Shaw66

Well, I think you're looking at this wrong way. I mean, what you say is true, but you misperceive what is important to the league. The primary objective is not to be fair to the teams. There are two primary objectives: Keep everyone healthy, and play all the games with as little disruption to the schedule as possible. There is punishment for teams that have positive tests. Every season some teams have good schedules, some teams have lousy schedules. It's inevitable. This season, it's necessary to adjust the schedule, so who has a good schedule and who has a bad schedule is changing in the middle of the season. It's unprecedented, but trying to preserve someone's sense of fairness in the schedule is NOT very high on the League's agenda. Bottom line: Everyone plays 16 games, and the teams with best records make the playoffs. Want to go to the playoffs? Then win the games the League gives you to play.

Smash mouth is a winning formula.

I agree with this. One big question in this game, in the other rescheduled games, is how each team will handle it. I agree that the situation was easier for the Titans to handle well, because they had that anticipation, and they had something to prove. But that doesn't explain why the Bills seemed to have lost focus so badly. The penalties, Allen's second interception, the dropped passes. I didn't expect those problems.

All the whining about the refs is misplaced. On the broadcast they explained that theLJ is supposed to leave the line of scrimmage on a passing play. That's his job. On the replay they have to have CLEAR EVIDENCE that the call was wrong. As much as it may have looked like he was over the line, it was impossible to tell exactly where the line was or whether some part of his body was on the line. Just couldn't tell. (Just like the phantom INT against the Rams. Call on the field was INT, and there was no evidence that the ball wasn't intercepted. It was pretty obvious what happened, but not evidence.) Williams was just stupid and wrong on the procedure penalty. I thought on o lineman moved when Epenesa jumped. I too, have my doubts about the PI calls, but the point someone else made is the key point - officiating was not among the top ten reasons the Bills lost.

