Shaw66

I don't think there's been a season when Beane hasn't surprised me with moves he's made. I've learned to expect the unexpected from him, so I'm not prepared yet to say that the Bills will have no big-dollar signings. I think the roster will change more in the next six months than it did last season. Clearly, there's likely to be some movement on the offensive line. I think it'll happen on the defensive line, too. The receiver room will change. Stuff's going to happen, and some of it will be surprising, just like Allen and Edmunds in one draft was surprising, just like trading for Diggs was surprising.

You know, I can't say I ever really thought about this (if you'd asked if he was on the Wall, I might have said yes), but I do remember thinking that Booker Edgerson was a marginal choice to go up there. Byrd was a force, and he was a much more important contributor to the Bills' success in those years than Edgerson, who was solid, unspectacular, and a good teammate. For me, the way I feel about Edgerson on the Wall and not Byrd is about the same as I'd feel if you told me Levi Wallace was going on the Wall and Tre'Davious White isn't.

It's interesting to think about. I'll say this about Payton - even though he's an offensive genius, I've always liked the way his teams play defense. His defenses attack more than McDermott's, and that attacking nature puts pressure on the opponent. His offense and defense complement each other in ways that I've said the Bills don't. Still, I think McDermott's method, his commitment to process, will make him and his teams better, year after year. Payton won it all in his second year as a head coach and failed every season thereafter. One might argue that his Super Bowl was a lot of things coming together just right, and that he was unable to pull it together after that. (Nobody would make that argument about Belichick.) McDermott has the potential to be Belichick, and I'm not going to be in a hurry to replace him, at least not until he proves he's Schottenheimer.

I wouldn't fire him to hire Payton. If McD quit, I'd be all in favor of Payton.

Well, I don't know if I'm right. I'm just analyzing how you make the decision about the head coach of the Bills. I think it's a no brainer. I often say that it's a mistake to give up on talent too early. In McD's case, the downside of his staying too long is that he's Schottenheimer. The upside is that he's Reid, or maybe even Belichick. The chances of getting a better head coach than McDermott are slim. I wouldn't be willing to trade him head up for anyone. Maybe McVay. Not sure about the guy in SF. Belichick and Reid are too old. What are you gonna do, fire McD and hire Bienemy? Who'd take that risk. Are you ready to trade even up for the guy in Cincinnati? I mean, really, I'm riding McD until he's proved conclusively he's Schottenheimer.

Oh, I think he will. This is a teaching moment. He's not going to change his style because Farwell made a mistake. He's going to use Farwell's mistake to show people why it is so important to master all of the details of your job.

Well, I don't know how many big "learn from my mistakes" coupons he's cashed. Every team loses games, and at the end of the day a lot of the losses are due to mistakes the coaches made, either during the week or during the game. And in games decided in the last two minutes, there are mistakes on both sides. They're all learning, all the time. So, although I don't know how many coupons he's cashed (not many, I don't think), he's certainly not at the limit. He's not losing games left and right with bad judgments on the field. And his overall record is excellent. And, most importantly, he's young. He's going to be a much, much smarter coach ten years from now. His expertise will grow a lot. And he's very self-directed about his growth. He examines his failures, determines the causes, and puts a program in place to correct them. That's part of the process, and he's committed to it. Reid had growing pains. Belichick. McVay has made big mistakes. McDermott looks very much like a keeper, and until it's certifiable that he can't win big games, the Bills shouldn't let him go.

I'm not surprised at all. McDermott is 100% committed to the process. At the core of the process is that everyone takes responsibility for what he's supposed to do. In return, he's given responsibility - he's not second guessed, and no one does his job for him. And the entire operation is based on the notion that I can do my job better if I have confidence that the guy next to me is equally committed to doing his job. If he's doing his job, I can concentrate on mine. McDermott believes that when everyone is properly engaged in the process, each remains free to do his job. And, as I've said before, McDermott had a job to do at the moment the kickoff team was huddling - it was to be giving Frazier guidance about what he wanted to see on defense (or, if others are right, just flat out making the defensive calls). You're describing Pete Carroll, frantically running the sidelines, grabbing players, and telling them things. McDermott doesn't do that because it would undermine the process.

