HappyDays

Bills 31 Pats 28 I'm expecting a pretty thrilling game. Both teams are going to give it their best shot. Milton Williams being out is a big deal. The Pats are the only team all year where I think their run defense legitimately outplayed our run offense. This time around I expect us to be able to run the ball. Kincaid being healthy is an even bigger deal. He got over 100 yards last time and probably should have had double that. I think Brady knows this and will have a similar passing gameplan to what we just saw against Cincy. And then of course you just know Allen is going to have a little extra fire in this game. On defense we tend to do better when we don't have to worry as much about the opponent's run game which is the case against the Pats. I've watched Maye struggle against pressure and blitzes and I expect us to blitz quite a bit because we have no pass rush otherwise. Feed Cook and the TEs, send extra rushers to maks Maye uncomfortable. That's the winning formula. Pats will still make some plays on both sides of the ball because they're decently talented and have elite coaching, but ultimately our experience in games like this plus our cheat code QB give us the edge in a tightly contested game.

That isn't Coleman's fault, that's the fault of this regime for handing him a major role with no backup plan. What does really bother me about Coleman is that he appears to not care about his profession. We know he didn't take his injury rehab seriously last year. Now this year as soon as he hit a little adversity he seemingly checked out. He's missed meetings and is running lazy routes. Mentally I just don't think he has what it takes to succeed in the NFL. I can live with being wrong about a player, but the Bills being wrong about the person is shocking. They've been so careful about selecting culture fits and they somehow ended up with a lazy immature manchild as their first pick. I would take Worthy over Coleman right now if I could, no question, but he wouldn't solve all our problems either. He has 4.2 speed right up until he takes on any kind of contact at which point his speed becomes average. A strong gust of wind could blow him off his route. So you just can't rely on him for a major role. It turns out both teams lost the trade, unless something drastically changes for either player.

I don't know, I'd like to think the voters pay close enough attention to know that he gave up zero catches against his coverage in addition to the sack and the pick six. I think the reasoning others gave is correct - for whatever reason the voters aren't willing to have the POTWs be from the same team.

So your original comment was based on the idea that we are 100% likely to lose to both the Pats and Eagles, and only 60% likely to beat the Jets? Yeah this was a waste of time for both of us.

Okay? They need to win 1 more game to have an 87% chance of being in. If they beat Browns and Jets they are practically 100% in.

On the Benford INT he tried to shot put the ball and lost control of it. That was definitely on him, although Benford certainly made a great play on the ball. On the other INT Jordan Phillips put his hand up and then almost a full second passed and then Burrow threw it right into his hand. It wasn't just lucky timing, it's like he thought he could get it over or around his hand and it was a poor judgment on his part. He definitely let his offense down. There was no need to force anything, they were moving the ball at will against us.

I'd like to see your math for how we only have a 60% chance of getting in. According to the NYT playoff machine if we only win 1 more game against the Jets or Browns we are 87% likely to get in. In fact we get in 23% of the time if we lose out. So your opinion is that we have a greater than 40% chance of losing out?

Somehow Benford was snubbed for Rasul Douglas of all people.

Am I reading into this too much or is McDermott genuinely pissed at Beane for the whole debacle?

Yeah I hear you. One reason I think this offseason will be different is the WGR rant shined a spotlight on the room. In retrospect I'm glad Beane did it, as stupid as it was. Before this year the national media wasn't paying much attention to the WR failings and the Bills were hiding behind elite offensive statistics. Now because of that rant everyone is paying attention and they can see that the emperor has no clothes. Games like this past week's where Allen has to pull a rabbit out of a hat over and over again just to keep them in it only makes the narrative louder. So out of self-awareness if nothing else they will HAVE to make a splash move next year. But hey, fool me a dozen times...

