Shaw66

Tier I didn't quote your entire post, but this addresses all of it. I think all of the optimists around here, including me, should read it and think about it. I don't agree with it, but you express a valid way to look at where the Bills are right now. Where I really disagree is on the big picture. The big picture is that McBeane are putting together a cohesive group with a team focus and a commitment to winning that is different from the precious regime, for sure. It's true that the team today isn't significantly more talented on an individual basis than three years ago, but the mix of talent is much better. Oliver can't possibly have a worse attitude than Dareus, the Bills have a much more talented MLB and QB than they had three years ago, they still have a star cornerback. The difference is that the guys they have now are all on the same page, rather than having. Guys like Richie, who was fine until he wasn't and Watkins, who never really worked at his job. There's a head coach with focus and a plan instead of a guy who's system was to fly by the seat of his pants. Th current Bills present an image of things coming together according to a plan. Three years ago there was none of that. At the end of 2016, the Buffalo News and much of the national media was treating the Whaley-Ryan Bills as a dumpster fire. No one is saying that now. Coaching and management is more important that anything else in the NFL, and the Bills are way ahead of three years ago in that department.

I didn't see this before, but this is what I think reasonable progress is. Anything short of this and you at least have to ask what's going on. I've said all along I think playoffs is possible, but a lot of things have to go right, particularly the oline coming together and Allen making good progress over last season. I won't be happy with 9-7 and no playoffs, but I won't be disappointed. I believe McBeane are doing what they said they'd do: build a foundation for long term success. They need one more round of free agency and one more draft. When they have those additional players they will have talent they should win with. If the Bill's are around .500 this year, 2020 is the hotseat year for McBeane.

Pete Carroll failed miserably in New York and then took a successful Patriots teams led by Bill Parcells and made it continually worse for three consecutive years before being run out of the NFL altogether. He was universally viewed as a failure of a head coach. Which was we were talking about.

Why stop at the offensive line? On first down on the second series, Shady will play left guard and Zay Jones will be the quarterback. Morse will split wide to the right, and Ed Oliver will be the running back. The defense will be so confused that they won't notice Zay handing off to Star, who will exploit a huge hole opened by Poyer at right guard, break a tackle and outrun the entire defensive backfield for a 92-yard touchdown.

I agree with the philosophy you express here. McBeane have been very clear that their intention is to build a long term winner and therefore they are not doing everything possible to win now. And I can see how they're doing it. However, of the Bills are worse than 6-10 this season, something is wrong. McD has lost the locker room. McD is a failure as an offensive head coach. Something is really screwed up. If the offense doesn't improve considerably over last season, something is wrong. If the defense falls apart, something is wrong. 5-11 the Pegulas will be forced to think long and hard before letting McD have another season.

Pete Carroll. Dick Vermeil. And I will note that both of those guys are high emotion, high character guys like McD. And both plus Belichick were workaholics who kept improving. McD is in the exact same mold.

Sammy by his own admission was not a team player any time he was in Buffalo. That disqualified him with McD before talent even became an issue.

They weren't ready. Belichick told his players to hit the Bulls receivers as hard as they could as often as they could. Reed admitted they weren't prepared for that. They came out ready to play just another game. The Giants were ready to play the Super Bowl.

Great times.

I fault Marv because once he said it wasn't his job to get players emotionally prepared for games. He said they're professionals and it's their job to get ready emotionally. They weren't emotionally ready for the first Super Bowl, and I don't think they ready for the fourth either. The teams that are ready make the plays. The Bills game out in the second half of the fourth Super Bowl and were seriously outplayed for 20 minutes. They weren't ready to match the Cowboys' intensity.

You may have thought it was a bad trade at the time. Others didn't. It wasn't obviously a bad trade at the time; their were plenty of people excited about and who thought Benjy was the perfect receiver to get for Taylor. But I'm absolutely certain that Beane had good reasons for doing it. It just turned out that some of the things he thought were true about Benjamin (from his prior experiences with him) turned out not be true. So his judgments turned out to be wrong. Yours has no doubt been wrong on plenty of other decisions. It happens. I agree. Giving credit for a single move makes no more sense than dissing the guy for a single bad move. In either case, it's like calling a ball player great or a loser after he (1) homers or (2) strikes out. One event is not the measure of either a hitter or a GM.