Which is another legitimate question someone asked. Shouldn't Farwell or McDermott have seen that and called time out? The best of what you said above is that this was, all things considered, a massive failure. The whole philosophy after the kick was "let's do everything we can to avoid making a mistake," and by taking that attitude they (the coaching staff) made a lot of mistakes.

That's great. I never saw that. Thanks. The best detailed description I've heard of the play, and I won't argue with him. I said somewhere here that Bass was the only guy on the kicking who didn't know what the play was. Still, I don't think the mistake mattered. With 13 seconds left and the ball at the 25, Bills had a 97% chance of winning. What would the percentage have been if they'd forced the Chiefs to, say, the 12 yard line? 98%? The win percentage dropped much more than 1% after the first play from scrimmage, and also on the second play from scrimmage. That's why I think the two offensive plays the Chiefs ran were much more important.

I think it's a sure thing that it was a called squib and no one told Bass. The coverage team was in some kind of prevent mode - they weren't running down the field as fast as possible, like they usually do. If it had been a high kick to the 10, we've seen them do that, and the coverage team runs hard AND they squeeze the play into the corner, so the guys on the far wing are curling in toward the opposite pylon. Nobody was doing that, either. They were getting themselves into position to stop whatever might happen - bad bounce, reverse or some other gadget, whatever. Bass was the only guy on the kickoff team who didn't know what the play was.

Hey, Newcam, I'm really enjoying this discussion. You raise really good points. I won't argue with that McDermott was completely in charge of the defense in those moments. As I said, I think he was either calling the shots exclusively or in conjunction with Frazier. Either way, McDermott's fingerprints were on the decision making. An important thing we don't know, damnable in either case, is whether (1) this defensive scheme had better plays to call than were called - in which case McDermott is culpable for not having called the better plays, or (2) they didn't have in place any more suitable defensive formations and approaches, in which case Frazier is culpable for not having put them in place and McDermott is culpable for not having identified that weakness and insisted that Frazier develop some other approaches. Damnable in either case. Your comments remind of two points I've made lately. One is that I don't like the defensive style, either. I mean, I get it, it's designed to be a defense that serves you well, week in and week out, as the type of team you play changes, and it's designed to keep you in games by keeping the score down. It works very well. And it often comes through with big stops when needed - there are lots of examples. It doesn't come through every time, no defense does. What I don't like about it - and I think this is McDermott, not simply Frazier, is the bend-don't-break nature of the defense does lead to complementary football when you have an explosive offense. With this offense, you want a defense that gets the ball back to the offense quickly. You do that with takeaways and three and outs. You also do it by giving up touchdowns - I know that's odd, but it's true. Which offense, high scoring or low scoring, makes it more imperative that you give up few points? A low scoring offense. Worst combination for a team is an offense that can't score and a defense that gives up scores. But if you have an offense that scores a lot, you can afford to give up more points, especially if in the process of risking a quick score, you're increasing your chances of taking the ball away. Look at the Chiefs game - if the defense hadn't let the Chiefs score as soon as they did in the final two minutes, Josh wouldn't have had time to lead the game-winning drive. That tells me that the Bills need a more aggressive defense. Maybe better put, they need a defense that can do what this defense does over the long term - limit yards and points, but that ALSO takes some risks to make big plays. It needs to be more unpredictable, and part of being unpredictable is threatening to attack the QB with any player on your defense. Dropping your two safeties so deep, two or your best playmakers, seriously limits your ability to make a play on defense. You said, essentially, that not squib kicking cost the Bills an opportunity to win the game (by running clock, by pinning them deep, or even by maybe getting a turnover on the kickoff). Well, playing prevent defense also costs you opportunities to win the game right there. The Bills need a defense that can and does play more aggressively. Maybe it means they need a high-level, stud edge rusher - he alone would be a threat to make plays. But they need to be willing to blitz and make it work, and they need to be willing to rush 3 or even 2 and make that work. I hope McDermott sees that and recognizes that his process hasn't led him yet to develop a defense that meshes better with this offense. I trust that he sees it and will work on it. In any case, the Bills missed an opportunity because he hadn't done enough to have the team prepared to play those 13 seconds in anything other than ultra-prevent mode. The other point is that you say you will remember this right along with Wide Right and the Music City Miracle, and I will too. And I'd throw in the Monday night loss to the Cowboys. And the loss to the Cardinals on the Hail Mary is almost up there, too. I get that. But McDermott reminded us a few weeks ago that beating the Pats in the playoffs wasn't as big a deal for him and the players as it was for the fans. There's a bit of that here, too. I mean, sure, the players are devastated by this loss - it's a horrible loss for a player to go through, given the months of hard work and struggle, only to lose because you and your team completely blew it in the end. But only some of those players lost to the Cardinals, only a few of them lost to the Texans in overtime, and none of them lost the Cowboys, Titans, or Giants in those epic collapses. And they've had a lot of successes. They don't think of this loss as just one more episode in the life-long lament of Buffalo Bills fans. So, for the coaches and players, it's very much about getting over the short-term pain and then doing the work to have some confidence that you won't do that again. It's about learning how to win, and this game has taught them all that they have more to learn. That's exactly the kind of challenge that drives McDermott, which is why I wouldn't think of firing him. Under McDermott, this team is going to get better - he will not permit anything else.

