Shaw66

Reid DID become a better coach, little by little, year by year. Yes, he needed luck, but his success now came from years of hard work and improvement. Because success in football is complicated.

I won't be shocked. It's coming.

I've always thought this philosophy is wrong, for the reasons I've just stated. Success in the NFL is dependent on a high percentage of positive plays. In football, the team game that requires more teamwork and more coordination than any other sport, a player who makes big plays by going off script and who, as a result, makes big mistakes from time to time, is a player who contributes to your failure, not to your success. With 30 seconds to go in the game, down four points and on the opponents' 30 yard line, an interception on a throw into the end zone is NEVER a good play. NEVER. If your QB's "style of play" is to go for it, you have the wrong quarterback. Unless it is literally the last play of the game, every coach wants his QB to make the right play, not the high-risk, high-reward play.

This is completely off the subject. This thread started out about Josh and whether he's being fairly or unfairly criticized. It evolved, a bit, into whether Josh does his job as well as he should. You're talking about who should bear the responsibility when the team underperforms. That is a completely different subject. Your bolded language makes the point. Who ever has had a job where their job performance is measured relative to how some other employee did their job? No one, that's who. "Well, General Custer, it is unfortunate about that battle, but you outperformed your soldiers that day, so you get an A for the Little Bighorn." Josh, like every quarterback, must be evaluated on objective performance criteria. Fans to a great extent, and coaches to some extent, do it based on common data, like completion percentage, yards per completion, etc. But I think that teams and coaches also use far more sophisticated criteria, objective and subjective. Each play is evaluated by what Josh was supposed to do, and what he actually did. In a perfect world, your QB does what he is supposed to do 100% of the time. That's executing the offense. What fans tend to do with Josh is overemphasize what he accomplishes off script, and particularly overemphasize the WOW! off-script plays. Nobody claims that Josh is better than Tom Brady, but Josh's off-script percentage is almost certainly better than Brady's. Brady gave up on plays all the time - when it went off script, particularly if he had pressure on him, he went down. Josh's off-script plays are good and important, but more important is to get a very high percentage on the on-script plays. One measure of success on on-script plays is whether you got positive yardage. I've said often that choosing the 30-yard throw with a 50% completion probability is not as good a decision as the 8-yard throw with an 85% completion probability. Stringing together positive plays is vey important in a league where the defenses are designed to deny big plays. And, in 2023, particularly early in the season, we saw Josh doing just that - he had a very high completion percentage in the first five or six games of the season, taking the easy, short throw over and over. The yards piled up, and the Bills rolled over opponents. None of that has anything to do with how well the linebackers played, or even how well the offensive line played. Even when the line sucks, Josh's performance is graded on what he's supposed to do under the circumstances. When someone misses a block and Josh throws the ball away to avoid a sack, the coaches don't just ignore that play for evaluation purposes. He's evaluated on whether he should have seen something presnap, he's evaluated on whether he looked soon enough to the side where the rush was coming from, he's evaluated on whether he had a hot read that he should have gone to instead of just throwing it away. I believe that in that kind of evaluation scheme, detailed, critical evaluation of every aspect of the QB's decision making and physical performance, Josh's grades are good but not yet great. I also believe that he's made steady progress toward great. I think he's improved virtually every season. 2023 was his best so far, and he isn't done yet.

Butting in here, but I think you're both right. It is certainly true that Allen's performances in the playoffs have never been the principal reason for losses. There are plenty of fingers to point in a lot of directions, and Allen may not even have been the #1 suspect. And while I'm not convinced Allen should have thrown for the first down instead targeting Shakir, I am absolutely sure that his mastery of the mental game is what Allen needs. That's what will define his true greatness. And just because he hasn't necessarily crapped the bed in the playoffs, having a more effective QB managing the game will make the regular season easier, make it possible to coast into division championships instead of scrambling to get there, make him tougher to game plan for, etc. etc. etc. I have no doubt Allen needs to get better.

