Logic

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.

Thanks as always for the post. Yesterday was the most fun I've had watching football during a non-Bills Sunday. Jets-Vikings, Chiefs-Bengals, and Dolphins-49ers were all great games on their own, but were even more interesting because of the playoff seeding ramifications they had on the Bills. I couldn't settle on an early window game, so for the first time ever, I watched NFL Red Zone for the whole three hours. It was excellent! commercial-free football, jumping around from game to game, whichever had the most exciting action at any given moment. The completist part of me missed the "chess match" aspect of watching one game from start to finish. But that was more than made up for by the ability to compare and contrast the different styles, strengths and weakness of each team as Scott Hanson jumped from game to game, and by the fact that I didn't have to sit through any commercials. Just constant, non-stop football. I'm not sure what took me so long to come around to the Red Zone channel, but boy was it fun! The Chiefs, as pointed out on social media today, are 1-5 in their last six games against the Bills and Bengals -- and are 13 seconds away from being 0-6 in those games. The Chiefs are still talked about as the class of the AFC by almost everyone, so I found that to be a pretty interesting fact. The Dolphins look like a different team when they go against a top 16 defense. Tua was totally off yesterday. All QBs have off days. We saw our own QB have a series of them just this season. Whatever it was about going against the 49ers, Tua was missing gimme throws left and right. It was downright bizarre how inaccurate he was. Bills seem to be exiting their slump at just the right moment. Win five winnable (not easy by any means, but all winnable) games and they get a bye and home field. An exciting month of December football ahead.

è stata una bella domenica!

I've always heard Green Bay fans are the absolute nicest people and kindest hosts to visiting fans from other teams. There's no part of me that believes that Jacksonville fans are nicer or more welcoming than them. The rudest fans in my mind would belong to the Eagles and Jets, but being as those people primarily are from Philly and Jersey, that's no surprise. As for Bills fans...I love 'em, they're my people, they do all the charity stuff and have the great tailgating and are super loyal, etc, etc....but my god, I have seen some of the most disgusting and ridiculous inebriation-related spectacles and ordeals at Bills games. Just really gross stuff. Super embarrassing, a lot of it. Bills games so often seem like a "getting blackout drunk" festival, where football is secondary to binge drinking on a Sunday morning.

What Boatdrinks said. The easiest way to understand Nick Wright and to put him into context is to realize that he's basically a pro wrestling heel (bad guy). Like Roddy Piper or Ric Flair. His whole schtick, his whole gimmick, is to be an arrogant antagonist to all non-Chiefs football fans. He deliberately employs a cartoonishly over the top persona and antics to get a rise out of viewers. He comes from the Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd school of "sports journalism", which is to say that he's an entertainer, a circus barker, and a clown. He is NOT an actual analyst, thoughtful journalist, or knowledgeable scribe. One of his most tried and true go-to antics is to constantly belittle the Bills and to never, under any circumstances, give any credit to them or to Josh Allen. It always works, too. It always gets Bills fans all riled up and irate. As they say, bad publicity is better than no publicity. Case in point, had anyone here ever even HEARD of Nick Wright before he started badmouthing the Bills? Laugh at the clown, yell at the clown, ignore the clown. Whatever works for you. But at the end of the day, just remember that it's all schtick. It's all a bit. This is what he does.

I sort of can't believe it actually all happened! Once Jimmy G went out with injury, I assumed Dolphins victory. I also assumed Mahomes would do Mahomes things and the Chiefs would win late. Here we sit -- after all the injuries, the Josh Allen UCL drama, the epic snowstorm, the brutal three game road stretch in 12 days -- number one seed in the AFC, with five winnable games in front of us. What a day to be a Bills fan!

I would love it if the Bills added OBJ, but all of this talk and hype has kind of moved me to the "I just don't care that much any more" phase. If they get him, he'll help the offense. If they don't, they'll have more money to re-sign guys like Edmunds, Oliver, and Poyer. At the end of the day, OBJ just doesn't seem like the type of guy to turn down the bright lights of NYC or Dallas for Orchard Park, NY. If we get him, great. If not, I'll shrug and move on.