BigDingus

Your assessment is spot on. Can't even get sacks in a preseason game. Still can't get off the field on 3rd down. I know it's preseason, but I'm just more interested in bolstering the offense at this point. McDermott's D will never be great.

At least the Bengals are trying something different. Bengals with Joe Burrow being 1-9 in the first 2 weeks of the season is more of a Zac Taylor stat than a Burrow stat. Something hasn't worked, so playing starters in the preseason shows they're trying not to start slow again. If it works, maybe they'll do it more in the future.

I still at home with the game pause for the first 30 minutes. I will be so stressed that I make myself sick. I will occasionally un-pause, skip ahead a bit & see who scored. If it's the Bills, I will rewind & watch the entire drive. If it's the opponents, I will walk around cursing & punching an effigy of Tom Brady. I will repeat this process over & over until the final minutes, to which I will stop watching entirely, get black-out drunk & pass out. Whenever I wake up, I will then squint at my phone (trying not to fully see, but also kinda see) just to check if I have a million texts or not. If I do, I'll know the Bills have won, go back & watch the full game, then spend the entire day reading articles, watching highlights & bragging online.

But can you still boof it? I mean, if you were so inclined to do so?

I'm a hypocrite, and I know it's a double-standard, but I think it's funny in an NFL game but disrespectful in a WNBA game. An NFL field is huge, the sidelines are huge, there's hundreds of coaches, players, crew, etc. surrounding the field. When something gets thrown onto the field, you can barely see it unless a camera man on the ground catches a glimpse (like the endzone one), and players can continue on with a high likelihood of missing it entirely. But in an NBA/WNBA game, fans are seated right up against the much smaller court. Players fall into spectators all the time. You can reach out & touch people on the bench. Anyone can throw something onto the middle of the court (if they wanted to). Cameras can't as easily avoid it since they're so zoomed in, and if it went further on the court, it's likely to stop play. The WNBA is also in a different position than the rest of the leagues. It's much younger, only now breaking out & building an audience, climbing up from the bottom and now working hard to gain respect & legitimacy. Fans could throw whatever onto an NFL field & people would just laugh mock the guy who did it (or not care at all). But throwing women's sex toys onto WNBA courts just invites a ton of jokes onto the league. I've already seen a ton. Whether it's fair or not, there's a different connotation surrounding it when the athletes are women vs when they're men.

Long time Brady hater, but I always respected & defended him when people would downplay his success. Everything he said here lines up exactly with what we saw on the field. People sometimes talked about him like he was just good with timing routes, but the reality was he knew where he wanted to go before snapping the ball. If that wasn't there, he knew exactly where everyone else was. His internal clock was nearly perfect too, and if a play took a bit too long to develop, he'd just get rid of the ball. He wasn't athletic enough to try & extend plays too long, but he sure knew how to move around in the pocket. What's most impressive to me is the fact he always maintained that same desire to win, regardless of how much success he had. Even when he already tied Joe Montana & Terry Bradshaw for most SB wins by a QB, something that wasn't supposed to be possible in the free agency era, he wasn't satisfied. Even when he was alone at the top of the record books with 5 SB wins, he went on to win another. In one QB generation he took the Pats from a 0 SB win franchise to tied with the Steelers for most all time. Then he won a 7th. Winning 5 or 6 rings was supposed to be an NBA thing & not possible in the NFL. That's why despite how much I hated him as an opponent, I'm still glad I got to watch him. Only wish we could've been the ones to face off with him in the Super Bowl when he went to Tampa Bay.

It's depressing. And just keep in mind there's more coming throughout the season... There always is. All you can do is hope it's not our best players, but each year, even some of them inevitably go down too. Then you have our best offensive weapon sitting out (which might help keep him healthy), combined with a limited cap that can really hurt our ability to get decent help to fill in for these guys. Sure would be nice if we could snag Terry McLaurin right about now.

Tre looked really bad last year, and he was healthy. It's probably a bit overly optimistic to expect him to be anywhere near Pro Bowl form after multiple season-ending injuries & now being 30. It would be amazing, and I hope he can stay healthy, but I'm not sure he'll be that good even if he is.

It's times like this that the whole "salary cap is fake" thing falls apart. Terry McLaruin & Micah Parsons both wanting a trade? Two positions we could definitely use help at? Unfortunately, I don't see how we could swing either one with the cap situation we're in now. We also need an established starting RB. Probably shouldn't trade the guy that was our primary weapon, biggest difference-maker on offense, and the guy who allowed us to finally have a run game & open up the offense for Allen to be much more efficient. Despite what fans say, RBs aren't a dime a dozen. We tried to find someone for years that could do what Cook has done, but because we don't want to pay him, everyone is ready to ship him off. Look what happened in the Chiefs game when we stopped going to Cook. Allen had the ball in his hands & got as many yards as his jersey number. He needs help, and going away from Cook hurt us. I don't think we should be so willing to move on.

