Shaw66

Well, I agree to a point, but it's understandable. What happens every year at this time is people are looking back on the season and talking about what didn't work. Only time that won't happen is if the Bills win the Super Bowl. So, what didn't work? The defense and the offense let the team down in the playoffs. Why? Well, that's what people are talking about. Not very productively, in my opinion, because I think the problems are much more nuanced than people here seem to think, but that's just my opinion. I am amazed, however, that people think McDermott is the problem. He's probably a top-five head coach, and people are complaining about him be too soft, or too oriented to the defense, or something. I don't get that at all.

Defensive coach and HOF QB worked pretty well in New England.

That's what I understand. But when you pay a hospital bill, you're paying ALL the expenses of the hospital, including the cost of sending the director of human resources to LA for a conference, including hotels and meals. You're not just paying for the nurse to sing Kum Bai Yah.

100% goes to hospital, which means it pays the hospital's bills which means it pays the salary of the CEO which means your donation is paying administrative costs, including dinner meetigs, etc. etc. Don't be fooled into thinking your money is going 100% to sick kids.

I don't think there's a law that that information be made public, but all well-run charities do it. I didn't find it on the website for Wilson's foundation, but that isn't unusual for a small charity like this. You can get a lot of answers from the return, and from organizations that try to evaluate the worthiness of charities. Hamlin foundation probably was a private foundation, because most of the mo e came from him. Not any more. His is for sure a public foundation now, and someone is going to have to start paying attention to it.

Thanks. I agree. An organization that size shouldn't need two exe s earning that kind of money. And spending $800,000 on a gala seems way out of line, too.

So, one of the trustees of Wilson's foundation is Larry Estrada. He is also a trustee of the Seattle Foundation, which has $1.5 BILLION in assets. Here's his bio from the Seattle Foundation website: This guy probably makes $500,000 a year at Goldman Sachs. He's a high-profile guy at a major US financial institution. Does anyone really think he's on the board of WIlson's foundation so he can scam it out of, what, $10,000 a year? Does anyone really think a guy like this is activity participating in some fraud with Wilson? It's absurd.

You're correct about this. The extent of ignorance about nonprofits is remarkable, and it comes out on this board whenever there's a report like this. Notice that this article doesn't say how much anyone in the foundation actually got paid, other than one friend of Wilson's being paid $100,000. Directors of many nonprofits are not paid anything, and this report doesn't say how much, if anything, all of these directors are paid. The report also says the foundation had revenues of $7.5 million but distributed only $2.8 million. It DOESN'T say the rest of the money went to Wilson's friends or others. It's quite possible, in fact likely, that the Foundation is making grants over time; if they passed out all the money immediately, the Foundation would close up shop unless more money came it. And if they're in the business of giving scholarships, they want to build endowment. In other words, there are plenty of reasons why they might not have distributed the whole $7.5 million. Plus, where do you think the $7.5 million came from? Almost certainly, the biggest portion of the money came from Russ and his wife, probably a million or more, maybe several million. Do you think Wilson is putting all that money in just to waste it? And if you do think that, whose being defrauded by this foundation? Wilson, that's who. So, he's making charitable donations to defraud himself? Are there fraudulent charities? Sure. Is the country awash in fraudulent charities? No. There aren't weekly reports in the news about charities stealing from people. Charities do good work.

This. The comments here are simply so ignorant, it's kind of hard to believe. I mean, person after person posts something that suggests there is no point in hiring the guy. What do they think McDermott is doing? Just adding a buddy to play golf with? McDermott has an organization plan for this guy. He will have specific duties, and those duties will relate directly to improving the team's defense in ways that McDermott believes are necessary for the team to get better. Do I know what the guy's duties will be? Of course not. But to suggest that the only reason for this hire is to bring over a buddy from Carolina or to have someone else to blame is remarkably stupid.

I'm in the cannibis industry, too. Exclusively on the buy side.

I'm 76, a mostly retired lawyer with a wife, three kids and four grandchildren. Who we really are is an existential question. We are living beings experiencing moments of joy, sorrow, just moments passing one after another that we try to attach some meaning to. There's no understanding them. Better just to appreciate each of the moments. They're all precious.

