SoTier

We should be good with this NOT being the worse season the Bills ever had? I got news for you, dude, I've been watching this team for well over 50 years, and this one rivals those 1-13 and 2-14 squads from the pre-Polian era in how uncompetitive with the rest of the NFL it is. Before the season started, I said they'd go 3-13 in the prediction thread. I may have been hasty in my judgement.

Two years into this supposed "rebuild", there are so many holes on this team that there will not be enough talent available in FA and the draft to fill all the holes even if the Bills could snap up every FA to hit the market and had all the picks in the first 3 rounds of the entire draft. They need virtually an entire offense. Who is at least NFL caliber on the unit? Allen, simply by virtue of the Bills investment in him. Dawkins. Jones. Clay and McCoy if the Bills keep them. Ivory. Groy and -- I hate to say this -- Ducasse as strickly backups. Maybe Miller is salvageable if he had better coaching, which is unlikely if McDermott remains HC. The defense is better but it's living on borrowed time as it's old with 2 35-year-olds (Williams and Alexander) and a 30-year-old on the DL for starters. The safeties are decent, and White is good at CB. Edmunds and Howard are promising but they're rookies who can continue to develop -- or not. Milano looks like the only other half way decent defensive player besides White to come out of the 2017 draft. This roster doesn't resemble a "rebuild" so much as a dumpster fire. McDermott is great at dismantling an NFL team but he's clueless about how to rebuild it. He needs to go ... as does his henchman Beane.

The GM being in charge of the personnel decisions and the HC having input on personnel but not control of who stays or gets shipped out is probably the most common organizational model in the NFL because it works better than other models. A few successful HCs, most notably Belichick and Reid, have personnel control but they didn't get that control from the get-go. They earned that power because of their success over their careers (Belichick relied on Scott Pioli to acquire NE talent early in his tenure in NE). Giving neophyte HCs like McDermott or HCs with mediocre credentials like Jauron or Gruden personnel control is a prescription for failure.

Why? So he can go 0-16 in 2019? So he and Beane can insure that Josh Allen busts because he has crappy coaching and no offensive support????

Some of it's arrogance, especially when successful collegiate HCs like Nick Saban and Chip Kelly come to the NFL and think they can re-create their collegiate successes based on recruiting exactly the players that fit their plans. They fail miserably because of the limitations of player contracts and the salary cap as well as the fact that NFL players are no longer green eighteen-year-olds who don't dare question "Coach". Other coaches are convinced that they have the "real answer" to being a winner, and in order to do that they have to "clean house" of all the current players who don't fit their vision of how a model football player should be. They are perfectly willing to sacrifice talent for "character" or "attitude" or "buying into the process" or whatever nonsense they want to spout to hide the fact that they are seriously lacking in personnel management skills. Basically, these guys can't deal with disparate personalities and/or are intolerant of alternative/opposing opinions; they're "my way or the highway" guys. Both McDermott and Gruden are this type of HC IMO, and they're both going down in flames because of the limitations of the NFL salary cap. Teams simply cannot afford to shed talented players simply because the HC can't deal with players who don't fit the HC's narrow criteria for "his kind of player". I'm not talking about players with off-field issues that may affect their on-field play. I'm talking about players who just have attitudes or beliefs or temperaments that the HC doesn't find acceptable. Managing disparate personalities is a fundamental part of being an NFL HC in the 21st century, and HCs who can't do it, fail miserably. Perennial successful NFL HCs are notable for tolerating players with lots of different perspectives and molding them into winning teams. Think Belichick, Reid, Carroll, Tomlin, and Harbaugh. Whoopty - doo. HOF credential for sure.

Dak wasn't a first rounder. He lasted until the fourth IIRC.

They made roster moves in order to improve the talent at those positions. "Gutting the roster" means that current players are cut and replaced with lesser players instead of better ones. What positions did the Bills actually improve other than CB and S? Certainly not WR or OL

Poor baby. If you don't like what posters are writing, you can always put them on "Ignore" ...

Keep making excuses for McDermott.

Chuck Knox coached the 1981 Bills to the playoffs. Mike Ditka coached the 1985 Bears to a Lombardi. Bill Parcells coached the Giants to a win over the Bills in the 1991 Super Bowl. All these "successful" HCs supposedly without great QBs had their success 2 or 3 or more decades ago.

Are you serious? How, exactly, are KC and Philly examples of "the plan"??? Both of those teams are offensive powerhouses embracing offensive innovation not trying to resurrect the 1980s. This is 2018 not 1981, 1985 or 1991. McVay didn't gut the Rams in order to bring in "his guys". He built on the talented players already on the Rams on both sides of the ball even if his experience came from the offensive side. He wouldn't have gutted the Bills offense just because they played for his predecessor. He'd have hired first rate coordinators, too: DC Wade Phillips, OC Ken Whisenhunt, STC: Jim Fassel.

Yes, I would. The Bills offense in 2016 was about the best it had been since 1999, and played well for Lynn when it struggled under Ryan's original OC, Greg Roman.

Anthony Lynn wanted to be the Bills HC permanently. Instead, he went West to the Chargers. He coached the Chargers to 9-7 and missed the playoffs last season on tie-breakers, and has the Bolts at 5-2 this season. I guess he wasn't committed enough to "The Process" to suit the Pegulas.

