Logic

Yeah. Pretty awful. He needs to stop dropping catchable passes and to be more reliable when called upon. To be fair, though...in terms of catch percentage, DK Metcalf is ranked 91st. Brandon Aiyuk 87th. The great Justin Jefferson is ranked 75th. A receiver can be highly productive in the NFL and still have a below average catch %. But yeah, he needs to clean it up.

Brandon Beane is a former AP General Manager of the Year, under whose tenure the Bills have made the playoffs three out of four seasons (soon to be four out of five), are the current AFC one seed, have the second best point differential in football, and are the current Super Bowl betting favorites. But sure, he's a below average talent evaluator and not a very good GM overall. He just got lucky to get Josh Allen. He didn't, like, make a bunch of shrewd trades and draft day maneuvers to get into position to take a super raw guy that most of the analysts in the world thought was a giant bust waiting to happen. Didn't surround him with a stable environment, good coaching, good enough protection and good enough weaponry, and exercise the patience needed for him to reach his potential. It was just luck. Beane is below average. The Bills are the AFC 1 seed, have the second best point differential in the league, and are Super Bowl betting favorites IN SPITE of Beane. Sure, Jan.

Tremon Smith and Khalil McKenzie are crucial to the Chiefs' playoff push this year. Darwin Thompson and Nick Alligretti are really killing it for them. Michael Danna and Thakarius Keyes are paramount to their success. Oh wait, those are a bunch of nobodies. The hit rate from round 5 onward is awful for every team, including the Chiefs. People have unrealistic expectations of what constitutes a good draft. Typically, if you can get 3-4 contributing players from each draft, you're doing great. Those that expect GMs to hit on every pick from round 1 to 7 every year simply don't know what they're looking at.

The blueprint would/will work against the Bills IF Josh is not patient. IF he does not play smart. IF he forces the issue instead of taking the smart plays and checkdowns. If Allen plays within himself and Dorsey doesn't abandon the run, if the Bills offense looks sort of like it did against the Pats -- leaning on the run game, taking the checkdowns, taking care of the football -- then the Bills will be fine. It largely depends on Allen's willingness to take what the defense is giving him and to not give the ball away.

I have seen nothing -- not one thing -- to suggest to me that Stevenson is an NFL level player. Even his nickname doesn't check out. They call him "speedy", but he runs a 4.45. That's fast, no doubt, but it's not SPECIAL fast. It's not so fast that you're calling him "Speedy". Even then, it seems to be buildup speed. He doesn't have much quick-twitch or instant acceleration. He also seems to have trouble actually CATCHING the ball. He wasn't a particularly dangerous or trustworthy looking return man when he got the shot last year. All in all, he's good for maybe some go balls, and that's about it. Practice squad sounds right. One more year to work and develop and see if he can stick as a special teams ace or something.

I don't think there's a single offensive position where they're better than the Bills. Guard, maybe? Defensively, I'd give them defensive line, and they have a legit argument for corner. Linebacker is a push at best. Safety? Bills. Top to bottom, I don't think many other than Jets fans would agree that the Jets have a better roster, even discounting the all-important QB position.

I totally agree. I think both things are true: He needs to stop dropping passes and to be more consistent....AND....he's been a legitimate #2 receiver and not, as some state, a disappointment. I also think he's been fighting that bum ankle all season. That's not an excuse, because tons of players are playing through injury at this point in the season. I'm just noting that I don't believe he's been 100% since that injury.

Gabriel Davis is ranked 26th in receiving yards. He has the same amount of receiving touchdowns as Justin Jefferson, Ja'Marr Chase, Ceedee Lamb, Amon Ra St Brown, and Mark Andrews, and more than Tyreek Hill, Tee Higgins, and DK Metcalf. Only 8 receivers in the league have caught more touchdowns than he has. I'm not sure in what universe those aren't good WR2 numbers. Even if your contention that he was expected to emerge as a WR1, well...there are 32 teams in the league, and he is ranked 26th in receiving yardage and tied with a bunch of other guys for the 5th most touchdown receptions. Among players with at least 25 catches on the season, he is ranked 5th in 1st down %. The Bills offense as a whole ranks 2nd in yards and 3rd in points, with Davis being the second leading receiver on the team. I'm not sure if the problem people have is unrealistic expectations or failure to accurately assess Gabe Davis's production relative to that of his peers. Saying he "hasn't stepped up this season" is not really backed up by the numbers.