Wow! Glad your doing so well. There's some medication that they use that is supposed to be very effective with stroke patients if they can get it into you in the first few hours or maybe even a day. Since you were in the hospital, I'd bet you got it and that it contributed to what sounds like a great recovery. I'm happy for it. If you don't mind talking about it, could you explain to us how it feels to be aphasic. I understand the frustration level is huge, because your brain is thinking but you can't find words to say what you're thinking.

As I understand it, it largely is not correctable. It's caused by brain damage suffered as the result of inadequate blood flow. That's why CPR from the very beginning is so important; CPR keeps some blood flowing to the brain until they can restart the heart. With inadequate blood flow, brain cells start dying, and those cells cannot be regenerated. Apparently, the patient can't make progress in the first few days and weeks, bringing damaged cells back on line, but after that it becomes very difficult. People with aphasia essentially have to train other, unused brained cells to do the work of the cells that have died. Training brain cells is pretty easy in infants - that's why they're language and intelligence grows so fast in the early years, but it's pretty difficult in adults. People who make progress usually work very hard, with good speech and language therapists. It's much difficult, long-term work than coming back from an ACL repair or something like that. The tissue around the knee repairs itself, and rehabilitation is mostly about getting that tissue reconditioned. What Kim is trying to do is more like not fixing the ACL and trying to train other muscles to compensate. Progress is slow, and patients tend to get discouraged. She's blessed with serious personal determination, a supportive family, and essentially unlimited resources. I wish her well.

Bills fans should have a song to sing to Kim before every game. Or maybe at halftime. Just to say hello and to let her know we're thinking of her.

Me too. I so wanted her back, because she's been such a big part of the Bills and so important to Buffalo. It's terribly sad.

Lamar Hunt, or whoever ran the Chiefs at the time, said firing Marv was the dumbest thing he ever did as an owner.

Now, I'm just down to repeating myself. Of course, what you say here is correct. If you have the wrong QB, a good HC and GM will get a different one. If you have the wrong DE, they'll get a different one. If people around him the organization, or smart football people around the league, are saying you can't win with that defense, and the coach doesn't change defenses, well, then the owner has to get a different HC. That's true. But it's not like the Bills are the only team in the league playing 4-3, or the only team in the league that tries to get pressure on the QB rushing only four, or that avoids cover zero. A lot of teams do what the Bills do, so I don't think the Bills have a failed, outdated defense that McD stubbornly sticks to because, well, he likes it. Have you noticed that all last season and all off-season people here were pounding the table to get rid of Edmunds because he wasn't a run stuffer and he wasn't tough enough, and all of that has gone away because he made a few more tackles this season? I think we have to recognize that these complaints about McDermott and Frazier, although present a bit in earlier seasons, have become the flavor of the month. The Bills had one of the best defenses in the league, but this season, for reasons I don't completely disagree with, McDermott and Frazier are taking the blame. Well, that's all well and good. If McDermott is so stubborn that he won't change things that have been demonstrated not to work, fine, he will have to go. However, McDermott is a self-defined lifelong learner who is into continuous improvement. Staying in the same place, let alone going backward, is not acceptable in his personal world. When he came to the Bills he instituted a management system, from the top of the organization to the bottom, of regular and continuous evaluation, correction, and improvement. Everyone in the organization, including Beane and McDermott and Frazier, is evaluated regularly, is given feedback, and is expected to learn and improve. Everyone has a plan of improvement that is established cooperatively between that person and his supervisors. McDermott has said repeatedly that he is subject to that system and that in any case, he does it as a matter of personal habit. The whole point of the system is that people, players, coaches, sales people, cafeteria people, will continue to improve in their jobs, from day to day, week to week, year to year. In that environment, both organizationally and personally, McDermott will not continue to do things that are not working. He has, for example, studied the 4-3 and the 3-4 for 20 years, and I'm sure he understands more about both systems than any person posting here. He knows the strengths and weaknesses of both, and he prefers the 4-3. He can explain his reasons for preferring it, and he can agree with us that he might be wrong about his preference, but he doesn't think so. When it becomes obvious that the 3-4 is better, McDermott will switch, because he learns and because winning is what matters to him. So, too, his 8-man DL rotation, and his preference for zone pass defense, and every other strategic choice there is to be made on a football field. McDermott will not continue to do what doesn't work, and he won't permit Frazier to continue to do what doesn't work. So, yes, we all can sit and say Frazier isn't getting the job done, and that means either Frazier or McDermott or both need to change or be replaced, but that is not something McDermott and Beane and the Pegulas don't already know. And the Bills have in a place a management system the whole point of which is to identify and address issues exactly like that in order to improve. So, yes, you've set forth the problem nicely and as usual, I agree with just about all you say and admire how you say it, but I'm not stressing over it. McBeane will deal with it. If I want to play DC for a minute, McD's DC, I know I'll be running 4-2-5. I'll have Hyde and Taron Johnson at safety, White and Elam at the corners, Benford or Jackson in the slot. I'll probably get help from some rookie DB. I'll have Edmunds and Milano and an 8-man rotation on the Dline. I'll be figuring out how to get more pressure on the QB in my system, and I'll be working with Beane about tweaking the personnel, again, in that area. I'll be studying film and understanding how the Bengals and other teams have been getting receivers open for medium-range completions, and I'll be tweaking the scheme to make that tougher. I'll be figuring out how to change the mix of zone and man how to get more stops on third and seven and third and eight. If people want to come on here and say they would prefer a different defense, well, fine, but as I said, people's preferences are just that. If they want to proclaim, as many do, that they're right and McDermott is wrong, well, I'm sticking with McDermott.

