SoTier

This isn't 1989 ... in case you didn't notice. The Cowboys essentially traded the #1 overall pick in 1990 (they crapped the bed again) for the opportunity to draft another QB at the end of the 1989 draft who ended up a career backup, who in a 10 year career, was active for all of 80 games, threw 40 TDs and 50 INTs. How, exactly, is this a move to emulate???? With the salary cap, no team can realistically afford to use so much cap space on 2 unproven first round QBs from the same draft class for "insurance". How do you know that "Rosen is cheap"? Except for speculation by media sports mavens, there's no indication that Rosen is even on the market.

Please don't feel guilty if you decide to put your dog down if they can't figure out what's wrong with her in short order. IMO, if a dog is suffering, it's better to put him/her down too soon than to let him linger. On Feb 17, my 11 year old Standard Poodle began vomiting and couldn't keep down even water. I took him to the emergency pet clinic 50 miles away. They thought it was pancreatitis because he had had a bout with that about 5 years ago. They kept him overnight but he didn't respond as well as they had expected, but I took him to my own vet as per their instructions where he was to stay at least for several hours. When I visited him that afternoon, he still wasn't doing well and was refusing to eat. I was torn between giving up then and putting him down or waiting another day in hopes he would improve. I waited another 24 hours, but his condition significantly deteriorated. When I finally decided to put him down, I don't think he knew I was there with him. I should have gone with my gut feeling and put him down on the day I brought him back to Jamestown so he would Known that I was there for him. I will always wonder if he felt abandoned at the vet, and the stress from that contributed to his worsening condition ...

Arguing over which stats, especially rookie stats, are "important" indicators of future performance is simply silly. All that really matters is whether Allen improves his passing game, both his mechanics and his decision making, as he gains experience. As a rookie, he wasn't very good as an NFL QB. Neither was Wentz. Wentz significantly improved in his second year. He had more modest improvement in his third year as a starter, but whether that means he's reached his plateau -- as all QBs do at some point -- remains to be seen. If Allen improves his game as a sophomore, then he's still on a trajectory to be a franchise QB. If he only improves somewhat but then stalls, that will be cause for serious concern. Sometimes, as Wentz shows, injuries and team issues may limit a QB's development, but it usually takes a young QB two or three seasons (including being the #1 QB in training camp) to realize his potential. Allen's rookie stats are largely irrelevant now that he's coming into his second year. He's not competing against only the other 2018 QBs or just against other recently drafted first round QBs. He's competing against all the QBs in the NFL, including Brady, Rodgers, Brees, Luck, Wilson et al, and the reason why those QBs are considered "great" is how important they've been -- and are -- to their teams' ability to win lots of football games. How Allen's play translates into Bills' wins in the future is what will determine if he's considered a bust, a disappointment or a success, not arguing over rookie stats or the relevance of this particular stat over that one as some kind of predictor of future success.

True. Maybe, maybe not. If Allen busts badly as Paxton Lynch did, that's a problem for both McDermott and Beane. If Allen only turns out to be mediocre, Beane will probably outlast McDermott for a while. I think everything for both depends upon Allen. Since McDermott now has "his" players, he has no excuses. If the Bills don't win more than 6 games in 2019, he'll be on the hot seat in 2020. I agree with this post pretty much until your last sentence. I don't think that Pegula is particularly committed to winning in either the NFL or the NHL. That he not only kept Russ Brandon but promoted him to be head of both the football and hockey organizations says that profit counts for more than winning. Brandon was promoted despite heading up a football organization that went 82-110 with only 2 winning seasons out of 12, although the Bills were a very profitable business for the Wilson family during that time. Furthermore, Brandon was fired because of issues unrelated to the performance of either the Bills or the Sabres.

I don't think that Stafford has ever been the real problem in Detroit. Like the Bills, the Lions' FO can't seem to "put it all together" very often. Stafford is significantly better than either Tannehill or Cutler, just not nearly as good as Luck or Brady.