I was just on the Jets forum. One of the posters actually said these words: "Comparing our roster to the Bills' roster, this is a game the Jets should win". L O L

I think there's going to be an awkward adjustment period for college football, but things will eventually "settle down"/normalize. I'm just happy the kids finally get to make some money.

First it was Romo calling Dane Jackson a future superstar, then this past game I heard Al Michaels call Boogie Basham "very underrated". I'm as a big a Bills homer as there is, but.....what are these guys smoking?

I think nepotism plays a big role in this one, too. Based on Hackett's track record, I can't help but wonder if he would have "fallen upward" quite as rapidly if he was not the son of a great NFL coach.

Well, when you have a chance to hire someone from the Doug Marrone coaching tree, you just HAVE to do it, right? In all seriousness, when I heard that Nate Hackett was hired as head coach, I had PTSD flashbacks of the absolutely awful offensive playcalling when he was with the Bills. I told myself that coaches change, evolve, and learn, and that he had surely gotten better along the way and would do just fine... ...and here we are.

I think Treylon Burks is going to end up being a good receiver. The problem is that the Titans' championship window is open RIGHT NOW. They were the AFC 1 Seed last year, they have an aging superstar RB, an aging QB, a good defense, a good coaching staff, a weak division... They're an AJ Brown away from being title contenders this season. That's the issue. Treylon Burks becoming what they need him to be next season or the season after doesn't undo the wasting of a Super Bowl window season that trading away AJ Brown did. On the other hand, I'm sure Robinson's firing is about more than that. I'd bet we hear more in the days to come. Maybe misconduct or some other kind of allegations of impropriety. There's got to be more to this than simply "the owner was mad that he traded away a good player!". The timing of the firing says to me that the team is trying to get ahead of something. Just what that is remains to be seen.

Indeed. There are some similarities, but they're quite different. I enjoyed them both.

I think our defense is going to bring Mike White back down to earth this Sunday. You always see this happen with backups across the league. They come in and have a few great games and everyone is like "wait a second, has this been our best guy all along?!". Then some team eventually brings them crashing back to earth. Maybe because there's more film on this player's tendencies, maybe they just have a bad day at the office. Whatever the case may be, everyone quickly remembers why this player was a backup to begin with. I'm not that concerned about the Jets offense vs the Bills defense. Now the Jets DEFENSE, that's another story. They, I do believe, are genuinely good, and will give the Bills some trouble this Sunday. Nevertheless, I expect the Bills to take care of business, and I think the 9.5 point spread is just about right.

For the 10th time in this thread, I say: pushing/pulling teammates, the way it's being done right now, has NOT always been a part of football. Aiding a runner like it's done now was made legal in 2005. For decades before that, it was not legal. Go back and watch games from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. You don't see this stuff.

I read that the Dolphins were hoping this game would be moved to Sunday. They play in LA on Sunday night the week before, and thus won't get back into Miami until the early hours of Monday morning. As such, it becomes a bit of a short week for them, with the rest and preparation advantage going to the Bills to some degree. Back-to-back trips to the west coast, with the second being a Sunday night game, followed by a Saturday night game in Buffalo, is about as a rough a three game away stretch as one could imagine for the Dolphins. Not that they're going to get any sympathy from me or other Bills fans after what the Bills recently endured.

As I've pointed a few times in this thread, it's not as if this has always been a part of football, and I'm advocating for taking something out of the sport that's always been a big part of it. That's just not the case. For the vast majority of the history of "modern" pro football as we know it, assisting the runner has NOT been legal. It was only made legal in 2005. My disliking it has nothing to do with the specificity of any particular scenario. The Bills have obviously benefitted from it multiple times this season. My dislike of it has more to do with the fact that it doesn't resemble American football to me. It resembles rugby. I suppose in the end it comes down to the classic divide of those that want a more open, exciting, safe game, based on skill and design, and those that want a smashmouth, big-piles-of-guys-leaning-on-each-other game, that is somehow a tough, throwback harbinger to "when men were men". Like I said, if you go back and watch classic games from the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s, this prevalence of pushing runners isn't a thing. I think most people would agree that football was just fine during that period WITHOUT player-pushing being a part of the game.

