Last Guy on the Bench
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Posts posted by Last Guy on the Bench
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I have to say, even though we lost that game in completely agonizing fashion, it was one of the most incredible games I've seen. The fact that it was a night game on national television only added to it, as well as the fact that it was the craziest and loudest I think I've ever seen the crowd at the Ralph. The TD interception return by Wilson was electrifying, and the one by Kelsay was one of the most awesome single plays I can recall at the Ralph.
The OP stated this list should be restricted to wins, but that game, as horrible as it was at the end, has to be up there on the list of great games. If only we had a shread of offense that game...
I agree. As heartbreaking as that was, that was still one of the most enjoyable games I've been to. And it was insanely loud. My father couldn't hear right for six months after that game.
Makes me wonder what people would list for their favorite games that the Bills lost. I know, I know - that's kind of an oxymoron, but for me some losses are definitely better than others in terms of how the team played, what kind of heart they showed, what kind of growth potential they hinted at.
That Dallas MNF game would make my list for sure. The Leodis fumble game against the Pats in 2009 was very fun until that ending.
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Look, I don't like the Jets (obviously), but anyone who has ever played for him has said that he's fair and honest -- far more honest than most coaches, if players are to be believed. He also has a sharp coaching mind. I find him entertaining and fun. He brings life to the league, in contrast to the grim Belichicks and bland Jaurons of the world. In short, he comes across as a person who wears his heart on his sleeve and loves life. The fact that he's a Jets coach is neither here nor there.
Ditto on all of the above. I see the same thing.
I really enjoyed watching him in Hard Knocks. If he were the Bills' coach, I bet most people here would love him.
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Terrific article. For once there is some real, sustained legwork behind it. It's not just from press conferences and press releases.
It paints a very interesting picture of Marrone. I was fine with the hire, but not overly enthusiastic from what I've seen of him in press conferences, etc. (Not super critical, mind you, just not overly enthusiastic.) Well, after this article I am feeling MUCH more charged about Marrone as our head coach. He seems quite impressive in a number of ways. Definitely his own guy. Not just another robo-coach.
You never know how things will turn out, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see him do a great job here. I'd be rooting for anyone the Bills hired, since I have the incurable medical condition of being an unreasonable Bills fan. But I'll be pulling for this guy extra hard. Would love for him to turn out to be "the one."
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Context is key, definitely.
Me saying I'm going to go eat some watermelon is not racist.
If I made a snarky comment about a black person, and told them to eat watermelon, then yes, that'd come off as racist.
Here, we have a guy who, at worst, has been a little whiny and heart broken about his draft placement in the draft, getting called a thug. What other reason would he be called a thug? So it comes off as a bit racist.
If he had problems with drugs, violence and that general attitude? Then yes, thug away.
Well said.
If a white guy said/did everything that Geno has said/done, he'd be taking all sorts of crap, but I seriously doubt anyone would be calling him a "thug." It's not "PC" to point that out; it's logic.
Doesn't mean the OP is racist, but his comment definitely comes off that way, and you don't have to be hyper-sensitive to think so.
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Can I happily chow down on my packaged meat and feel there is a difference between raising/hunting animals for food vs. hunting them for trophies?
GO BILLS!!!
Yep. You can feel whatever you want. And I would agree with you on this one.
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Nice work, people. This needs to turn into a poll.
My votes from what has already been suggested (based purely on entertainment value):
1) Wide Starboard
2) The Wreck of the Ryan Fitzgerald
3) This Boat'll Have a New Captain in Three Years
4) Ashton YouBoaty
How about:
Home Run Rowback
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calm down guy and have a stalk of Rhubarb or something. It was a joke.
Rhubarb
. Now that's actually funny.It's all good. I'm a big admirer of Marv, so this thread has gotten me worked up a bit. I just don't understand the narrow (and in my opinion unrealistic) views on coaching that equate quality with how things turn out in a handful of games rather than looking at the body of work as a whole.
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if acty true, even more of a reason not to like him.
Jim has to agree with me in this one.
Yes what someone chooses to eat is an excellent reason not to like them. Well done.
Besides, the point was that Marv wasn't being hypocritical in the pork chop way that Jim implied. Otherwise, I would agree with Jim that people who criticize hunting while happily chowing down on packaged meat don't have much of a leg to stand on. Hunting your meat is much more honest, in my opinion.
Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian. Feel free not to like me either. Marv and I can console ourselves over a nice plate of Tofurkey.
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Sure. When Marv convinces me that pork chop on his plate was gotten from the pig in a fair fight.
Marv is a vegetarian.
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I, for one, think back to the '93 Comeback game, and one play (call) in particular that solidified my belief that Levy was not just a good, but great, head coach.
