BillsFanSD

The red and blue sentences go together. You're right that we need to hit on a second receiver on their rookie contract. We thought we did that with Davis, and we were wrong. Hence the freak-out.

Yesterday was our first day in 23 years without Directv. Kind of weird, like the end of an era. No hard feelings toward DTV at all. They provided a good product with good service, albeit at a somewhat high price point. It's just that aside from live sports, I can't understand why anybody would want a service that requires to you to tune in at specific times to watch the shows you want, with commercials included. That business model isn't going to survive the 2020s. It's barely alive now. DTV and the networks just offer an objectively inferior product when compared to any decent streaming service.

Sure, and when that time arrives Josh Allen will be 35 or something.

You couldn't have known that Jefferson would be available at that pick, or that Jefferson would be so much better than, say, Jalon Reagor. This is Monday morning quarterbacking. The reason why we traded for Diggs is because we knew with ~90% certainty that we were getting a blue chip star. No such certainty with the draft.

3. Have the officials bail you out when you need a helping hand.

The Diggs trade was a good use of draft picks. Epenesa was a whiff. He plays, but he's just another guy in a rotation. You expect much more from a 2nd round pick. Moss -- Wasted pick. Davis is a solid contributor. He's not a reliable WR2, but he can play. Pretty good pick for a 4th rounder. You need this kind of guy in the middle rounds. Fromm -- Wasted pick. Bass -- Excellent. Couldn't ask for a better selection at PK. Hodgins -- Hard to evaluate. This might have been a really good selection if we had kept Hodgins around, but we didn't, so it isn't. Jackson -- Excellent. Any time you get a quality depth guy in the 7th round, it's a win.

2022: In the top tier. 2023: Hard to say without seeing how FA goes, but I'm inclined to guess that the Bills are just outside the top tier. (Playoff team but not championship contender).

Yes, of course. You seem to be under the impression that "tough" means silent and stoic. That's not the case, and you should rid yourself of these sorts of stereotypes about what masculinity looks like.

The 49ers have had replacement-level QBing all season.

They openly admitted that they couldn't get motivated for a divisional playoff game. That defines soft. Also, you need to get over this antiquated stereotype about how mental toughness means never showing emotion. Some mentally tough people aren't overly emotional, but Diggs wears his emotions on his sleeve and he produces on the field at every opportunity. Knock it off with the outdated tropes.

I expect the Bills to win the AFC East in 2023, but that's by no means a sure thing. Miami is a good team that should push us if they can keep their QB healthy (unlikely but still). The Jets will also be good if they find a QB. Right now, I'd say our odds of winning the division are about 50-50, or maybe 60-40. I think it's more likely that we miss the playoffs altogether than that we win a championship. This team feels a lot more inclined to take a step backwards rather than forwards.

Spencer Brown should be competing for a starting job next year. Emphasis on "competing." I'd be perfectly comfortable with Brown as a backup tackle.

They're the Dungy-era Colts. They win a bunch of games in the regular season against teams that can't hang talent-wise, and they struggle with playoff teams. Of course, those Colts teams did win a super bowl and certainly had their moments, but I don't think anybody would seriously object to the observation that they were under-achievers.

As I've gotten older, I've swung around strongly to the view that age discrimination should be perfectly legal. The idea that people don't slow down as they age is just nuts.

Cool. I certainly won't complain about an up-and-coming rival scoring an own goal.

I think that was still a pretty reasonable believe in training camp. Consider: Davis was productive during his rookie year with a few catches in the playoffs. He blew up in the 2021 playoffs. It was reasonable to expect him to continue to build on that production in Year 3. He didn't. We thought we had two halfway decent options in the slot, three if you count Shakir. Turns out we were wrong. Three times. We thought we had added an extra dimension to our offense by adding Cook. Then he fumbled and got sent to the doghouse for the rest of the season. We thought that a DL featuring almost nothing but first- and second-round picks would come into form. Whoops. We added to our LB depth by investing a third round pick in that guy who was inactive every game. We drafted a corner in the first round to play opposite Tre, but our coaches wouldn't play that guy. Also, Tre took much longer to come back that anybody was predicting. How many safeties did we burn through this year? That's a lot of whiffs mixed in with some places where we actually were pretty deep but our depth was severely tested (the secondary).