A legend for good reasons. He was a special running back until they figured out that he was even better as a receiver. He was special.

Wow! That's a much more interesting question. As I've said, I just can't get upset, in terms of how the game played out, with the non-squib quick. Yes, as you said, it was a chance to win the game on the kickoff, and that's a communication failure is inexcusable. The plays that determined the outcome were the next three (I include the field goal, because it was an opportunity to make a play, and no one did. In fact, I don't recall being impressed by any attempts to block place kicks this season.) I think the bigger failure, the more complicated failure, happened on the first two plays after the kickoff. I don't know enough about defense, and I don't remember the plays well enough to be able to critique intelligently what they did and should have done. I know a few things. Someone here once said about the defense they ran was that they dropped their two best defenders so deep that they were able to be factors in the play as it unfolded. I heard Sean Payton say the Bills DBs were defending the sideline, to stop quick outs and clock stoppages. But the Chiefs had time outs - they clearly had the whole field to attack. There was no reason to defend the sidelines, and that opened the middle, even more. Think of it - your DBs tethered to the sideline and your safety 30 yards downfield. Someone suggested holding Hill and/or Kelce at the line of scrimmage on the first play. The play runs out, Mahomes' has one key guy subtracted from his attack, and he burns time trying improvise the next best choice. Maybe you blanket the other guys and Mahomes burns 6 or 7 seconds, maybe ends up throwing incomplete to get out of the down. Bills take the five-yard penalty. Those are just random, serious questions to be answered. Maybe there are answers, but I doubt it, not for all of them, especially when you include more specific questions that others can suggest. Either McDermott delegated all that authority to Frazier, and I doubt that, or the defensive decisions were joint between Frazier and McDermott or even dictated by McDermott. Had to be one or the other. I don't think you can conclude anything other than that they underperformed expectations. They didn't have the strategies or hadn't prepared their defense well enough to execute two plays and hold the offense under 15 yards per play. So, what's McDermott's response? I think however he thinks about it, he has to have less confidence now in Frazier, and I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't secretly hoping Frazier would get a job somewhere. McDermott can't very well fire Frazier, especially not in the current racial climate in the NFL. And it's not that he wants to fire him because of what happened, but I'd guess that he would like a more creative, maybe younger, guy in that role, a guy who's not quite so passive. And McDermott simply doesn't have the time to get seriously involved in running the defense. His system demands that he be free from day-to-day D coordinator stuff. All McDermott can do, I think, is work hard with Frazier to develop goals for Frazier to hit. I don't know goals they should be, or why they weren't goals before now. I think one goal, one deliverable, would be a revamped strategy for end-of-game situations. They need a defense that can attack when necessary, that can truly take a player out of a play. What they seem to have, the ultra-prevent styles that show up every once in a while, has two problems: they're passive to excess, and they're too predictable. Too predictable in that all teams know how to attack prevent defenses, and when you're playing the Chiefs or the Rams or the Bengals or the 49ers or the Packers and some others, they're throwing a receiver at you who will kill you in all that space you leave open. The Bills have to be able to do something better than "keeping the play in front of you." Was being unprepared to do better a fireable offense. I think it could be considered fireable insofar as the defensive coordinator is concerned, but as I said, I can't imagine the Bills firing Frazier now. They wouldn't want the political heat, and McDermott's too loyal, anyway. Fireable for the HC? Well, yes, if you had a head coach with a mediocre track record, you might say "damn! of all the other things you haven't really changed around here, now there's this." But with McDermott's track record, and with his attitude, you have a high level of confidence that issues like the 13 seconds will not continue to be problems. That's why I think that all they can do about the defense is move on with the guys they have, try to learn from it, and get better.

