HappyDays

Bo Nix just isn't it. Misses way too many throws and looks out of sorts in the pocket. They have a great roster but without a QB it doesn't matter.

Report came out yesterday that the Saints will be sellers at the deadline. Shaheed is a no brainer move for this team. Any kind of vertical passing threat at all would be welcome.

Must be healing slower than they hoped. On the short clips I've seen from practice this week he doesn't look entirely comfortable after drills.

Sucks about Dorian Strong, I wonder if the neck injury is a season ender. Our CB depth is suddenly very thin. Who is even the 4th guy in after Ingram, Cam Lewis I guess? Two DTs elevated makes me nervous that both Oliver and Sanders will miss the game. Another year with certain position groups on defense getting hit with multiple injuries. Just crazy.

After Burrow's injury I'd say the divisions are about equal this year. Steelers = Patriots Bengals < Dolphins Browns > Jets That's how I'd stack it. We should be big Steelers fans the rest of the season. They have no chance at the #1 seed but they have a real chance of keeping Baltimore out of the playoffs entirely. If they can beat Baltimore once they just need to go 7-5 in the rest of their games to end 11-6 and that is probably enough to take the division.

It's really difficult to tell exactly how good he is. Allen single handedly erases a lot of stalled drives and the only other time Brady was an NFL OC he failed and got fired. The best thing he has going for him is he knows what his players do well and he only asks them to do those things. Compared to Dorsey where for example he would ask Gabe Davis to read coverages and catch a lot of targets. As soon as Brady took over that kind of nonsense stopped. His play design and play calling is simple, for better or worse. He calls a few select formations and only has like 3-4 concepts he calls out of each of those formations. He basically tells the opposing defense I think I can call these plays even when you know they're coming and I dare you to stop it. We've seen that strategy falter a bit when defenses sell out to stop specific plays, but it's hard to argue with the results. Any given week we can put up 30+ points while barely breaking a sweat. Yes we have Allen as the ultimate force multiplier but that's been true since 2020 and we've only seen the week to week consistency show up since Brady took over. I don't think he's particularly creative and he can be a bit too conservative for my liking so I would say he both significantly raises our floor and slightly reduces our ceiling.

There actually are 5 rushing, it's hard to see because 1 of them is getting swallowed up in the middle. I have no problem with the blitz call. It worked as intended getting Taron as a free rusher. My issue is, to use Babich's own words, the pass rush is not married to the coverage. Leaving Benford in off coverage on an island against an elite route runner is not how you get Rattler to hold the ball. I mean that's a college level read and anticipation throw that any backup QB is going to hit. Rapp ends up sprinting backwards from the line to cover nobody while Benford is being hung out to dry. This is a 3rd and long that should have been converted and it is 100% on the play call.

They might as well keep all their questionable players out and try to re-group next week. No chance they are beating any team, even the lowly Texans, with Lamar out plus like half of their starting defense.

This play is a good example of our play calling issues on 3rd down. It technically counts as a 3rd down stop but only because Olave dropped the ball: This is exactly the kind of call that I hate. We bring an exotic blitz on 3rd down which I'm happy with. But Benford has no chance on this play. He's in off coverage and is back pedaling even before the ball is snapped. He's still back pedaling as Rattler gets into his throwing motion. Just way too easy against a route runner like Olave. I mean what is even the intent of this play design? The off coverage look invites Rattler to throw to his #1 target, so why even bother sending extra pressure when you know he'll get the ball out quick? If it were Spags he'd send the same pressure but Olave would be bracketed inside and out, which would give Taron the extra couple seconds he needs to get to the QB. This is just an utterly garbage play call that we got lucky on, and we've seen it on tape over and over again since last year.

Just crazy to me that they paid Brock Purdy. I don't want to overreact to one game but is the difference between Mac Jones in this system and Purdy in this system really worth $50M a year?

How would you feel about Rashid Shaheed? 1 year deal which makes a trade palatable, gives us the vertical element that we're missing. I don't think a true stud WR is in the cards so I'm trying to think about realistic options.

This is like the Lions from last year. Eventually you just don't have enough players to field a legit defense.

And now Kyle Hamilton is injured:

Right now I'd be more worried if Cook ($11.5M AAV) got injured than if Rousseau ($20M AAV) got injured. And I like Rousseau, I understand he has his role and does it well. But the whole conversation about how you never pay RBs got way out of control. For the way this team is built Cook is the 2nd most important player on offense. Maybe the 2nd most important player on the entire team this year. What would our offense be without him?