Apples to apples. Football coaches, like engineers and most other professionals, specialize in specific disciplines within their field. The Bills needed a QB specialist for their new QB who had significant need of one, but instead they hired a WR specialist who had no professional QB coaching experience in 30 years. You can spin that any way you want but it doesn't change the facts of the matter.

The problem with this idea is that it would subvert the salary cap and increase the inequality that the salary cap was instituted to limit.

So, because a structural engineer and a software engineer are both engineers, you'd applaud a bank exec who hired a structural engineer to design his bank's computer security system because if the structural engineer can design bridges that don't collapse, he should be able to design computer systems that can't be hacked? After all, the structural engineer did write a pretty sweet computer security system for his computer security class back in his college days thirty years ago.

Culley wasn't necessarily incompetent but he was certainly unqualified for the job the Bills gave him based on his experience. He was a WR coach not a QB coach. Case closed. He should not have been hired as a QB in the first place, and that McDermott and Beane hired him for that position raises serious questions about their competence to do their jobs. Even if McDermott had fired Culley, he and Beane don't get brownie points for finally figuring out that the unqualified guy they hired couldn't do his job very well. They also don't get applause for thinking a barely competent backup QB and an incompetent backup QB could help Culley do his job -- or help Allen, either. It's a possibility that Culley left before he could be fired. He may have realized he was in over his head and looked for a position that actually fit his skill set.

The map also seriously under represents urban populations because it maxes out at a population density of 90 people per square mile. Counties containing large cities or close to large cities frequently have population densities of 10 times or more of that population density. My county, Chautauqua is predominantly rural but in 2010 it had a population density of about 100/square mile. Nearby Erie County which contains Buffalo and most of its suburbs had a population of more than 900/square mile but both have the same value color (90 or more/density) on the map. If you watch the map carefully in its later decades (from1920-2010) in the area of the Great Plains, you can see the populations of some counties fall as the population on the high plains fell because of the major changes in agriculture resulted in much larger farms/ranches worked by many fewer people using much more machinery.

Excellent post. Local governments in smaller municipalities are actually made up of your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who choose to get involved in/work for the local municipality. I live in a small city (30,000) in a predominantly rural county (120,000). A current county legislator is the spouse of one of my best friends. A former county legislator and the former long-time president of the city council were among my co-workers. The current county executive brings his dogs to the local dog park. Another friend of mine lives around the corner from the mayor who stops to chat with her if he's walking in the area and she's doing yard work.

