to winning than having even the best CBs. Merely compare the success of teams like the Jets with their lockdown CB Revis or even the Bills who seem to have spent a lot of capital on lockdown CBs like Winfield or whatshisname who flew the coop for SF or the largest defender deal ever signed at the time. Look at how safties like Polamalu and Sanders played for Pitts and Indy when they won SBs and it is a good indicator that your claim about the relative value of CBs/Ss is old thinking. Certainly the Bills have also spent a lot on folks like Witner, but her was one of 3 safeties that year who commanded top 15 picks. Its just not your grandmother's NFL anymore.

My GUESS on this is that: 1. Byrd is actually experiencing real pain from PF (I hear nothing credible which indicates he is simply making this up) 2. PF is a pretty variable condition and all the posts that say I had it once and a couple of weeks of therapy is all Byrd needs to solve his problem are simply STUPID. There can be no credible claim that a posters PF and his are the same and even if they were medically his PF came from being a world class athlete and he must recover to the level to be a world class athlete and to claim any equivalency with out couch potato status is just STUPID. 3. That being said my GUESS is that if he needed to or wanted to he could play through the pain, BUT there are all sorts of business incentives for him not to play for a team which is not competing for the playoffs (yet). 5. The main reason he might take the risk of playing would be personal desire to be a part of the team right now and personal desire to be a part of the team effort right now. However, his teammates recognize we are not competing for the playoffs right now and are sympathetic to the business reasons for not playing. SUMMARY- Barring this team putting up a couple of Ws which make them competitive he can (and probably should as an American doing business) sit. He has a few weeks to let the situation play out and if he comes back then his teammates will easily forgive him and the coaches are saying the right things right now to welcome him back as well. As far as us fans he will need to rack up a couple of INTs when he comes back and if he does he will be forgiven by the fans as well.

Fox does seem to do a worse job than CBS and by far ESPN in their game day shots and camera work. In addition to the penny pinching ways of boss Rupert Murdoch, I attribute a lot of this to Fox simply having less history of this type of work than the other nets and also for evening or high profile games getting assigned the A team and more cameras than less desirable games like losers such as Bills/Panthers. As long as they are going to use replay and the # of cameras as part of determining the actual play in the games they should have a minimum # of cameras assigned to each game. They do not need the many cameras and glitzy swinging cameras on guywires they have for high profile games but they really need more cameras and better quality camera work than what we saw for this weekend's Bills game.

Its probably more important to think positively about training marginal players rather than focus on the buzzkill of cutting marginal players after the psychic boost of a last second win. The focus now is building a TEAM rather than simply cutting a bad player who knows are system for another bad player who does not know our system.

Re your comments on the production team: My sense is that several factors led to these problems: 1. Lesser games get fewer cameras which has impacts on things from replay challenges (the Bills may have lucked out in one Panther challenge was rejected when there simply were few cameras looking closely at whether a Bill stepped OB) and 2. younger and unproven crews get the non-marquee games like Bills/Panthers. In general sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. The Bills are gonna suffer from bad camera work until we become a winner and/or we get some marquee players to attract more crews and better coverage. More Monday night football means better camera crews. I also think Fox tends to spend more time.money on gladiator graphics than other networks like ESPN or CBS.

The other good thing to take into account is undoubtedly the next game will see the OL play shift toward Mario Williams who clearly demands a double (of not triple with a little chip block from an OL player with primary responsibility elsewhere. I suspect we may see even better play from Dareus and the rest of the DL as Mario demands more attention.

A decision about cutting him would depend upon at least three things if I were GM/HC 1. Is there a more useful than Summers player I can acquire? I think many of us armchair GMs are happy to simply get rid of this or that player when the reality is that even by game 3 any player not on the team right now comes in with the significant problem that they have not lived and breathed the Bills system for critical training and getting on the same page with his teammates of the end of camp and the first two games. I am willing to cut a player whom I judge hurts my team but I easily can see how simply signing a player who by definition was not good enough to make an NFL squad makes me pretty reluctant to cut a guy after one bad game. 2. In addition to consideration of individual player talent I am concerned about what this teaches the remaining Bills. If I think it is useful to motivate my team by demonstrating the Turk may show up if a player makes a mistake then I am more inclined to cut him. However, if I want to teach my team that they are all in this together and need to pull for each other when one of them, fails I do not axe Summers but really demand and demonstrate that the team will support them in bad times. For NOW I do not panic yet and I keep Summers and try to train him up to snuff. Right now my group of talented players having just dodged a bullet to scrape out a win in a game they easily could have given away may be on the verge of becoming a TEAM. In order for this mere group to become a winning TEAM the whole must be more than the sum of the most talented parts. I simply am more interested in emphasizing the positives by teaching Summers to play better than emphasizing the negative by casting about for some reject from the entire league to get plugged into Summers spot.

I think one of the things people want from news is to hear something new. Sully just seems to pile on. There is no desire to have him make stuff up, just he always seem to focus on rehashing easily seen QB failure and failed to deliver new news about FO failings. There was more of a real story about why Ralph and the FO kept picking failed QBs than his almost mindless whining about the failings of the individual players.

The prime qualification for this QB signing is to get someone with NFL experience who has played for multiple teams (where he gained the experience of learning new team offenses) and providing the WRs and other players with good practices. I actually hope the team does not waste any effort trying to get, train and assess the QB of the future. We need to be about dancing with the QBs we got.

He had me from the words Super Beta Prostate