Shaw66

I want Reid to retire!

I've always thought the better example is that the Bills are to the Chiefs as the Colts were to the Patriots. Year after year Manning tried to find a way to beat the Patriots in the AFC championship game, and he had only limited success. I like that comparison because in both cases we're talking about all-time great quarterbacks: Brady and Manning, Mahomes, and Allen.

Hey, Plant Been meaning to respond to this. I generally agree - I look at the lineup and how well it performed, and I don't see much need to change. However, I'm sure there'll be more change than your post suggests. I think the receiver room will change, for sure. I think it's even possible there will be change on the oline. Johnson is probably gone, and there'll be a replacement there. In general, I think every GM knows that standing pat is the way to a slow death, so I think we'll see at least a surprise or two on offense. I do agree, though, that where this team has room for improvement is on the defensive side. The Bills haven't gotten quality defensive help out of the draft, quality that helps in the guy's rookie season since Benford. Bishop disappointed, but maybe he'll be more solid this season. I'd love it if by October there were a couple of new young faces on the field on defense.

I agree with this. McDermott is not going anywhere. I just have more confidence than most people in his his ability to improve and develop additional skills and talents. I believe for example, but nothing we're saying here is new to McDermott. He understands better than we do, how game plans are developed and what the practices are that the best coaches follow. I have no doubt that he is determined to improve himself in those areas and to continue to look for coaches with the talent and creativity to make the team competitive at the highest levels. Which is not to say that I'm not disappointed that we haven't seen more progress. However, I do believe the Chiefs are a special organization, and they present a unique challenge. I also believe that 2024 was one of McDermott's best coaching jobs. The team had mixed the personnel, at best, and still performed at a very high level. The bills will be better in 2025. The Bills have run just as aggressive blitzes from time to time, but I agree that in that situation, McDermott is much more likely to revert to he's more conservative approaches. As I always say, however, I expect a McDermott will continue to improve and continue to surprise us. His onfield decision making, for example, is much more aggressive and creative now than even a few years ago. I think we will continue to see changes.

Well, sure. We can rehash 13 seconds, and the conclusion is always the same - there were some serious coaching failures, both in preparation and with game-time decision making. But the fact is that over the last five seasons, the Chiefs have been the best team in the league and the Bills have been the second best. If the question is whether to replace the head coach, I think it's a no brainer. No current coach in the league has been able to play the Chiefs as competitively as the Bills, and replacing McDermott probably means (1) an immediate step back in competitiveness and (2) getting a coach who is less likely to win like the Bills have over the past five seasons. If Reid wins the Super Bowl on Sunday and shortly thereafter announces his retirement, which team will be the preseason favorite to win next year's Super Bowl? The Bills, that's who. If that's where we are in a month, I do not want a new coach.

This is excellent. Thanks for posting it. I don't know enough about Babich to know what his upside is, but I think you describe it pretty well. The players could have more talent, but I think they can get more out of the defenders they're putting on the field. As for figuring it out at halftime, I agree, but I think that's how the defense is designed. They come out playing their standard defense and let the offense try to attack it. Then they see how the offense is attacking, and they adjust. It's a conservative approach, and we've seen it put the offense behind almost immediately, but the approach has worked pretty well for McDermott. He may tweak it a bit, but McDermott's fundamental approach is stay close in the first half and win the second half. I don't agree about Brady. I think Brady has shown a lot of creativity, with some blind spots. I think we'll see further improvement in the offense next season. I believe that these guys grow in their jobs, and McDermott will challenge them to get better in particular ways. We know, for example, that McDermott told Brady last year that the Bills had to run the ball successfully, and we saw how Brady responded - with a really effective running game. We'll see more development in 2025, I'm sure. But whether either coordinator will get better at attacking the opponents' weaknesses, whether they'll get better at identifying tendencies and responding, whether they'll get better at anticipating how the opponent is likely to break tendencies, all of that - I don't know. But it does seem to me that those are the areas where the Bills are consistently underprepared against the best opponents.

