Logic

And if the Lions play all their starters, and the Bills do too, and the Bills wind up playing better and continuing to look good overall....THEN are we allowed to be excited? Better question: Can't we just be excited now? It's football. Our football team looks good. Once again, I'm not saying "Super Bowl champs!", I'm just saying this team looks completely prepared, is executing soundly, and I have hope that this sound execution and preparation can carry over into the regular season. The most optimistic thing I've said so far is that they might win 10 games. I get it, some people like to guard themselves against disappointment after experiencing it so much over the past two decades. Not me. I choose optimism, because life is short and sports are fun.

I have this recurring feeling that people didn't read the original post. My basic point was that while schemes and scores don't matter, execution does, and the Bills have been executing well. Our players have been lining up and beating the players lined up across from them. I don't care who those players lined up across from them are. Your job in football is to out-execute the player you're going against in individual matchups ("do your one eleventh"), and the Bills have been. Personnel and scheme don't matter to me. Execution does.

It's almost like you didn't read my post at all. I admitted that record and final outcome of games don't matter. I said that I look for sound execution, which the Bills have demonstrated. I never said this preseason means that the Bills are winning the Super Bowl this year. I just said they've looked very good, out-executed their opponents, and have done so in a way that leads me to believe their performance will carry over into the regular season. And if the point is "cool it, it's only preseason, we have to wait and see", well...I know that. It's the title of the thread. ? What if the Bills HADN'T out-executed their opponents even though they're resting starters? That's happening all around the league this preseason. Sloppy performances by teams going against opponents who are resting key players. You're SUPPOSED to dominate opponents who are resting starters, and the Bills have. And once again, THE BILLS were also missing key players. Are Alexander and Hyde not crucial to defensive success? Are Morse, Nsekhe, and Brown not going to play big parts on offense this year? If all anyone has to refute my (admittedly cautious and tempered) enthusiasm is "but our opponents have been resting starters", well...did you read the original post?

@Ol Dirty B Enjoy staunchly defending your "I can't take any joy from the fact that my football team looked good the past couple weekends!" stance. Seriously. Have fun with that.

That's weird. I don't seem to remember the Bills playing Lorenzo Alexander or Micah Hyde on defense last week, yet they shut down the Colts offense pretty convincingly. I don't seem to remember Mitch Morse, Ty Nsekhe, or John Brown suiting up for Buffalo tonight. The Bills offense still took it to the Panthers defense. Look: You can only play the people on the field. If the opposition is without key players, it means you'd better DOMINATE them. And the Bills did -- even though they, too, were missing key players. Like I said, the alternative -- and this is happening across the league to teams who are playing against opposition that are resting star players -- is to come out and look bad and fail to execute EVEN THOUGH the opposition is not at full strength. What would you say then? If you want to be a pessimist about it and refuse to take even a modicum of cautious optimism from the fact that the Bills have looked better than their opponents two weeks in a row, then so be it. Fandom must be a real drag for you with that type of outlook. Me? I'll roll with cautious optimism, because life is short and sports are supposed to be fun.

I would absolutely LOVE to see you logically explain why what I said is illogical. Love it. Please enlighten me.

This year, like many years in the past two decades, there are a lot of Bills fans saying "Slow down, it's only preseason. It doesn't mean anything yet". There's one key difference, though: Most years, we're saying it because the Bills look sloppy, disjointed, and ineffective. We're saying it to calm our anxieties and talk ourselves off the ledge, because the Bills look like a 5-win football team. This year? Well...this year we're saying it because the Bills look better than their opponents on both offense and defense. In the past, we've been trying to talk ourselves into more than 5 wins. "It's only preseason, they'll figure it out". This year, we're trying to talk ourselves out of a breakout, 10-win type season. "It's only preseason, it's all vanilla schemes, it doesn't matter". See, here's the thing about that constantly uttered preseason phrase "it's only preseason, it doesn't matter": If we're talking about the SCOREBOARD, that's true. If we're talking about EXECUTION, it's a filthy lie. Sure, the opposing defense is running vanilla plays out of a limited playbook. All the more reason you want your offense to easily be able to march it down field against them. Sure, the opposing offense is trying not to tip their hand and is calling a limited script of plays. All the more reason you want your defense to easily shut them down and keep points off the board. Score and schemes may not matter in preseason, but EXECUTION MATTERS. If your offensive linemen hold their blocks, it matters. If your receivers beat the men across from them, get open, and catch the ball, it matters. If your defense plays as a unit, shoots gaps, and keeps the score low, it matters. All things being equal, you have to look SOME SORT OF WAY in preseason, right? So wouldn't you rather that your team dominate the opponent? Put a different way: How would you all feel right now if Allen and the Bills stunk up the joint the past few weeks? Well, you'd still be saying "It's only preseason", but you'd be saying it for a very different reason. Look, we all know: it is a good idea to temper expectations in the preseason for the aforementioned reasons. Nevertheless: the Bills are executing their assignments more effectively than their opponents, their rookie quarterback looks vastly improved, and their defense looks absolutely stifling. When I flash back to all of the preseason ineffectiveness of recent years, I notice that it almost always carried over into the regular season. If you can't execute against vanilla schemes, you DAMN sure can't execute when the lights come on for real. So maybe, just maybe, the Bills preseason effectiveness this year will carry into the regular season. Maybe they'll keep out-executing opponents. The score and schemes may not matter, but execution matters. Two more weeks and then we all get to see the Bills in real, important NFL regular season action. Until then, I'll keep trying to remind myself: "Slow down, it's only preseason".

