Shaw66

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.

It's interesting to me, but not surprising, that so many people are bashing me for giving the Bills a pass. They're right, I am giving them a pass. For me, too, it was the first time I was glad a season was over. (Well, maybe when Rex resigned before the last game, I was glad that season ended, too.) Why was I glad it was over? Because this season just didn't feel right to me. Things weren't falling into place. Things got a little derailed when Luke Knox died. It felt like the COVID season when a game was moved to Detroit. I was distracted by the pain I felt, the suffering, when the blizzard hit. And I was grieving after Damar collapsed. By the end of November, the Bills looked good on the stat sheet but not on the field. People were beginning to think Philly was real and beginning to recognize that you didn't want to play the 49ers and realizing that the Bengals were really tough and seeing that the Chiefs had it again, but I wasn't thinking the Bills were in that conversation. Now, it's easy to say that the end of November was exactly the time that the coaches were supposed to be fine tuning offense and defense, dialing up the intensity, all of that, and I agree. But in light of the distractions that already had happened, and in light of the things that were coming, I think it simply got too difficult to keep everyone, from McDermott on down, focused and moving forward. Sure, it's their job and all of that, but those are just words in a vacuum. Just take Dorsey as an example. First time offensive coordinator, and you know that he was feeling the pressure to produce. Maybe he wasn't up to it and never will be, but maybe he needed to go through it once to experience it. Maybe McDermott should have done a better job with him, but McDermott has managed only Daboll as an OC, and he came to the job with a lot of experience. And maybe, Dorsey was fine with Xs and Os but he didn't manage his assistants properly. Maybe his players were too distracted and he simply couldn't get through to them. Sure, it's his job and all of that, but as I said, those are just words in a vacuum. It's a real job with real people and real problems, it isn't enough just to say "do your job." Sometimes, too much gets in the way. Losing to the Bengals wasn't 13 seconds, not even close. It was losing to a better team. Why were they better? They put it all together at the end of the season better than the Bills did. Why did the Bengals lose to the Chiefs? Because the Chiefs put it together better than the Bengals did. The Bills aren't somehow simply entitled to be the best team, and those people who think the Bills had the best roster are dreaming. In fact, I think it's to the credit of the coaches that they went 14-4 with that offensive line, not a stud among them. It's a credit to the coaches that they went 14-4 without a true #1 corner and half of a good safety on the field. A loft of things have to come together to win it all. Sometimes it just doesn't come together, and you get a pass. Should the HC, the OC, and/or the DC be replaced? Maybe one, two, or all three. I don't know. But fan disappointment over not winning the Super Bowl or getting semi-steamrolled by the Bengals in the playoffs is not the reason.

Well, this makes more sense. I still disagree that McDermott keeps Frazier around as some kind of fall guy. The desire to win is burning inside McDermott so hot that he is NOT going to anything less than what he thinks he needs to do to win. Which leads, at least possibly, to your second point - that maybe McDermott doesn't perceive very well what's necessary to win. That's certainly a possibility. But he's a lifelong learner, and he's going to be studying, thinking, talking to people about how to get better. If he learns that his defense is what's holding the team back, he'll change his defense.

Fair enough. At the end of the day, the 2022 Bills just didn't have enough.

And as I stated at the outset, I think it was more or less impossible to get them ready to play, under the circumstances of the previous 8 months, 2 months, and 3 weeks. Coaches weren't ready to coach, players weren't ready to play.

Happy, First, i really enjoy talking with you about these things. We've done it before. You have excellent things to say, this quoted text very much included. It was eye-opening to me and on the money to say the whole offensive lineup is going to be rebuilt. So true. Keep Allen and Diggs and one or two others, but by 2024 there will be a lot of new faces. A bright offensive coordinator genius would say, "give me those two and a couple more, we'll add what I want, and let's go!" On the defense, however, I think there's more of a rebuild coming than you said, or that I thought. There are going to be new safeties. I think there are fewer keepers on the line than you think, especially if the defensive philosophy is going to change. Rousseau and his young friends are too passive, don't attack and win enough. They play that way because of the scheme, but if McDermott is gone, there would be a modern scheme, and the line would change. And I'm an Edmunds fan, but I don't think there'd be much reason to keep him if you aren't playing a lot of Tampa Two and its variants. In fact, if you're going to pull the trigger on McDermott, now would be the time to do it, before they write a big check for Edmunds. Sig, signing Edmunds and then bringing in a new coach would just create more of a cap problem. Still, I think your point is valid. Replacing McDermott now could very well be a better way to go, given that there's going to be significant roster turnover, whoever is running the show. As I think about it, I think there's another reason to stick with the current regime, and that is because the league is changing so much from year to year. There clearly was a resurgence of running as core strategy on offense around the league this season. The passing attacks keep evolving. I think a team will always be two steps behind if it builds roster to respond to what teams succeeded with last season. The Bills' statistical dominance demonstrates the benefit of McDermott's all-purpose approach - the Bills try to be good at stopping whatever the other team does, and they do it very well. Football Outsiders said the 2022 Bills were one of only five teams ever to be in the top five in DVOA on offense, defense, and special teams (although they would have made top five on special teams except for two kickoff returns for touchdowns in the last game). What McDermott is doing clearly works, at least in the regular season. The question is whether it's possible to win the Super Bowl like that, where you run into teams that are very, very good at some things. I think the Bills have the wrong defensive coordinator. I think they need a more creative guy who pushes McDermott to let the DC add more aggressive, attacking wrinkles to what's almost purely bend-don't-break. I don't know about Dorsey - I didn't like Daboll early one, either, but he progressed well. Watching the Giants in the playoffs, and how smoothly their offense operated, I wondered how much better the Bills offense would have been with Daboll on board in 2022. What did the coaching have to with the Bills entire starting defensive line rotation healthy (except Miller), the Bengals playing THREE backup offensive linemen, and when the Bills rushed four, no one sniffed Burrows? Some of those eight are supposed to be good enough to beat backup linemen and hit the quarterback. They didn't need coaches to do that.