In the 3rd quarter, trailing 35-24, and having momentum- Levy eschewed the field goal and chose to go for it on a 4th and 5 from the 18 yard line. What other coach makes that call? Maybe a Belichick, who knows? I'd say 99% of coaches would not. Conventional wisdom dictates kicking the field goal and cutting the lead to 8 (after all you have an entire quarter left to play). If the Bills had failed to convert on that play, Levy is ripped to shreds by fan and media alike. But the Bills went for it, got the touchdown pass to Reed, and the rest is history. One of the gutsiest calls I've ever seen a coach make.
I'd forgotten that. Good recall.
Those teams did play like crap on occasion, but they never played scared.
People can question any number of individual decisions Marv made, but I don't think he made any out of fear.
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Honestly, you people do not know what you're talking about. You were either too young to watch Marv
as a coach or you're so disgusted with Bills football of the last 12 years that you're just ragging on everyone.
I think too many people discount how good of a coach he was because of his lackluster outing as a GM.
Marv was a great coach!!!! Do you really think it is just a fluke that he is in the HOF and still considered one
of the 20 best of all time?
Oh right, it's just because he got lucky to have great players...
What about Shula having Unitas, Griese, and Marino
Or Jimmy Johnson having Aikman, E. Smith, and Johnson...just for a start
Any team that makes a Super Bowl has great/all pro/HOF players. If you say that for
Marv, you have to say that about every other Super Bowl coach
Walsh...Montana, Rice, etc
Knoll...Bradshaw, Greene, Stallworth, Franco, Swan, etc.
That is just such a bad argument.
That Bills team was full of egos...Marv united them, made them a family. It was war, us against them,
being accountable to the other men in the trenches with you. He inspired that team. Do you really
think without Marv's leadership they would have gone to the Bowl 4 times? No, that team would have
been at each other's throats (remember the bickering Bills) and imploded. They persevered because
of what Marv instilled in them. They didn't achieve in spite of him, they achieved because of him.
He may not have been the architect of the K-gun/no-huddle, but he definitely had a hand in it (if you remember
how it came about---after the Cincinatti game) and he had the final say on using it, how they would use it,
allowing his QB to call the plays, etc. and ended up overseeing one of the most prolific offenses
ever. And it was due to Marv that Special Teams became important again league-wide and made a name
for Steve Tasker and Mark Pike.
What? Marv was only a .500 coach in the NFL before coming to Buffalo?...Well, Bill Belichick was under .500 in 5 years
at Cleveland and 1 year in New England before Brady took over. Marv also coached in the Canadian League.
In 5 years up in Canada, he was in the Grey Cup (their Super Bowl) 3 out of 5 years, winning 2. And although,
his time with the Chiefs wasn't completely successful, he had inherited a horrendous 2-12 team and each year
they improved to 4, 7, 8 wins, then 9-7 in 1981 (before a strike shortened season).
The reason we failed in the Super Bowls was because the league was changing at that time to bigger, beefier
offensive lines and our small 3-man front couldn't stop the run consistently enough against those new O-lines
(Washington and Dallas). And sure the Giants (Parcells and Belichick) had a good game plan in SB XXV to
use a time sucking ground attack to keep the Bills offense off the field, but it's not like he was severely out coached,
we lost the game by 1 point for Christ's sake and if Norwood's FG goes through we would have won. And don't forget,
in week 15 of that same year, we had beaten that same Giants team in the Meadowlands 17-13. Those teams were so evenly
matched and those were two hard fought, close games.
Marv is the only coach to go to 4 consecutive Super Bowls (do you know how hard that is even though they lost them)?
He was also the coach of the greatest NFL comeback of all time.
In an 8 year stretch, his Bills won the AFC East 6 times.
He was Skyline Conference Coach of the year both years he coached at the University of New Mexico.
He also won Southern Conference Coach of the Year awards 2 out of 5 years he was at William & Mary.
Won the Annis Stukus Trophy (Coach of the year in the Canadian League) in 1974.
Was NFL Coach of the Year in 1988 and AFC Coach of the Year in 1988, 1993, and 1995.
One of only 2 coaches (Tom Flores was the other) to have a winning record (17-6) against the winningest coach
in the history of the NFL (Shula).
One of only 14 coaches to win at least 100 games with one team.
One of only 2 coaches (Bud Grant, the other) to appear in both Grey Cup Championship and the Super Bowl.
Over a 10 year span (1988-1997), an entire decade, the Bills won more games than any team in the AFC and
2nd only to San Francisco in the entire NFL (I'm sure coaching had nothing to do with that...right?)
I just don't understand this revisionist history. Give the man his due and have some respect for not only one
of the best Bills coaches ever, but one of the best of all-time.