A billion people have said this already, but add me to the "we haven't drafted particularly well" camp.

I don't know anything about this person, but he spells his first name correctly so that's a very good first step. Works for me.

I was getting irritated with the offense toward the end of the season, but I was one of those people who was hoping that maybe we were just holding back some wrinkles for use in the playoffs. Nope, I was wrong. There were no wrinkles. My opinion of Dorsey dropped quite a bit between the Miami and Cincinnati games. I don't feel bad for giving him the benefit of the doubt (what was I supposed to do? -- it's not like he's under my control or anything) but I can certainly update my priors accordingly.

I'm strongly in favor of not firing McDermott, but let's be honest. He's a COY candidate because one of his players was severely injured on the field. He's not being nominated because of his team's success, and the way our season ended pretty much eliminated any real chance he might have had of winning a sympathy award.

McDermott is arguably the best HC the Bills have ever had. Levy was great of course, but he didn't have to deal with the salary cap and got to coach a loaded roster every year. Without getting hung up on whether McDermott is better than Levy, let's just posit that he's really good. That said, nobody's perfect. He's been here long enough now that we have a pretty good idea of his strengths and weaknesses as a HC, and his weaknesses are going to get called out a little when our season unexpectedly comes to an early end. To the degree that he has a voice in the draft, our drafts have been mediocre. He refuses to play rookies as if this is still the Bill Parcels era where rookies are seen but never heard from. There seems to be communication issues between him and his coordinators. But more importantly, he's built a team that's both physically and mentally soft, much like the Dungy-era Colts. We're that team that wins 12+ games every year but you don't mind seeing us in the playoffs. That's absolutely on the HC. Do I want McDermott fired? LOL no. I remember the drought thank you very much, and I'm enjoying our continued run of high-quality relevance. But I do think it's fair to question whether this coach is optimized for a championship.

I actually don't mind this part. The team had lots of first-hand experience with Dorsey. They knew the guy way, way better than any of us did. They knew his background, they knew (or should have known) how he thought about offense, his relationship with Josh and the other offensive players, etc. If the people with years of experience working with him day in, day out thought that he was the right guy to replace Daboll, cool. I'll trust their judgement. Of course, the corollary here is that if you get that decision wrong, you need to admit as much and make a course correction. I don't feel strongly about it, but I'm skeptical of the idea that we should allow Dorsey to grow into his role. That would be okay if we were rebuilding, but you just can't waste time developing an OC when you have Josh Allen. In other words, I would be happy if the team decided to throw a bunch of money at Frank Reich and make him the highest-paid OC in the league. Surely this is an attractive job for a top OC.

The coaching staff and FO absolutely should have their feet held to the first on this topic. Toss Elam in there while we're at it. And why did we even draft Terrel Bernard? Why are we drafting players and then not playing the players we drafted?

I expect to win the AFC East next season, but it won't be a cakewalk. Miami is legitimately good, and they will be a threat if they get their QB situation straightened out. The Jets will also be a threat if they get a QB. (Not worried about New England at this point). Sitting here in January of 2023, I guess I give the Bills something like a 70% chance to win the division, and maybe an 85-90% chance to make the playoffs. This assumes that Josh Allen stays healthy all season. This team is not a playoff team without Allen, and it doesn't really matter who the backup is. (The quality of our backup QB matters if we're talking about a game or two -- if Allen misses any significant amount of time, we're screwed.) That said, this team is clearly on a downward trajectory in the sense that we no longer have the luxury of having an all-world QB on a bargain bin salary. We'll have to make some tough personnel choices, and from here on out we'll be challenged by up-and-comers with star players on rookie contracts. The days of us having a built-in cap advantage are officially over. We should still be competitive of course.

The guy's an #######. Big deal. Lots of people in lots of lines of work are #######s. If you get bent out of shape every time you encounter one, you're never going to get anything accomplished.