Thanks for this. I don't disagree much - you raise some really good points. I don't think Josh being the ultimate tractor carrying his team, which he is, makes Josh a good QB. Michael Vick carried his team, too. What I said about Josh, and have said for a long time, is that his number one job is to execute the offense at a very high level, and although he improved a lot at it last season, he still isn't elite. I've said something like this before. Maybe you've got 40 offensive plays in the game, and the QB's job on 30-32 of them is to execute the play as designed, on schedule, making the right decisions and quality throws on 100% of them. Mahomes does that. Burrow does that. Brady did that. On the other 8 or 10 plays, the QB has to bail his team out, go off script and make something happen. Allen may be the best in the league at that, and only Mahomes compares with him. And in that category that Burrow falls down. He's more like Brock Purdy or Tua on steroids - he's superb at all the throws that he can make on script, but if the on-script play isn't there, things tend to fall apart with him. Josh needs to be better on those on-script plays.

Hah! You can take the boy out of Connecticut, but you can't take UConn out of the boy! Who goes on a 30-0 run in the Elite Eight? I often analogize to basketball, and I think football is much more of a coaching game than hoops. As the number of players goes up, the complexity goes up, and the importance of individuals goes down. I feel like I'm starting to see Brady's vision, which is Diggs, Samuel, Shakir, Cook, and Kincaid running slants, outs, crossers, deep crossers, corner routes all day long, and Josh finding and hitting the guy who has the mismatch or who gets leverage. They'll get deep, too. I think it's going to be fun. I don't think it's necessary to add a #2, because all he will do is take one of those guys off the field. And I'm not precluding a rookie receiver who can be the guy you're talking about, but I think having signed Samuel takes the pressure of Beane on day one of the draft. And that rookie is not John Brown; he's a guy with good speed but who has brains and can run the routes that the other guys will be running. .

I have often made this argument- that a particular guy will make the whole offense - or defense - better and I get it. I made it last year with Kincaid. Samuel may very well be the guy this year. I think football is more about coachimg than talent. You need a few a few studs for sure, but then it's about having good players and using them the right way. The more I've thought about it, the more important I think the Samuel a question is. I think Brady told McBeane that Samuel I what he needs.

Josh may have been the MVP last year, but he came on too late. The voters make up their minds in November and December. It's stupid.

What's he done? Well, he's beaten Josh Allen in the playoffs. His career passer rating is 6 percentage points higher. 6! He has better completion percentage, yards per attempt, and fewer interceptions. Other than that, he hasn't done anything.

Where is all this negative talk about Josh? I haven't heard it, but I don't watch or listen to many of the sports shows. I've said over and over here that Josh needs to get better. For all his extraordinary talents, what wins in the NFL is consistent execution of the play that is called, with the right choices and with accurate throws. Mahomes and Burrows both are better than Josh in that category. Where Josh excels is on the six to ten plays where things break down and you need someone to make a play. Josh is outstanding then. It's the other plays where he needs to be better.

Sorry. Maybe I should have said this: There is no question the team wasn't prepared for the moment, and that of course is on McDermott.

Nice subjective reading. He said "we all made mistakes." He included himself. Not just McDermott. There is no question the team wasn't prepared for the moment, and that of course is on McDermott. However, he said "we all made mistakes, and the clear implication is that a lot of different people could have done things differently.

My creation based on what he's said year after year. It's no mystery.

There are no mysteries. Beane has always been very clear about how he will handle the draft. The problem is that the fans have their own views about needs and who's available in the draft, so they concoct all sorts of theories about what Beane is going to do. Here's what Beane is going to do: 1. Evaluate the players available and rank them. 2. Look for players the Bills covet at any position who may be falling to where the Bills pick. 3. Maybe trade up to get one they like. 4. Do all of this with an understanding, THEIR understanding, of what the Bills need. Their understanding and ours may be very different. This season, in particular, their understanding of whether the Bills need a receiver and what kind of receiver may be very different from ours. Their understanding of where to get what they need may also be very different from ours.