I'm not. He's already better than Newton ever was. And he's already won more playoff games.

Can't say I liked Glass Onion all that much, but the puzzle analogy to the movie is pretty good. Don't be so sure about your #2. McDermott will watch film, and he won't like he sees. Changes will come. McDermott is NOT a my-way-or-the-highway guy.

LUCK! I didn't mention luck. It takes more than you say, but you are right that the key to winning the Super Bowl is getting into the tournament. Yes, good to get a bye and homefield, good to have this, good to have that, but really it's about getting there and figuring out from there. I don't agree that's enough. In particular, I think much better work by the OC and DC was needed. By late in the season, teams knew how to stop the Bills and how to move the ball on them, and the Bills never responded effectively. As I said, yes, you can pick one thing and you'll be right, that needs work. But it's simply more complex than that. Especially from season to season - fixing last season's problem doesn't do anything to help you with the things that worked last season but don't work next season. Everything keeps changing.

Happy - the problem with your plan, although I like it, is that it likely would require dismantling the roster. It would mean a rebuild - not a full rebuild, but as the style changes to suit the coordinators, the players necessarily must change. So you have to weigh that against letting McDermott continue to build on his scheme. Ultimately, the thing that gives me confidence in McDermott is his lifelong learner philosophy. He is not afraid of throwing out what he's doing if he sees a better way. So, I don't think we're going to see a defense that falls further behind state-0f-the-art defense in the NFL, and I don't think he's going to tolerate substandard offense from Dorsey. Still, what you say makes sense.

I think it's a much more complicated puzzle than that. It's like a an old tire innertube; every time you patch one part another part springs a leak. The task of winning a Super Bowl is to get a whole lot of different things enough right AND have it all come together in an efficiently operating machine AND be able to keep it all working as you turn up the aggressiveness in the playoffs AND not have a key guy like Von Miller go down at the wrong time. Yes, I think they need a better offensive line and someone other than Miller who can be a regular threat to get at the other quarterback, but I think a lot more than that has to happen for the Bills to win a Super Bowl. But the point is that if you have a stud - Kelce for them and Diggs for the Bills, other pieces can change. It's not like you have to have the three Cincy has in order to win. It's nice if things can fall together so you can have Kelce and Hill for a Super Bowl run, but it isn't necessary. You don't have copy some other team's roster to be successful. In fact, if you try to do that, you'll fail. The task of winning a Super Bowl is that you have to build a supremely effective offensive and defensive machine and have it as well tuned as it can be when the playoffs hit. Everyone's machine is different. Chasing after the style of last year's winner is a losing game.

That's a good plan. And that guy would have his pick of D coordinators, because who want that job on this team?

Good stuff. I can't really argue with it, but it's not the conclusion I'd reach. In part not because the chances are very good that if you replace McDermott, you won't get someone as good. I wouldn't trade him for McVay or for Payton. Don't know about Siriano or Zac Taylor. But none of them is available. The only guys available are big, big crapshoots. I think there's a much better chance that McDermott, who's shown that he can create a very good team, can succeed in going the rest of the way than starting over with a new coach and/or a new GM, because you're probably not getting someone as good. Reid had a QB in Philadelphia whom I wasn't a fan of but who was good enough to win a Super Bowl. Reid couldn't do it. It's really hard, and it takes a combination of a lot of things to get there. This season, as it turned out, McDermott had more adversity than almost any coach with a good team ever has faced. I have to give him a pass for 2022, and I'm not making 2023 a make-or-break season. It's a work in process. Fans overreacted to the near-miss against the Chiefs (I, for example, didn't become a believer in Davis as receiver 1A), and they're overreacting to the loss to the Bengals. The Bills were a mess by the end of this season. It just kind of fell apart, for a lot of good reasons. I'm not worried about next season. McDermott will not stand pat, and Beane won't either. The Bills we better in 2023, and that's over a very good 2022.

Uh, okay. Who said he's a victim? And to suggest that he keeps Frazier around to have a scapegoat is truly ridiculous. McDermott wants to win, so he knowingly keeps a DC around who can't win? That's truly ridiculous, meaning worthy of ridicule.

You know, even through all the playoffs (except Super Bowl), Bills still have the best DVOA on Football Outsiders. They played superior football. But DVOA is best over a lot of games, like a whole season, and doesn't mean much in individual games.

The problem is by the end there were multiple "one things." DC's scheme. Pass rush. Pass protection. Ferociousness. Maybe intensity was the biggest problem. And maybe that's what Saffold meant when he said they were "exhausted." In neither playoff game did they hit like they need to in the playoffs. It wasn't their year.

Well, I'm not. I just don't know enough to comment much. I said the coaches didn't respond well to what teams were doing to them. Given McDermott's success as aHC so far, I'll leave it to him to figure out what to do. Like I said, it isn't easy to do what they're trying to do. 31 teams fail at it every year, and no one other Belichick has won a lot of Super Bowls.

Chiefs were outstanding. And for those people complaining about Davis not being a good enough #2 and not drafting a Tee Higgins or whatever, Chiefs lost Tyreek Hill and no wideouts left from when they won the Super Bowl. Didn't matter. Great coaching and tenacious defense wins.