HappyDays

The ol' Buddy Nix gambit!

Not overly confident in this but I'll go with DeWayne Carter. He has apparently transformed his body this offseason to be a more natural 1T in our scheme, and that is a spot that has no other obvious candidate behind DaQuan Jones. Fully recovered from injury and fully committed to doing what the team asks him, I could see him having a bigger impact than expected.

I didn't expect Cook to make it, good for him. Tua making it on the list feels pretty silly especially after another year where he missed significant time after an injury.

If you were an attorney and the person your client sued was about to sign a multimillion dollar contract, would you advise your client to file before or after the contract was signed?

This is beyond parody. Really the perfect summation of discourse in the social media era. Brazen ignorance is not a badge of honor, contrary to now popular belief.

This is equally as bad as people assuming Hairston is guilty.

Having Tre White in the 13 seconds game very well could have been the difference in that game, Levi Wallace messed up his coverage on the fateful drive that got them into FG range. And having Benford on the field this past AFCCG may have made a difference on one of those drives where Elam was completely hapless in his coverage responsibility. CB is not as critical as pass rusher, but it is still absolutely a difference making position. Especially in playoff games where the margins are thin.

This presupposes that if an accuser loses their case, that definitively means they lied. That isn't true at all. Sometimes the best thing the courts can decide is that they don't know what happened which means no one is held liable and everybody has to just move on. I think the reason that these discussions get so polarizing is because most people are unable to accept such an unsatisfactory conclusion and want somebody in the story to be the bad guy. The world of course doesn't work that way.

Oh sure I think anybody assuming anything about this case is nuts. It is a pure he said/she said from 4 years ago. But I am already seeing some takes online, including in this thread, about how Bills fans are hypocrites if we criticize Browns or Chiefs players, and I just want to be clear that every case should be looked at separately on its own merits.

Because they rightly assumed the worst case scenario would be a civil lawsuit followed by either a quick settlement or a dismissal. This story is not going to follow Hairston throughout his career. It's barely even a story today outside of the Bills fanbase.

Mostly agree with the rest of your post. Just to be clear though there is no comparison between this case and Watson's. The reason I'm confident Watson is guilty has nothing to do with the uniform he wears. It is primarily the number of accusers confirming the same general story that makes me confident. Plus there is zero wiggle room for nuance or implied consent in what he was doing. Hairston's case is much murkier. One accuser, and circumstances where consent is a lot more difficult to ascertain for people that weren't in the room when it happened.

Also worth noting that she filed a police report back when Hairston was just a visiting college freshman, not a 1st round pick, which counters the notion that this has just been a big money grab. There is an increasingly common double standard that is happening with these cases on social media, where some of the same people saying "innocent until proven guilty" are quick to immediately pronounce the girl as a lying money grabber. Filing a false report is in fact also a crime so innocent until proven guilty applies in her case as well.

All civil lawsuits are by definition money grabs. She filed a police report back when the incident allegedly happened and has posted about it on social media over the years. She is now trying to pursue her final chance at some kind of recourse. My speculative take is that the girl genuinely feels like she was wronged, but that doesn't mean she actually was in a legal sense. There is in fact a middle ground on this issue between "Hairston is a rapist" and "the girl is a lying money grabber." But it's a very messy middle ground with no clear answers.

Not only was he not charged, the matter was investigated and dropped due to lack of evidence. The girl has posted on social media about it several times over the years but there has never been any corroborating evidence, so I don't know what she or the law firm are expecting to happen here. I would guess they're hoping for a quick settlement.

Weird move. Waller can't block which is part of what made Jonnu Smith valuable to that offense. I guess we'll see if he has anything left in the tank as a pass catcher.

It is good for the Bills. Last year we had trouble separating outside, and one of our division rivals now has nobody that can cover outside. Bills fans have an unduly negative opinion of Ramsey because of comments he made in the past about Allen. He is no longer in his prime but he is still a very good outside CB. In our matchups last year our WRs couldn't do anything against him.

The Dolphins now have zero starting caliber outside CBs.

For most coaches those blunders are things like "ah we ran on 4th and 1 instead of giving our QB a chance" where the thought process was defensible and the fan reaction was entirely outcome dependent. You're not typically seeing cases where the coaching decision was so bad that it effectively ended the game. In those cases the offending coach is usually quickly fired, like Matt Eberflus after the Thanksgiving game in Detroit last year. Another example to me was in the Ravens playoff game when we had our backup DL on the field for the entire final drive, which gave us no chance of stopping them, but luckily we got saved from that fatal coaching blunder through sheer luck on the 2PC. My fear with McDermott for a while has been that I think you need to win those moments at least once or twice in your playoff run to ultimately win a Super Bowl. I don't know if he just tightens up too much in those high leverage moments or what, but he has consistently failed in those moments in some pretty shocking ways. Some of the other criticisms of McDermott I can find some explanations, like maybe the defensive breakdowns in the playoffs really are just because of talent and/or injuries, but I can't find an explanation for those end of game moments.