Except that Goff hardly looked all that great as a rookie so there was a real question about whether he was a massive bust. Wentz was the only one of the 2016 first round QBs who truly looked promising after his rookie campaign.

Are you serious? Actions speak much louder than words, and in the first half of the season opener against Baltimore, the Bills played so poorly on offense that McDermott started Allen in the second half but you can pretend that that wasn't a clear message of how the team felt about Peterman if you want.

I see them all on the channel guide and when I click on any of them, I see the game. I'm in Jamestown.

McDermott is in charge of personnel. He reports to the Pegulas, as does Beane, but McDermott makes the personnel decisions, and Beane simply sees to it. It's similar to the way that the Bills have operated since 2006 when Russ Brandon took over the team. Levy was a figurehead GM in Jauron's first two years, then Jauron ran the team until 2009 when Buddy Nix came in to oversee scouting apparently. Nix had a more traditional GM role as he hired Chan Gailey but Gailey was more interested in coaching than selecting personnel. In 2013, Whaley became GM with shared personnel responsibility with the HC. It lead to issues with Marrone, and may have led to some issues with Ryan. The Pegulas changed the situation when they fired Whaley and turned personnel responsibility over to McDermott with Beane being the guy who works out the details. Beane also has limited, if any, player personnel experience. His role in personnel in Carolina was similar to that of your company's HR director rather than player evaluation.

When do you think that will happen? I'm not optimistic that it will happen any time soon because McDermott doesn't value offense, and he's in charge of personnel decisions. More distressing is that in the last two drafts, the Bills have seemed to fixate on particular prospects and be willing to give up too much to get those particular players. In 2017 and 2018 the Bills got relatively little for the draft capital that they had because they traded up several times. The success of high draft picks (rounds 1-3) is too iffy too often to make trading up frequently a good strategy. Yes. I think he was maybe the second QB taken in 2003 behind Carson Palmer. Lots of Bills fans wanted him, too.

^^^ Isn't part of the OC's job to evaluate the talent available to his offense? How can an experienced offensive coordinator NOT recognize that Nate Peterman's very serious physical limitations make him a questionable backup for even the most experienced, durable QB playing behind a great OL, much less for a team without even a solid OL, a non-NFL caliber WR corps, and an anemic running game? How can a competent OC name Peterman the starter at the beginning of the season when his teammates are not behind him? How could Daboll not "feel" that the team wasn't behind Peterson despite his supposedly good preseason showing? If Daboll is responsible for these decisions, then he's incompetent to be a NFL OC. If Daboll's opinion on offensive players' talent and likelihood for success is being trumped by McDermott or somebody else in the Bills FO, this team is so dysfunctional that bringing in another OC -- if anyone would be desperate enough to take the position -- would be useless. Excuse me, but the lack of NFL caliber players on the OL and in the WR corps is NOT something that McDermott and Beane inherited. They made the decisions that resulted in the hot mess they have in both units. They gutted the competent WR corps (Watkins, Woods, Goodwin) they inherited in 2017 and replaced them with trash. The OL wasn't great in 2017, and then they lost Wood and Incognito to retirement, and replaced them with career backups and bottom-feeder FAs. Then they traded away Glenn. That was all before the draft -- a draft that after taking Allen at #7, they didn't bother to draft another offensive player until almost the end of the fifth round despite the desperate need for improvement on the offensive side. No team can expect to build a decent offense using primarily sixth and seventh round and UDFA OLers and WRs.

Who's saying that the Colts are going to blow the Bills out except possibly the Las Vegas bookmakers? Most don't think the Bills can score many points, so all Indy has to do is score one more.

Right. We all know that media professionals in general don't bother to prepare for their jobs, especially former NFL players.

Unlike many Bills fans, especially the homers, the "experts" watch numerous NFL games every week so they have a good idea of how futile the Bills are on offense ... even before they had to start their QB du jour.

Maybe McDermott "had a good blue print" for the 1970s or 1980s but this is 2018, and his philosophy of great defense, strong special teams, and a conservative, run heavy run game with limited passing simply isn't sustainable. Teams that want to win consistently have to be able to score more than 1 offensive TD a game. As for McDermott's supposedly "Super Bowl caliber" defense, that's hyperbole. The D is good enough to win against limited offensive teams but not against great ones, shown by the Bills got their clocks cleaned by the three of the four good/great offensive teams they played. Ummm ... the Rams canned the coaching staff that ended up "DEAD LAST in virtually every offensive category", and Goff was hardly "the WORST quarterback in the league". More importantly, the Rams GM Les Snead makes the personnel decisions, including hiring the HC, not the backassward way the Bills do things with the HC answering to the owners and the GM subservient to the HC, so there's not much to compare between the Rams and Bills.

John Elway is absolutely NOT any kind of "proof" that Allen can be an effective NFL QB despite his inaccuracy. Elway was drafted 35 years ago. If he had been drafted 30 years later (2013 rather than 1983), you can bet your last $ that his completion percentage would have been significantly higher (consistently in the 60s).

Seriously dude, after the Bills play the Colts, they face NE, Chicago, the Jets, and Jacksonville. Even if you allow them a fighting chance against the Jets (I wouldn't at this point but it's the most likely), Derek Anderson is never going to develop a "hot hand" against the Pats, the Bears, and the Jags. Not happening.