Shaw66

Thanks. On McDermott, the objective is to be a master of the game like Belichick. He didn't know a lot about offense when he became a HC. He's still known as a defensive coach, but there's no doubt he's the master of the offense, too. That's where McD needs to go. As for Daboll, I guess I'd never tied the second half offensive strength back to the switch to more of a speed lineup, which was quite apparent when it happened. That's a good observation. I'm not suggesting that it happened one way or another, but it would be interesting to know whose idea it was to go the speed route. Did McDermott tell Daboll he wanted more speed, did Daboll tell McD? Did Daboll have trouble convincing McD? Did someone else on the offense suggest it to Daboll? Regardless of who gets the credit, that's one example of the offensive creativity that's necessary - look at what's working and what isn't, and make changes so it works better. That kind of thinking is necessary both on a macro team identity level and on the game to game planning level, as well as the micro playcalling level.

I think McD would tell you it has to be about him, not Daboll. If McD isn't the leader of the offense, over the long term your offensive is only as good as the OC, and as soon as the OC is identified by the league as a star, he's gone to a HC position. McD has to install a system (or master a system someone else installs) for the team to have the long-term success he wants. Short term, of course, if Daboll does it without McD, I'm happy. Just so long as someone does it. I don't have a lot of reason to have the confidence in Daboll and the others as you do. I think it's purely wait and see. As I said, I think there's enough talent across the lineup to put competitive (at least average) talent on the field.

Again, I don't Xs and Os, but I think you're right. I like the comment from Beasley that sounded like he's getting to run the whole route tree from different positions - he likes the complexity of what the Bills are doing compared to the Cowboys. Frankly, if Daboll hasn't learned enough from Belichick and Saban to do this, it will be disappointing. I think the personnel is there, in the sense that it's good enough so that they shouldn't get blown out. There are just too many experienced offensive linemen on board for a coach not to be able to find a pay to put together at least decent run blocking and decent pass protection. There's enough wideout talent to get people open and complete passes, if not with devastating effect, at least to be able to move the ball and score some points. Shady and Gore SHOULD be able to do some damage, and I'm personally excited about Singletary. I think he may very well have that special skillset that will let him have at least a few successful years. Allen showed enough at QB last season to be able to build on it. The talent just isn't that bad. The question is whether the coaching will be above average, or below.

I watch a lot, but I'm not expert in Xs and Os. But I'll say this: I think McD's defensive thinking is WAY ahead of his offensive thinking. I'd guess that McDermott spends a lot of off-season time studying offense, because he knows that's where this team needs more leadership. This point about the pass defense is a good example. I don't know the details of what the Bills play back there, but it's been obvious for the whole defensive back seven last season and at least for the safeties the past two seasons, that they've been give a defense that is difficult to throw against and that they've gotten very good at executing it. Guys rarely get beaten badly. Receivers rarely have a lot of open field after the catch. I admire it, because Belichick's back seven have been like that for a long time. I don't know if the fundamentals of the D are the same or different, but I know the results in Buffalo look a lot like results in NE. The pass defense just doesn't give you a lot. Obviously, the Bills have shown more or less no offensive mastery like the pass defense. The question is whether McDermott can develop the knowledge and leadership skills to help Daboll get that kind of excellence out of the offense.

I think the blowouts reflect a bigger problem than you say. It's unusual, I'd say very unusual for a supposedly solid team, a team that may be building but is fundamentally sound, to get blownout more than once or twice in a season. You're not fundamentally sound if you're getting beaten badly for more than a quarter of the season. Jauron couldn't win enough, but he didn't let games get away from him. (And, by the way, I agree that the Pats game late in the season was a blowout in a sense. The Pats were in control, everyone knew it. That shouldn't happen, at least not very often. I remember when the Saints came to Buffalo 8 or 10 years ago and shut down the Bills. One of their coaches or players said after the game something like "We could have played another two hours and they (the Bills) wouldn't have scored on us.") In his second season, McDermott should have had a team on the field that knew what it was doing well enough not to get dominated more than two or three times. In fact, I think he had the players. Not to win 10, but to be in just about all games and to find a way to win seven or eight. Maybe it was poor scouting, maybe it was poor game planning by coordinators. I say this I guess because there were other games where the Bills were well prepared and the players fought and executed and still maybe lost, but didn't look lost on the field. That tells me they players were good enough to compete, and the coaches let them down. That's why I was happy to see McD make some changes. Something was missing. And that really is my concern for the future. Despite the whole debate here about where they are and how they got here, I like the players. I like them now, and I like the fact that the overall talent on the team will get even better in 2020. What troubles me is whether these coaches, and ultimately whether McDermott, can get athletes to be competitive every week, athletes who are physically good enough to compete. Somebody clearly wasn't getting that job done from week to week in 2018, as demonstrated by the blowouts.

