Shaw66

I guess I'm like a lot of guys - I only notice the special teams when they screw up. In that sense, it was a more or less total turn around from a week before. Obviously, Gilliam was enjoying the opportunity to make a contribution. The kickoff coverage was energized all game long so, yeah, I guess they woke up. Harty is a great addition as the punt returner. I love his share hands, and I really don't ask for anything more than that. But he's one of those guys with the knack - he knows when to take the return, and he generates serious returns - 10+ yards - when he does. So I like that. Hindsight is 20-20, but seeing the Bills yesterday made me wish they'd pulled the plug on Dorsey a week earlier. Broncos game definitely should have been a W.

Yes, you're correct, all of that seemed nice, but even you point out the reasons why it may not have been as good as it seemed. And, maybe only two turnovers result directly in points, but the other two affect field position, which is of great value when playing a team that has trouble moving the ball. I mean, I get. Maybe they actually were good yesterday. I saw a lot I liked. And NFL games don't go according to script, ever, so they're going to be messy in part, almost all the time. What I'm saying is: The Bills have looked like a mediocre team for a month. When you look like a mediocre team for that long, there's a good chance your team is - yes, a mediocre team. It happens almost every week in the NFL: a mediocre team has a good game. When it happens to most other teams, I don't jump to the conclusion that the team is actually good - it may just have been a mediocre team having a good day. This week, it happened to the Bills, and I'm not prepared to jump to the conclusion are a good team. We thought the Bills were a good team coming into the season, but they did enough to convince a lot of people they aren't so good. People were so convinced as to declare that McDermott must go. One game shouldn't convince any of us that the team we thought we had in September actually just reappeared.

You're correct. My memory isn't what it used to be.

Thanks for this. I saw your comments in the other thread, and I found them very interesting. I think we saw the same things, but reacted to them differently. From my point of view, a lot of what I saw yesterday were positive changes, so we agree there. I'm not ready to ascribe it to evidence of actual change, because it's still only one game. If the offense can have something like that kind of effectiveness moving the ball against the Eagles, then I'll say what we saw yesterday was something more any given Sunday. The sight Kyle Allen taking over in the 4th quarter? So true. That's something we used to see, pre-Dorsey, from Barkley or Trubisky. If the Bills offense truly turned a corner on Sunday, then the Bills search for an offensive coordinator already ended.

