TheBrownBear

Holy snot. I wish I hadn't gone into this thread to see all these stills and replays, because now I am extremely pissed off about that loss. And to the Dave McBride fella in here who keeps defending the refs and claiming the takedown of Diggs in the endzone wasn't a penalty, regardless of what type of handfighting occurred at the beginning of the route, once the ball is in the air, the defender cannot continue to tug and tackle the receiver to the ground. That is 100%, clear as day, defensive pass interference. Very good chance we win that game (though no guarantee given our redzone execution struggles) if that very clear and simple penalty call is made.

Yesterday's game was an outlier as we rarely ask Josh to pass that often. You'd think that based on that article and this thread, we'd lead the NFL in passing attempts. We are 6th in passing attempts (18th in rushing attempts). And our offense is still ranked in the top-10 overall (8th in yards, 4th in scoring). The two big issues we have is our inability to stop power rushing teams on D and an inability to score in the redzone. We are going through a rough patch these past two weeks and it seems as if the sky is falling, but we lost one score games to two of the top-4 or 5 teams in the entire league, almost entirely because of the two issues noted above. If we can make some tweaks and show some modest improvement in those areas over the soft schedule these next four weeks, we can enter the playoffs as a threat to make some noise. But yes, the O and D lines are serious issues from a personnel standpoint and we need to address them in the offseason.

The QB and receivers are fine, obviously. Our O-Line sucks, and on top of that, we don't have a dynamic running back who can make a play in tight space or serve as a real pass catching threat in the RZ. I think it's mostly those two issues at this point. Defenses are begging us to run the ball inside the 10, knowing damn well that we can't do it against their base 3 or 4 man fronts.

You can't see the defender clearly pulling the neckline of Diggs' jersey almost to the point of reaching his beltline? May need to invest in glasses or Lasik.

LJL at people who think Josh is part of the problem. He's the only thing keeping us from being the Jets or Texans.

Nah. It was the Jax game. They broke our will and our brains apparently. Couple dead cat bounceback wins against the Phins and Jets, but otherwise we've been a rotting corpse since Jacksonville.

Don't know, but I'm certainly sitting in an Angry Chair. That rainbow from Brady to Evans is this game in a Nutshell.

Does McDermott survive if we finish 9-8 and miss the playoffs?

Holy crap. We have a ton of work to do in the offseason. Need a complete rebuild on both lines or we risk wasting Josh Allen's career.

Kick was the right move. Need something to show for your efforts especially in light of the last two drives last week. Next time, you go for 6.

This season is over. See you next September

I assume the 5mph "winds" are just fans being pumped into the laboratory to circulate the air?

As soon as I saw this thread title I ran here to post the similarities to the '89 Bills. Very similar vibe to this team - both teams were less than the sum of their parts - lots of turnovers and sloppiness from both teams in their losses. Started off dominating for the most part before mid-to-late season slides with some headscratching losses.

Lol. On Monday evening I didn't think I would ever get over this loss. Told my wife and kids I was done watching the Bills and started making plans in my head for golf this Sunday. Went to bed salty as hell and woke up not wanting to think about the Bills. Then I checked in here, started posting and processing the loss, started feeling better in the afternoon, and by the time I woke up this morning I had convinced myself we were finishing 12-5 and poised to win a Super Bowl if we could just clean up some of our sloppiness. So, I guess somewhere in the range of 36-48 hours.

Bingo! I'd like to add that it's almost all self-inflicted wounds. In the games we are losing we are almost always losing the turnover battle and/or making other negative plays (blocked punt TD, penalties/dumb sacks taking us out of FG range, slipping on QB sneaks, missed FGs, multiple redzone 0fers, etc.). We outgained Pittsburgh by 120 yards, TN by 70 yards, Jax by 80 yards, etc. That's a big difference between this year and last. We are clearly better than a lot of these teams we are losing to, but our inability to play 60 minutes of disciplined, focused football is killing us.

That's nice and all, but we get zero push and Singletary/Moss aren't the type of dynamic athletes that can conjure up yards out of thin air like a prime Shady McCoy could do. If we try to run it 30 times against a decent front seven, you'll be looking at a 3-and-out rate north of 50% and a lot of exasperated fans and players (even more than what we're seeing now). The commitment needs to be made in the offseason. Nothing to be done at this point other than scheming some tricky stuff to hopefully break open the odd 15-20 yard rush. Our RBs suck, but in their defense, on about half of their carries they've got an interior o-lineman grinding up against their crotch by the time they secure the handoff.

