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Belgium_Bill

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Posts posted by Belgium_Bill

  1. In my timezone I won't watch, cannot bring myself to wasting an entire pre-workday night if it ain't the Bills.  I'll just watch the "game in 40 minutes" version on GameDay (or DAZN as it is over here now) tomorrow morning without knowing the score.

    It wouldn't be the first superbowl that turns out totally different from what all the analysis has been throwing at us for 2 full weeks, so my prediction is that 49rs will win on the back of a great performance by their defence, the unlikely hero of the game will be Jauan Jennings, but since he's not famous enough CMC will get the MVP.

    See you all in the off-season, Go Bills! 

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  2. I believe it's essential to consider the full body of work, spanning six years. I commend McDermott for his significant contributions in developing both the team and its culture. In that respect I view him as a top-10 coach, also in terms of defensive preparation. Despite the setbacks of losing key defensive players like Tre and Milano this year, McDermott has, for the most part, elevated our defense to an impressive level in recent weeks.

    However, there is another aspect that needs acknowledgment - the challenges in game management and in-game tactical adjustments. In this regard, McDermott falls squarely in the bottom half of NFL coaches. While I won't revisit the 13 seconds controversy, the overarching issue seems to be an inability to grasp the correct vibe in crucial moments. This often manifests in poorly timed (usually defensive) timeouts. One instance that particularly frustrated me was when he called a timeout just before the 59-yard Eagles field goal. Elliott got the time to have a few nice practice kicks on the sideline for crying out loud... Not feeling the moment IMO.

    McDermott undeniably excels from Monday to Saturday, showcasing his coaching prowess. However, the challenge lies in translating that success to game days. I can't help but think about the stark contrast in game instincts between McDermott and someone like Dan Campbell.

    If you want to climb Mount Everest, you assemble a team of sherpas to guide you to near the top, and then there's that one exceptional sherpa who leads you to the very summit. Perhaps McDermott is the top sherpa for getting the team to the last base camp, but the crucial test remains in reaching the summit.

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  3. It's a constant balance between being certain of the play-offs and still winning the division... Analysis is correct: the main team to root against is the Steelers, and the likeliest "unsuspected help" in the last two weeks has to come from the totally unpredictable Titans.

     

    Here's one for you all: which scenario would you prefer after the week 17 games, assuming we have beaten the Pats:

    1/ Bills mathematically certain of play-offs but Phins beat Ravens so the division title is gone.

    2/ Phins lose so Bills play in Miami for the division title but a loss could spell no play-offs alltogether.

     

    Where would you rather be next week ? Apart from right here right now of course....  

  4. Wouldn't it be a fun assignment to ban the word "if" from the board in the upcoming weeks...

     

    Leaving aside the resting the starters part from this thread, what I totally agree with is the underlying vibe of this message, that we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves too much and qualifying for the play-offs is by far the most important thing, seen as we were all but dead and burried after the Eagles disaster... The board has been full of pipe dreams of where we could end up by winning out, but frankly, after the many blows this season what I absolutely want to avoid is losing at Miami and be eliminated from the play-offs alltogether.  And that scernario is still possible. Last nights win by the Ravens means that they may well have locked up the #1 with a win over Miami next week, leaving the door open for the Steelers who play their final game at Baltimore.

     

    It's a sad consequence of our losses this year, but it may come down to that, downward trending poor teams getting crappy easy wins in their last few games: Jaguars (home Carolina, @ Tennessee) is another example.  As great as it would be to play for the division title in Miami, knowing that a loss there might be season ending would make it a mega bum squeezer.  So my main prayer is to be guaranteed a play-off spot by next week.

  5. 55 minutes ago, Scott7975 said:

     

    I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say here. I don't know Dunne from a whole in the wall.  I just have seen people like Tim Graham and such give him respect.  Yes, he may be as you say a tabloid peddler but I like reading that stuff as long as what is written is not made up.  I have no reason to believe any of his sources are fake.  I have no reason to believe anything his sources said was a lie and I have no reason to believe he inaccurately quoted his sources.  Some stuff in the article was his perception or take on the comments to paint a story, but I am intelligent enough to see opinion from the rest and I take it as such and make up my own mind.