The story of American football is a story of evolution and change. It started out as a brutal game, not far removed from rugby. Tight formations of men in scrums leaned on each other to try to gain yardage. You had three downs to gain five yards. Even that was not very easily done. Most games in the first 30 years of football were punting battles. Punters in those days were afforded the same national fame and acclaim that quarterbacks are today. You used to have to tackle a player to the ground and keep him pinned there for a series of seconds or until the ball carrier yelled "down" for the tackle to count. Clotheslines, punching, and headslaps were legal for years. Football player deaths were so common in this brutal version of football that the president of the United States had to step in to demand changes. It wasn't until some 90 years into the game's history that forward passing even became a viable, regular part of the game. If you could somehow watch a game of football from 1890, it would BARELY resemble the game we see today. The point is that American football has seen constant change and evolution. "The original spirit of the game" can be used to describe lots and lots of things that no longer take place in football. And again, pushing a teammate forward was only made legal in 2005. For many years before that, it was not legal.

"Accomadating" brute strength and making rules that cause brute strength to be more important than skill or playcalling are not the same thing.

There are a few replies to my most recent post here that say some iteration of "it's been part of the game since its inception" or "it's always been part of the game and always will be". That's not true, though. For most of the modern history of NFL football, assisting the runner in this fashion was illegal. It was only made legal in 2005. Go watch games from between, say, 1990 and 2019 and you don't see this happening much, if at all. Certainly not to the extent that it's happening across the league right now. https://www.rookieroad.com/football/assisting-runner-penalty/#:~:text=For a long time%2C pushing,pulling or lifting the runner. "Assisting the runnier is defined somewhat differently across the leagues. For a long time, pushing as well as pulling the runner was universally prohibited, but the NFL made it legal in 2005 to push the runner to advance them forward... In high school leagues, pushing the runner to gain yardage is still illegal. The rule has stayed in place mainly to prevent the offensive team from gaining an unfair advantage. To a lesser extent, it also protects the runner from being tackled for a prolonged period of time, which can put them at higher risk of injury."

Suppose that in the AFC championship game, the Bills only need to stop an opponent on 4th down to seal a victory. They call the perfect defense, the defenders execute, and two linebackers converge on the opposing ball-carrier 1 yard deep in the backfield, stopping him definitively for a loss. The defenders begin to ease up just the slightest bit, figuring the play is dead and they don't want to risk a personal foul. But the refs don't blow the whistle, so three of the opponent's teammates run up to the player and push him forward for a 1st down. Perfect playcall, perfect execution, but the subjectivity of when to blow the whistle leads to the play continuing, and the ball carrier happens to have more guys around to push him forward than the defense does to push him backward. The playcall and execution are moot, and sheer numbers and brute strength win out, with aid to referee subjectivity. Would you still feel it's a non-issue?

This is where I'm at. If it is totally legal and viable to push piles like this, it could completely change the game, and not in a way that I think the NFL would want it changed. It de-emphasizes individual player skill and playcalling and instead rewards sheer brute strength in numbers. It moves away from American football as we have known it and more toward rugby. I think the NFL is going to look at altering the language of the rule or re-outlawing pushing altogether this offseason.

As I watched multiple games on Sunday, it was impossible to ignore. In game after game, players were stopped by a horde of defenders, only for a group of their teammates to rally to the pile, pushing the whole mass of humanity for an extra 3-7 yards. When it happens, it looks less like pro football and more like a rugby scrum. I've been reading a book called How Football Became Football: 150 Years of the Game's Evolution, and in it, I learned that American football used to look a lot like what we've seen recently: huge piles of humanity pushing on each other, fighting for every yard. Basically, it wasn't far removed from rugby when it began. Players even had loops sewn onto their pants for a time for their teammates to grab onto to either push or pull them more easily. One of the earliest debates in football was how to spread the game out, make it less dangerous, and less of a tedious "three yards and a cloud of dust" affair. These "momentum plays", as they called them, lead to a ton of injuries, and to a frankly ugly, more brutish, less exciting form of football. The ability of a running back or receiver to gain yardage is de-emphasized in favor of the ability of a group of players to push harder than another group of players. After years of this ugly, rugby-style pile pushing, rule changes in football eventually disallowed it. For most of the history of modern pro football as we know it, pushing or pulling the pile in the manner we have recently seen has not been allowed. In 2006, a rule change made pushing the pile legal again (though pulling is still technically not legal). For whatever reason, it took until this season for it to really become as common and prevalent as it has. The question is, should it be allowed? Are these big pile-push scrums really American Football? I'm curious to know how other football fans feel about this issue.