BarleyNY

I agree. Plus Specials shouldn’t be forgotten. Our third side of the ball had a tremendous game. As for Watson’s big play at the end of the game, he’s a top 10 QB in the league. Sometimes a player like that is going to make a Wow! play. The game should have been over in regulation - and it would’ve been if the offense had done its job.

Excellent article. Thanks for posting.

Allen did take a shot to the head on one of his runs in the game. I’ll have to look to see if the horrible decision making started after that. It would make a lot of sense. That’s the play I was thinking of. I was surprised he wasn’t checked out by the medical people after that.

Yeah. As good as he looked in the first half, he choked big time after that. He’s young and learning. Hopefully he steps it up in crunch time. I’ve been a critic of his and he effed this one up, but even with that said I’m not totally down on him. It’s easy to forget how raw he was coming here. He’s done some great things and that makes you forget. Here’s hoping he grows from this. He deserves to be our QB next season so let’s finish building the team and see what he becomes in 2020.

Kitchens was Dorsey’s pick. Depodesta wanted Stefanski (Vikings OC). Haslam went with Kitchens in large part because Mayfield liked him and gave him the thumbs up.

Congratulations to Tre, he sure earned it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the world worked that way?

The sports media is about clicks, eyes and ears. They’ll always run with hype on any team making splash moves - especially in the off season when they need all the material they can get.

A lot will depend on the Texicans playing zone, as Romeo prefers. Josh has done well against that but has struggled against man coverage, especially with a strong rush. On the other side of the ball our DL needs to handle Houston’s poor OL and make things tough on Watson and the run game.

Have to visit the FIL and his family. I’m dragging my sous vide set up and mini charcoal grill to make filets. Not sure what else is on the menu but I’ll at least have that. Also I’ll be drinking.

I will truly miss Captain Andrew Luck’s Twitter account

Outside of QB the only two offensive players on Houston that I take over ours are Hopkins and Tunsil. That’s it. The rest of their OL is poor. Their TEs are a joke and their RBs are pedestrian. I’d take Beasley over Fuller in the slot and Smoke over Stills. As for QB, Hopkins is a top 10 QB in this league. Allen is not close to that today. But I think he still might be okay on Saturday. Romeo Crennel likes to play a disciplined, but passive 3-4 with a lot of zone. That’s exactly what Allen thrives against so we might have a really favorable matchup in this game. I like our chances to get the W.

He was the OC the second half of the season and Baker and the Browns offense did very well for those 8 games. That’s what got him the job. But he was in way over his head as HC - especially also calling offensive plays.

This is fact. FWIW I hear that he realizes that he screwed up for pretty much exactly that reason. He thought it would be easier this year and it wasn’t. It also didn’t help that he got crushed by Kitchens’ incompetence. People wonder why the Browns did well in so many games on their first drive or two, then fell apart offensively. It was because the OC, Monken, scripted a couple series worth of plays every game. Then Kitchens took over. The good news for Baker and the Browns is that Mayfield has what it takes to be their FQB. He needs to dig in and properly prepare. I fully expect that to happen. The bad news is that the Browns also need to get their organization in order and get the right people in the right places. That is far, far less likely.

You might want to think twice about ripping on Depo. His job is to provide organizational structure for the Brown, though that’s been largely ignored up until now. The Haslams went against their management’s wishes when the Browns hired Hue Jackson and against Depo’s when they hired Kitchens. He preferred Stefanski. Also when the brass - including Depo and analytics driven GM Sashi Brown - voted unanimously for another candidate, but the Haslams ignored them to select Hue, do you want to guess who they all voted for? It was none other than Sean McDermott. Seems like the problem with the Browns is ownership, not competent people like Depodesta. Things with the Browns aren’t going to get better until they step aside.

You can’t hold that against Dorsey. It’s exactly what he did tell the Haslams, but they made him keep Hue for another season. Dorsey’s problem was that he went with Kitchens when he did get to chose. He also meddled with some coaching things and hid that from ownership, which did not go over well when discovered.

Already a thread on this

Yes, except for Green Bay. That’s public information, which the owners of the other 31 teams hate because their numbers are public. They are often used to to help estimate the finances for the other teams.

This really got ignored, but it’s the correct answer. Passing efficiency in meaningful situations is what matters. Take garbage time out of the mix, add in a QB’s rushing ability, account for drops, etc. and you see a much stronger relationship between wins and a QB’s performance rating. Metrics like QBR, DYAR and DVOA get ripped on a lot around here yet they do a much better job of rating QB performance than ones like passing yards and completion percentage. Take a look.

Correct. BB coached Cleveland’s last game but Baltimore didn’t want a Cleveland coach holdover.

No team has ever not rolled over their cap space. One could chose not to do so (or make an unintentional mistake and not do so), but that would not impact the minimum they are required to spend. The minimum spending limit is calculated as a percentage of the unadjusted league cap. Rollover cap dollars from each team are added to the unadjusted cap amount for that year to get each team’s adjusted cap.

It’s only if you kick the ball and it makes it past the LOS. If a FG is blocked and doesn’t cross the LOS the kicking team can recover and retain possession of the ball. Obviously If it’s 4th down and the kicking team doesn’t advance the block past the first down marker it’s a turnover on downs. If it’s 1st, 2nd or 3rd down then the kicking team retains possession if it recovers.

Again, I disagree. Looking simply at scoring averages the Bills have been giving up an average of 16.4 ppg. You’d expect more to better offenses and less to worse ones. NE is better than average and has been scoring 26.2 ppg. Average those two numbers and we get 21.3 points. That’s about what I’d expect NE to have scored if both sides played about average. They got 24. So NE got 2.7 points more than expected. NE was also playing at home so I’d expect them to do a little better which could account for at least some of, if not all, of that 2.7 point difference. In any event I don’t see “much worse” by our defense. Let’s keep this in mind too - there will be a lot of excellent offenses in the playoffs. The defense will probably give up more than 16 or 17 points to those offenses too. But it’s because they’re playing good offenses, not because they're playing poorly.

Two of the posts I responded to were just short lists and the other only talked about why other QBs weren’t on his list. Not exactly exhaustive arguments. They got an equivalent response. I’ll leave it at this: There are a lot of good, young (or at least not old) QBs in this league who have outperformed Allen. An unbiased look at the QB options would yield a much longer list than between 0 and 3 names. I hope Allen keeps getting better, but there’s no guarantee that he will and he’s not the only QB who can do that. If we’re looking at performance to date then there are a lot of better options.

Well, then they need to because they aren’t carrying their weight. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. The defense wasn’t stellar, but they weren’t bad either. Good teams are going to score in the NFL today. And if we’re going to criticize let’s do so based on performance, not just expectation. The offense was a notably worse than the defense yesterday and they’ve been that way all season.