That's a really good way to put it. McD wasnt guilty of gross negligence. He called the play and he communicated it the coordinator. The coordinator failed to communicate with the players. It was literally inexcusable. McDermot could not excuse the failure and fired the coordinator who failed.

Thanks. That's a good explanation. Personally I don't agree that the possibility of burning time was worth the risk of the uncertainty that play brings with it. And I'm not really arguing that the squib was the right call. What I'm saying is that the result of what actually happened, first down from the 25, wasn't some kind of disaster. It wasn't a pick six, it wasn't a muffed punt or a 60 yard return. Yes, it may have been a blown opportunity to end the game, but we will never know that. What we know is that the Bills should have won the game with the Chiefs starting when and where they did. It was a mistake without a serious consequence.

Yes, the clock. But a squib kick, which apparently what was called, really doesn't do much to the clock. The clock doesn't start until the ball is touched by the receiving team. The receiving team will do everything it can to handle the squib kick outside the 15, and they will immediately take a knee. No time, or at most a second, will go off the clock. They're only going to return a squib kick if the kick makes it inside the 10, and maybe not even then. A pooch kick is different, because the kicker can deliver it more or less where he wants. But the replays make it pretty clear that a pooch kick wasn't called. That would have gone toward a corner, the way the Bills always kick it, and the coverage team would have been running full speed with their lanes converging on that corner. They weren't doing that. They were in some sort of slow motion, prevent mode, covering all lanes (in part to protect against a reverse, a throw across the field, or other gadget. I don't know what the Bills were trying to do, but they didn't execute it properly. Still, I don't see that it was a big problem. The chances were good that even if they'd executed properly, KC would have had 12 or 13 seconds left to work with - maybe from deeper in their own territory, maybe not. Maybe the Bills had a way to force KC to return the ball, which would have burned more time, but which also opens up the possibility of giving up a game ending touchdown if the execution is blown or if the Chiefs had a play the Bills weren't prepared for. What the Bills got was nice, conservative, risk-free result - ball on the 25 with 13 seconds left. So, I still say the same thing - I don't see the benefit of a squib kick. The Bills left themselves with an easy task - hold the Chiefs under 30 yards on two plays. The squib kick wouldn't have left them much better off.

I guess I don't understand what the magic is with a pooch or squib. If it was an excellent technique for pinning the other team inside the 15, okay, I get it. But if it's such an excellent technique, why don't teams use it all the time? I think they don't use it all the time because it's unpredictable. On a squib kick, the ball might be recovered on the 35, maybe on the 20, maybe on the 10. Or it may go all the way to the end zone. So, what your tell your cover team? Converge on the 30? No, maybe converge on the 20. I think it's a terribly unpredictable play, and that's why it isn't used regularly as a kickoff technique. What it does do is make it difficult for the receiving team to run a trick play, because they can't count on the ball coming to any particular player. A pooch kick, a high kick that definitely falls within the field of play makes more sense to me. As someone pointed out, Bass has successfully kicked the ball short, and to one side, many times. That's a much better way to kick it from the point of view of the cover team, because a pooch kick to the ten near the sideline allows the cover team to cut off the far side of the field, it forces the opponent to catch it (because the coverage team would be converging on a loose ball if they don't). But it didn't seem the Bills called for a pooch kick - the coverage team were staying in their lanes and not converging on a point where they expected the ball to be. So, what exactly is the benefit of the pooch kick, anyway?