This is the point where your argument, and others, go wrong fundamentally. There is no evidence that Coryell COULD NOT win the big game. The evidence is that he DID NOT win the big game. Marvin Lewis DID NOT win it, either. There is no logic that proves that McDermott cannot win it. None. McDermott is virtually universally recognized by knowledgeable pro football observers as one of the best coaches in the league. It is only disgruntled Bills fans who think he isn’t. And one more thing. People who argue that McDermott has failed because he hasn't won with a great QB are wrong. Last season was the first season where Allen began to run the offense like a great QB, and he didn't do it consistently. He's improving, but he still can't do it like Mahomes. And if you watch the video of Kincaid's targets, it's clear that Allen isn't accurate enough. McDermott's QB is good but not good enough to support an indictment of McDermott's coaching ability.

Jauron wasn't a risk taker. McDermott is, at least in some ways. Jauron wasn't ever going to win, even with Allen. Unless he changed his stripes.

There is no "breaking point." Such things can't be predefined. If I'm the owner, I have to make a change if he loses the team, that's for sure. But each year I evaluate his performance, the team's performance. The question never is how many times he's failed to win the Super Bowl. The question always is whether I think he can win the Super Bowl. Lately, every team has failed unless the QB's name is Mahomes or Brady. The Rams broke through for a year; does that make McVay great? No, it means everything fell right for one year and he won. I'm not firing Shanahan because he didn't beat Mahomes and Reid, and I'm not firing McDermott, either. I never thought Dungy was a very good coach. The Colts stayed with him longer that I would have. I don't have the same feeling about McDermott. The team is very good, the players love him, and he's young. Coaches get better with experience, just like players do. The difference is that with players, more experience means your body is getting older and failing. Coaches don't have to worry about their bodies failing. McDermott will be a better coach at 60 than his is at 50, and he's better at 50 than he was at 45. Until he gives me reason to go another direction (and as I said, not winning it all yet is not a reason), I'm happy to watch him get better.

I think you're wrong. Your evidence that he's feeling the pressure is based on you evaluation of his performance in a press conference. He's ALWAYS been bad in press conferences. He's uncomfortable, he doesn't like it, and he isn't good at figuring out how to give useful answers to questions without saying too much. It's ridiculous, meaning it's fair to subject you to ridicule, for you to compare McDermott to Dick Jauron. McDermott has built a perennial top-five favorite to win the Super Bowl, and Jauron went 7-9 three years in a row before the team fell apart. There is NO meaningful comparison. You're free to not like McDermott, but you're not going to convince anyone who knows football. The 49ers aren't firing Shanahan and the Bills aren't replacing McDermott.

But you're ignoring the fundamental point, which is that almost everyone plays two deep safeties, and they play all kinds of complicated man-zone combinations, all of which are designed to stop the deep ball. It doesn't really matter if you have John Brown II, because he's going to find himself double covered most of the times he goes deep. That's what's happened to the league in the days since Brown left. It's not like without a deep threat teams are shutting down the Bills' passing game. They were seventh in yards and 8th in TDs in their passing game. That's not bad. They were fourth in total yards and 6th in scoring. As I noted in an earlier post, the teams that win and were effective in the playoffs don't feature a John-Brown type threat. Instead, they force the defense to stop the run and the pass from sideline to sideline and from 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage and 60 yards downfield, and they do it not by having a classic deep threat. They do it by stressing the defense with ins, outs, deep crossing patterns, occasional fly patterns when they get the look they want, etc. They don't do it by splitting a speedster out wide and threatening the defense on every play with the prospect of a fly pattern. They have receivers who are fast enough to get deep when the offense is running the right patterns against the defense. So, what the Bills need at receiver, I think, is a smart receiver, quick, good hands, and good speed. That's why they got Samuel. He's fine. Now, the Bills need a replacement for Diggs in the next year or two, and I'm not suggesting that they're good for now with Samuel. And more speed is always better than less speed. But speed isn't the most important criterion for wideouts the way the game is being played now, and the notion that the Bills "need" a guy with great deep speed just isn't correct, in my opinion. In some ways, it's comparable to running backs. In previous eras, people used to think that great speed was essential for someone to be a great running back. People don't think that any more. Yes, it's great if you have a running back who can make the cuts, break the tackles, catch passes out of the backfield AND has great speed, but if he can do all the other things without having great speed, people are fine with that. Nobody is saying McCaffrey isn't great because he doesn't have break away speed, and no one was troubled by the fact that Thurman couldn't outrun the fastest defenders.