I hate this "held accountable" stuff. How should McDermott be held accountable? Should he be fired because he didn't draft Mahomes? Head coaches get fired because they aren't successful over time. What qualifies as success and how much time they get is determined by the owner. One thing is sure: none of them gets fired for one mistake. Not drafting Mahomes is one decision out of thousands that gets tossed on the scales when McDermott's performance is weighed. I expect that five years from now the narrative will be that two teams each got a great QB as the result of one trade.

All your examples are before free agency rules and salary cap. In that rea it WAS possible to win in the NFL on talent. I think the Lelly Bill's are, as you say, the perfect example. But that hasn't been true for the last 20 years, except for the Seahawks, who hit some draft home runs that let them succeed for a few years with superior talent. That is not a good strategy for building a winning franchise - that strategy requires that a Russell Wilson fall into your lap so you can get great QB play at bargain basement prices. Bill Belichick, Andy Reid and Sean Payton say hello. Their talent keeps changing and they keep winning. Reid won with Alex Smith, so don't say it's all about the QB. We're about to find out what kind of coaching skill the Bill's have.

Fair enough. Our difference is that I am convinced that the game is more about coaching than talent. I think the Bills had more than enough talent on offense to be better than they were, and it was the coach's job to implement a scheme where ordinary NFL talent can fill in and succeed in a scheme playing beside good players. In other words, I think the coach's job is to get more of the talent than the sum of the parts. Any decent coach can get the sum; more than the sum is the added value that coaches bring. I don't think Dennison brought any added value.

One of the things that sold me on McDermott, and I'm mostly sold on him, was that he actually fired Dennison. By the end of the season, I wanted Dennison out of there, because of his total lack of creativity. I thought McDermott was too forgiving, to much a believer in the process, to can Dennison after only one season. When I saw that McD had pulled the trigger, my view of McD went up. It said he has objectives and he isn't afraid to to make hard decisions when objectives aren't being met. That offense should have been better than it was, and McD knew it.

That's a fair assessment, except that neutral is failing. ANY decent coach will get the sum of the parts. That's just giving the guys an offense to play and seeing that they execute as well as they can. If you're not adding anything, you deserve to be fired at this level. He had Tyrod Taylor, LeSean McCoy, Dion Dawkins, Eric Wood and Richie Incognito. Bills were something like 29th in yards and 27th in touchdowns. Dennison didn't add anything, and he got what he deserved.

I'll be there. Waiting for someone to invite back the next week to see them beat the Giants. Then I'll be at the home opener. 3-0 when the Pats come to town. I'm ready!!!

Ah, Joe Willie. Those were the days when there was no system, no process. Take a guy with an arm and a good gut feeling for the game and turn him loose! That's Mahomes, and I expect people are going to see that that is Allen, too.

Like everything else, teams adjust. Defenses last season were disguising their defenses and shifting out when the two-way radio went silent.

