jrober38

For sure. Allen's scouting report described a freak QB with a rocket arm who can run like a gazelle. We've seen that. It also described a guy who doesn't do well in the pocket, and excels when things break down. It also described a guy who struggles to throw with touch, and is best when he can uncork his fastball. We've seen all of that as well. I underestimated Allen's ability to run. That alone gives him a higher floor than I expected. He just needs to become more consistent. He was great in the 2nd half, and that's what we remember, but he also only had 50 yards passing at halftime. He needs to clean up the long lulls where our passing game is non existent. Allen was great yesterday and we should have won, but there's still a ton he can improve on. He needs to learn to check down from the pocket more and take what the defense gives him, and he really needs to work on his deep ball which hasn't been accurate all year.

Agreed. He's a freak. I think the future change will be that opposing D lines no longer try to sack him. As we see time and time again, he just side steps them or shrugs off their arm tackles and runs away. I think eventually you see teams rush 3, and just play contain by operating a two gap defense vs trying to get around a defender and lose gap control that Allen winds up exploiting. Then on the back end there will be 8 guys in coverage with their eyes on him. Right now the mistake everyone makes is thinking they can sack Allen. As you said he's too big and strong and it doesn't work.

The blueprint is there. For whatever reason teams just aren't utilizing it. Eventually people are going to figure out to stop a player like Allen, you need to rush 3 with a Spy, and drop the other 7 guys into zone coverage so they can keep their eyes on him in case he tries to run. Same as Tyrod. Make him be a quarterback, and eliminate his ability to escape the pocket, roll to his right and make big plays down the field. He's such an amazing runner that might now happen, but that's what I'd be doing if I was an opposing DC. Forget trying to sack him, just keep him in the pocket and make him beat you with his arm. He's the same size as Cam Newton, and after a while even he started getting banged up from the hits. Broken ribs, concussions, etc. You can't run as a QB as much as Newton did early in his career and Allen is now and expect to stay healthy.

This isn't really true. Pretty much all of Allen's big plays are from outside the pocket. He makes some throws inside the pocket, but more often than not he's looking to run and extend plays because he can create big plays running around and using his arm to throw fastballs as hard as he can down the field. Allen played well yesterday, and his running ability is unbelievable, but at some point he's going to start taking some big hits which will take a toll. Eventually he'll need to spend 80% of his time in the pocket, and right now I'm not sure it's 50-50.

McDermott has never been a very good in game manager. He regularly wastes challenges, doesn't utilize time outs properly, rarely looks for points before halftime if the clock is under 90 seconds, and loves punting on 4th and short inside opposition territory (he did it again yesterday on 4th and 2 from the Miami 48 yard line). McDermott gets his guys to play hard, and his players seem to respect him, but his conservative nature is really tiring. For a team that's not going to make the playoffs, there's no reason to be playing as conservatively as we do on offense.

I'll agree. His overall accuracy isn't as bad as I expected, although he still has the random throw that he throws right into the turf which is weird. Allen is very good at throwing the ball on a rope. If he's given the opportunity to let it rip, and he's throwing right at his target with no defender in the way, he's quite good. On the flip side, any time he has to throw with touch he struggles. He can't naturally put air under the ball and drop it in a spot where his receiver can catch it. His deep balls are often inaccurate and he misses some easy throws where he can't just let it rip. Hopefully he works on those this offseason.

Drop. Clay should have run back to the football and let him hit him in his chest. It shouldn't have been close. He just completely misread the flight of the ball.

I'm not going to rip on Allen, so don't read into this that way. He played pretty well yesterday all things considered. He has some moxie, seems to like big moments and the team clearly rallies around him which is important. He runs too much but I'll let him have it because he's young. With all of that said, anytime he can't throw his fastball, he struggles. His deep balls are often over thrown and lack touch, and he missed what could have been a big play to Jones down the sideline yesterday when he escaped the pocket and rolled right. He tried throwing with touch, but it wasn't accurate and the throw was missed (the play would have been negated by a penalty, but it was still a bad throw). He really needs to clean this up going forward if he's going to be successful. It doesn't matter if you can throw a football 70 yards if you can't throw it for your wide open receiver to catch. The positive is that the guys he's throwing to are generally wide open and if he can fix it the offense could be pretty good because his running ability is like nothing I've ever seen before.

Allen can't miss that throw to Jones. He seriously needs to throw more than just his fastball. Some touch would be nice.

We have an offense that can create big plays, but we can't move the football consistently. The lack of production is getting old. It shouldn't be this yard to move the football in 2018.