Western New York -- the area west of the Genessee River -- wasn't opened to settlement until 1800. New York State gained control of the area from the Senecas and confined them to reservations in Niagara County, in what is now South Buffalo and West Seneca, and in Cattaraugus County near the Cattaraugus Creek and the Allegany River after the Revolution and sold the area to a Dutch company, the Holland Land Company, in the 1790s. Joseph Ellicott, head surveyor for the Holland Land Company, and his crew had to survey the entire area before it could be sold to individual buyers, which started around 1800-1801. Virtually all land titles west of the Genessee River, with the possible of lands that were originally part of the Seneca reservations, begin with ownership by the Holland Land Company property and are based on Ellicott's survey. In an era where water was the fastest and cheapest mode of transportation, the Mohawk River formed a water highway into the interior of the western part of the state to around Rome or Utica. These areas were already frontier areas during the American Revolution when the Senecas were still using western New York as their tribal hunting perserve. The Erie Canal took 8 years to build (1817-1825), and it was built from east to west (unlike the first transcontinental railroad which was built from the east and from the west simultaneously). Population started increasing along the canal as soon as it was operational, so the areas further east that were along the earlier parts of the canal began growing from 1817 while Buffalo wouldn't benefit from it until 1825. Building the series of locks to get up and down the escarpment at Lockport stalled the canal building for a couple of years. The complete finishing of the canal was also somewhat delayed by the struggle between Buffalo and Black Rock over where the terminus of the canal would be. Buffalo won the battle because the city fathers built the breakwall along the east shore of the Niagara River so that canal boats could avoid the currents of the Niagara River and make port in Buffalo in the Erie Basin. Buffalo's population expansion only began in the late 1820s because it took the canal so long to get to Lake Erie. The influx of people into Buffalo increased the local population from the first, but it wasn't until after the development of the croplands of the Midwest established Buffalo as the first major transshipment center in North America caused the city's population to soar. In the 1830s, the lake plains south of Lake Ontario was known as "the breadbasket of the US' because of all the wheat grown there. As new lands opened up in the Midwest, "the breadbasket" also moved west. The growth of railroads in the 1840s and 1850s enabled that western grain to be shipped the Great Lakes and then to Buffalo. In 1842, Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar built the first steam powered grain elevator in Buffalo to unload grain from ships and store it, which gave Buffalo a decided advantage over any other possible rival. Much of Buffalo's post-Civil War growth began during the Civil War with the rise of large scale manufacturing to supply war materiel for the Union armies. Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago as well as numerous interior cities in the Northeast and Great Lakes area all benefited from war industries. If you've ever visited what the author you quoted called "the passed over" district, you understand why it was passed over. This area includes the cold, bleak area of the Tug Hill Plateau where the climate is unfavorable for farming and the western slopes of the Adirondaks which is heavily littered with protruding bedrock shelves as well as lots and lots of rocks which also made farming difficult. Farmers would have by passed this area for the better lands to the south and west. Mark Goldman has written several books on Buffalo, all of them very good. There are a lot of reasons for Buffalo's economic decline, some of them inevitable because of external forces like the decline of the shipping/railroad industry and the steel industry but others due to the short-sightedness and conservative -- and sometimes reactionary -- mindset of Buffalo's business and political "leaders".

That's not necessarily true. Most local governments actually do care about providing services for the locals but they have lots of competing agendas and have to balance them. Not everybody in the municipality has children or grandchildren who play soccer, so they probably welcome the rental income to off-set some of the park maintenance costs which might be a significant expenditure in smaller communities. Moreover, the municipality didn't rent out the soccer fields for every day, only two. There are still three week days and both week end days available for free practices. My guess is that the local government officials didn't think that would an onerous burden on the kids soccer teams that used the fields for free. The OP can take this issue to the next city/town council/board meeting but I think that he/she may not be successful because many people will see this as one group being unwilling to share public facilities just because they've used them in the past. I can't disagree with that view.

Apparently unlike yourself, I'm sick of the losing, and nothing that McDermott or Beane have done so far make me believe that this Bills regime is significantly better than the ones before them. It's not MY problem that you don't approve of my views.

What's really sad is that the Bills have only had 3 winning seasons in the last 19 and only made the playoffs once in that entire time.

Apparently, everybody is accountable except for McDermott and Beane -- y'know, the guys who hire assistant coaches and make decisions on players.

The troubling part is that McDermott hired Culley to be the QB coach in the first place. Culley had absolutely no experience coaching QBs on the pro level and only a year as a QB coach at a modest collegiate program (SW Louisiana I think) thirty years ago. Position coaches are responsible for helping players master the fundamentals of the position, so they NEED to know how to play the position and teach others how to play it. How could anybody consider Culley to be qualified to be an NFL QB coach, especially for a raw first round QB in more than usual desperate need of coaching? I complained about this last season, and as far as I'm concerned, it raises serious questions about McDermott's competence as a HC. A good HC hires good assistants, and McDermott's failed 4 times already in just 2 seasons: OC Rick Dennison, STC Danny Crossman, OL coach Juan Castillo, and QB coach David Culley. As for Peterman and/or McCarron "mentoring" Allen or not, this is just bull manure. First off, it's NOT the job of backup QBs to be coaching assistants to the QB coach. Second, neither Peterman nor McCarron has enough experience to mentor anybody! If they were to be starters, they would NEED mentoring almost as much as Allen. If the Bills wanted somebody to mentor Allen, they should have kept Taylor, but the whole idea of expecting a player to be a mentor another player is simply stupid. It can happen in the right circumstances where the two players "hit it off", but there is no guarantee it will.