A couple of things: First, as rancorous as the discussion as been in this thread, several people are posting here who know a lot of football, and the discussion, despite all the sniping, has been pretty interesting. Thanks to all. I think what I've quoted here goes to back to the fundamental point that's been kicked around here: What choices did the new coach and the new GM have after first Rex then Whaley were booted? Did they have only one choice or more than one? Did they make the right choice? I think you're correct that the Bills had talent to work with when the new guys started, and I think some new leadership would have built from what they had. Every new leader would have made a new QB a priority. Some would have gone after the best available first round guy in 2017, some would have been more cautious, as McDermott was with a lame duck GM. (I have to believe that McD knew he was getting a new GM. It had to be part of the discussion when he was hired - how much control did he have, etc. Given that Whaley was gone the day after the draft, it seems obvious that the decision about Whaley, at least tentatively, had been made a few months earlier. I suppose McD could have gone to the Pegulas after being on board for a month or two and said that he loved Whaley and wanted to keep him, but unless that had happened, Whaley's ticket out of town had already been punched.) So knowing he was getting a new GM, seeing a good crop of QBs coming up in the 2018 draft, and not being so sure about either Mahomes or Watson, McD chose to wait. As for whether to do a total rebuild, different coaches would have decided different things. I think that, given his overriding philosophy about the kind of players he wanted, McD probably always was likely to rebuild. If the Pegulas were smart about it, and I'd think they were, after how poorly they'd vetted Rex, they would have asked McD that question. McD's answer clearly would have been "I need a team full of guys who have the attitude, the mindset, the character I think is essential. I will use as much of the first year here to figure out how many of the guys we currently have fit that mold. If there are a lot, great. My guess is there aren't many, and I'll want to rebuild. I'll need a GM with the same attitude." So once the Pegulas decided that McD was their guy, the die was cast - the Bills were rebuilding. Whether someone else w. ould have built from what the Bills had is relevant only to a discussion of whether the Pegulas picked the right coach. And that discussion, in my opinion, is pretty pointless, because to have that discussion today we have to ascribe TWO YEARS of front office and coaching decisions to the new regime AND make so many assumptions it's useless. You have to start with drafting Mahomes or Watson, keeping some combination of Watkins, Woods, Glenn, Dareus and several lesser names, stripping out White, maybe Power and Hyde, Edmunds and a couple of others. Then you have to make assumptions about how the new QB would have developed with an imaginary coach and a lesser collection of skill players around him. There are simply too any scenarios to make almost any scenario worth talking about. With perhaps one exception: I'd like to see the alternate universe where Anthony Lynn got the job and drafted either Mahomes or Watson. Lynn had a head start on McD and everyone else, and maybe Lynn would have made something click with Watkins and Woods. But even the Lynn discussion becomes pretty pointless, because what would have happened on the other side of the ball is poor guess work. So go back to the one scenario we do know: McD is hired as head coach. You say "he chose to play Jauron ball with Dennison." Starting from the assumptions that he's going to rebuild, he doesn't have a QB, he knows Watkins is not a team player and will be leaving, he has a great running back and he thinks he can have a pretty good defense if he gets a couple of safeties, playing Jauron ball, as you say, was exactly the right decision - maybe not for the long term, but for the short-term while you're waiting to assemble a whole new offense from pieces you don't have yet. And, lo and behold, playing Jauron ball got his team to the playoffs. That was a really, really good decision. I come back to the same place I've been for months. McD hasn't proved anything yet, because it's all about winning and he hasn't demonstrated that he can win. But I can see what he's been doing and it makes sense to me, not that it's the only way someone might have proceeded with the hand he was dealt, but it was one way to proceed. And it looks like he's making process at what he intended to do, so the fact that he hasn't been a big winner yet, and might not even be a big winner in 2019, doesn't trouble me. Absent a 2019 implosion, 2020 is the year that matters.

Tim Graham's article is about how guys get into the game on the coaching/management game. Not how they get to the top. Getting to the top is purely a meritocracy. Either your reading comprehension is weak or you're intentionally misleading people. At least based on what we've seen, I think yours is an accurate assessment of Mahomes. Maybe the league will catch up with him. However, I think if Allen had had a year on the bench at KC and then had become the starter in 2018, HE would have been the MVP. Great coaching, great surrounding cast, plus Allen's talent.

I'm sticking with what I wrote a month ago: we are witnessing the beginning of a decade of sustained excellence. It's coming. I hope I live to see it.

This is excellent. With retirements of Eric and Kyle, this is really a brand new team. That is an accomplishment in and of itself. Now, for the winning ...

6-3 game was awesome. I almost put it on my list. I still think it has to be sa serious contender for worst NFL game ever. It was so bad, it was a privilege to be there.

You're correct. And it's not that they're demonstrably wrong in their general point. McBeane haven't proven anything yet, and the team could implode over the next two years. The problem we have with what they say is that it is far from obvious that they are correct and McBeane are wrong.

More fiction. You cite a few exceptions and expect us to belive they represent the reality of how football teams are run. You say its pretty common for people to hire their relatives. There are probably 5000 people employed by NFL teams, probably 20,000 different people over the last 30 years. You cite four or five examples over that period. How does four or five out of 20,000 translate to "pretty common"? One perfect example: you ask us to believe that Ralph Wilson had a BILLION DOLLARS invested in a football team so he could give his daughter job? Sure thing. You think Ralph couldn't find a less expensive way to get his daughter a job? Of course management of NFL teams make some bad decisions. Everyone makes bad decisions; I'm making one right now wasting time responding to you. The fact that you can point to bad decisions does NOT demonstrate that NFL teams are generally managed badly. They aren't. In a business where success is measured by wins and losses, less than a quarter of the teams can be successful; lack of success does not necessarily establish bad management. You could have 32 perfectly managed teams and you'd still only have a few that win more than 10 games.