"Where would you rather be than right here, right now"
"When it's too tough for them, it's just right for us."
Come on Man!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Great post.
Super Bowl fever makes people insane. Winning the Super Bowl is a huge crapshoot. So many things have to go right. A few plays go differently and Brady and Belichick have won zero. Or five. (I think they are both all-timers, BTW.)
The way to judge a coach or team is consistency in terms of being in the hunt. Marv and the gang couldn't win the big game because they lost 4 Super Bowls (3 against superior and/or extremely hot teams)? Really? Those conference championship games weren't big? Those other playoff games? Those comebacks? Those division clinchers? Those games against arch rivals like the Dolphins who had been pounding the Bills for years? Those Monday nighters?
Marv's Bills won a donkey load of big games. They were competitive and entertaining and resilient for a decade. They were a joy to watch. But sure, Marv had nothing to do with it.
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I look forward to the day when the product on the field makes those press conferences irrelevant.
Good point. This past decade, the drafts, the player signings, the coaching/admin changes, and the press conferences surrounding them have been the most exciting moments for this franchise. Sadly I've gotten used to it and now seem to confuse those things with football itself. I would love to have my brain re-washed by actual football highlights. Here's hoping Whaley and Marrone are the guys to make that happen.
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The beat writers' job will be tougher. Nix was relatively open and chatty while Whaley mostly sticks to his message. You could ask Doug three different questions and not get much more than "it takes a commitment from top to bottom, we're excited." I don't envy those trying to get quotes out of him, he doesn't budge.
That's for sure. It was stunning. I never thought someone could make Russ Brandon look like a paragon of authenticity. Never heard such dense corporate-speak in my life.
Not saying either guy is inauthentic as a human - from all accounts they are both good guys. I'm just talking about their approaches to public communication.
I hope Whaley does well, and I'm sure he is as hard working and likable as everyone says. But press conferences are going to be painful. From that respect, I miss Buddy already.
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Nix was on with Ryan and Kirwin yesterday. They asked how he felt Mario did last year...to paraphrase
"Well, the other team certainly knew where he would be every snap"
I knew you would love that....just amazing gu did not get fired mid season
Didn't hear this, so don't know the context. But are you sure that rather than taking a dig at Wannstedt, he didn't simply mean the other team had to game plan around Mario (i.e., implying Mario was good, from that respect)?
I can't see Buddy taking a cheap (even though true) shot at Wannstedt. I can see him defending Mario's overall play by highlighting the respect that opposing teams had for him.
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over weights bench press under weights broad jump especially for WRs- in three months of hard work I could double DaRich's bench press reps, no ones adding more than 10%-15% to their vertical jumps
Exactly. Any metric that equates a FOOT in the broad jump with one bench rep is absurd.
Say there are two guys with the same vertical jump. On the bench, Player A does 25 reps, player B 22. But Player A has a 9' broad jump and player B has an 11' broad jump. Player A will have the higher "explosion" number. Nonsensical.
If we are just looking at explosive athleticism, I'll take the guy with the massive TWO FOOT advantage in the broad jump over the guy with the very slightly stronger upper body.
Even if he got the weighting right, though, it's still too reductive to mean much. Too many other athletic factors in play.
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You guys can keep ignoring the facts I'm sure that the sheep will say that ESPN sucks (CFB is the one thing they get right) It's hilarious to listen to the sheep mentality in this board. Trying to justify the reasons why EJ was average in college. There's always excuses with every Bills reach. Hope it makes you feel better. an't wait to bump this thread.
"Average in college?" As in middle of the pack out of 120 FBS schools? Really? You don't have to think he will be a great pro to acknowledge that EJ was at least above average. If he was average (i.e., somewhere between, say, the 40th and 80th best FBS QB in the country) then the Bills just made the worst draft pick in the history of the the NFL.
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To make it in 30 minutes they must strip out all the whitespace and just show nothing but the plays.
I'm OK with the ~70 minutes I get
Yeah, it's the same on Game Pass, which I have, living abroad. I imagine it's the same for Rewind.
They just show the plays themselves, and it comes in under 30 minutes a game. You do miss some of the drama and the build-up, and if you lose your concentration for a second, you forget what down it is. But it's pretty great. I like it to quickly catch up on games that I've read about as being good. I can plow through the best games of the weekend on Tuesday and Wednesday in a couple of hours total.
But if it's a game I actually care about, it's still worth watching live, or at least the full-length archived version (fast forwarding through commercials).
I, of course, always watch the Bills live. If they play well, I'll watch the 30 minute archive a couple more times during the week and then again during the off-season. It's a drug.
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I would've rather had EJ star against Florida forcing us to take him at #8 than have him struggle in that game.