The Bills lost to the Tennessee Titans on Tuesday night – yes, Tuesday night – by a score of 42-16. In some respects, the game wasn’t as lopsided as the score, and in other respects it was. Sean McDermott’s Buffalo Bills seem to have some of these games, games where all of the progress of the previous weeks vanishes, games where you wonder how this team will ever win another game. There probably is some explanation, and the explanation probably has something to do with how McDermott’s process works. I understand. I trust the process. That doesn’t make it any easier emotionally as Bills fan to go through another mid-season blowout. It’s distressing every time it happens. The story of the Bills’ loss to the Titans is filled with all of the usual reasons for the collapse: Turnovers, penalties, game planning, injuries, rookie mistakes. Everything went wrong and still, to the Bills’ credit, they kept fighting and weren’t all that far from a win. Huh? 42-16 and they weren’t far from the win? I mean it. Beneath all of the bad things that contributed to the loss was a good football team. The Bills ran more plays than the Titans, gained more yards than the Titans, and were more efficient on third down. Early in the game, things looked good for the Bills. After the early turnover and Titans’ touchdown, the Bills showed they could take a punch. They came back with a beautiful drive of their own, converting multiple long third down challenges to get into the end zone. It looked like they were imposing their will on the game. Instead, the Titans kept punching, and the Bills just couldn’t match them. The Bills often seemed like they were ready to break out and take over the game, but the Titans defense never let them. The Titans defense was textbook bend-don’t-break. They forced the Bills to dink and dunk all the way up the field, to play errorless football for long drives if they wanted to score. Sometimes the Bills made it to paydirt, but often some mistake killed the drive. For their part, the Bills defense forced the Titans into the same game. The Titans just didn’t make the mistakes the Bills did. And the Bills couldn’t stop the Titans. After the Bills went three and out from their own ten and got, effectively, an 80-yard punt from Bojo, the Titans did what the Bills couldn’t – march 90 yards for the TD. (Bojo, of course, also contributed to the loss, badly outkicking his coverage earlier in the game, giving up a 40-yard return that led to a score.) Fundamentally, the Titans shut down the Bills mid- and long-range passing game. They kept “everything in front of them,” as the saying goes, and forced the Bills to succeed in the short passing game and the running game. And, in fact, they did succeed, pretty well, in the short passing game. Allen completed 63% of his passes and would have completed a half dozen more with a little more help from his receivers. Diggs, Davis and Knox all missed catchable balls, and Roberts could have bailed Allen out on his first interception. That’s not to say that Allen was sharp; he wasn’t, but he wasn’t so bad that with a little bit better execution the result couldn’t have been different. The running game is what killed the Bills. Whatever it was the Titans were doing in the defensive backfield, it was designed to stop the Bills’ downfield passing game. The only way to do that is by committing players to defend downfield, and that commitment is an invitation to run the ball. The Bills couldn’t do it. Without an effective running game, the Bills were forced into a short passing game, which they did pretty well, but not well enough. Look at those keys to the loss: Turnovers: It may be too simplistic to say the Bills lost because of the turnovers, but it’s true. Three turnovers, three touchdowns, three missed scoring opportunities. The first put the Bills in an immediate hole. The second ended a productive drive that could have made the game 21-17 in the middle of the third quarter. Instead, the Bills quickly were down 28-10, and the situation was desperate. Roberts’ fumble just was the beginning of the Titans’ celebration. The Bills may still have lost, but the game would have been completely different without the turnovers. Penalties: The Bills looked like their heads were not in the game. Presnap penalties; one per game is not good, but you can live with it. Multiple presnap penalties is unacceptable. Two pass interference penalties on Norman. Frankly, I liked what I saw from Norman. I wasn’t at all sure about the first PI, and CBS didn’t replay the second one, but they weren’t killers. Roughing the passer on third down, on the other hand, was a four-point mistake at a critical time. Game planning: Brian Daboll, what happened to your passing game? The Bills were unprepared to be shut down like that. They didn’t have answers to get the ball deep, and they didn’t have answers on the line of scrimmage to get the running game going. The game was close until late in the third quarter, but already by then the Bills were passing on two plays for every one run. There had to be opportunities to run, but Daboll couldn’t find them or hadn’t prepared his team for them. Injuries: The Bills pass defense is not the same without Milano and White. Taron Johnson was exposed, I suspect because he wasn’t getting the help he usually could expect from the linebackers and safeties, because they were trying to help the corners deal with the wideouts. It was a mess back there. And Brown’s absence probably explains some of the problem with the passing game. Roberts and McKenzie, for whatever reasons, aren’t credible deep threats. The Titans focused on stopping Diggs, and no one else was able to run free anywhere in the middle of the defense. Eventually, the Bills got around to finding Beasley short, but that wasn’t going to change the outcome. That was taking what the Titans were happy to give. Rookie mistakes: This category is reserved for Josh Allen (although Epenesa gets honorable mention for getting drawn offside. Pure lack of focus.) Allen actually played pretty well, including an absolutely beautiful run for a first down, but his second interception, probably the play that decided the game, was a classic rookie mistake. CBS didn’t show enough replays, but it looked like Davis may actually have been open up the sideline. In other words, the decision to throw to Davis may not have been bad, but Allen never should fail to see the defender underneath. He has to see that guy and adjust the throw – or not throw it at all. That was the point in the game where everything changed, the point where the kid pulls his team back into the game or puts his team in a big hole. Allen was a rookie on that play. A couple of comments about the Titans. It’s hard not to be impressed with Mike Vrabel. His team always is full of fight, and always is well prepared. I hate saying it, but he clearly learned from the master, and his teams will continue to be competitive in the NFL. I’ve always liked Tannehill. He’s smart, he’s athletic, and he can throw. He did an excellent job against the Bills – not spectacular, but effective all night long. Derrick Henry. I’ve noticed this and said this before: in terms of running style, Derrick Henry looks more like Jim Brown than any runner I’ve seen. He runs straight up. He has relentless power, always moving forward, always challenging the defense to get him to the ground. He has the speed to get to the edge. He’s a big-time threat. The Bills stopped Henry from beating them, but it was their commitment to stopping Henry that allowed Tannehill and others to get outside the tackles for easy gains or pass completions. The Titans commitment to the run gave them the run-pass balance that the Bills lacked. It’s a long season. It’s a process. For some reason, the process includes a mid-season meltdown or two. In the past, McDermott somehow has been able to get everything back on track, to continue to improve the team and how it competes. He’s faced with that problem again. The Chiefs are waiting, and they are hungry. GO BILLS!!! The Rockpile Review is written to share the passion we have for the Buffalo Bills. That passion was born in the Rockpile; its parents were everyday people of western New York who translated their dedication to a full day’s hard work and simple pleasures into love for a pro football team.

I agree. It's all about being good in November and December, and we've got a few weeks before we're there. Plus, teams are developing even more slowly this year, because of COVID. It's fun to talk about the power rankings now, but it's all just guess work.