The Bills beat the Jets in Orchard Park on Sunday afternoon, 32-6. A win is a win, but beyond that, ascribing some greater meaning to this game is difficult. Has the offense turned a corner under new offensive coordinator Joe Brady? Hard to say. Do the fans love Sean McDermott again? Ask after the Bills play the Eagles and the Chiefs. Will the injuries stop, or will the Bills simply run out of players on the defensive side of the line? Pick ‘em. Is there something wrong with Stefon Diggs? No. Was the emotion we saw on the field a one-game thing, or have the Bills rediscovered the competitive edge that’s been missing? Tune in next week. Did the Bills dominate, or are they just an ordinary team that will win by a big score when the opponent turns the ball over four times? To me, it looked like the latter. Were the Bills good, or are the Jets just bad? Yes. Here are a few reactions to the game: 1. I’m really getting to like James Cook, now that he has remembered to hold on to the football. I always marveled at LeVeon Bell’s ability to wait, to wait and look, and then attack the opening that develops. Increasingly, Cook is running that way. When it’s time to go, Cook accelerates like a Tesla – instant burst. We’re seeing some real football intelligence from him. 2. Gotta give the offensive line credit, both for creating the opportunities for the running backs and for keeping Allen upright in the pocket against a defensive front that has been tough for a couple of seasons. 3. The Bills were showing a lot of emotion on the field. Actually, I prefer it when their actions speak louder than their words. Dotson should not be showing off every time he makes a tackle, especially because he misses, too. The question for the Bills is whether they’ve begun to raise the intensity of their play for the stretch run, or was the emotion a one-time explosion following weeks of frustration and then the Dorsey firing? 4. Joe Brady had to be happy with his debut, but there’s plenty left to work on. Getting three field goals on the first three possessions was nice but not enough. The Bills still didn’t display a truly diverse offense – they sort of traded Diggs and Davis for Kincaid, Shakir, and Cook. The offense Brady is hoping to see is one where they all show up on the stat sheet. 5. Josh Allen looked comfortable with what he was doing. He saw the opportunities and took them. I’ve said in recent weeks that the team doesn’t need his special talents on every play – most of the time Allen needs to manage the offense, make the throws, keep things moving. His special talents are needed on only a half-dozen plays or so. Like on Shakir’s touchdown – Allen was looking left, maybe knowing all along that he was coming back to Kahlil, maybe not. Then he looked right, found his man and without ever really resetting his feet, fired a 30-yard rocket for the completion. Allen is one of the few QBs in this or any era whose body can make the plays that his mind can see. 6. Josh ran, too. He didn’t have one of those big, dazzling runs where he’s free in open space, but that isn’t the point. The point is that he has to be on the move just enough to make the threat of his running one more thing in the minds of the defenders. The Bills’ offense should be a load for any defense, just with Diggs, Davis, Shakir, Kincaid, and Cook (plus an occasional dose of Harty and Knox) – images of #17 blowing downfield is the special sauce. 7. Just an observation: After all the years, all the decades, of watching the Bills, it’s quite amazing to have a quarterback who, on his own, makes the offense very good with the potential to be great. Kelly needed his skill players, Ferguson was special, Kemp was a field general; none of them on their own made the offense. 8. The injuries on the defense have to stop. They can’t afford to keep losing players like Johnson, Douglas, Rapp, and Jackson. There’s no hope if the Bills are putting new players on the field every week. Good to have Benford back. The young linebackers are getting a lot of experience – critical for the stretch run. Shaq and Oliver and Floyd are showing up. 9. Lest we forget, McDermott gets defense. He’ll get the most out of the talent that’s available. It’s actually pretty impressive to see how well the defense has continued to play through the dual adversity of the injuries and the offense being MIA. 10. The key to the defense, however, is having Hyde and Poyer healthy and on the field. Every part of the pass defense works better when they’re out there directing traffic. Their health from here out is critical, especially with Rapp down. And looming in the not-so-distant future, they will become big holes in the lineup. I tend to look four stats when I want to know how my team is doing: Yards per game, points per game, offense and defense. For the past few seasons, Bills fans have gotten used to the Bills being comfortably in the top five, sometimes top three, of all four categories. This season, the Bills are essentially top ten, except that they are 4th in points allowed per game. That says that they are a very good team, but not at the top of the league. The defense, with the injuries, is good and very stingy. The offense is showing signs of being very good or even scary good. A big run actually is possible. 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 every-day 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.

Yeah, I noticed Sauce give up, too. Always a sign the player is focused on himself rather than the team.

And Moss did pretty much nothing after he was traded last season.

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He doesn't like the Swiss army knife only for the reason you give, which is a good reason. He wants to be able to play every style, so he doesn't want a true road-grader at guard, because the guard has to be able to pass protect and pull downfield. He wants a kick-returner wideout who can run the jet sweep, so he can threaten you in multiple ways. The trouble with Swiss army knives is that nothing about them is really good at a single thing. A real corkscrew is a better cork screw, a real can opener is a better can opener, a real screwdriver is a better screwdriver. And where we started, a real dog is better than a Swiss army knife dog.

Yeah, it's funny how different people have different perspectives. Maybe I'm just waking up! Calling it a rule doesn't make it a rule. It's just a statistic. I think it was in that movie Sully where a member of the board of inquiry says "no one ever did that before, and the Tom Hanks character replies that no one ever did anything before until someone did it for the first time. It's like to the Wright brothers that they can't fly because no one ever did it before. As has been discussed here several times, one reason that you can't find any coach combos winning after five years is because either the coach gets fired or the QB leaves or gets traded. In other words, the impatience of the owners and GMs is probably the reason you don't see winning combinations beyond five years.

That's an interesting point. Who are the dogs? I'd say they are Diggs, Murray, probably Spencer Brown, Hyde, Poyer, Bernard, Taron Johnson. If your point is their aren't enough, I agree. I've been commenting for a while that McDermott's love affair with the swiss-army-knife guys has gone too far. At some point, you gotta have guys who are really tough to deal with at just their position, even if they're the only positions the guys play.

