jrober38

Agreed. 8 TDs to 18 Interceptions with 7 fumbles for his career, on teams where he was with the team he played for all season. Asking a terrible QB to play a regular season game with like 5 practices under his belt is moronic.

All we're getting to is that the Bills should have never traded up for Allen. As you said, if you give up that much for a guy he needs to play immediately, and that was never a viable plan for an unprepared, mediocre QB from the Mountain West Conference who was picked 7th overall almost entirely because he's 6'5, 240 with a rocket for an arm and "looks" like a franchise QB. He has to learn all the other details associated with playing QB, like how to read a defense pre and post snap, how to throw with consistent accuracy, etc. You don't draft guys as raw as he was, who had poor college production and plenty of bad game film, in the first 10 picks of the draft. Not going all out to get someone who could keep Allen on the bench where he belongs will probably be what costs this regime their jobs.

This just isn't true. Barkley had a noodle arm in college and he has a noodle arm now. He thrived in college throwing a ton of WR screens to Marquis Lee and Robert Woods, but has never been able to drive the ball down the field. As a QB he's extremely limited, hence why he's struggled to hold onto a job as anything more than an emergency QB since he was drafted. My guess is it's never happened, which explains the whole having the worst offense in NFL history thing.

Barkley throws the ball down the field with a noodle arm. The result has been 8 career TDs to 18 picks and 7 fumbles in 266 pass attempts. He's a terrible QB.

Fair enough. Everyone knew the Jets were picking a QB and had Josh McCown and they were still able to get Teddy Bridgewater. I think a strong argument can be made that the Bills have mismanaged their QBs this year more than any team in 20 years. No team I can ever remember has starter two QBs who they signed only 1-2 weeks prior to them playing.

His arm is terrible. He was a 4th round pick because he's got a noodle arm. I hope they lose on a last second field goal. Winning does nothing to help this team long term.

Free agency takes place before the draft...

Why would they want to win this game? The season is over and they should be trying to get the best draft pick possible.

No idea how the Bills can expect anyone but the most hardcore to watch this game. It's week 10 and this team is completely unwatchable. I'd love to hear the last time a team had to start two QBs in the same year after they'd been on the roster less than two weeks.

What about if he starts Matt freaking Barkley? Holy crap this season is a disaster.

It sure didn't for JP Losman, Kyle Boller, Jamarcus Russel and Josh Freeman, among others.

Who cares?

I'd have held on to Tyrod. His floor QB rating of 85-90 was worth more than the 3rd round pick we got for him. He's not going to win you many games, but he won't lose you any games either. I think he'd have easily kept Allen on the bench for half the year. He'd likely have the offense clipping along around 17-18 PPG like last year instead of the garbage we've seen this year. The problem in Cleveland is that Mayfield clearly outplayed Taylor over the summer. Mayfield had an excellent preseason, having produced very good numbers and with Taylor struggling early on and getting injured, it was always just a matter of time before the #1 overall pick would see action.

All of this goes back to the fact that Josh Allen wasn't ready to start this year. He said it himself against the Bengals in preseason that he was shocked at the speed of the game. Since then, he's mostly looked like a deer in the headlights aside from a half of football against the Vikings. He hasn't been reading the field, and almost always just looks to check the ball down if his primary read isn't immediately open. Allen was an incredibly risky pick. I don't think playing him this year has benefited him at all and prior to his injury it's not hard to argue that he'd been steadily regressing since halftime of the Vikings game. Naming Allen the starter in July wouldn't have changed any of these things. He was a project QB out of Wyoming who has never produced big numbers and was always going to take 2-3 years to develop. Putting him on the field before he's ready won't help him long term.

Totally agree. That was intended to be a shot at the people who keep telling everyone to calm down and that the state of the team is what they'd planned.

McDermott has done this in the past. He doesn't release his starting lineup until he absolutely has to because he views it as a competitive advantage. The people thinking this team is intentionally losing games are incredibly wrong.

I disagree with this. What the Bills should have done was sign a real QB and give Allen a redshirt year.

I don't think this makes sense. He sold off all our good players for picks, and then used those picks to overpay according to the draft value chart so that he could trade picks and move up for specific players he wanted to draft. Reality is that the Bills could have had 2 first rounders, 2 second rounders, and 3 third round picks. If we held on to each of those picks, the "farm" would be well stocked right now. We desperately need a sweeping infusion of young talent to this team and it didn't materialize. Instead, we walked away with Josh Allen, Tremaine Edmunds, and Harrison Phillips, and the Bills' "farm" of young talent is one of the worst in the league as a result. Allen is super risky, Edmunds looks great, and Phillips is just rotational depth at this point. We had an amazing opportunity to stock the cupboard, and instead we decided to go all in on two guys.

Agreed. The tops teams around the NFL outside of the LA Rams haven't got where they are by spending money in free agency. For the most part, teams who spend big in free agency do so because they're compensating for poor drafting, and as a result they usually wind up overpaying for players and regretting that decision 2-3 years down the road. For example, the Bills just had to gut their roster due to several free agency mistakes made by Doug Whaley. His drafting was HORRENDOUS, and to avoid getting fired he went out and spent more money than the Bills had ever spent, and within a year or two it was clear that the contracts he gave out would hinder us in the future. The Bills should keep doing what they've been doing, and target guys who want prove it contracts. Go after guys who are willing to sign for 1 or 2 years, and avoid going after the high price guys who want 5 year contracts with huge amounts of guaranteed money. Maybe try to sign one quality offensive linemen, but don't throw around money at this wide receiver group by locking them up with 5 year deals and good chunks of guaranteed money when hardly any of them have had consistent production at the NFL level. If the Bills want to improve, they should parlay their 1st round pick into more picks by trading down, and then hoping that all of the picks they have in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd rounds pay off. We also need to start finding talent with our 3rd day picks. So far we've added guys who have hardly any NFL traits and seem like nothing more than special teams players. Start rolling the dice on some guys with off field issues or on athletes from small schools. We need to get more athletic across the board. Stop trading up and giving up assets.

Each of these guys grew up on the defensive side of the ball, but they're just "head coaches" now in the sense that they don't have any real impact on play calling. They rely on their coordinators to call the games and install the game plans and it works for them. All of these guys are CEO type coaches. Guys like Andy Reid, Sean McVay, Sean Payton and Doug Pederson are a bit different in the sense that they actually call the offense. They are 100% in charge of what's going on on the offensive side of the ball, and each of them has hired a very experienced Defensive Coordinator to run that side of the ball. Recently the NFL seems to be moving more and more towards the second group of coaches being the more successful hires in recent years. You need one of these elite offensive play callers as your HC, because if you just have them as a coordinator it's inevitable that they will get a head coaching job somewhere. IMO it's a lot harder to find a really good offensive play caller than it is a defensive coordinator.

Actually history shows most don't and some do. There's a big difference.

I'm sorry, but this is pure insanity. You might trade a rookie QB who hasn't looked good and a very good corner back for one of the best QBs in the NFL. Totally nuts.

You wouldn't trade Josh Allen and Tredavious White for Pat Mahomes?

An extra year or two wouldn't have improved the results. The Bills biggest mistake over the past 6 years has been flip flopping between a 3-4 and 4-3 defense pretty much every season. Both schemes require very different players, and flip flopping with coordinators under Gailey, Marrone and Rex really didn't do us any favours.

They're not tanking, but at this point we shouldn't bother trying to win any games.