I wanted to give another example for @Logic and others. I know Logic was talking about defense and I gave an offensive example. Here's one for defense: Maybe it's been discussed here, but a friend told me that Mahomes went 12 for 15 against man-to-man in the AFCC game. That would mean he was 6 for 11 against zone. Just prorating, if the Bills had played man on 10 pass plays, Mahomes would have completed 8, and he would have been 9 for 16 against the zone. That's one fewer completion. Would that have made a difference? I don't know, but it's one fewer play that the Chiefs would have had success on. He averaged 13 yards per completion, so 13 yards could easily have made a difference in the right drive. For me, that gives rise to a lot of questions: Did the Bills know that Mahomes was that much better against man than zone, either in general or against the Bills specifically? Did they plan to be that heavy in man and if they did, why did they think they could have success in man when obviously they couldn't? Did the coaches realize during the game that he was killing them in man? If so, how did they adjust? I don't know how one does this, but it seems to me that if the Bills thought they could have success in man, they should have a plan for what to do if they didn't. Wouldn't it be good, for example, to have planned to show man pre-snap and then switch to zone post-snap? Maybe I'm dreaming, but my understanding is that good coaches do exactly that kind of scheming. It's all just nitpicking, because the Bills obviously planned for the game and had success doing things, both offensively and defensively. However, it sure seems like the Chiefs always have a little more success in their scheming before and during the games, and the game comes down to just a few plays here and there. It's true that players haven't made plays, like Kincaid, but in the McDermott era, it sure seems like the Bills are less well prepared than their opponents in the playoffs. Maybe it's only the Chiefs, because most of the playoff losses are to the Chiefs, and that may mean that the Bills just happen to be the best of all the teams that lose to the Chiefs. There's no shame in that, because the Chiefs have shown a remarkable facility for winning. Even if that's true, it doesn't mean that the Bills shouldn't be working to find ways to close the gap. They've been close, maybe closer than any other team in the league, to beating the Chiefs, and I'm sure they're working at closing the gap. I don't think the answer is new coaches, in part because there aren't any coaches who have shown that they're closer to beating the Chiefs.

Okay. Your bolded is a good point, and I don't have an answer for you. I've become a firm believer in my own ignorance, so I can't answer this question. I don't know anything about the fine points of football. I think I see things that are inadequate about how the Bills are prepared, but I don't know if I'm right and I don't know how to fix them. The example I've talked about in threads a bit is the fourth down throw to Kincaid. As I understand it, the Chiefs showed a blitz to the right side, and on film that was consistently a bluff, and they would send the blitz from the left. As a result, as I understand, the Bills set their blocking assignments to the left, anticipating the bluff. Instead, the Chiefs broke their tendency and brought the blitz from the right, and they had the Bills blockers outnumbered. Okay. Seems to me that the Bills needed to be prepared for the Chiefs to break tendency. Maybe they still set their blocking assignments to the left, but the players needed to be prepared to execute a successful play if the Chiefs broke tendency. They weren't. That's a major coaching failure. Seems to me that when the ball is snapped, Josh needed to verify where the blitz was coming from. When he see it's right, he knows he's in trouble and he should have been prepared to roll left immediately. He had Shakir out there. In addition, the blockers on the left side of the line, once they saw that the rush wasn't coming from the left, should have pulled left to block, either downfield, or guys who were trailing the play. All the receivers, except Shakir, were going right, and Josh would have had options. Now, that's just my creation. I don't know if it would work or not, but the point is that Josh needed to be prepared for the blitz coming from the right, and he wasn't. No one on the team was. That's bad coaching. I think the Bills should have been prepared to run something other that a QB sneak, once the Chiefs showed they could stop it. It was foolish to keep running a play that no longer had a 90% probability, especially a play that was predictable by the formation. That's bad coaching. I don't know what the solution was, but the Bills should have been prepared with something else. I don't know how you fix that. You need some high level, creative football thinking to identify those problems in advance and then to prepare for them. I think the lack of that kind of preparation is what we saw in 13 seconds and what we saw last week. Reid's teams are prepared in exactly those ways. They seem to always have a play. Belichick's teams were prepared in that way. Good coaches have their teams one step ahead of the opponent, so all the players have to do is execute. When you're not one step, you're hoping Josh will make a miracle throw, which he did, and your receiver will make a tough catch, which he didn't. Coaches have to make the game easy for the players. I don't know how you do that. McDermott should start by hiring some football savants, some guys who have the reputation of being creative football thinkers. That's what I would suggest, but as I said, I don't know what I'm talking about.