I agree. I don't think the B ills are the #1 team in the league, but I doubt Seattle is. Defense wins championships; Seattle's defense isn't nearly good, and the Bills aren't there yet, either. I'm really interested in whether we'll see defensive improvement tonight. Nobody goes 16-0, so the best team in the league is going to have losses, and they are going to have close games. The Chiefs look really good to me.

Matt Ryan is one of those guys who makes being a GM so difficult. Ryan is essentially a top-15 quarterback. He's been very good since he came into the league. Having said that, he isn't a transcendent talent who just by his presence on the field makes his team a contender. Roethlisberger is one of those, Ryan isn't. With a guy like Ryan, if everything else falls together just right on the team, you can win a Super Bowl, but it's all got to be just right, because Ryan isn't going to win the Super Bowl by sheer force of his will. We saw that when they lost to the Patriots. However, if you get rid of Ryan looking for the perfect QB, more often than not you're going to end up with a worse QB than Ryan, and then you're going to be on the seemingly endless hunt for a true franchise guy. The Bills were on that hunt, and we know what it's like. If I'm the GM and I think my team is close, I go with Ryan and look to acquire the pieces the team needs to be competitive. It's pretty clear the team is not close, so I'm unloading Ryan anyway I can and starting the search, because every year I'm not in the search for a QB is another year when I pretty much can't compete. The next question is what do I do with Julio Jones. If I think I can get a a rookie phenom QB, like potentially Lawrence, I'm keeping Julio. If I think I'm a few years away, I'm unloading Julio, too, to capture whatever value he has to help in the building process.

Even when they play 16 games, some teams are disadvantaged by the schedule. These reschedulinga are just another advantage/disadvantage that will fall on teams. May be unfair, but it's just the breaks. Just like a bad call or a bad bounce.

I watched a lot of that game, and I was thinking generally along with the OP. The Raiders had more trouble handling the Bills offense. And the Chiefs had more trouble handling the Raiders than the Bills did. The Bills beat a good team last week.

That's a nice article, with some interesting perspective. I think there are a couple points he misses. First, this nonstop "Allen-wasn't-accurate-in-college" narrative, was and is an over-reliance on stats. I think it was clear, and the Bills and other teams figured it out, that Allen's low completion percentage wasn't because of massive mechanical limitations. He could throw the ball very accurately; he just had a lot of things that made him inconsistent. The Bills understood that once Allen got himself under control, accuracy would be less of a problem. Second, the conclusion says one of two things happened. It says either the writer and others badly misjudged the ability of ANY quarterback to have dramatic improvement in QB efficiency, or it just turns out that Allen is a freak and defied prediction. I think the truth is a combination of the two. First, as I said, accuracy (and efficiency) weren't physical or mechanical problems; Allen just had some things to learn. Second, yes, Allen IS a freak, but it isn't a surprise. Scouts who saw him in college recognized hat his was freak. People just didn't understand that what they perceived as incurable accuracy problems were in fact less significant than they thought. I hadn't read the thread before I posted. This says sort of what I said. It's a better explanation about why Allen's "inaccuracy" was more statistical than real. He just needed to understand more, learn more, get more experience. Nice for us.

That's really well said. It's a point I don't often think of, how the random individual play changes games. What McBeane are looking for is guys who execute their jobs at a consistently high level, play after play AND have the ability to make the occasional individual play that has great influence. I think that may be what Josh Norman is. That's what Oliver is. And certainly Roberts. Those guys make your team both strong and dangerous.

That's interesting. That's what I did before I posted, and it showed the Bills as seventh, not first, in kickoff returns. Thanks.

I agree with this and with eball. He didn't have big returns last season, but I thought his talent was obvious almost every time he touched the ball. He gets everything out of every return. And yes, his decision making and his hands are excellent. I'm always amazed that some of these skills aren't transferable. You'd think that what he can do on kick returns would translate somehow into important receiving skills, but he's never been anywhere where he's shown that he can contribute as a receiver.

Thanks. That's interesting. I finally figured out how to go the virtual private network route, and I bought NFLGamepass through a server in Germany. I actually like Gamepass, because I can watch any game I want, and I can switch between two good games. The VPN is only $10 a month, and I suppose instead of buying gamepass I could just get the VPN and CBS All Access. Wouldn't get me EVERY game, but it would get me most Bills games.