Our offense is unwatchable. Can't pass, can't run, can't block.

Buffalo has 68 yards of total offense with only 24 yards passing. What a joke.

What a disaster. Special teams haven't shown up today.

The top 4-5 coaches in the NFL all go for it there. McVay, Payton, Belichick, Reid. They're all letting their offense make a play.

He loves punting on 4th and short in opposition territory.

He's a great athlete trying to figure out how to play QB. I can't figure out why defenses don't spy him every play and take that away. The book on how to stop Allen is the same one people used to stop Tyrod. Just keep him inside the pocket.

The Bills offense is so hard to watch.

I disagree. What would have happened if there were no witnesses? What would have happened if there weren't two men and a woman holding him back throughout his attempt to attack the woman? Hunt was completely out of control, and only stopped from doing major physical harm by the fact that his entourage did what they could to prevent the attack.

What would have happened if there weren't two guys holding him back?

I don't see anyway that's remotely possible. You don't hear about your star running back being involved in a domestic dispute in 2018 and not dig into what actually happened when there was ample security footage available. They might say they didn't know, but there's no chance that's true. I don't see how that's possible. It simply doesn't make any sense that they never asked for the various security footage available and didn't have enough sway or $$$ to get a copy.

The Chiefs knew exactly what he did and did nothing about it. No chance an NFL team in 2018 just relies on an the info they get from an interview with their player to formulate how they'll proceed. They would have investigated, and easily found out there was a tape, and chose to do nothing about it. If this incident was last week, the Chiefs would look great. The issue was this incident was in February, and they certainly know exactly what happened and hoped it would stay swept under the rug. Luckily for them player contracts aren't guaranteed and the opportunity cost of keeping him vs cutting them earlier was a no brainer on the football field.

The fact that the Chiefs knew about this since February and did nothing is sickening.

Doesn't matter. Tailgating is a sunk cost for an NFL franchise. This is about improving the game day experience and making the games more appealing to more people. Reality is that once late November rolls around, the Bills are only really capable of selling tickets to college kids and men in their 20s and early 30s. It's a major uphill battle to get seniors, children (they hardly go anyways because the crowd is so immature) and women. The NFL is a business, and if you're going to spend $1-1.5 billion on a stadium, you're going to do what you can to create an environment where instead of people filling themselves up on food in the parking lots, you'll encourage them to come to the games on an empty stomach and eat products from the concession stands instead. I get that people love tailgating, but a downtown stadium in a more accessible area with a roof appeals to a hell of a lot more people than a stadium in the middle of nowhere where the weather is terrible for half the home games. I'm talking about a new subway in the city. The city has been talking about a project called the Yonge Relief Line for about 6-7 years now. The main subway artery to downtown along Yonge Street bottlenecks where it meets the east/west Bloor line, and the result is a disaster at Bloor Station every morning between 7:30 and 9:30 am. Same thing going the other way once people get off work. The project is valued at about $10 billion, and it'll add 5 new stations and siphon off a ton of the people who head downtown to work from the east end of the city, reducing the overwhelming pressure on Bloor Station. There's still no plan on when that'll happen, even though it would help hundreds of thousands of people get down town. If they can't figure that one out, no chance they devote massive public money to service Niagara Falls and its 88,000 residents.

It just won't happen. The provincial government is broke, and the politics of investing cash into an area with a tiny population relative to the overall province is always very difficult to make happen. Any major public works projects are focused on Toronto. Toronto adds more people per year than Niagara Falls, ON has in its existing population. The city desperately needs massive infrastructure projects to commence, particularly with a new subway line, and all the key government players from the feds, to the province to the city are trying to figure out how to spend about $10 billion on that project.

Maybe. But probably not. Football fans don't usually flip what team they support once they've settled on the team they support. You might get some bandwagon fans, but not many. This is why away games like the Raiders are such a huge draw for the Bills because there are so many fans in Southern Ontario who grew up cheering for them in the 80s and 90s. Same with the Dolphins, with people who grew up cheering for Dan Marino. Most of my friends are football fans, and hardly any of them cheer for the Bills. They might go to a Bills game every year or every other year, and throw on a dated jersey that they bought 10 years ago at the first game they went to, but they're not Bills fans. They're just football fans who go to be entertained, but they're really fans of other teams. They go to Buffalo every once and a while because the team they really like is too far away. A better team on the field would probably result in more Canadians going to games, but probably not more season tickets and potential Private Seat Licenses which is what they'll need to build a new facility.