AKC

You might want to go back and take one more look at the Pitt WR corps. I'm just guessing that there's only so much you can do with strings and sealing wax, or whatever else is being smoked in Belechiks office. It's defense that's won for him in the past (although fans give all the credit to their O) and his defense may not hold up against the competition at the postseason '05 level in the AFC.

Kevin Mawae is more important than Chad Pennington on the current Jets offense, and even 4th graders just picking up "I Pass" for the first time realize that if they live on Long Island. You want more examples of how utterly ridiculous your assertion is?

If you complete the triangle of big game losers by adding Eric Moulds to the package, I'll sign on.

The Stadium Wall has experienced an evolution over the course of its life, from its beginnings as a football board to its unfortunate metamorphosis today as merely another style board in which facts and considered analysis and debate have been replaced by unfounded whims and compulsive obsessions. It’s surely no surprise since this has paralleled a like evolution in sports radio, where we’ve seen thorough analysis trumped by Jim Rome and the Jungle. Looking at The Stadium Wall today a new fan of football just discovering a message board community would be led to believe that the 2004 Buffalo Bills offense, quarterbacked by a blind handicapped walk-on who played in shackles, forced us to suffer through a wholly end-to-end dreadful season during which we faced the worst competition in the NFL and failed to live up to even the expectations of being led by a blind handicapped walk-on in shackles. On the other hand, the same new fan of football just discovering this message board community would be confused by the promotion of the idea that our defense played the cream of the crop in the NFL and showed up huge every Sunday, kicking the snot out of the best the NFL could put up and ultimately being dragged down by our blind handicapped quarterback playing in shackles. So the new fan could only come away with the idea that our offense and defense competed each week against different opponents! And oddly enough that would be the one correct conclusion that the new fan might garner- but not for the way it's portrayed by many on The Stadium Wall. We surely did face different competition each week this season, but it was our offense that far and away faced the indisputably tougher assignments over the course of the season. We saw 8 top 10 defenses while our defense saw only 4 top 10 offenses all season. We faced top half of the league defenses 11 times this season while our defense saw only 7 of the upper half offenses. That means our offense more weeks than not faced a top half defense while exactly the opposite was true of our defense. The fact is that the defenses we faced, based upon the final rankings of the regular season, prove our offense faced defenses that were 29% tougher than the offenses our defense played over the same span. One lesson that the new fan might learn is to believe none of what you hear but instead believe what you see. If you watched the Buffalo Bills this season you can draw different conclusions about the appropriate direction for next season, but you can not accurately say that any one unit of this team kept us in every game single-handedly every week. We played as a team this year and when you do no single player and no single unit is “responsible” for our “awful” 9-7 rebirth as a team moving in the right direction according to most outside observers. The 2004 Bills won as a team- and we lost as a team. There are many positives to find for our football team, although they might be almost impossible to uncover with some trying to achieve the “style” post of the day whining on and on over and over about how many times they paid attention to nothing but the football all season long. There’s a lot more fallacies than this big whopper being spread by these Jim Rome disciples and it’s clear they will not allow their licorice whistles to be silenced by reason and fact. So we’ll do what used to be the provenance of lesser fan bases- we’ll observe what is expected of the casual fans in New York City with their Jets and Giants, or the Miami and San Fran fans- we’ll watch as our fan base becomes more like those fan bases screaming about the QB position whenever the team loses a game and less like the Green Bay fan base we were more typically compared to in the immediate past. We’ll sit by while the “style” fans squawk on with unfounded opinion and a disregard of history. But we should not sit by idly ;-)

Clearly the one to blame is Eric Moulds. As our opponents realized Eric no longer needed as much attention yet our rookie was a double threat- speed AND hands- our opponents focused their deep help and also their underneath double primarily on Lee. Look at the Pitt game- they figured they could cover Moulds with single coverage by Chad Scott coming off 7 or 8 weeks from an injury- and they won the battle of the odds in doing so when Moulds lost two by his own poor handling of the ball while being single covered.

You young'uns never got to watch Old Man Manning play. I'd guess he'd be happy to let you know who the most important guys are on the offensive side of the ball!

If all Trey Teague did was snap the ball you might be able to better support your position- the fact that upon snapping the ball Mr. Teague has further duties tends to diminish the argument that the only guy who doesn't have to bang around with the opposition on every play is the most important guy on the field.

The only real measure we have is their rookie outings, although again I'd hardly consider it a fair comparison: Johnson: 28 catches 329 yards 11.8 YPC 28 longest catch 1 TD Evans: 48 catches 843 yards 17.6 YPC 69 longest catch 9 TDs I'm sure Kitna would have made Evans a legitimate performer though ;-)

No doubt; if we only had Trent Dilfer, Josh Reed would be making his Hawaii reservations right now.

I'd hardly compare the two. Chad Johnson has 4 years in the league. Lee Evans in his rookie campaign averaged 3 yards more per catch than Johnson has over his career.

A mere crumb can constitute a full meal for a rat.

I guess you don't get to see many of our games ;-)

And while you're at it you better get what you can right now for Lee Evans, a player whose talents would be wasted with a limp armer like Kitna. Evans would go from emerging star to "Where Are They Now?" if he loses one of the 4 best long arms in the league. But Josh Reed would LOVE Kitna!

You have to have some amount of sympathy for any poor bastid who has to play alongside Pucillo. Mike clearly is not an NFL caliber lineman and his presence on our roster exposes how thin we are on our OG depth chart. VA Bills- I'd give him some credit for his feet- they use him a lot to break to the outside block on off-tackle runs and there's not a lot of centers who can get out there. If you go back to games and watch how many times a Willis run is spring for 8+ yards INSIDE of a Teague block you might give him a higher rating, at least in this run block first offense.