I didn't get all the bashing of Roberts around here this summer. Whenever I see him return kicks, including last season, it seems pretty clear that he has the knack. Through four games, Bills are seventh in kickoff return average and seventh in punt return average. Historically, leaders in average do it by having a TD return or too, but the Bills haven't done that. I'm sure the special teams are creating the opportunities, but it's obvious that Roberts can read the broken field and take advantage. He's an important piece to the team's success.

I hate to keep going around about this, but I thought I couldn't use CBS-All Access to get anything other than the game that my local CBS affiliate is carrying.

Wow. Thanks for this. I didn't know it was an actual law.

The NFL has some kind of deal with the NCAA not to play on Saturday, at least until the NCAA regular season games. I don't know if they have a written contract to that effect - maybe it's just a gentleman's agreement. It's also why there isn't Friday night NFL football - the league does it to protect high school football.

At an absolute minimum, yes. As I said, I think there is only one principle that is driving this: the NFL wants its money. I think the NFL should cancel games and impose forfeits, but at a minimum, at least flat out postpone and deal with the consequences later. Pats-Chiefs was a good example. No way the NFL wanted to give up the revenue from that game, so they moved it. It seems like it worked out, but we won't know for another few days whether playing caused a Chiefs outbreak. NFL already has Titans-Steelers revenue at risk, and Bills-Titans turns out to be another pretty good TV draw, so the NFL doesn't want to postpone it indefinitely and maybe lose it. It's all about the dollars, despite the good-face the NFL tries to put on it.

Maybe not, but for all of his brilliance, Belichick certainly has a problem with getting too close to the line, and that's part of the Patriots' culture. Vrabel certainly could have learned the cultural lessons without having the football intelligence that Bills has.

I like football, and I haven't really paid attention to the ins and outs of all that goes into making decisions in this environment, but it seems to me that the hard-line approach is the only thing that can work: If a team goes over the limit, the limit being whatever is deemed to be the acceptable level of positive test results, the quarantine rules, etc., the team forfeits the upcoming game. It isn't rescheduled, it isn't played. The players don't get paid. The scheduled opponent gets a win, and the players on the opponent team get paid, because they did all that they could do to play the game. This approach has a variety of benefits. First, it creates an enormous incentive to the players to stay healthy. Second, it doesn't penalize the teams that stay healthy. Third, it avoids the secondary unfairness of schedule changes. Why should the Bills be living this morning with all this uncertainty about their schedule just because the Titans couldn't manage their players and their facility properly? Why should we be talking about the Titans game moving to Monday night and the Chiefs moving to Saturday? Fourth, it makes a broader social statement - it says the NFL is deadly serious about controlling the disease - it is willing both to impose forfeits AND to take the economic hit of losing a game to televise. What's going on now just makes the NFL's greed more apparent. They won't cancel games because they don't want to lose the money, so instead they are doing caseoby-case decision making every day, trying to adjust on the fly. The NFL needs to put their big-boy pants on and take the hit.

I don't really know, but I do know that he learned from the master.

I think this comment, the "well, it's good when it works" comment, misses the point. I think the point is that the Bills had done their film work and they knew what they could expect as a defensive alignment. They knew in that alignment that everyone just had to execute routine, quick blocks. They knew there was little chance that anyone would penetrate the right side of the line. Could it go wrong? Sure - any play can go wrong. But just like teams have two point conversion plays that they are confident they can execute, the Bills came into the game knowing they had a fourth and one play that they were confident they could execute. Frankly, I think one thing that the Bills counted on was that the Raiders had seen McKenzie in motion a lot on film, but the Bills rarely gave him the ball the first three weeks. I think the Bills counted on the Raiders seeing McKenzie in motion and thought, maybe just for an instant - "decoy." Then he had the ball and was at the edge almost instantly. The real difference that we keep seeing, season after season, is that the Bills execute better and better every year. If they do something on the field, everyone does his job. Remember the play when the Bills were maybe third and three and Williams moved early? Five-yard procedure penalty. When that happened I thought, "man, that's unusual." The McDermott Bills don't make mistakes like that. So, when they execute that jet sweep on fourth and one, it isn't a surprise to me. The call is a surprise, but the execution isn't.

Real nice to hear that. That guy has some enthusiasm, and he has veteran leadership. You can tell he has seen what it takes and he wants his teammates to get on the train with him.