SCBills

Bills have been really high on Smoot. Hopefully we can get him back against his former team next Monday Night and have a legit 4 man rotation on the edge. A lot of us were hoping to get 75% of Von pre-injury… He’s looking more and more like we may get at least 90%. I found myself watching him off the edge like I did that short stint when we first got him.. Legitimately thinking he can smoke the Tackle every time.

Checking X and a lot of people around the Chiefs think he won’t play this year at all.

I think the Bills should just stock up on fast/athletic linebackers and developmental corners every draft. Day 2 & Day 3 type picks. I think they have a specific prototype and if you fit that, they can coach you up to be successful. Spector is a great fit for this defense and I think he’s going to play well. Only issue with him is staying healthy. (Shocker) *That Bernard picture is extremely uplifting.. hopefully he’s only out a few weeks.

Agree - The strength of this Defense, given the injuries, is very clearly top tier cornerback play and a strong defensive line. Just have to make it work at linebacker and safety. Would love to see if Bishop can push for a bigger role during this semi-bye.

Bills Conerbacks: Douglas Benford Ingram Elam Johnson Lewis Legitimately two deep at each position If/when we get our Safety situation sorted out, this Secondary could be something else. Hamlin & Rapp look solid through two games, we know Edwards is a dependable player from his time in KC and Bishop showed off some serious athleticism at the end of the game breaking up that corner end zone pass.

The thing with Cook has always been that he has WR skills as a RB. In the CMC, Kamara mold. He’s starting to show that.. Thats the type of RB that you, at least, give thought to extending. Especially given he barely had any usage in college. Im not saying we should.. but if he keeps this up, you’ve got to think about it.

Cam Lewis making it so the coaches need to figure out a way to keep him on the field.

Some of it is bad luck.. Also, you can get really talented linebackers in RD3 & RD5 for a myriad of reasons… The position is devalued and the player is raw (Dorian Williams). Or.. because they’re undersized (Terrel Bernard & Matt Milano) Undersized players are always going to be a bigger injury risk. Taron Johnson falls into that category as well. If the Bills want to keep going this route with the Defense, they’d be wise to draft a mid-round linebacker, like they do Day 3 corners, every year. Keep a deep stable of young guys ready to fill in. I thought Williams & Spector looked really good out there. Problem now is, who’s behind them. The other injuries just happen.. it is what it is. Daquan, Von, Rousseau in past years. We don’t even typically play heavy usage on the DL.

This is exactly what I thought.. going to have both Bernard & Milano coming back with two games left in the season. (hopefully Bernard’s isn’t that severe, but we’re also the Bills and he plays defense, so….)

These first down runs have got to stop.

Schopp & the Bulldog actually making a great point right now.. Vivid Seats estimates 44% of tickets sold to Bills fans based on zip code analysis. Given how many Bills fans live in driving distance, Bills fans should easily be the majority in that stadium tonight.

I actually don’t think his “eating the cats” comments were crazy anymore. I don’t know if he meant for it to be a 4D chess move, because I’m not willing to give him that much credit.. but it’s working out that way. Normies now are hearing about a small town of 60k in Ohio that had 20k Haitian migrants dumped on it and if you look it up there’s stories from citizens all over of pets missing, ducks being taken and a decapitated pigs head in a park. It’s in the mainstream consciousness now. Run of the mill illegal migrant rhetoric wouldn’t have done what those comments did.

Trump may have sounded unhinged talking about “they’re eating their pets”, but he injected this story into the mainstream consciousness.. Even has Marianne Williamson backing him up on it today..

Eh.. you underestimate how much he resonates with a certain segment of young people. We’re a Kamala Harris Presidency away from young people potentially driving the far right movement like we’re seeing in Nordic countries. (If she continues the economic & border policies that we’ve had for 3 years). Keep your eyes on fraternities and sororities around the country… they no longer care about being openly known conservative.

Agreed. It’s basically a football game for people who care about politics. You root for Kamala. I root for Trump. We both watched the debate. Trump kept fumbling and missing opportunities to score. Harris didn’t do much, but was able to capitalize on Trump’s mistakes and home field advantage. Kamala wins. Nothing changes. We all move on. We’re far too polarized of a society for these debates to mean a ton anymore. The only people who matter are the sliver of undecideds in seven states. That’s it. The rest of us.. it’s just about getting us excited about our team.