I think it's pointless to try to keep a scorecard like this. GMs make dozens, if not hundreds, of personnel decision every year, and if you measure them based on whether the player became at least a solid contributor, most of the decisions made by EVERY GM were wrong. GMs make their decisions for a variety of reasons. They make them on imperfect information. And the success a player achieves sometimes depends on the players around him. So grading GMs on any one player decision is pointless. The only way to grade a GM is on his collective body of work. Did the team improve, and by how much? Then, in an effort to explain why he succeeded or failed, the story becomes either look at all the good decisions he made to get the team over the hump or look at all the bad decisions he made that failed to fix the team. When a team is in the middle of a serious rebuild, as the Bills are, you can list deals that worked or didn't, for sure, but it really doesn't matter. The only question is whether the team is going to get better, and that question is currently unanswered. You can argue about whether decisions so far have been good or bad, about how you and I might have done things differently, but there are no answers to those arguments, because the story hasn't played out yet.

Yeah, I get it. I was responding mostly for others who might be reading his stuff and actually buying it. I think the notion that Allen can't throw short, or won't is silly, and I think that will be very clear as soon as the season starts. McDermott has been very clear about what he wants, and Allen is the kind of guy who does what the coach wants him to do.

This point of view is foolish. You suggest that players don't change, which is totally wrong. Aaron Rodgers today is NOT the QB he was when he came out of college. Nor is Brady, nor Roethlisberger. But if you really believe that Allen is gunslinger who never will be happy playing a possession passing game, then you MUST believe that either McDermott should be fired or the Bills should move on from Allen, because McD wants a ball-control passer and Allen can never be one. What's the point of continuing with a mismatched head coach and QB? Well, of course we'd all be pretty happy, but that would be because Whaley was right instead of wrong on many of his decisions. The fact is, he was wrong, and that's why he doesn't have a job. GMs are evaluated on how their decisions work out. Sometimes they work out well, sometimes badly, but if the sum total doesn't result in wins and playoffs appearances, the GM is getting fired. That's what happened to Whaley. EVERY GM would still have his job if his team won all the time.

That's not true. What you said was "if that's not your game." Your clear implication was Allen can't play the short passing game. That's what you said. You said since he has a big arm he should throw deep balls. That's not true He didn't throw short, which is different from not being able to throw short. What everyone says in the NFL is you take what your opponent gives you. The opponent gave Allen the rookie the short ball and he didn't understand the game well enough to take it. It is a learning issue, not a capability issue. If you believe Allen can't learn to take what defense is giving, then that means you believe Allen is not the right guy. Is that what you believe?

That doesn't mean anything. You're trying to suggest that Allen is bad at the short game. That's not true. He hasn't played the short game. That doesn't mean he can't. What Allen did last season was CHOOSE not to throw the short ball. This season he will choose to take those throws.

You're truly wrong here. It isn't "not his game." It isn't a game he can't play. It's just a game he hasn't played. Allen is now being coached, maybe for the first time, to take the short throw. His completion percentage will go up nicely this season because he will take the short throw.

Bado I gotta say, I think you really overstate the case, but the more of this I read, the more I tend to see your point. I would say this, however: There were very few people, myself included, who believed the Bills had a good offense in 2016, the stats notwithstanding. Taylor didn't do anything close to his 2015 season in 2016. His 2015 numbers, except for his passes attempted, compared favorably to the best in the league. In 2016 he looked like a journeyman, and there were big questions about whether he was worth keeping around for 2017. And ultimately I come back to this: McBeane are rebuilding, completely. They are installing their system with their kind of coaches and their kind of players. That includes (1) making mistakes and (2) letting talent go that doesn't fit their system. Mistakes make everyone look bad, if all you look at are the mistakes. And everyone lets go of players that don't fit their system. Colts gave up on Jerry Hughes. I'm on record. I think McBeane are going to great places with the team they're building. The fact that someone may think the Benjamin trade was a mistake, or the Darby trade, or whatever, is irrelevant in the long-term history of a successful team. Each of those trades made sense to them at the time in the context of what they were doing, in exactly the same way that the trades up for Allen made sense in that context. It's not a perfect, and reaching conclusions solely on the basis of how the imperfect things look isn't a fair evaluation.

I think this is correct, except for the wrong reason and the wrong time-frame. They should be ready to compete against anyone in 2020. I say wrong reason because it isn't about star players. QB is the only place McDermott needs a star, and he has Allen. Allen learned a lot last season and will learn a lot more this season. He won't be fully developed, but he'll be one of the top 10 QBs by 2020. One aspect of McD's process is that he trains up a core of players who commit, work hard and lead. When new guys come on board, they learn the process and the culture and they adapt quickly. So, yes, there are a lot of new players this season, but they will integrate quickly. Allen and Morse will lead the offensive linemen, Beasley the receivers, Shady and Gore the running backs. Hughes and Star on the dline, ALexander and Edmunds at linebacker, Hyde and White in the defensive backfield. The new players will integrate. In 2020 there will be more talent upgrades - another o lineman, another d lineman, another receiver, always another DB. They will integrate quickly, too. The culture is in place to make this team continuously successful. Edit: Obviously, I hadn't read the intergalactic billiards portion of this thread before I wrote this. Sorry to break everyone's train of thought.