Thanks. Good stuff. Where I differ is that for me there's a difference between stretch the field and get deep. Diggs and Davis got deep but weren't classic burners. Shakir too. I think that kind of speed is all you need. It's enough to keep the safeties deep, even though they can't just blow by corners.

I agree with this. I don't see how we can just assume center is taken care of. Guy hasn't played there, so we simply can't know. And I don't think we can assume much of anything about Edwards, either. It all might work out, it makes sense, I get it, but it's two changes on the offensive line, two changes from a line that performed well last season. And I absolutely agree about safety. I don't see how they've gotten better there. Rapp wasn't better last season than either of the two vets, and I don't think Edwards was either. I'm one who believes more help is coming, and it won't be a rookie.

I've been thinking about this "stretch-the-field" notion for a few days or weeks now. I keep thinking about it when I see posts that want us to return to the days of John Brown. We all loved watching Josh bomb away. The reality is that the league has changed. Total scoring per game in the league is down six points since 2020. Rich McKay, who heads the competition committee, says it's down because everyone is playing two-high safeties and because they're calling fewer defensive penalties. We all know how interference is called has changed a lot in the last few years. Defenders get away with a lot of contact, including on deep balls, making it that much harder to complete long throws. A few years ago, pretty much all contact was called, which made the defenders play off the receivers, and that's the era where John Brown could thrive. Yes, they've had injuries, QBs out, etc., but the guys we like to think of as elite receivers, the tall guys who can stretch the field, are not dominating any more, especially in the playoffs. Hill and Lamb put up big numbers, but their teams aren't winning. Who are the receivers in the winning offenses? 49ers, Bills, Lions, even the Chiefs don't feature deep threats. They all have guys who can get deep, not guys who "stretch the field." Why? Because the defenses are designed to stop those guys getting deep, and those defenses create opportunities for smart, talented, versatile receivers, like the guys you see on the 49ers, Bills, Lions, and Chiefs. Shakir would have been useless five years ago, because he's not as physical as Beasley. Five years ago, defenses were designed to stop guys playing like Edelman, and Beas was one of the few who could thrive in it anyway. Shakir couldn't. But with defenses now shutting down the deep ball, guys like Shakir - smart, quick, good hands - can get production in middle of the field. Maybe they'll tinker with the rules again, and maybe we'll see the return of quick-strike offenses, but until that happens, teams have to be built for the way the game is being called. That means a different breed of receivers are the guys who will be effective. And that is what Beane was talking about.

No, it doesn't, but the point is about how you acquire talent. Free agency is a much better market for proven young talent. It's a lot simpler to sign those giluys in free agency than ti draft them. Well over half the players drafted in the last three rounds in 2018 are out of the league. Three of the first rounders are gone. It's a no brainer that the chances of getting a good long-term player are much, much better in the first round, even if you have multiple late round picks.

First, the Bills didn't draft Poyer and Hyde. More to the point, I'm not saying you can't find useful players, even good ones, in the later rounds. I'm saying if you have a good roster, and the Bills do, there's a limit to how many of those rookies you can keep. The Bills are very unlikely to keep several late round picks from this draft. When they go to your practice squad, they get poached. A first round pick is a high percentage opportunity to get long-term talent on the team.