No, not likely. KC would fall on the ball and give themselves up. Or take a fair catch on a pooch kick. Either way, no time goes off the clock. Now, if they muff it, or somehow if the back thinks he has to run, yes, then maybe you get a few seconds, but that wasn't likely to happen.

Now, that's a better point. It isn't his job, either, to be sure everyone lines up the right way, but if he notices something wrong, he's got to intervene. He may very well should have been tipped off by where Bass lined up.

I really never thought about it, but I think you're correct about this. OF course, that kick to the five always goes toward one sideline, typically the right sideline, and there's a risk that your kicker kicks it out of bounds. But as you say, Bass has made that kick a lot, and frankly I don't recall that he ever put one out of bounds. Bills know very well how to cover that kick, and it's a kick pretty much forces the return man to return it - he doesn't want to take a knee at the five, or a make a fair catch there. So it has the benefit of being play the Bills run regularly and the only one that is likely to force the Chiefs to burn clock just to get off their own goal line. I think people are forgetting that squib kicks are unpredictable. You can't be sure what you're going to get of it. If it was a sure thing that you could squib it and keep them on the 15, everyone would squib it all the time, because inside the 20 on a kickoff is very desirable. They don't use it all the time, because bad things sometimes happen on squib quicks.

Yes, but the ball is bouncing along the ground, and there are a lot of different possible outcomes. It also could have been recovered at the 30 or 35, depending on where people are lined up, where the kick goes, lots of things. IT's also possible, of course, that KC screws up somehow and the Bills recover. But generally, the likely possible outcomes of the squib kick are the ball on the 20 to 30, or 15 to 35, with 12 or 13 seconds left. With the ball going into the end zone, it was on the 25 with 13 seconds. It's pretty hard for me to see how that difference was the most important play in the game. If the Chiefs start on the 20 instead of the 25, Buttker's kicking a 54-yard field goal instead of 49, still within his range. The kickoff didn't decide the game, and people saying McDermott needed to talk to Bass particularly on that play are wrong.

But they wouldn't have been down to 9. KC would not have returned the squib quick. The kick returner catches the ball and takes a knee, or recovers it on the ground. No time goes off the clock, or if he catches it and drops, a second goes off. No matter where he is, he gives himself up immediately. I know it was blunt, but what you said was in fact completely wrong. We only know which plays were the most important in the game AFTER the game. Before the kickoff, no one was thinking the kickoff was the most important play. The most important play was the play before, the touchdown pass. Did McDermott go to Davis before that play and be sure he knew his assignment? Of course not. How is McDermott supposed which play is the most important, and how he is supposed to know which player he should talk to before each play he thinks is the most important. It's absurd to expect the head coach to be doing that.

This is completely wrong. It was a friggin kickoff that the kickoff team had practiced probably 100 times. It was a completely ordinary play. McDermott had no reason whatsoever to believe that on this simple, ordinary play, someone wasn't going tell the kicker what the play was. McDermott's not running down the sideline to talk to the punter on every fourth quarter punt. He's not going to Josh with a fourth quarter lead and telling him not to fumble. EVERY play is potentially the most important play of the game and his career. EVERY play. How is he supposed to know which one someone is not going to do his job? He can't be chasing players the entire game reminding them what they're supposed to be doing. And beyond that, even in retrospect, it wasn't the most important play. The next two plays were the most important. Which one of the 11 defenders was he supposed to seek out and talk to? Each one? Jerry, you do this, Addison, you do that, Tremaine, don't forget about Kelce, Levi, nobody deep, etc. How many guys is he supposed to talk to? It simply is not his job. His job is to make decisions and relay them to the coordinators. He was doing his job. Other people weren't doing their jobs.

Win a couple of Lombardis, and memories will fade.