Conventional wisdom doesn’t matter with Trump. It’s insane. We watch a debate, think he lost. Nobody cares. Focus groups show people leaning more to him now after that. His clips dominate social media. The viral Gen Z TikTok trend right now is people dancing to an EDM edit of “they’re eating the cats” and making jokes about Haitian migrants in Springfield.

I know it’s not a must win for the season, but in terms of my outlook for the season… a win would make me view us as a legit contender, whereas currently .. I’m just not sure yet.

It’s not even so much being a role model.. Its that, despite the lavish lifestyle, more women than not now relate to a 34 year old woman who’s never been married, has no kids and thinks every man she’s dated in the past is toxic. I don’t dislike her. And this isn’t meant as a dig.. But her fanbase isn’t just 13 year olds, she’s huge with 20, 30, 40 something year old women .. and just an honest fact, they identify with her because in their romantic lives.. they are her.

We’re two days out. There’s a Trafalgar poll showing no movement post-debate but I highly doubt you care about that one ha. All we know so far if that general consensus amongst commentators is that she won. I agree. Focus groups don’t show that translating to winning them over. Some focus groups have 6/10 undecided now Harris and some have 6/10 undecided now Trump. We do know from those focus groups that a big issue is that they still don’t know who she is or where she stands on the issues. And we know the Harris camp wants another debate, whereas the Trump camp does not. I certainly thought it would be the other way around after Tuesday Night. And we know from reporting that Harris advisers have privately told her she needs to establish herself more on the big issues, namely the economy and border, where undecided still, post-debate, trust Trump more. Which lines us with public focus groups.. and we know both campaigns also have private focus groups as well. Maybe polling comes out next week and the debate made a difference. Maybe not. We don’t know yet. All we can do is read the current tea leaves.

Taylor Swift’s endorsement was always coming. It was just a matter of when. She’ll register, maybe, a million new voters when all is said and done, of which maybe half will actually vote when the time comes. If I’m a Dem, I’m leaning on her and her PR team to put pressure on Kelce and his PR team to publicly endorse. I don’t know that it moves the needle with the male vote they have all but conceded (pun intended) .. but it’s a better shot at doing so (pun again intended) than trying to pitch us Tim Walz goofball self. It’s a risk for Kelce.. but he did the Pfizer ad, knowing he’d get mocked for it. I think there’s a chance he does endorse Harris. He’s also had some right wing “likes” and comments in the past, so I have no clue what his politics are, but I think he would endorse her if the PR teams involved deemed it helpful in his post-playing career.

Ok, anyway… It’s not moving the goalposts to analyze how undecided and/or persuadable voters digested the debate. I think Kamala won the debate. She was more prepared, kept Trump on defense and had rhetorical sidesteps ready for everything that came her way. I think she did everything she set out to do in that debate. I think she’s hoping that being a candidate who can’t be pinned down on any of the big issues is enough against a candidate a lot of people may have been looking for a reason in that debate to not vote for. But it doesn’t seem like that worked. There is a disconnect between stylistically winning a debate and winning over voters. The persuadable voters in this election very clearly needed to hear what she stands for. Many of them admit that life was better under Trump, but he’s Trump, so give me a reason to vote for you… And she didn’t. Dont get mad at me.. Her own advisers, days after the debate, are telling her she needs to debate again and get out front on the issues. If they felt her strategy worked, this wouldn’t be their advice.

What did she say to win over undecided voters? That seems to be the growing question coming out of the debate as focus groups don’t seem to match general consensus that she won the debate, therefore she won over voters. Everyone knows who, and what, Trump is. Trump fighting with Kamala and both moderators all night, going off about very online stories of Haitians eating pets and talking about mafia tactics against the Taliban is who he is. Optics-wise, Kamala controlled the debate, but what she didn’t do was tell anyone who she is and/or what she stands for. Trump doesn’t need to do that, we all know. She does. And she didn’t. Also, the moderators were way too over the top and due to that, we’re now seeing a Streisand Effect where research on the Haitian pet stories, research on late term abortion etc are skyrocketing in google searches and social media shares. Trump’s clips are the ones being shared on IG, X and TikTok. Kamala had a polished, corporate speak night, which seems to be fading into obscurity. Nobody remembers anything about her night, because she said nothing. My snap reaction was that Trump was a disaster.. but that doesn’t seem to be reflected anywhere outside the political class, in real America.