Those coaches are gone, yet we made equally terrible coaching decisions at the end of the Rams game this past season. One of my concerns with McDermott is that I haven't seen improvement. Too frequently in high leverage moments we are still seeing boneheaded coaching blunders and that has persisted year over year. Oh well. Just gotta hope he figures it out this year, nothing else I can do.

Okay I nailed the first one. I was wrong on Coleman although I'd like to know how close I'd have gotten if he hadn't gotten injured. He did finish 2nd in yards and TDs which I don't think most fans would have predicted especially with him missing 4 games. I was way off on the last one. Nailed the Rams. I expected San Fran to take a step back and for LA to be better than people thought. I was way way off on the Bears. Every year one of my bold predictions is picking a 4th place to 1st place division team which happens pretty much every year. Of course last year was one of the rare occasions where that didn't happen so I was doomed to fail in any case. Texans and Packers were not as good as I expected. I earn zero points for predicting KC in the AFCCG. Lions I think would have been there if they weren't decimated by injuries.

Rookie - TJ Sanders. He was already getting some positive reviews from beat reporters at OTAs and I think it will only get better once the pads go on. Non-rookie - Elijah Moore. He also got a lot of buzz at OTAs. His skill set will shine in a camp setting and I think ultimately the fanbase's expectations will get high, possibly too high.

Last year's offensive scheme was about making Allen's play more boring, no? I don't mean that in a bad way. Raising the floor was an admirable goal and the results spoke for themselves. I think Justin Herbert's problem is Justin Herbert. He is missing that spark of pure will that defines the top 4 QBs. That mentality in critical moments that he will make it happen all on his own if he has to. I don't think Harbaugh took that spark out of him, he just never had it to begin with. What Harbaugh did last year is make the best out of a horrid group of skill players and a QB that isn't uniquely talented enough to overcome it.

This is a huge year for McDermott. To me it should be looked at as his defining season - either he can get us to the ultimate goal or he can't. Short of our IR wire looking like the Lions last year, there can't be any excuses. Last offseason we took our medicine and took a purposeful step back as a means of opening the second championship window. That window is now wide open. This offseason we have hired new defensive coaches with different philosophical backgrounds. We re-signed 3 of our own defensive cornerstones. We spent most of our free agency money on defensive players. We spent all of our premium draft picks on defensive players. So the message from the team is loud and clear - all of these investments presumably were necessary to help take McDermott's defense to a championship level. If after all of that we suffer yet another playoff loss to KC where the defense barely puts up any resistance, that has to be the final signal that McDermott isn't going to get it done. Ever. We also should be competing for the #1 seed this year. McDermott has to find a way to avoid the team's annual 2-4 game slump which perenially keeps us out of that conversation. It's not gonna get any easier than 10 games combined against a weak AFC East and NFC South. So get the #1 seed. If you don't, okay, the defense still needs to perform against KC in January. If neither of those things happen, then what is the reason for optimism that McDermott ever gets it done? I'm so over the debate on what he's done in the past. Both sides have made their points. My hope is that everyone including McDermott optimists are at least willing to draw a line in the sand on the team's performance this year.

I mean this is just stretching to find reasons not to compliment the player. KC's defense had the play sniffed out and perfectly covered. None of the RBs you mentioned would come close to making that play. There is a phenomenon happening amongst certain Bills fans where they're making the jump from "we shouldn't pay Cook" to "Cook isn't that good." There are plenty of reasonable arguments for why Cook shouldn't be extended - his position, his snap count, his 3rd down %, etc. You can make those arguments without making irrational comparisons to Singletary and the like. Any discussion about extending Cook should acknowledge the fact that if you don't extend him you are losing some of the great individual plays he made last year.

Funny enough I don't think there's any way Hurts is the 5th best QB in the NFL right now. But you're weighing different factors more heavily than I am. I can't find reason to poke holes in anyone's list because there are a lot of different ways to approach the question. The top 4 is the top 4 in whatever order you want, and then from there it gets tricky. The way I look at is pretend each QB was on the Eagles last year. What would their record be? The top 4 might have had that team undefeated. From there I am ranking based on how I see their consistency and skill set.