I love how people just trot out random stats and think it proves something. It actually proves the opposite. Tomlin's been the head coach in Pittsburgh for 15 years, been to the Super Bowl twice and won one. In the Super Bowl era, the ONLY Bills coaches to have playoff success are the two longest-tenured coaches in Bills' history - McDermott and Levy. Other than those two, the Bills have been turning over coaches every two or three years, so how well has the coaching carousel been working?

Great point! But if McD is in trouble, you go there and make the offense hum, and they win a Super Bowl, McD gets extended. You still get a HC job, but not with Allen. Well, I agree with that statement, but if you're going to have a winning football team, you're going to have dogs on the team, and the dogs want a dog to lead them. And, in fact, until this season, Allen's teammates said he was a dog.

I remember saying that. Have I changed my mind? Maybe a little, but I really was just asking the question, because I don't know. In general, I'd say that if I'm a position coach somewhere and McDermott called and asked me to be the OC, I'd jump at it. If I have confidence in myself, my thinking is I can do the job AND I get Josh Allen. But today, having read things here and thought about the situation, I can imagine that if I'm one of the hot assistants coming up, a McVay or someone with that kind of buzz about him, I'm looking to be a head coach, and maybe I worry that things are screwed up in Buffalo and things outside my control might limit what I can do there. I don't know if that's true at all, but I can see that a smart guy coming up would want to consider that. Two years ago, when Daboll left, pretty much every talented up-and-coming assistant would have grabbed the job Dorsey got. Today, it's not the same slam dunk.

Yes, nothing wrong with it, but it's not ideal wiring for a quarterback. Diggs doesn't want a QB who doesn't share Diggs's passion. And it's the unusual well-rounded person who drives himself to excellence. If the fire isn't burning hot inside him, then Josh almost certainly is the wrong guy. Tom Landry wanted to start Craig Morton, because he had all the tools, and he stayed on script. He didn't like Staubach because he was less talented and his passion for playing took him off script sometime. Staubach's passion got results that Morton couldn't (until one season when it all fell together in Denver). There has to be fire.

No you weren't mistaken. The basic rule of good offense, I'm convinced, is make every play a positive play. Throwing the pass you can complete 80+% of the time for 5 yards and a possible run after catch is a much better play than throwing a pass you can complete 50% of the time for 15 yards. Josh has to understand. Yes, there are situations that demand something else, but most of the game, that kind of decision making is what wins. The Bills were winning early in the season, and Josh had completion percentages in the 70s and 80s. He can do it, but the coaches need to give him the open guys to throw to and the reads so that he can make those kinds of decisions. And this is where Josh's running comes in. I've come to the conclusion that the Bills don't need the 800-yard rushing Josh, but he needs to have a couple of good runs a game, some designed, just to give the defense another element that makes the Bills offense truly multi-faceted. Josh needs to get down and avoid injury, but he needs to run often enough so that every play the defense has that threat in the back of their mind. With that added element, any good coordinator should be able to create route trees that generate open receivers on a regular basis. Josh needs those trees, and he needs to know how to recognize where the open guy is. That's all on the offensive coordinator.

I agree with your take on this, and it's why I've been complaining about Dorsey for a while. If they're taking away the deep ball, and they've shut down the 15-yard wideout Josh used to live on, and if they're covering the underneath stuff, too, then their are opportunities to attach SOMEWHERE. It isn't possible for the back seven to cover sideline to sideline, line of scrimmage to the end zone. We saw nothing from Dorsey that suggested he could see where the openings were or that he could design routes that would punish the defense for playing the way they do.

Yeah, the nature of the relationship, and the importance of it, is an argument for an offensive HC, to be sure.

Seems to me it's a two-way street. There has to be a positive, productive relationship among QB, HC, and QB. They do have to listen to Allen, but Allen also has to respond to their leadership. Allen has to want to be great and be willing to do whatever it takes. As someone said, he needs to be obsessed about football excellence. That comes both from I side and leadership on the outside. I go back to Belichick and Brady. Bill was a defensive coach, but he and Brady were always on the same page when it came to what Brady was doing on the field. These recent comments suggest that McDermott delegated the care and feeding of Josh to the OC. If he did, that was a mistake. McDermott has the obsession. He needs to draw Allen in. Allen needs to see and live the vision of true greatness. I thought he was getting it earlier this year but, no. The best way to see it is to hang out with McDermott.