But it IS "coach better and play better." All three recent playoff losses came down to exactly that. The Chiefs make the plays they need, and they have strategies that win. True, their offense has declined, but they make the plays that win games. They don't beat the Bills by being fundamentally better on offense or defense. The games are close, and the Chiefs are better in the final two minutes with the game on the line. The regular season games are similar, and the Bills won those. So, I don't buy the notion that there are fundamental problems with the defense. If the Bills had made ONE play in each of the last three playoff games against the Chiefs, nobody would be looking at this graph. That doesn't mean the Bills don't need a better defense. They do. But they don't need a better defense to win more playoff games. Dawkins needs not to back into Allen, Kincaid needs to catch the ball, and the coaches need to strategize like pros, not like high school coaches.

Allen isn't where he is on that graph because the defense was bad. He is there because most of his playoff losses were against the Chiefs, which is the only team that can score points like the Bills can.

What that geaph says is the Bills have been the second beat team in the playoffs and would have several more wins if Mahomes weren't around.

I think this is generally correct, but I don't put it all on Josh. I am very much a believer that we can see Josh's comfort level in his eyes. I can see the anxiety in certain games and certain plays. I don't necessarily believe that it's a big-game thing, although it may be. I was really excited mid-season, when Josh would come out of the huddle and survey the defense with a look that suggested that he understood everything he was seeing and he understood where the play should go. I think in both the beginning and the end of the Chiefs game, that look was gone. It was as though he didn't have confidence in what he was seeing or confidence that the play call would work. Certainly at the end of the game, he didn't seem like he knew what he should be doing. I contrast it with Mahomes. His face never shows that lack of confidence. He sees the defense, knows he good or changes the play or calls timeout. Either way, he's in charge and he knows what he's doing. I think in those moments, like the end of the Chiefs game, it's the coaching that's letting him down. I think Allen was finding himself either in plays that didn't fit the defense, or he was looking at a defense he didn't expect or that was unfamiliar. He just wasn't sure. And I don't buy the point of the OP. I think this is more cherrypicked data. In the first place, Allen is playing an era of pretty high scoring offenses, so when you lose in the playoffs, it's probably because you gave up a lot of points to a high scoring team. There's no shame in that. Second, as someone pointed out, by changing the number of games, you find a lot of big name QBs with similar data points. Without going back and studying those games in detail, I know it's fair to say that four or all five of those games were one-score games, and could just as easily have been wins rather than losses if someone had made a play. Certainly the last two Chiefs games could easily have been wins if Allen hits Shakir and if Kincaid catches the ball. If the Bills had won those five games instead of losing, the fans of the other teams would be nitpicking the data in the same way, and they would be complaining that their defense failed them. It's pretty simple. Bills need better coaching and they need players to make plays.

I don't think so. If the Bills had known that the rush was coming from the right side, Allen never would have rolled to the right. He certainly would have drifted left and he would have had other options. At the very least, they would have had a run by Allen around the left end with a blocker ahead of him. They only needed five yards. What you describe wouldn't have been the plan. The plan would have been to avoid the rush, and that meant escaping to the left.