Is Brown basing this on ANYTHING at all, or is it just complete conjecture?

JSH JUST STAY HEALTHY That's all I ask. They could run 50 straight HB Dive plays and score zero points. I don't care. Just stay healthy.

Sooner or later, Brian Daboll will get hired as a head coach. I've already accepted it. I'm hoping that Ken Dorsey takes liberally from his playbook and winds up being a worthy candidate to replace him. I suppose we're getting ahead of ourselves, though...

The Cardinals look putrid. They're going 4-12. Katie, bar the door!

My favorite part of this article is at the end, where Babich says that Edmunds is like a combination of Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs. That's one badass combination right there.

The Bills currently have -- and insanely enough, I don't think this is hyperbole or exaggeration -- potentially the greatest athletic specimens at both quarterback and middle linebacker that the league has ever seen. I'm not saying they're the best ever, or that they WILL be the best ever at their positions. I'm just saying that from a purely athletic standpoint (and their smarts and work ethic don't hurt, either), both Allen and Edmunds have the POTENTIAL to be among the greatest to ever play their positions. That's pretty ***** exciting.

Tim Graham said his Bills source denies the Clowney stuff. I trust him infinity times more than proven fraud IncarceratedBob.

I loved this article so much. Lee Smith is the man. Best quote? "I promise you one thing right now: Tommy Sweeney is not just a blocking tight end. Maybe I am but he’s not. The kid can run, he gets in and out of his breaks - I mean he’s not making plays against the threes out here, he’s playing plays against the ones. That’s our one defense and they were second in the league, if I’m not mistaken. He’s a good football player in both aspects of the game and he works his butt off."

I love it that all these people no one has ever heard of have the inside scoop, while the most well connected NFL insiders haven't heard a peep. ?

Yes. The fact that people STILL, after all these years, believe in the many-times-discredited IncarceratedBob is amazing to me. Someone even once did an entire ARTICLE exposing the dude. People still buy into his "throw darts at a wall, don't include any hard details, claim victory if you're right, delete Tweet if you're wrong" strategy. HALF his followers are bots who attack you if you question him. After that, he outright blocks you. Say it with me now: IncerceratedBob IS A FAKE!!!

I'm with you. Year two is CRITICAL for Josh Allen, and keeping him upright is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for this team. It's higher on the list of important factors than improving the pass rush, even though that is ALSO very important. Aside from that, I imagine the only tackle they'd even ACCEPT in exchange for Clowney would be Dawkins, and trading a good LT for a good pass rusher is just spinning your wheels, in my opinion. It just makes it so that instead of spending a 1st round pick on an EDGE next year, we have to spend one on an LT. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul.

Thanks. You said what I was thinking in a much more concise way than I did. Brevity has never been my strong suit. ?

I see two things at play: First, the media always bases its predictions off of last season's results. Even though there are multiple team-changing factors like player progression, addition and subtraction of personnel, and coaching changes, it's just easiest for national sports media -- who aren't really all that clued into the changes teams undergo, by the way -- to make predictions based off of a how a team performed last year. Second, the Bills finished 6-10 last year and have been bad for 20 years prior to that. Seeing the routine incompetence of the team and the most recent poor season makes predicting failure for Buffalo an easy proposition. We as fans may see all that's going on behind the scenes and read the camp reports and strongly believe the team will take a big jump, but the national media doesn't see/read/have emotional connection to any of those things. They just see years of basement-dwelling failure and a 6-10 2018 record and its easy pickins. Furthermore, I don't feel that the national media necessarily believes that Josh Allen will be any good. If you looked at most national media predictions, I'd be willing to bet that the majority have the Jets finishing better, despite having a first year head coach with a proven track record of losing. Why? Because the national media narrative is that Sam Darnold will be a star. Not so much for Allen. You see a few national media guys that see what the Bills are doing and predict a bit more success: Adam Schein, Brian Baldinger, Kay Adams and Peter Schrager, etc, but most are just taking the easy/obvious way out and predicting failure for a team that has seen a lot of it in the past two decades.

Once Kroft and Knox come back healthy, SOMETHING's got to give at the tight end position. They're keeping Lee Smith and Tyler Kroft, based on what they paid them. They're keeping Knox, based on how high he was drafted. I doubt they risk putting Sweeney on the practice squad, with how well he has been playing in training camp. Smith Knox Kroft Sweeney Croom Are they really gonna keep 5 TEs? If not, Croom could be the odd man out. ESPECIALLY since some of the undrafted youngsters like Nate Becker have been showing really well.

I'm legitimately curious to know what you don't like about her. Is it JUST that she's a woman, or is there something else?

So much hype over a 9-sack per year guy.

48% of the revenue goes to the players, yes. But that still means that 52% of the profits are being split between 32 men, while the other 48% is being split between 1,696 players. I have no idea. How could we know that? Fair enough. I respect your opinions. As I said, I'm not looking for you to agree with Matthews, or to approve of MY agreeing with Matthews. You know what they say about opinions...