Well, I'm sort of in your camp, but certainly less enthusiastically. I love his past, but his past is irrelevant if your evaluation of McDermott is that his personal style and his vision of organization success just don't and can't deliver ultimate success. If you actually believed that, and there are many people on this forum who believe, then sticking with McDermott is a mistake, regardless of his history. If you believe his relationship with Allen, in particular, has soured for some reason, well McDermott probably has to go. So, I can see scenarios that are fairly realistic but not public knowledge that would make me decide he should go. But as I've said elsewhere, the question is what leadership is most likely to get this team from here to a Lombardi? And the answer to that may very well be McDermott and Beane, because we know that they can at least build a team that is a consistent playoff team, which is the first step to winning the Lombardi. A hotshot coordinator may look like the guy, but he's never done it before. It's difficult to find the right guy. And there's continuity. They've been running the team for the past two years with the next three in mind. They've set up the roster in terms of age with a plan for how they will transition into a new collection of players, including new leadership. That's a huge head start over a newcomer coming. So, for me, there has to be a really good reason to move from those guys. The Pegulas hurried them to be long-term successes in Buffalo, and they haven't yet shown that they can't be. What they've shown is they haven't done it yet.

This raises another interesting question. I haven't seen Brady, but I agree with your observations of Dorsey. In some post today, I said Dorsey seemed like he was trying to solve a puzzle, rather than a guy who feels like beating the DC on the other sideline is the most important thing in the world, and doing it is second only to beating a guy on the field. Dorsey's whole style, including his oral presentation, never gave me the feeling that he was the guy to lead men into battle. The other interesting question is this: If what we're talking about is real, why hadn't Beane and McDermott figured out that he wasn't a leader before they promoted him? That was a serious mistake. Was it because Josh wanted him?

Oh, if Terry P. keeps McDermott for 24, I think he's keeping him for multiple years after. If he's guided by belief in Sean and by belief in continuity as organization principle, keeping him next is deciding you're in with the next run. And, yes, as you say, that belief in Sean would almost certainly mean Pegula likes him personally. It would be interesting to know what up-and-coming offensive assistant coaches think about the Bills OC position. If you would like to have a future that follows the standard ladder - Assistant, Position Coach, Coordinator, Head Coach, would Buffalo be attractive? Or do assistants around the league already think that the environment is poisoned, and the coordinator position there won't be a good stepping stone? When Sean McDermott goes to the market to hire the next OC, will the best candidates submit their resumes?

I don't agree that we know that for McDermott. I think there are people who do know, most importantly Beane and Terry Pegula. They know what the relationship is like, and I'd expect that Mr. Pegula will be thinking a lot about it for the next few months. He may do his thinking on his own, he may do it with Beane, but he'll be thinking. But he might very well simply say to himself, "I trust Sean. I decided to go on a journey with Sean, and I'm on it."

Great stuff, particularly the bold. I've heard coaches say that they love coaching because it's a way to continue competing. That of course is McDermott, but a lot of other guys, too. Beane actually says it, that what he loves about the job is trying to beat the other GMs in free agency and the draft. Dorsey never seemed to me to be a fighter. He seems to like the game because it's a puzzle to solve, rather than a chance to run over the other guys.

This little exchange you and UK had was an excellent collection of observations about Allen I think you describe him, and what else he needs to do, perfectly. "Mentally obsessed with the game" is exactly right. It's not enough to think about it and then trust your body. You've got to know it, inside and out, live it, and when you can do that, then you'll be special. And here's the big question about McDermott. Almost every QB needs a coach who shares his obsession, and the two have to relate. The coach is the one who stokes and feeds the passion. Brady without the obsessive Belichick might never have grown to what he became. Reid is Mahomes' muse. It can't be the OC, because OCs are going to come and go, so it has to be McDermott. McDermott and Allen have to be tight for this team to flourish. If they aren't, then there has to be a new head coach. Simply put, at the end of the day, the job of the head coach of the Buffalo Bills is to harness the power that is Josh Allen. If you can't do that, you aren't the man for the job.