Ayjent - Great stuff, as always. Thanks. I really like the first paragraph. "Imposing its will" is the key and as you say, that's what's lacking in the playoffs. Well, missing this year. I thought the Bills were more than tough enough against the Chiefs last year - there were other problems. And I agree that down the stretch of the regular season, they didn't have it. But just like against the Chiefs, the previous season that wasn't a problem. Going into the playoffs in the 2021 season, they were the team no one wanted to play. So, I think the things you're commenting on, although perhaps being somewhat true in early seasons, really are phenomena that troubled the Bills this season. And as I've said, I think their inability to pull things together this season were the result of a lot of different things, in some cases unique things, that the Bills just couldn't overcome. I agree about your analysis of the defensive line, and I've said here myself. They need some guys who WIN; instead, they seem to be loaded with guys who read and react, particularly Rousseau. He really needs to crank up his intensity. I never paid much attention to Von Miller before this season, but he knows how to play the position. Not every play, not by a long shot, but every once in a while on the snap he absolutely explodes on the OT and knocks him off balance, then creates from there. Doing that once every ten plays or whatever puts the blocker on the defensive, and it allows Miller the opportunity to attack all the other way he attacks. Rousseau needs to do that to - instead, everyone knows he's just going to come across the line and look to see what's happening. Did they play too much soft coverage this season? Looked like it. The thing about all of this, from my point of view, is that McDermott is smart and determined, more than any people we tend to meet in our day-to-day lives. He works and studies all the time. He knows the coverage was too soft. He knows the pass rush didn't work. He knows the defense didn't impose its will. He sees all of that stuff and hundreds of other things, and he know what he wants to do about it. Frankly, I think if you asked him about the soft coverage, he'd tell you exactly why they played that way, and he probably has to do with having substandard safety play late in the season, White being off his pre-injury game, and Jackson and Elam being vulnerable. I don't know that, but isn't that the kind of reason that you would expect a smart guy like McDermott to have for playing a defense that he knows was not aggressive enough? Especially, when he's playing a quality QB like Burrows and he knows that none of his defensive linemen are going to get home, he's not going to play press coverage if he doesn't trust his corners or safeties. Whatever the answers are, McDermott has literally made it his life to learn them. He knows if Frazier is a problem. He knows if Dorsey is a problem or just needed to get a year under his belt. He knows where his personnel is weak, and he's told Beane. None of which is to say that he'll figure it out. I'm haunted by memories of George Allen, who has absolutely glorified by the press has a determined, detail-oriented coach who would lead Washington to the Super Bowl and more, and he couldn't do it. Just being like McDermott isn't necessarily enough. But, as I also said before, there is nothing that any of us sees that he doesn't see, he knows which things he needs to fix, and he almost certainly knows better than any of us how to fix it. So, like you, I'm not replacing him any time soon.