By the way, this narrative tells a nice story, but of course it paints a picture inconsistent with the facts. The facts are that HALF of McBeane's picks at the top of the draft for the last two years were for the offense (Allen and Ford) and HALF of their big free agent signings in the past two years were for offense (Morse). Plus, they have almost completely retooled the offensive line. Your comment suggests they've ignored obvious opportunities to stock up on high end offensive talent. It isn't true. They've been building the talent on offense as much as, perhaps more than, the defense. But your narrative sounds good because the offense wasn't good last season and is unproven so far this season. Sounding good doesn't make it correct.

This is the kind of be argument style that makes it not worth talking to some people. My comment was made in the context solely of the management of the QB situation. Instead of responding, "you're right, the 2018 QB decisions have had no long-term impact, let's move on," you imply my comment was incorrct by saying the QB decisions have to be viewed in a broader context. The conversation in which I was participating had a context, and it was narrow. It's bs to change the context and claim victory. Sure, there are all kinds of valid and interesting things to be said about the relative ineffective development of the offense since McBeane arrived. I agree with many of them. I think there are valid explanations for some decisions, not all. I'm also willing to be patient with young first-time GM and coach. None of that has anything to do with the point that was being discussed. GMs and coaches make thousands and thousands of decisions every year. Many of those decisions turn out well, many turn out poorly. It makes sense to me to examine and criticize decisions that turned out poorly, like how McBeane handled the o line last year. It makes little sense to waste time on decisions that turned out well, like the QB decisions. Those decisions didn't hurt the team in 2018 or 2019, so there's little point in dissecting them. Decisions fall into four categories: theoretically good that turn out well, theoretically good that turn out bad, theoretically bad that turn out good and theoretically bad that turn out bad. It seems in your mind it isn't enough for a decision to turn out well - you want the decision to have been made for the right reasons, too. To be logically consistent, then people should stop complaining about the Benjamin trade, because it was made for the right reasons - it just didn't work. But no, McBeane gets beaten up just as badly for that deal. They had bad luck on a good decision to get Benjamin. They had good luck on some bad decisions at quarterback. You can't depend on luck to pull you through. You have to get decisions right as much as possible, because that minimizes the impact luck has on you. They got lucky at QB last season. Accept the luck and move on.

Thanks. Your response makes sense. I realize now that we have different perspectives. I understand how you can call a game, or even a series of plays a disaster. I've done it, I'm sure. But when we are talking about whether a regime is succeeding in building a football team, from my perspective one or two games is not a disaster. It's just part of the normal course of a successful season. Whenever I reread the history of the regular seasons in 1964 and 65 and the Super Bowl years, I'm surprised how ugly some losses, and some wins, were. Some losses were disasters in your sense, but how the team responded was more important. But you are right that Peterman was bad on a monumental scale, and what McDermott was thinking is a bit of a mystery. I can speculate, but it takes almost comic-book-like creativity.

There was no consequence. If your philosophy is to have your rookie QB ride the pine, it's because he isn't ready to play in the league and needs seasoning. Allen showed from day one he was ready. If your philosophy is to start your rookie, by all means you want him to get first team reps in training camp. But by the end of Allen's rookie, the fact that he didn't get a lot of first team reps in training camp was largely irrelevant. Where he is today in his professional development has not been affected materially by his not getting those training camp reps. To call that outcome a disaster is absolutely ridiculous. A disaster is something that requires an extraordinary recovery effort. The Bills have had to do absolutely nothing to recover from how the QBs were handled. What you mean is it was a theoretical disaster. It was not textbook, by any measure. But it absolutely was not a disaster. The Bills putting themselves in the position where JP Losman was their starter, that was a disaster. The Bills putting themselves in the position where EJ Manuel was the starter, that was a disaster. The Bills lost games because of those decisions. Nothing about the 2018 QB situation was a disaster. Now, if you want to call the 2018 handling of the offensive line a disaster, okay, be my guest. Quarterback was in no way a disaster.

Bad hires get fired, true, but people get fired, true./ But most people at the higher levels of the NFL get fired because their teams didn't win. Each season, three quarters of the teams in the league are unsuccessful, and upwards of half of their head coaches get fired. Most of those teams had inadequate quarterbacking, but the coach still gets fired. There are very few guys hired as head coaches who are not qualified, who haven't had a lot of success for many years in the NFL or college. They get fired because almost all coaches get fired, not because they aren't competent.