Thanks. Good discussion. I focused on the quoted language. We're talking about the same thing, but I look at it a bit differently. McDermott's objective is to have his players do what you said the KC players did - just go to the places where you're supposed to be, do your job, etc. And the Bills players do that very well, probably better than any other team. However, the coaches aren't giving them the details you're talking about. The game gets easier the more details the players get. It's the difference between Allen and Mahomes. Mahomes almost always makes the play he's supposed to make, not because he's better than Allen, but because he's better prepared than Allen. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. I heard a retired NFL player (I don't think I heard his name), a journeyman who had played for several teams, say this: Under Belichick, Patriots players were routinely better prepared than their opponents. He said it was the only team he'd ever been on where every week, the coaches gave him two or three or four keys the were player or situation or formation specific. Things like "when they're in X formation and the guard is pulling, he lines up six inches back from where he normally lines up." Little details like that. He said they were always right, and it gave him an advantage on a half dozen plays every game. He said he never got that stuff on any other team. It's not enough to be prepared for what the opponent has done in the past. You have to be prepared for what they might do in this game. Reid knows you know his tendencies, and he knows how you'll respond to those tendencies. Spags did it on 4th and five.

Well, sure, some of their plays looked like they were talking candy, but really, the Chiefs struggled all day to put up points. The stats were incredibly even. It wasn't a cake walk for the Chiefs. The difference was what everyone always says - the game is about five or six plays and who made them. In this game, coaching is what enabled the Chiefs to make plays, and the lack of coaching is what hurt the Bills. I don't know where I said this, but the Bills coaches needed to go away from the sneak. Once the Chiefs almost stopped it, it meant that the play would not have a 90+% probability of success. When they did stop it on third down, that was proof positive. Bills needed an answer on fourth down, and the coaches either didn't have one or didn't see that they needed to go there. Either way, the coaches let the team down. Yes, but his drift back to the right was based on the assumption that the Chiefs would go with their tendency and blitz from the left. They had the blocking set to handle the blitz to the left. They were showing blitz from the right, and he needed to be prepared if they went against their tendency. If he had looked at the snap, he would have seen that the blitz was coming from the right, and then he could have rolled left.

I really agree with this. I'm trying to not get demoralized. I wouldn't call a massive coaching gap. It's just a gap. Bills lost by 3 and had a quality chance to win. That isn't massive. However, I think there more than enough plays in that game to demonstrate that there is a coaching gap, massive or not. I wrote to a friend that the Bills are long on culture and tenacity, but short on coaching acumen. Now, in McDermott's defense, no one else is outcoaching the Chiefs, either. Their record in one score games this season is a testament to that. Still, if you want to beat Reid, you have to think along with him, and the Bills are not doing that. It's really galling to hear the Bills saying over and over that the Chiefs did things the Bills hadn't seen on film. Well, duh. It's a simple task. You look at the Chiefs' tendencies, prepare for them, and also ask yourself what the Chiefs are likely to do to counter their own tendencies. It's basic game prep.

Since this discussion of the play began, I've been thinking about what should have happened. We've seen replays of Shakir floating out into the flat on the left side. Bills only needed five yards. So, here's what I think should have happened. The Chiefs showed the blitz coming from the right. The Bills knew their tendency was to drop those potential blitzers in coverage and instead blitz from the left. If Allen had been well prepared, Allen would have shifted the protection to the left, as he apparently did, and then on the snap check where the blitz was coming from. If the Chiefs stay with their tendency, he hangs in the pocket and the play proceeds as called. If they switch it up, which they did, and come from the right, then Josh immediately scrambles left. Because the Chiefs were blitzing, they were in man, and all the patterns were dragging the receivers out to the right. Allen then has the option: toss it to Shakir or let Shakir block the first defender to arrive and Josh keeps it. The first down would have been more or less automatic if he had rolled left.

Exactly. Ask Mark Andrews. 90sBills is correct; it wasn't an easy ball to catch. But pretty much any tight end in the league will tell you that it was a catchable ball, and that he should make the catch. The Bills have a 35-year history of not making the play to win the game. Start with wide right, and go forward from there. Make a play in the Music City Miracle. Make a play in the Cowboys Monday night game. Make a play in 13 seconds. Make a play against the Chiefs in the playoffs last year. Make a play against the Chiefs in the playoffs this year. Think about all the clutch catches you've seen in big games. That guy for the Steelers in the Super Bowl with the incredible two toes inside the line for the touchdown. Edelman picking the ball of the ground. That guy for the Giants pinning Manning's desperation throw against his helmet. You have to make plays to win big games. Josh made the play against an incredible rush and put a catchable ball out there, a pass that would have put the Bills in position to tie or win the game. Kincaid has to make the play if the Bills want to win.