A dynamic every down back and a new interior line would change quite a bit. Our three running backs combined (Devin's shiftiness, Moss' "toughness" and Breida's speed) barely add up to a good NFL starter. And we don't have a single guy who looks natural catching the ball out of the backfield. Even if the o-line sucks, just having a real third down back type would make a world of difference at the moment. It's really frustrating to watch and unfortunately there is nothing to be done about it until the offseason.

I generally agree with your original take, but I think the issue with much of the fanbase is this: if a team is essentially 100% one-dimensional in it's playcalling to the point that you know they are going to run it on every single down, you'd expect your defense to be able to completely stuff it from a pure "mano a mano" numbers perspective. And that feeling of frustration was exacerbated by the fact that the Pats "big" drive of the game was chewing up clock during much of the third and fourth quarters when we were already losing and in desperation mode searching for a stop. So, I definitely get both sides of the argument. But yeah, regardless of what you think of the defense last night, this offense had more than enough opportunity to put 14+ points on the board if not for their many gaffes.

The first drop (which was horrible) kind of colored our perception of him for the rest of the game. I agree that the other two "drops" weren't drops at all. They were pass breakups and no one was catching those balls. He was also horribly held and interfered with on the 3rd and 14 "drop". He wasn't good, but he wasn't the reason we lost.

100% agree with everything you said. He hasn't come through in the clutch this year. I think he almost feels too much pressure not to settle for field goals after the way the AFCCG turned out last year. But in some of these games (last night and Jax for sure), just avoiding negative plays (the stupid sacks absolutely must stop) and kicking FGs would have been enough. Something a seasoned QB like Brady is great at is just accepting that you can't get a TD every time.

I agree. He ain't perfect from a mental or execution standpoint (yet), but he's got the biggest toolbox in the entire league. Last night highlighted the real disparity in talent between Allen and a guy like Mac Jones. Unfortunately, it also highlighted the disparity in coaching talent between Belichick and McDermott.

Crazy thing is that if they had just played for field goals in those games in the redzone, we likely would have won. Instead, we pressed, made negative plays and either turned it over or found ourselves outside of automatic FG range. This team is nothing if not frustrating this season. It's like every button we've pushed has backfired this year.

Wow. Lots of psychotic posts in this thread, but you know what, I can sort of see it based on how frustrated I felt last night. I didn't read through the entire thread so I'm sure I'm repeating some of what has been said before, but I didn't know where else to complain this morning, so here goes. A couple of things that keep repeating themselves that I hate about the current team (especially in light of what we witnessed last night): - Why does Daboll almost always call some horrible vanilla run on 1st down inside of the redzone? These plays have never netted us more than 2 yards that I can recall (outside of a single game where Moss was able to muscle his way to a couple of TDs). It's like he thinks "I have to show the threat of the run to open up a pass, so I'll just get it out of the way on first down." The problem is that teams know that there is no real threat that the Bills will run the ball in with a RB, so they just play their base D and happily let the Bills waste one of their 3 (or 4) downs in the redzone on a 1.5 yard gain. To see this occur over and over and over again is enough to drive a fan insane. I understand the need for balance, and going empty backfield every time in the redzone will just cause the opponent to flood every passing lane, but when you don't have the horses to make it work in a traditional running scheme, then you have to get creative. We don't. Which brings me to... - Why do we seemingly never use misdirection/jet sweeps/creative running plays? I feel like these were used fairly regularly last year and now they've all but disappeared from the playbook in exchange for an endless string of relatively unproductive RPOs. Either Daboll sucks or this really is the best use of our personnel (which means our talent sucks). I had given Daboll a pretty long leash when it came to criticism, but I'm finally on board with those who think he's a problem in our struggles. Last night really crystalized it for me. Josh seemingly had to will the team down the field for every yard. I don't recall a single play where I was like, "wow, that was nicely schemed" to get someone open or free in space. - Finally, the running Josh up to the line to bark like crazy trying to get the D to jump needs to end already. It seemingly never works and if anything it ends up backfiring with penalties on us, or situations where Josh thinks he has a free play and basically wastes a down. Even when we snap it and run an actual play it seems to throw our offenses rhythm off. I'm done with it for now.

Hard to say you're the better team when you can't beat a team that only attempts to throw it 3 times. The Pats could have started a random defensive back or punter at QB last night and won. That's pretty astounding.

Nah, Breida got another carry pretty quickly after his fumble. It really surprised me at the time. And he was in there for a handful of passing downs as well. With regard to the McKenzie thing, who knows what's happening behind the scenes at practice that has caused McDermott to lose faith in McKenzie. Maybe it's performance related or something else. And I have no problem with McDermott's answer. He just told the reporter the truth. And yes, I thought McDermott coached a terrible game last night (the challenge, taking wind in the 3rd, wasting other TOs, not going for 2, kicking the FG on the penultimate Bills possession). He really felt the weight of the game last night and it showed.