BillsFanSD

But why is it collusion? Everybody seems to agree that what the Browns did was stupid. If we all agree that the Browns are stupid, why are we surprised that NFL GMs apparently agree too?

TBF, letting Poyer walk is the right business decision. I love the guy and I'll wish him well as long as he lands outside our division. It just doesn't make sense for us to pay him what he's going to be able to get from other teams. I do hate losing Edmunds and it would not surprise me in the least if we end up regretting his departure. People are all bent out of shape over Isaiah Hodgins. This board will melt down if Edmunds becomes an all-pro with some other team. Hopefully we put those assets to very, very good use.

I don't understand the "collusion" argument. Why would teams be colluding against Lamar Jackson? That doesn't make any sense considering some of the contracts that we've seen signed just this week. A much simpler explanation is that the shaky passer who isn't using an agent overestimated his market value.

Good for Geno. So glad we're not in this situation.

Reading Tim Graham's latest article in The Athletic bothered me more than it really should have. It feels like there's a growing conflict between Bills fans and Bills reporters, where beat reporters are barely able to disguise their contempt for fans. The reporters are always the ones who come out of these sorts of conflicts looking small. I mean, I like Frazier. I didn't want him to leave, and I wish him well in whatever comes next. But if some fan was a little more agitated than me about the status of our defense and they wanted a change, fine. I don't see why Tim Graham feels obliged to tell that fan what an idiot he is. That fan probably has a more stable and lucrative career than Tim Graham. If we're going to question one another's wisdom as human beings, let's talk about what drives a college-educated person into a field like sports journalism, and the life decisions that led you to that point. Let's start with second-guessing Tim Graham, and then we'll move on to random fans.

Absolutely, yes. McDermott has exceeded my expectations by far. It's not close. Now, of course, my expectations were very low when we hired him. After Rex, Marrone, Jauron, etc. I just assumed this McDermott guy would be the next in line and we'd be conducting the usual postmortem in 3-4 seasons. Obviously I was totally wrong about that. He took a sad-sack, frankly irrelevant franchise and turned it into a team that is expected to win playoff games. That's a night and day change. We seem to be a destination of choice for free agents, which is also a night and day change. McDermott didn't accomplish all of this on his own, and he would never say so. His staff helps, Beane helps, the Pegulas help, and of course drafting Josh Allen helped just a little smidge. But McDermott is probably the best coach this franchise has ever had. I'm not happy with the way the second half of this season went, and I have some criticisms of how we used our rookies and how this team has been built. But that's constructive criticism directed toward a person who I think is doing a very good job.

Our defense gave up 31 points to someone named Skylar Thompson.

I'm not sure if this is the right move, but I am okay with this.

Pretty much exactly where I am. Football is a weird sport in the sense that a 17-game season followed by a single-elimination tournament creates a ton of variance. Excellent teams get their seasons completely upended by injuries to individual players, weird bounces of the ball, officiating errors, etc. You can't just assume that because your team is the best team on paper, it will automatically be there at the end. Soccer, baseball, and basketball are all far more predictable than football IMO. You can't be firing your HC or GM because of one season of under-performance or one horrific gut-punch. By and large, McBeane have done well. They've gotten us into the playoffs as a matter of course, and it's now the expectation that we win our division. That's very good. Huge step up from where we were. But like you said, it does feel like something is just off with this team. It's not that they're just a player or two away, or something like that that would be easy to fix. They're mentally and physically soft. They're the Dungy-era Colts. Plenty of talent on paper, and none of it matters when they encounter a good opponent with more spine. But maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm right and McBeane are already working to fix this problem. For what they've accomplished so far, they deserve the benefit of the doubt for one more year. If 2023 is like 2022, though, I'll probably be advocating for some new people.

I'm rooting for the guy to make it back to the NFL. He was treated very poorly by the media and the Bills organization. If you actually read the criminal complaint, you would have noticed that victim was very careful not accuse MA of participating in her gang rape. She specifically said, out loud, that she couldn't recall if he actually raped* her or not. But the good folks at Cover 1 and the Buffalo News knew better or something. * Technically this is still a statutory rape situation since nobody disputes that they had consensual sex, but also nobody ever really cared about that angle because nobody actually has a problem with a 21 year-old shagging a 17 year-old. That was all pretend outrage.

He knows that it's not designed for him. That's his point -- the championship game of his favorite sport isn't designed for fans of that sport, and it should be.

I think it's okay for football fans to ask that the super bowl be about football. You might not agree with the specific items that he's raising, but your gatekeeping is not needed.