It's a good point. There is no question that players need to make plays to win games, and Kincaid didn't make the play. However, if the Bills had been properly prepared for that blitz and had called the right protection, Allen would have had time in the pocket and would have thrown a ball that didn't require Kincaid to stop all of his momentum and come back for the ball. My reaction during the game was that the Chiefs were better prepared, and these comments seem to support that.

The thing that is really revealing to me in this excerpt is that the players are essentially saying that they got outcoached. Why? Because they keep saying "we didn't see that on film," and they went against their tendencies. Well, that's what scouting and coaching is all about. If you're self-scouting your own team, you know what your tendencies are and you design plays to go against your tendencies. You save those plays for when you really need them. And you prepare your players BOTH for the other team's tendencies and for what they might do to beat you by going against tendencies. What these players are saying is that the Chiefs were better prepared than the Bills were, and I believe that is true.

Well. I'd like to agree with you, but he didn't show me much during the season. There was a good discussion of him here a week ago or so. I said he needs to get stronger and show some real fight for the ball. Gunner and others said he needs some training in his footwork and other things getting into and out of his breaks. Whatever it is, he has to develop something that we didn't see this season.

Very good. Yes. I have this odd feeling of anxiousness but not worry. Whatever happens, will happen. I can't imagine losing, but I'm not counting on winning. For me, some of it is old age. And some of it is just how long I've live with this.

Thanks for this thread. It's interesting to think about that evolution.

Thanks for this, and I agree. I don't know the technical aspects that good coaches and trainers might teach to getting separation, and I'm sure there are things he can learn about it. So, I hear you. However, in my mind, he's never going to be a great separator, because he doesn't have the foot speed and he just doesn't look to me like a guy who can make the sharp cuts and the stop-go moves that are key to separating. Yes, he can improve, but he isn't naturally gifted in the way that Shakir is, so there are limits to what he can do. That makes me think a lot of his catches are going to be in close quarters. If he can't win in those situations, his future will be limited, because he's not likely to become elite at separating. To make contested catches, he needs to be stronger and to fight harder.

Of course, you're free to disagree, but your your disagreement is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules. You are correct that if this were basketball (and if we ignore all the earlier contact by White), what happened looked like a charge on Coleman. White occupied the position, and in basketball Coleman is not permitted to run through him. Charge. However, in football, who got there first has nothing to do with the play. The question is whether White interfered with Coleman's opportunity to make a play. It may be just a coincidence, but I like to think that is why they call it pass "interference." White got in position, stopped running, and interfered with Coleman's ability to run to the spot where he might catch the ball. (Is there any question that if White hadn't gotten to that position, Coleman would have a good chance to catch it? I don't think so.) It would not have been interference if White himself were making a play on the ball. Neither play is deemed to have interfered with the other if they're both trying to catch the ball. On this play, however, White wasn't trying to get in position to play the ball - it's obvious, because he stopped running to the place where the ball was coming down. It's even easier to understand by considering how offensive interference has been called for the past several years. One receiver cannot occupy a space, remain stationary, and get in the way of a defender trying stay with another receiver. That is a completely legal pick in basketball - it's a basic basketball play But it's a penalty in football because the offensive player is interfering - there's that word again - with the defender's opportunity to make a play. As for Coleman's acting job, if you want to call it that, I was glad to see it. Earlier in the season on a few similar plays, Coleman just stopped when the defender got in the way, and he didn't get the call. To get the call, it's necessary to show the officials that you're making a play on the ball, and at this crucial time in the game, Coleman did exactly what he was supposed to do. White interfered with Coleman, and Coleman made the play that left the official little choice but to throw the flag. . I've been meaning to say this for weeks now, and this is as good a place as any. A week after the season ends, Coleman has to get himself in the weight room to build upper body strength. He may be good at high pointing the ball, but he doesn't win fights for the ball in close contact. He would do well by watching a week's worth of Mike Evans video. He could be a version of Evans, but he needs to learn to win when the ball arrives.