My point was that if EJ rocked it against Florida, he might not even have been there at 8.
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Fair but what am I supposed to base my opinions on? Defenses like WF, Maryland and USF? Or his tougher games like OU and UF? That's how CFB goes, you might play 3-4 good teams per year and the rest are against very average comp.
To me, great QBs will their team to wins. I've watched football for a long time and we've all seen guys like Brady and Manning do this even when the rest of the team doesn't have it. Not sure how they do it but it's an intangible that very few QBs have. That's why I loved R WIlson. The effect he had on Wisky in '11 should have won him the Heisman. He transformed that team. I've never seen that out of EJ.
Again, I just think it's tone. If your opinion is that EJ isn't Brady, Manning, or Wilson, you offer a good (though not certain) argument. But asserting that he will never win a game by himself based on a very small number of games feels like a stretch. You just don't really seem that interested in discussion about this. If your mind is mind up, well OK. I'm just not sure why anyone's mind should be made up at this point. I do appreciate your insight, though.
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Can I ask you a question- can I not like the pick? Can I have an educated point of view just because you don't agree with it? I'm not concerned about being right, I'm concerned that the Bills made the wrong choice again. I won't be rooting against him but my expectations of him are far from the anointed savior that so many, who haven't seen him in a game outside of youtube, think he is.
I agree with you about the play calling. Jimbo is a known control freak with his players and coaches (mass exodus). That being said, Jimbo didn't turn the ball over 4 times in the biggest game of the season at home. Jimbo didn't fail to log a single point against NCst in the second half. EJ has never been able to do it by himself. Just facts.
It's not the opinion, it's the tone of certainty. You pick out a few games, each involving dozens of players and coaches, specific conditions, specific systems, etc. and then offer your prediction of the future of a still-developing young player as a fact. Not saying your opinion is not educated. And of course, you might be right. But lots of people with very educated opinions get their player prognostications wrong all the time, either because they didn't account for all the different variables at work (nor could they have), or because players change over time.
This is a forum for discussing opinions, but when people present opinions as stone-cold facts, and do it over and over and over again, well, they provoke an understandable reaction.
I'd say the same thing to anyone who says repeatedly that EJ will definitely be an all-pro.
I posted that vid link, because I was really interested in hearing different takes on EJ's play during that game beyond the obvious stats and end-result. As for me, I have no idea what he will turn into. I'm optimistic, but wouldn't bet a penny on my opinion either way.
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How you could possibly come to such a conclusion on EJ's future in the NFL is ridiculous. He hasn't even taken a snap yet @ this level, where he will be surrounded by more talent than he had at FSU.
Agreed. I never understand people who are so sure about the future of still-developing younger guys. It's a complete fantasy, masquerading as critical thinking, to imagine you can see players' futures clearly. The guys who spend their lives evaluating this stuff for a living are geniuses if they get it approximately sorta kinda right even 50% of the time.
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Jimbo seemed to have had his issues during our 4 Superbowls as well.
OK, so two per year.
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I recently watched all FSU's offensive possessions in the infamous 2012 Florida game. Full game is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NCdvC9LSlg
It wasn't fun, but it didn't bum me out as much as I thought it would. EJ made some bad decisions, but it felt like one of those games that just didn't go well and kind of snowballed on him. Used to happen to Kelly at least once a season. Happens to almost every QB. Also, I think I read somewhere that he had hurt himself the week before, so wasn't playing at 100%.
On the plus side, he hung in there mentally. The team came back. EJ's late fumble that killed their chances was not actually careless IMO. He got his clock cleaned. Looked to me like he had the ball pretty securely, but when he got hit his body went limp and he just let go of it. He lay on the ground without moving for a little bit. It was a KO or something close.
On another board, a poster mentioned running into Bill Polian at a golf tournament on Friday. The poster said he chatted with Polian for a while about the Bills' draft, and Polian apparently said he had EJ at the top of his rankings until he watched the Florida tape. That seems like a lot of weight to give one game, especially when the guy has played well against some other good teams and in bowl games. If other NFL teams over-weighted that Florida game, and if, as I suspect, it was just one of those days and not indicative or EJ's overall ability or mental toughness, it might have been the best thing that's happened to the Bills in a long time. If EJ plays lights out in that game and they beat the number 4 team in the country, maybe he would have been wearing a KC, Oakland, Jax, or Philly jersey right now.
Just a thought.
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You can also download full episodes on iTunes. I'm just discovering the show and really enjoying it. Murph is smooth.
An indicator of the Bills implementing analytics
in The Stadium Wall Archives
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Interesting story about the Eagles using the same technology. It explains the benefits more clearly than the video.
http://mmqb.si.com/2013/07/24/chip-kellys-mystery-man/