You say that, yet against KC, we got the ball back in Josh's hands with 3:30 left + timeouts, and got nowhere... 2nd time in 2 years where the offense had an opportunity with the ball in Josh's hands. People talk about our offense like there's no room for major improvements, but that's just not true. Yes, our D has been bad in the playoffs, but why do we keep trusting McDermott to get his side of the ball right, despite his constant failure to do so, rather than giving our best player more support? Imagine how much better they'd be with more talent! They tried with Diggs, and he was instrumental in Josh's improvement, but he never was a game changer in those big playoff games. Meanwhile, people expect the "defensive-minded" HC who couldn't get his D to protect a lead for 13 seconds, who wasted numerous early picks on defensive players who haven't been relevant in the playoffs, who had All Pro players at both safety positions, LB & CB, to suddenly figure out with new players? Adding an unselfish & great all-around talent like Terry to THIS offense would be amazing. Dude is like the modern day Eric Moulds, only with even worse QB play up until last year.

Yes, that's the one! My heart sank reading that! https://x.com/ChristianSRauh/status/1950615822587900388?t=U_S-Os_aVaBECMuNg8yXXA&s=19 I had to look it up again, but it was the Circle the Wagons Podcast.

I just came to this board after seeing a Tweet saying it was confirmed he had an ACL tear. Thank God that turned out to not be true!

This is just more reason for why I'm all in on just bolstering the offense. The end result is always the same come playoff time. It's still McDermott's unit, everyone always gets hurt, and they give up 30+ ppg regardless of who we have back there. Even when we sign a ton of players in FA & spend most of our draft on the defense, they somehow end up in the same spot in January. Obviously, McDermott's coaching methods & scheme isn't injuring our players, I'm just not confident he knows how to identify key players that will change our fortunes, and injuries aren't helping.

Quarterback, just to groom & prep under Josh for the next 10 years. By the time he finally starts, he'll be grizzled veteran.

Because you'd think he'd be able to learn it in 3 years... Elam spent just as much time in Buffalo's system than he did in his last system, yet he couldn't figure it out. It's also not like the Bills don't ask DBs to play man coverage at all. He wasn't even good in that. Most players will have to adjust to new concepts when going from college to NFL, so if Elam's only way to succeed was by playing in an identical scheme as he played in college, then he was always bound to fail.

Pretty sure Door Dash also gives you a free subscription to HBO Max I think

HALLELUJAH!!!! I can't overstate how happy this makes me! They should also bring back the red endzones for games where they wear these helmets 😁

It may sound disrespectful, but in my mind, I'm acting like Bosa is barely even on the team & expecting nothing. I'm going into the season assuming someone else will take over soon enough, so whatever he does manage to give us will just be icing on the cake. I have zero expectations. We didn't have him last year, we probably won't have him for long this year, and he'll be gone by next year, so hopefully he's at least there for a meaningful stretch of games while he's healthy.

Aside from Benford, that was last year. Or at least, that was the most healthy a team can realistically expect to be at that point in the year. Pretty much everyone is dealing with injuries by January (we beat the Ravens by 2 points, and they were missing Zay Flowers), so last year seemed like our best shot. Our problem is McDermott's defense in general. It puts up very little resistance against good QBs come playoff time, each & every year. Their only saving grace is turnovers. Other than that, we aren't as clutch as the Chiefs. I know that's an abstract concept, but we had the ball in Josh's hands, with the game on the line, the last 2 losses to the Chiefs. Him & the offense couldn't get a 1st down & had to settle for a long FG 2 years ago, then last year we had 2 shots to take the lead, or at least get in FG range, but couldn't do that either.

It genuinely feels weird to leave Kyle Williams off the drought team, just because he made it to the playoffs 1 out of his 13 seasons. But that aside, I think the current Bills win just because better QB + better coaching staff, but if you removed even just McDermott & Brady, the drought team wins. The drought team's defense was good enough in individual seasons to hold prime Peyton Manning & Aaron Rodgers down, so I think they'd create a ton of pressure.

Imagine being those kids & having this opportunity taken away from you. That's what I feel is lost on this. You're already growing up in a low income area, probably struggling with plenty of things that no child should have to deal with, then along comes a former NFL player trying to give you a better opportunity & provide your team with resources that you'd previously never had any hope of accessing. Then it's all taken away because of some adults deciding "if everyone can't have nice things, YOU can't have nice things." Life can feel really unfair, especially when you're a kid. This won't help.

Agreed. In fact, that old Redskins logo & jersey is the reason I became the only Bills fan in my family of all Redskins fans. I was a little kid, and my first game was the Bills vs Redskins Super Bowl. I thought the maroon & "gold" with an Indian face looked so ugly, but the other team with the red helmets, blue unis, and charging buffalo logo looked so cool! I couldn't understand why my family was rooting for the ugly team, so I cheered for the other guys. My dad was just happy I was into football & that his team was winning. But then I just stuck with them. All because the Redskins looked ugly to me 😂

I don't think Bills fans can judge. We all know Josh is also a big boy.

Starting to feel Texas is going that way as well, mostly due to giant companies buying up all the houses to rent or for Airbnb.

Well deserved. Aside from Allen, he's been the best weapon on offense & the biggest reason for our success. I'll say it over & over again, he has more of an impact on the field than people like Groot, yet one gets paid significantly more than the other just based off position.