     

    I like reading that stuff because I like to know.  There are always secrets behind what really happens.  Not enough people report on that stuff.  I hear stat stuff and BS Josh Allen sucks talks everywhere.  I don't care to hear it all the time.  I mean, who didn't want to know what really happened with "i wasn't privy to that conversation" or things like who really took charge in that draft or when did they know they were going to fire Whaley.  Was it because of that?  Was it because McD didn't like him?  There are all kinds of things I would have liked to know from past regimes that people just speculate about.  Now we get real information and all people want to do is discredit it act as if it's all fake and all bs and just a witch hunt or something.  Why?  Because they are too scared that McD will get fired and we will end up like the Sabres.

     

    What the Pegulas do with all this is their business.  Personally, I do not think McD is the right coach.  I think that he pisses his pants in key moments.  Something that Dunne tries to get across and pretty much outright says in the article, but I have thought that since 13 seconds.  The article had nothing to do with it.  I also think McD is a good football coach and everything he does is to try and get this team to win a championship.  I don't think anything he does has ill will and I have no reason to believe he is a bad guy.  I just think that "his way" is the wrong way.  This article pointed out to me more of the "his way" stuff that I didn't even know about. I believe every word of it.  Doesn't change anything for me really.  Just gives me more insight into his coaching. 

     

    Ultimately, while I think McD is a good coach, I don't think he is a good enough coach.  As the article paints a picture of... this team is only going to win a championship if it overcomes the head coach.  I firmly believe that and I believed that before the article.  It's too hard to win a championship like that.  You already have to overcome injuries, referees sometimes, the way the ball bounces, luck, facing teams that are either better than you or at least on par with you.  It takes too much to win a championship if you have to overcome the HC. 

     

    13 seconds is on Sean McDermott.  He has shown nothing since then that he learned from it.  In fact we have lost games in the same fashion from the same coaching style.  This is why I think he needs to go.  Not because of the article or anything in it.  Simply because I believe he isn't good enough and hasn't learned from that.  He still craps his pants.  He still folds in big moments.  This is why he takes timeouts at the end of the game defensively. Just kneeling the ball with Josh Allen and 20 secs against the best team in the league is enough to show me he hasn't learned a damn thing. It showed he is still coaching scared.  Instead of looking at what Josh could do in 20 seconds to win a game, he thought about what could lose the game.  I don't want a coach like that.  I want a coach that sees he has one of the best and most gifted QBs to ever play in the NFL, hands him the ball and says go win this football game.  Too many people are afraid that we will go back to being a crap team by hiring a worse coach.  As long as Josh Allen is here, it won't get worse.  Josh Allen is what is carrying this team, not Sean McDermott.

     

    Anybody that disagrees with any of that, I respect that but this is my opinion on it.

    From thousands of miles away I 100% agree with this.

     

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  6. 2 hours ago, Virgil said:

    I've started to wonder if they are trying to work towards another NFL Europe league.  I can't imagine any teams will sign-off on having a NFL team over there.  The travel for the opposing teams, especially those in the same division, would be terrible.

    I think that would be manageable to be honest, at least during the regular season. They could plan it in a way that the European based team plays stints of 3 consecutive away games then 3 at home, so as to limit constant intercontinental travel.  As for the visiting teams there wouldn’t be much different from the way things are now, they just have to travel over once per season, preferably not waiting to leave until the Thursday I would suggest…🙄


    Once it gets to possible play-off games things become far more complicated of course in terms of Europe based team.


    Anyway, the current trend of adding international games in different countries - now they are adding Spain it seems - is contradicting the strategy of a fixed home team in Europe, so I have no idea where the NFL is heading with this, apart from the fact that they are heading towards an ever fatter bank account of course.  Unless of course the big plan is a European team without fixed home base, playing all over the place... 


    One small remark for those here complaining about 9:30am games on a Sunday, spare us a thought please, every US evening game means a 2 am kick-off for me, often on a (very) early Monday morning at the start of a working week.  So no, I don’t feel sorry for you watching NFL games while having your Sunday breakfast 😄

    • Like (+1) 1
  7. A lot of doom and gloom across the Atlantic…

    Bengals are (now, this month) a better team than the Bills, so losing this one away from home by 6 points was not that surprising to me.  Too many parts of our team are only average or at best just above average, including our D since Milano went down. 

    The most frustrating part for me is that, when it matters, we cannot run on teams.  Yes there is the odd game where it works, but overall, the Bills “pure running game”, by which I mean the combo of OL/running back(s) excluding QB runs has been poor for the best part of a decade.  Have we really had a RB in the past 10 years that was in let's say the top 10 of NFL RB’s ? Not in my opinion anyway.