It feels weird to say this in a football forum, but I've skipped the last several super bowls, starting with PHI-NE. Part of it is the Bills. Now that they're good, and I feel like they belong in the super bowl, it's too painful to watch football after they've been eliminated. My nerves are still too raw and there's still too much "what if?" in the air. I have nothing against the Chiefs, but I don't want to watch them hoist a championship trophy. So when the Bills' season ends, my season ends too. But in the particular case of the super bowl, it's just a bad sporting event, in the same way that the Olympics are bad. There's way too much pre-game and build-up to the game itself. It takes way too long to get through the team introductions, the coin flip, the national anthem, etc. The commercials are stupid and over-produced. The halftime show is stupid, and while I can ignore it, that doesn't change the fact that halftime goes on and on for this game and this game only. The commentary is geared toward people who never watch football, so the announcers are worse than usual. Plus the game starts too late, goes too long, and I have to work the next morning.

This seems like healthy ribbing to me. Good for him.

TBH, it's kind of sad that we, as a fanbase, would get triggered over stuff like this. Tired of seeing Mahomes in the super bowl? Beat him. We're not some 5-12 bottom-feeder. We have the horses to beat this team. We've beaten them each of the past two seasons. Just take care of business and quit being babies because somebody drew our QB in a slightly unfavorable light in a cartoon.

The NFL doesn't care right up to the point that fan dissatisfaction starts reducing the value of television contracts. Then they care a lot. So no, obviously Goodell is not going to lose sleep over one guy on one forum complaining about one call in one game. I don't know if you've noticed this recently, but there are lots of people out there who either agree with OP or who are vaguely sympathetic to OP. I'm fairly confident that some of us have been complaining about part-time officials for years. We know the league won't care until there are more of us. That's why we're seeking to bring more attention to the issue.

I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of the truth. The Bills have been really good at these decisions analytically.

This one in particular is a tic that I hadn't noticed on this forum until last year, and now it seems like an almost monthly occurrence that someone plays the "nobody owes you an explanation about anything" card. Technically, they're right of course. If McDermott doesn't want to say what happened with 13 seconds, or doesn't want to comment on how Tre is coming along, or whatever, that's absolutely his right as a coach. And as a fan, I absolutely have the right to advocate for marginally more transparency. Trust me, I'm not under any delusion that I can stroll into OBD and start demanding answers to all my questions. I'd just like to know a little more about what's going on with the team, and it's strange to me that certain fans react so viscerally to what strikes me as a perfectly normal desire.

Not that I ever disliked Diggs, but his reaction to the Bengals game is causing me to view him with increasing respect. I would expect any professional to be disgusted with that performance. The drought-era teams were filled with guys who were happy just to cash a paycheck, and I thought we had gotten rid of those people back in the cap purges of 2018/2019. Glad Diggs isn't having any of this. What evidence do you have for this? I saw a team that was checked out for the last few weeks of the season. I think Diggs saw it too.

Nope. If our coaches are as good as they say they are, we should routinely see people leave our staff and flourish elsewhere. That's a clear sign of a healthy, well-run organization that develops its people. Daboll's success reflects well on the Bills. Obviously it would have been nice to keep Hodgins, but he wouldn't have made a difference this year and we need to do better than him next year.

Wouldn't mind seeing less of Michael Irvin. Also wouldn't mind seeing less rush to judgement.

Sounds credible. I too meet relatives of professional athletes who share confidential information with me, a total stranger, on a near-daily basis.

My first name is Jason. I'm 50. My wife and I both grew up and went to school in Indiana. I became a Bills fan because they became an interesting team with lots of big personalities when I was in high school. At the time, the Colts were in the AFC East, so I got to see the SB teams and also caught some of the early post-SB guys like Bryce Paup, Moulds, and Flutie. We left for South Dakota in our mid-20s when I become a college professor. Still there. I've gotten to see the Bills play at Arrowhead a couple of times (not recently though) and was there for The Hurdle in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, attending a Bills game usually means getting on a plane. We raised both our kids here, and they're now both out of the house, which is wonderful.

2020 was fantastic, but in the back of my mind I was always wondering how much of that year was Josh, and how much of it was empty stadiums. 2021 removed all doubt, so my vote goes for 2021.

I've been assuming this whole time that she either suffered a drug overdose or a failed suicide attempt. Those are usually pretty safe bets when a family is extremely tight-lipped about what's going on. I wish they had just said earlier that she had a heart attack.