Shaw66

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.

As the Bills lost to the Bengals in the AFC Divisional Round, I wasn’t ready to step off the ledge. I hoped they’d win, but I expected they wouldn’t. I hoped a truly competitive playoff team would emerge in January, but I hadn’t seen much evidence of that kind of dominance in December. It wasn’t their year. I guess I’ve mellowed. Worst case, I’m losing interest, but I don’t think that’s the case. I had tickets and a hotel in Atlanta, and I had a hotel and a rental car in Arizona. I was interested. For now, however, I think less than I used to about what went wrong and what needs to be fixed than in past years. I have developed a healthy respect for all of the things I don’t know about football, and I no longer can pretend that I see that one thing the Bills need to fix to get over the top. If it were easy enough for a guy sitting in his family room to figure that out, someone in Orchard Park would have done it already. What it takes to win a Super Bowl is a complex, almost unknowable combination of factors, many of which are completely or largely outside the control the General Manager and the coaches. The extreme example was the COVID pandemic season, when the rules that governed practice, travel, and schedule all changed and kept changing throughout the season. Teams had to figure out on the fly how to accomplish the training and preparation necessary to play the game at a high level under circumstances they’d never seen before. Even short of that extreme, the variables are constantly changing, and each team is challenged to respond. Coaches keep experimenting with approaches to offense, trying to find ways to move the ball consistently and score, and as they do, defensive coaches adjust their approach to defense. What works changes from year to year, even from month to month. Players come and go, with a quarter to a third of the players on the roster changing annually, and as the players change, the things the team can do effectively on the field change. The process, from April through February, is like 75 people trying to complete a giant jigsaw puzzle while the picture being built is changing before their eyes. In that kind of environment, just getting to the point where your team is one of the half dozen that have gotten good enough to compete in the playoffs is a major accomplishment. The winner will be the team that can keep growing and building a team that can play at increasing levels of physicality. The winners also invariably talk about how the team is a family, how much they care for each other. Some people think it’s a cliché, but it’s said so regularly that I’m sure it’s true. The winners must come together, not just physically and technically, but emotionally, as well. It is amazingly difficult and unpredictable, and every year the winning players and coaches are justifiably proud of what they’ve accomplished. And there’s no shame in falling short. The Bills fell short. I think the emotional roller coaster of the Bills’ 2022 season was too much to overcome. That is, it simply couldn’t be expected that they could accomplish all of the technical things – the training, the study, the learning, the teamwork, the offense and defense growth and development, the insertion of inexperienced players, like Hamlin, Jaquon Johnson, and others into the lineup – all of that and more, while struggling with the extraordinary events of the 2022 season. The Bills were central to or lived through three national news stories: the Topps murders, the blizzard, and Damar Hamlin. Those events were, at the least, big distractions, and more likely difficult and draining once-in-a-lifetime emotional challenges. And they lived through Kim Pegula’s health issues and the death of Dawson Knox’s brother. On field, what went wrong? Plenty, I’m sure. Josh Allen didn’t have an MVP season. Teams figured out how to slow down the Bills’ offense and how to attack their defense, and the coaches didn’t implement strategies and tactics to counter what opponents were doing. Losing Micah Hyde for almost the entire season was a major blow; he more than anyone else is key to the Bills’ defensive scheme. Losing Von Miller for the late-season and playoff run hurt the pass rush, as did the failure of Greg Rousseau, Ed Oliver, and others to develop as defensive threats on their own. The offensive line was not nearly effective enough. If I had to point to one factor in the Bills’ playoff loss to the Bengals, I’d say “pass rush.” The real difference in the game was that Joe Burrows regularly had time to throw, and Josh Allen didn’t. One play stands out for me: I believe it was Allen’s incomplete pass deep to Diggs up the left side on third and four, the Bills’ first possession of the game. Allen was flushed out of the pocket to the right, found Diggs, and threw. Diggs was open, but Allen threw the flat deep ball that we saw a lot from him in his early years. He had plenty of room to throw to open space toward the middle of the field, and Diggs could easily have adjusted to get there. The right throw would have been completed for a big gain or possibly a touchdown. Allen didn’t have time, and when QBs don’t have time they rush their throws. Under Sean McDermott, the Bills are enjoying great success. There is no reason to complain about him or his abilities, not yet. Ten, thirteen, eleven, and thirteen wins in the past four seasons, four and five in the playoffs. Andy Reid won his first conference championship game in his sixth year and didn’t win another one until more than ten years later. Zac Taylor has already lost a Super Bowl and a Conference Championship game. Sean McVay is looking more lucky than good. Kyle Shanahan doesn’t have a Lombardi. The sports news media, particularly one Associated Press article after the Bengals game, made a big deal about the Bills going “all in” to win the Super Bowl this season. That’s simply wrong. Brandon Beane and Sean McDermott have always been very clear that their objective is sustained, long-term success. The Rams went went “all in” last season, trading for Von Miller in his free agent season, signing Odell Beckham, and it paid off for them. Then they collapsed. The Bills signed Miller to a six-year deal, with the likelihood that he’ll play at least three. The Bills made no short-term plays to win it all this season. The Bills have become a dominant team in the NFL, a team that should be in the mix to win the Super Bowl for years to come. It didn’t happen in the 2022 season, and that’s disappointing, but it’s easy to see that things simply didn’t fall together the right way this season. Now, they’re in the process of building for next season.