Several thoughts about this. First, I was hoping Frazier would get a HC job last season. I've always thought he's too passive. Second, however, I think that you're mischaracterizing the defense in several ways. Yes, they spent money on the defense, but they spent it to make it be more and more like the kind of defense that McDermott wants: a defense that can survive playing all different styles: playing man, playing zone, stopping the run, etc. It's more important to McDermott that his defense do everything reasonably well than it is that the defense is feared for being the most aggressive in one or another way. He wants eleven tough-minded, versatile athletes running around out there, making plays. Now, all kinds of people on this board will argue that that's the wrong style of defense, because you get what we've seen - a defense that is statistically excellent and wins a lot of games in the regular season, but that can't deal with the really high-powered, offenses that they face in the playoffs. It's like he has a defense that would be the best defense in flag football but not tackle football. I get that argument, and I agree with it and I can at least speculate why McDermott prefers that, but that's not the point. The point is that if you really think that style will never win a Super Bowl, then there's only one answer: Move on from McDermott. My own answer to that, which plenty of people disagree with, is that it's very unlikely you'll get as good a coach to replace him, and you're better off having a coach who repeatedly gets you close and may, over time, actually win the whole thing. Third, if I were McDermott, I'd replace Frazier with someone who can run McD's defense, but with more fire. I'd replace whoever the D line coach with someone who will impress on those guys that they have to WIN their battles on the line, and if they don't they'll be replaced. Lots of guys can occupy space on the Dline. McD's defense requires guys who can win. Fourth, I don't think it's about "figuring out" McD's defense. Every team's defense gets figured out. What's good about McD's defense, or what's supposed to be good about it, is what's good about Belichick's defense, which is that as team begin attacking the parts of the field that you don't defend well, you can tweak things so that you can defend that part of the field better, so that you players, in more or less the same defense, can recognize when teams are lined up to attack that weak spot and know how to cover it. When it works well, which it did with Poyer and Hyde, you'd never see Jamar Chase wide open in the middle like he was in the playoffs. Never. But when you're playing Elam and Marlowe and Jaquan Johnson, they haven't yet learned it, or they can't. That is, I don't think McDermott's scheme is the problem. I think who they have on the field and how aggressively they play it is the problem. Thanks for posting.

If i had to choose, i agree. But I want McBeane's vision, which is playoffs every year and multiple Super Bowls.

Ah, I misunderstood. I'm actually not too concerned about Josh's longevity. I've thought for a long time that he's most like Elway and Roethlisberger, Elway particularly. Cam had an arm to match those other guys, but he wasn't and never became a true pocket passer and field general. Allen will run less as the years add up, just as Elway ran less, but he'll remain a threat to take off once in a while. He'll move in the pocket and be tough to take down like Roethlisberger. He will, like all the really good QBs, get better and better at seeing the field and making decisions. In the end, even if he becomes as immobile as Peyton, he'll be a brain attached to an arm - give him decent protection and some receiving threats and he'll still be a threat to take a team to the Super Bowl.

You're tough to please!

Got it. Did you read Graham's piece in the Athletic? There's a thread about it. It's absolutely dead on, in my opinion. If your choice is trying different leadership or trusting Beane and McDermott to figure it out, the smart money is on McBeane. They showed up and immediately made the Bills a playoff team, and within three years made them a Super Bowl contender. They must know something.

We both understand we're just talking here. It doesn't really matter. But really. Peyton Manning played about 10 seasons with various combinations of Edgerrin James, Reggie Wayne, and Marvin Harrison, Sr., and he won ONE Super Bowl. In those years, Manning was getting sacked less than 20 times a season, throwing to one of the very best receiver combos of all time. Ask Peyton if it's easy. And if you say he didn't have coaching, well, do you think there was any coach in the WORLD who didn't want to be the coach of that team? It all makes the point I keep saying. A lot of things have to come together. You need the right GM, the right HC, the right coordinators, all of which means you need the right owner, and you need luck and no injuries to the important players and a lot of other things. It isn't easy.

Deek - I think you seriously misperceive how hard it is to win the Lombardi. Ask Marino - 17 seasons and not one. Elway - 14 seasons before his first. Peyton - seven seasons before his first, and was truly great. Ask Brees. Ask Rodgers. It's really, really hard. We may tend to think it's easy because we watched Brady for so long, but that the truth is that you had a truly remarkable QB with the greatest coach of all time, and even they couldn't win it every year. It ain't easy, and in some years it just doesn't come together. It came together in 2021 for the Bills, and they blew it in 13 seconds. People want to complain about the coaching in that season, I'm all in on that conversation. 2022? It wasn't the Bills' year. Do things need to improve? Sure, all kinds of things need to improve. It doesn't change the fact that in 2022, for a lot of reasons, a good Bills team didn't peak in December and January.