It's hard for me to imagine Teague playing LT in the Clements offense, an offense that would benefit mostly from a bulldozer at LT, someone along the lines of, let's say, a fit Mike Williams? That would make finding a RT in the draft or FA a much easier prospect, especially considering they'd be working next to our best OLineman. The position to watch in FA is LG- does this team truly believe they can polish up Tucker or will they make a move that indicates they feel a quality vet at LG would push the running O over the top?

I'd agree early on in the season, but it appears that Lee got a lot more of the safety attention and double brackets as the season wore on and by the time we played Pitt Eric was seeing a lot of single coverage.

The only problem with those examples is that the measure "Big Game" being used by the Dumpsoes appears to only include the Super Bowl, and therefore since Bledsoe took a team there and lost he's a "Big Game Loser'. These same Dumpsoes agree that Jim Kelly is a "Big Game Loser". It seems only fair to hold Eric to the same standard for the purpose of this exercise in consistency.

The incident of immediate impact WRs from the draft is increasing. Anquin Boldin comes to mind as a non first-round impact WR. Don't underestimate the valuethe Chargers got in picking up the ever underrated Keenan McCardell during the season. For me, our #1 is already on our roster and he's going into his sophomore campaign. He's a real receiver, with great hands and speed plus a year under his belt. Moulds has never had the potential to impact our offense like Evans can at the 1 spot.

Ah, the future! An interesting aside is that Lee Evans is the best WR on our roster as of January 2005. I don't expect that to change in September ;-)

I'd agree with you that if a player's negative impact is so great in balance with his positive impact that the difference is a cumulative negative, and that negative difference is greater than any other players overall positive sum then that former player can hold the position of most important on the team. So to your post, I'd completely agree with a personal addendum that not only is the QB not the most important on "some" teams, he's not the most important on "most" teams AFAIC. But I don't find your scenario the case for Bledsoe in the 2004 campaign. First of all the offensive strategy was designed so that it would be almost impossible for him to become the most important player. His reduced role was handled by him very well for the most part both in the opening losses and through the winning run. The role of the RBs and OL became more critical in this particular system, and that's why a player like Chris Villarail became the backbone of our offense and why I'd rate Villarial equally as critical and impactive as Willis McGahee. Bledsoe remains far down the ladder in the scheme we used. Another player who became much more important this year was Mark Campbell, who jumped maybe 4 to 6 places in importance based on scheme versus our use of TE in the '03 season. Bledsoe was the typical poor accuracy in the short game passer he has alwasy been against Pitt. Moulds was also his typical poor handed self in dropping at minimum one, and IMO two of our early games, losing them single-handedly by letting important balls go. His Pitt performance was awful too, letting two perfectly thrown balls hit the ground while being unable to get any separation from singel coverage by a Pitt nickel back coming off something like an 8 missed game injury stretch. I keep hearing the screams of "big players make big plays in big games". Funny how I can't remember Moulds making any "big plays in big games" over the course of his career. In fact, it may have been your post in this string with the position ranking by TFO. If you really buy their formulas for grading players how do you justify paying MORE money in '05 for the #43 player at his position in Eric Moulds versus paying less for the #30 player at his position in Bledsoe? While I'd refute both their numerical positions, the stats were brought up and they illustrate exactly what I've been saying all along- if you make the argument that we've heard Ad Nauseum for a year about dumping Bledsoe, the exact same measure applied to Eric would seem to argue even stronger against HIS retention. Why do some refuse to insist that other high-priced players should also be held responsible when they underperfom when the going is toughest?

You mean I won't see any more snipey and insulting posts from you with virtually no logic to back them up? Glad we worked that out!

Since you're struggling so much with the most basic of concepts let me break it down even further for you. On some teams the QB is their most important offensive player, but it's not exclusive. So let me say it another way because you apparently are unable to remove your blinders about the position. On some teams their most important player is a RT, on others a WR and on others and OC. The reason you struggle to understand this is apparently because you spend all your time wathcing the ball during a game and you consequently fail to see the difference makers on any team. It's fine you choose to believe it- you're like 80% of the casual fans of football who are naive enough to believe that foolishness and I don't intent to make you any more knowledgeable a fan than you have chosen to be. As to your "yes" and "no" questions you again have zero perspective as to my observations- and I'm perfectly willing to prove how little you know about football by asking you to list, in order of importance and impact to the team, the starting players on the Buffalo Bills offense this past season. This should be incredibly simple for you because you have a flawed, and static, view of the importance of players based upon their positions versus the actual dynamic importance structure that exists in any organization based upon many dynamics including scheme, opponent, personnel and sideline decisions. Yours will read something like this: QB RB WR TE etc. etc.

So you believe Jeff Hostetler, Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson, Doug Williams, Kurt Warner and Mark Rypien were the most important players on their Super Bowl winning football teams? And there was a question attached to the post you referenced- WHY do you believe the QB is the most important player on a football team? Just 5 or 6 reasons would be helpful for me to understand.

That's profound. Perhaps you'd like to offer some reasoning behind why you consider it "foolish"? Or perhaps I can guess- "The Quarterback has to be the most important player on the field because he touches the ball every play." And let me further deduce that you leave the waiter HUGE tips when you go out to eat becasue he is, after all , the one bringing you the food every time.

Probably my subconscious refusal to allow Randy Cross to drive me nuts by listening to him.