To me this is the hardest game to predict so far. I could see them beating us by a hair if everything goes right for them, but I could also see us winning by 20. The Pats are going to give us their best shot and I believe in Vrabel as a coach. But I also think we've had this game circled since before the season and they're going to get our best shot back. Our offense hasn't given any team their best shot since the 4th quarter of the Ravens game. We've been rolling out of bed and lazily moving the ball down the field, and only turning it on when absolutely necessary. We've called variations of like 5 different plays and kept the rest of the playbook under wraps. My hunch is that this week we empty the bag and I don't think the Pats have enough talent on defense to stop us at our best. So it comes down to can our defense finally fix its situational problems on 3rd downs and in the red zone? Pats have a poor run offense, we have a poor run defense. What happens when a highly movable object meets an easily stoppable force? That matchup of bad vs bad might decide the margin of victory in this game.

Bills 38 Patriots 30 Pats defense is better with Christian Gonzalez back out there but I think Brady is going to empty the bag in this one and Allen plays at his best in primetime. So I predict our best looking offensive performance of the season. I don't really trust out defense to stop anybody right now and Maye has looked pretty good. I worry that this will be the game they finally unleash Treyveon Henderson and with our poor tackling fundamentals I could see him ripping off a couple big runs. Another frustrating defensive performance made up for by the offense finally putting together its most complete game equals a Bills win by a TD.

No thanks to more defensive help. Enough is enough. We spent our first 4 draft picks and most of our FA money on that side of the ball. We still have Hoecht coming back plus Oliver returning from injury plus Hairston hopefully will be back at some point. Make it work with the group they have. An underrated problem in the past two games is our offense has stalled out a bit after successful early drives. They've had opportunities to blow the doors off our opponents and build an insurmountable lead but couldn't deliver. So I'd be very interested in a field stretching WR. The name I've thrown out a couple times is Rashid Shaheed who is on a 1 year deal. Maybe a RB2 would intrigue me if the team is ready to move on from Davis, Cook getting too many touches worries me a bit.

My least favorite Babich tendency is a blitz combined with soft coverage on the back end. Talk about giving the QB an easy answer. What is even the point of blitzing if you're going to make it easy for them to get the ball out quick? Babich frequently talks about how the pass rush and the coverage have to be married together. Take a look in the mirror man, that's your responsibility.

Okay you've presumably watched every defensive snap this year. Do you honestly feel like you have watched a championship defense? I sure haven't. I've watched what looks like a championship offense, not quite as explosive as I'd like but plenty of elements to succeed at a high level and able to turn it on whenever they really need to. The defense on the other hand looks regularly confused and out of position. They've been bad situationally on 3rd downs and in the red zone. If you're happy with what you've seen feel free to say so.

He had been itching to make that play for a while. A couple drives earlier he had a play where he very clearly pre-determined that he was going to run but got corralled for a sack instead. Did he learn from his mistake? Hell no, he said I dare you to take me down twice and proceeded to make them look like fools. That's my QB.

To be above average in red zone conversion rate and 3rd down conversion rate. Currently we rank 21st (63.64%) and 25th (42.00%) respectively in those metrics. Given the level of experience in the defensive coaching staff and the quantity of investments, I think it's reasonable to expect something like 50% and 35% respectively. Especially if our defense is designed to be bend don't break and intentionally allow rushing yards to defend against the big play. In a vacuum I'm fine with that philosophy but it needs to be complemented by strong situational defense. The timely turnovers are the one saving grace, I'll give them that.

They can't beat Texans or Rams with Lamar out on top of all the other injuries. I know their schedule gets easier but 1-5 is quite the hole to dig out of. They can only afford maybe 2 losses in their last 11 games and there's no guarantee some of these injured players will come back the same.

Yes I've been in favor of that idea. Score 35+ per game and just steamroll the competition. Make the defense practically irrelevant. The investments made over the past couple offseasons however tell you the team was expecting a different path to victory so I'd like to see those investments start to produce the desired result.

We've given up a TD on 63.64% of red zone trips which ranks 21st. We need to be top 10 at worst in that metric for that philosophy to work.

My take is that I'd feel better about the trade if we had gotten a good player with that 3rd rounder, and not DeWayne Carter who is very likely to be a total bust at this point. My other take is that I think both teams got the players they would have taken if they had stayed at their original pick. So mostly I just can't bring myself to care. Coleman makes our team better and Worthy makes their team better. They also each fit what their respective offenses want to do. I think Worthy has already pretty much hit his ceiling and Coleman still has room to grow, and I'm a sucker for high ceiling players so I'd still take Coleman right now if it were up to me. But there's not an ironclad argument for either player. It's week 5 of year 2 of their 10+ year NFL careers. Everyone needs to chill out and see where it goes.