Nobody is going to trade for Ducasse or Bodine. ROTFLMAO! The Beane/McDermott regime resembles the wonderful duo of Brandon/Jauron from 2006-2009 far more than Polian/Levy. The "breath of fresh air" will come when the Bills start winning 9 or more games in a single season more than once or twice a decade. Until McDermott and Beane produce a team that can do that, they are not any better than their predecessors. You may be happy with winning the off-season/pre-season but the last time I looked regular season and playoff wins are generally considered the measures of success or failure of any regime. Well, don't hold your breath waiting for this winning to happen ... the Sabres haven't sniffed the playoffs since the first year Pegula owned the team -- before Pegula had a chance to put his losing touch on the team.

If Arizona really is trying to move Rosen, that's exactly what they're saying to the rest of the NFL: we think he's a bust. What team is going to trade for a bust with a high price tag (ie, first round QB even on a rookie contract)? They can find lots of busts all on their own who cost much less.

t Yeah, blame Crossman for not being able to turn crap into gold and fire his ass. McBeane did the same with Castillo the OL coach. McBeane seem to be really good at using scapegoats to disguise their own shortcomings in evaluating personnel.

The STs were brutal because the overall talent on the team was so poor, particularly on the offensive side. STers are rarely starters on either side of the ball. A team that doesn't have a lot of quality starters seldom has good STs.

How rational is it to attempt to field an offense without a single WR without enough speed to stretch the field, which was the Bills WR corps in both 2017 and most of 2018 until Robert Foster got a chance to play? How rational is it to replace a better than average center, a Pro Bowl left guard, and a better than average left tackle with bottom feeder centers and guards and an inexperienced left tackle and expect to get decent offensive performance from them? How rational is it to draft a blue chip QB prospect and expect him to perform without decent protection and decent WRs? How rational is it to keep Nathan Peterman on the roster as even a backup QB when it had to be clear that he simply couldn't do the job? How rational is it to have waited around for a month waiting for Derek Anderson to finish his golf tourney while keeping Peterman as Allen's backup? At best McDermott and Beane spent two seasons doing OTJ training. Maybe they've learned enough to have success but I'll believe that when they actually have success.

Of course there's really been a change. The Bills already have most of their "camp fodder" among the holdovers from last year's roster, most notably on offense.

Just because Arizona wants to get rid of Rosen -- and I'm not convinced that that's actually true -- that doesn't mean that any NFL team will give anything for him or be willing to take on his salary when experienced back ups who can impersonate competent NFL QBs for at least a few games (Barkley, Fitzpatrick, Griffin, Tannehill, Taylor) can be had for less. Rosen is NOT a Jimmy Garoppolo who had 3 or 4 years of experience as a backup with a handful of starts in which he looked pretty good sitting behind an established future HOFer. He's a former first round pick who had an unimpressive rookie season on a terrible team.

My view is that the Bills are signing so many FAs this off season because the current team is virtually devoid of offensive talent and needs immediate upgrading if Allen is going to have any chance to develop into a good NFL QB. If Allen busts, McDermott and Beane are history, so they have to do everything they can to put significantly better pieces around him ASAP so they can't afford to wait 2 or 3 years for rookies to develop. Most of the Bills extra draft picks are Day 3 picks IIRC which are far more likely to not make the team anyway. More importantly, I expect that several of the Bills current players, including possibly some who are currently penciled in as starters, won't make the 2019 final roster. It's also possible that not all of the FA signees stick. I think that another poster in a thread last week described the Bills' FA signings as Beane throwing crap at a wall and seeing what sticks, which may be a good analogy. Since this regime has shown a propensity to trade up for certain players, I would not be surprised if they did so again but I think that's not because they signed a bunch of FAs to fill their needs but because they decide they have to have Player X whatever the cost.