Cincy is just a poor comparison all around because they have terrible ownership that refuses to spend money. Pegula gives McDermott and Beane blank checks every year. I don't buy this narrative that Cincy's problems stem from paying Chase and Higgins. If anything the criticism is that they should have paid them one year sooner, and that again goes back to cheap ownership. I mean Cincy right now has $11M in cap space... We're spending right to our limit every year. They have $79M in projected cap space in 2026. I also don't buy that the Bengals have failed Burrow. He is just flat out injury prone. He takes normal NFL hits and misses almost half of his career from them. It's not like they've had trouble scoring points whether with Burrow or one of his backups over the years. That WR tandem is a cheat code that more than makes up for whatever deficiencies exist on offense. As far as their defensive struggles that is partly because of cheap ownership and partly because of poor drafting the last few years. You're not going to sell me on the narrative that the Bengals invested too much in their superstar WR tandem. The other issues that exist there are completely independent of that.

I don't think we're a 3 win team without Allen and I don't think McDermott is a bad coach. He's the proverbial RB that gets you 2 yards on 3rd and 2, and also gets you 2 yards on 1st and 10. My issue has been that McDermott and Beane chose to build the team in a way that takes away from Allen's greatness. Then we inevitably get into games like this past Sunday where we need Allen to be beyond great and boy are we blessed that he can pull off a win like that even when so much around him goes wrong, but to use McDermott's own words "it shouldn't have to be that hard" to win through the passing game. They intentionally constructed the team to have that flaw, and for what it's worth I give McDermott and Beane equal blame on that front. Like I said earlier in the thread I give McDermott credit for letting Allen win him the game. I don't mean that sarcastically. The best thing he and Beane can do moving forward is to build the team around Allen and get out of the way. He can gift them both a Hall of Fame legacy if they'll only let him. Some of McDermott's comments this year and his aggressiveness against Cincy give me hope that he's finally figured that out, and Beane goes as McDermott goes as far as I'm concerned.

Do you think Devin McCourty is paid to stir the pot? I saw him on FNIA on Sunday talk about how Josh Allen is the only reason we make the playoffs every year, then when we inevitably lose he unduly takes all the blame on his shoulders. Like the supporting cast around him doesn't even deserve to be there, but the narrative becomes that Allen is playing on a Super Bowl caliber team and can't finish the job. As I've said before Allen is a victim of his own success. He gets criticized for not winning playoff games that we have no right to even be in. His ridiculous and unsustainable caliber of play last year convinced his GM that the offense was perfectly fine without a lick of WR talent. He singlehandedly erases so many flaws with the coaching staff and the roster that it's almost impossible to evaluate the rest of the machine around him which means McDermott and Beane probably have lifetime contracts. I'm not sure that any one player in NFL history had the singular effect that Allen has had on the Bills. Not that he's the GOAT, that mantle still belongs to Tom Brady, but I do think he erases mistakes better than anybody else that came before him. McDermott and Beane's careers were absolutely built by Josh Allen, and I don't even mean that as a criticism of them it's just a fact. Hell I'm convinced our new stadium deal was built by him too. It's a shame that this regime inexplicably chose to lean away from Allen's greatness in this 2nd window rebuild, but hopefully they've learned from the entirely predictable mistake and will pull a 180 in the coming offseason whether we win the Super Bowl or not.

I'm not going to nitpick individual games from the past five years. This year in particular is glaring though. We're downplaying the Pats winning 10 games in a row, meanwhile we lost games to the Falcons and Dolphins. If we had gone on a 10 win streak which was absolutely doable from the stretch of Baltimore to Tampa Bay, would we be downplaying it because we didn't beat any powerhouse along the way? Is there even a powerhouse to beat in the AFC this year? We were gifted with an easy schedule and we blew it. Pats were gifted with an easy schedule and have taken full advantage. In that context criticizing the opponents they've beaten just falls totally flat for me, especially when we were one of those opponents.

I missed the post, what did he say? I've also sensed some tension between McDermott and Beane but I don't know how much to read into that. I'd be worried if they weren't feeling competitive tension after all these years of just failing to get over the hump. I still think Pegula views them as a package deal but I could be wrong.