    I’m still relatively optimistic about reaching the play-offs.  I considered winning one of the 3 super tough road games in this stretch (Bengals, Eagles, Chiefs) would do it, provided we took care of business we should take care off (not a given I know). And I personally thought that of those 3 games, current form considered, Bengals was the toughest challenge.

    On the other hand one has to wonder what we could achieve in the play-offs, and if not making them would long term be a better thing for this team, in that it may lead to some more drastic changes.  We seem to be stuck in some sort of limbo of hanging onto hope that this roster/coaches combo will lead us to the Superbowl, but even good teams need to insert some spark from time to time to. What that spark is to be I have my opinion just like anyone on this board, but I suppose that’s food for approximately 758 threads over the coming months…

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  8. 1 minute ago, TheFunPolice said:

    it seemed like the team had this weird dazed look to them, but maybe that's just me projecting based on the feeling of watching it

     

    It doesn't seem like the joy of the game is there this season.

    Is it too late to blame this on jet lag as well ? 😏

    • Haha (+1) 2
  9. 17 hours ago, BritBill said:

    Clark Griswold and family left London and stopped off at Stonehenge on their way to the airport. Lord knows which airport they were off to.

    It's been a few decades since I lived in the UK, not too far from Stonehenge in fact, so I wasn't aware of the new development of Plymouth International Airport. 😁

    • Haha (+1) 1
  10. When I got my ticket, about 10 minutes ago, I didn't scan the entire stadium but a rough guess is that at that time there were max a few hundred seats (all single) left. 

     

  11. I started the queue at just over 100.000, seemed rather hopeless, but you never know, the system now predicts I have a good 10 minutes or so waiting ahead of me.

    Then again the system has failed me before...  

    I will give an update if it's worth the wait.

  12. Overreaction, and making predictions based on the last game, will always happen in these cases.  In fact, just like we were the Superbowl favorite for most analysts after last season’s display in Kansas, you can be sure that nobody will put us in their top 5 for next year now.  Maybe that’s a silver lining.  After several decades of Bills fandom I feel very uncomfortable when being considered a favorite.  Remember, 8 months ago the roster was so-called perfect and complete, the Bills could afford luxury picks in the draft, like a punter in round 6, and everybody applauded it. Now according to some the entire roster bar a few needs to be blown up.

    We lost 3 games in the regular season, all narrowly.  Buffalo still is a good team, which doesn’t mean nothing can be improved.  I would focus on the longer term issues rather than have a knee-jerk reaction.  Sunday was a bad loss, one of the very few in the past 3 years where I felt fairly early on that we were truly being outplayed and didn’t have any answers. The other two were the Colts last season, and the home game to the Chiefs the year before.  Common denominator of those 3 losses: the opposition ran all over us. 

     

    Second main issue I have is with Josh.  Well, not so much with him as with his surroundings.  JA is a stallion, he can do things no other QB can in the league, but he doesn’t have the level of self-control of some other – admittedly more boring (Brady) – QB’s. I vividly remember a scene from a game I think in his second year when Daboll was still on the sideline, and after a bonehead decision by Josh, Daboll gave him a right earful, literally almost as I think he shouted down his ear from like one inch removed.  Allen has grown in stature of course and I don’t suggest he is treated like a bad child, but he would IMHO benefit from a real strategic mentor as OC, who can let him be himself while setting the boundaries, and who has mental authority over him.  I don’t believe Dorsey  is an awful OC, but let’s be honest he is Josh’s mate who he lobbied for, it’s pretty obvious who has the mental authority in that relationship. 

     

    Thirdly, more of a standard remark, draft better.  It hasn’t been spectacular in recent years, certainly not in the first few rounds. The rope of the salary cap is getting much firmer round the neck now, so this is more important than ever for future years.

     

    Apart from that you can make hundreds of more changes but being realistic, we all know McD is staying and I think Frazier will do as well.

    Oh and one last random thought I had on Sunday: I know wizard Belichick started the trend and after that all analytics proved him right but F**¨that. If you play the team that has the best record in opening drives of the league and you win the toss, don’t defer.  This game was over by the time we played our 4th snap. The cynic in me says it should at least have been our 7th.

     

    Despite all this, for old times sake: Go Bills !

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