Fair enough. So far as I know, McD's said nothing public about it either way. My view is one more reason why he would it have gone after Mahomes.

Agreed, I like discussing alternatives, but I like discussing the alternatives either while the decision remains to be made or after the results of the decision are known. For example, I like talking about whether to trade up when the Bills had a shot at Watkins, and I like talking about it now that we know what Watkins is, but talking about it as a good or bad decision a year after draft bores me. I think McDermott came in not knowing what he had in Taylor in the same sense that he didn't know what he had in anyone else. The most important thing to McDermott, as he has said multiple times, are the issues we sometimes lump together under the heading "character." Is the guy a total team player? Is the guy an intense competitor? Does the guy live to work at his craft every day? Is the guy a locker room presence? McDermott wanted the answers to those questions about every one of his players, and he especially wanted those answers about his quarterback. If you remember, when he came McD was asked about Marcell's various problems in the past. McD said he wasn't concerned about the past; everyone starts with a clean slate. I think Taylor did, too. You know when McD decided Taylor wasn't his guy? When he started Peterman mid-season. That's when McD said to everyone "Taylor isn't the long-term answer." Whatever. As I've said many times, and many people agree, I like how things are going.

I don't come her to be insulted! ?

I look into this thread from time to time and have been tempted to add my two cents worth. This is post is a nice statement of some of what I've been thinking as I've read the criticism that McBeane could have and should have done something different. The question with any GM and any coach is whether he succeeded. If he succeeded, it's not relevant that he might have taken a different path to success. It isn't even relevant if some other path might have gotten him there more quickly. All that matters is winning. It isn't possible to know yet whether McBeane will succeed. Discussion about other things they might have done may be interesting to some, but unless you think the the Bills are in a bad place or heading in the wrong direction, discussion of other things that might have been done isn't very to interesting to most people. I very much like the point that McDermott came in with some very well defined ideas about how to run a football team, and Beane did too. It makes little sense to criticize them for making decisions based on those ideas - they were hired BECAUSE they had those ideas, and to criticize for not acting contrary to the ideas is stupid. I think people also tend to forget that McDermott is young, had never been a head coach before and decided (probably) that he was going to go slowly in the beginning. He was going to get his feet wet and understand the lay of the land before he took major steps. That's a prudent thing for someone to do when he's new at a job. So, for example, I will not fault him for not going after Mahomes or Watson. He didn't know what he had in Taylor, he didn't know the extent to which he could trust Whaley's judgment or the scouting staff, he probably knew he would be getting a new GM. He wasn't going to make the single most important player personnel decision in that kind of environment. As for decisions other than QB, he wanted to evaluate players before he decided whether he had the guys he wanted to work with. That takes time. His oft-stated philosophy, one that Beane shares, is that it's better to build a team right than to build it quickly. They want long-term success, which in their view has to be built on a solid foundation. McDermott first want to evaluate what he had, then make changes accordingly. If that meant taking a year or two more to put up some winning seasons, they were willing to wait. And I am sure they explained that the Pegulas, who bought the program. McBeane weren't intending quick fixes, and the Pegulas agreed. None of that means that there weren't other ways to go about running the team and building a winner. What it does mean is that they had and they have a process, and criticizing them for doing things that would have been inconsistent with the process is foolish. What matter is long term results, and that story hasn't been told yet. And, by the way, the Allen vs. Watson and Mahomes story hasn't been told yet, either.

This is all fun and games, but the professionals know what they're doing. They know what routes make sense, the shape of the routes, the number of steps, all of that. Its studies in more detail than any of us has studied it. For example, what the OP says about zones is obviously wrong. It matters a great deal what the route looks like when playing against a zone, because every defender in the zone is watching the receivers and reacting to where the receivers are going. One receiver's movements causes the zone to shift a step or two that creates the crease another receiver takes advantage of. Coaches know the best ways to get into and out of cuts, and fans rarely know better.

I think he is. Great arm strength, compared to the very best. Great size, compared to the very best. Great speed, compared to the very best. Maybe the best total package, purely physically, ever.