SoTier

I expected losses. I didn't expect ass-whippings every time out except when some opponent was in a trap game situation and didn't take the Bills seriously because of how badly they sucked in their previous outs. Can McDermott and Beane both, and their supposedly professional scouting staff, too.

Support was only "universal" for a "complete rebuild" in your own mind. Just because you jumped on the McDermott/Beane clownwagon from Day 1 and dismissed the opinions of many other fans who were skeptical or unsure about the current regime as being "stupid" or "negative" or "unrealistic" doesn't mean that they didn't exist. Get a clue. Not EVERYONE was on board with the BS that McDermott and Beane have been shoveling in the name of "planning for the future". Maybe you should check out the TSW threads on the Watson and Dareus trades. You'll find plenty of doubters in those threads, so don't even try to pretend that fan discontent with the McDermott/Beane clownshow is simply a response to the Bills being totally uncompetitive in 3 of their first 4 games, although there's that, too.

Stuff the "patience" bull manure where the sun don't shine. McDermott is a Jauron clone and Beane is his Stepandfetchit. If you think I want them gone, you're right and I make no bones about it. McDermott may be okay as a game coach, but his failure to select competent coordinators and assistants especially on offense, is making me think more and more that he's not up to being a HC. He and Beane are incompetent at team building as the sorry performances of the Bills so far this year attest, and giving those asshats control of player personnel has not only been a prescription for disaster, but it will doom the team going forward until they're both canned. The question is, how many more shut outs and blow outs will it take until Pegula pulls the plug on this clown show? It certainly can. The Bills went 9-7 in 2017 and finally managed a playoff appearance, and they seem destined for a 1 to 3 win season and a top 3 pick in 2018. McDermott/Beane spending "picks and dollars wisely" is a pipe dream. I can't wait to see how many picks they trade away and how much cap space they use on acquiring players who are then released or traded before the start of the regular season. If their "plan" is to build a defense first, then why did they waste so much talent and draft capital on a first round QB who is being set up to fail because he has no protection and no targets and no running game to help him have any real success? In case you didn't notice, their defense still isn't very good two years in -- and they've got numerous older vets like Kyle Williams and Lorenzo Alexander who are at about the end of their careers, so those holes will have to be filled next season. So, when exactly do the geniuses bother to get some help for Allen -- or do they assume that because he was a first round pick that he doesn't need to have help, that he can "carry" the offense all by himself?

What's laughable is your defense of McDermott's incompetence as a team builder by claiming he's building a "culture". The only "culture" that McDermott is "building" is a losing one.

It's amazing how virtually all those "non culturists" were most of the best players on the team -- Stephon Gilmore, Marquise Goodwin, Robert Woods, Sammy Watkins, Marcel Dareus, Cordy Glenn, even Tyrod Taylor, etc -- and the most of the "pro culturalists" that McDermott has brought in are busts, career backups, waiver wire/practice squad refugees, and other teams', especially Carolina's, rejects. Keep fantasizing about the juggerNOT that McDermott and Beane will build with that "100 mill cap space and 10 draft picks".

Mea culpa on confusing the guards. I knew that Ducasse was moved to the left side but the brain apparently wasn't totally in gear. I totally agree that the coaches rather than the players are the ones who have to "try harder", but there comes a time when the HC has to take the responsibility for poor game performance on himself. I'm not seeing that in a statement that essentially blames the players.

Except for Miller and Dawkins, the Bills OLers are bottom-level starters or career backups. They are what they are and what they've always been. Dawkins has taken a step backward after a decent rookie season playing beside Pro Bowler Richie Incognito instead of failed starter John Miller. Intimating that they could be better if only they tried harder is just so much bull manure. They simply aren't good enough to be better, no matter how hard they try.

LOL. Keep telling yourself that.

So, if only JP Losman and EJ Manuel had tried harder and been more dedicated, they'd have become successful NFL QBs? Sorry, dude, but everything starts with talent. What separates Khalil Mack from his peers isn't his work ethic or his love of football or "doing things the right way most of the time", it's his talent. It seems to me that what McDermott is doing is blaming untalented players for their lack of ability, instead of facing up to the fact that his -- and Beane's -- poor decisions have resulted in the dumpster fire called the 2018 Buffalo Bills.

Game. Set. Match.

How is this sorry clown show of McDermott and Beane any different than the previous incompetent regimes over the last 20 years? The names and faces have changed -- even the ownership -- but the asshats running the team are still making the same kinds of stupid decisions that nurtured the 17 year drought. "Rebuild" implies that a team was good at one time. A 9-7 season with a lucky playoff appearance does not qualify as "good". The last time the Bills won more than 9 games in the same season was 1999. This is the longest running "rebuild" in history.

Maybe you should pay attention to the rest of the NFL since Watson has been playing well on a pretty crappy team. He's thrown for 300+ yards in his last three games, and for the season he's thrown for 1246 yards with 7 TDs, 4 INTs, 62.2% completions, and a QB rating of 93.5. He's also been sacked 17 times (he was only sacked 19 times in 7 games in 2017).

Bledsoe in Buffalo is a quintessential example of how a good/decent QB can be sabotaged when he doesn't have protection and targets. It's why I've said repeatedly that the currrent Bills are setting up Josh Allen to fail because they haven't provided him with either protection or targets, just like the Bills did with Bledsoe. In 2002, when Bledsoe had a decent OL and an excellent receiving corps (Eric Moulds, Peerless Price, Jay Reimersma, Larry Centers, etc) plus a decent running game, he threw for 4359 yards (breaking Kelly's record), 24 TDs, 15 INTs, and made the Pro Bowl. After that first season, the Bills essentially dismantled their offense in order to build up their defense, and Bledsoe became a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the Bills organization to hire good coaches, draft well, and manage the cap ... pretty much what they've continued to do up to the present day.

I limited my list to the 21st century because that covers almost 20 years.

Why not? They haven't drafted one in the first round since 2010 ... and along with DBs and WRs, RBs are the Bills' favorites to draft in the first round -- or in the second if they don't have a first rounder. 2001 - Nate Clements DB 2003 - Willis McGahee RB 2004 - Lee Evans WR 2005 - Roscoe Parrish WR (2nd round) 2006 - Donte Whitner DB 2007 - Marshawn Lynch RB 2008 - Leodis McKelvin DB 2010 - CJ Spiller RB 2012 - Stephon Gilmore DB 2014 - Sammy Watkins WR 2015 - Ronald Darby DB 2017 - Tre'Davious White DB

The Bills aren't likely to win another game this season unless they luck out and play a team in a trap game situation after they (the Bills) embarrass themselves by making another mediocre team look like Super Bowl contenders ... or unless they play another game in a snowstorm.

I'm 68. I have been a Bills fan since I was 13, which was back in 1963, and I think my parents did me a disservice by raising me as a Bills fan. Sundays in the fall revolved around the Bills. Even my mother was a fan back in the days when few women would admit to having any understanding of the game much less serious fandom. It has been a very bittersweet legacy because the Bills have been so bad so often for so long. My mother died without ever seeing the Bills make the playoffs in the NFL (only the AFL). My dad never saw the Bills play in a Super Bowl. I don't expect that I'll live long enough to see the Bills win a Super Bowl, but maybe I won't care about that since I'm about at the end of my fandom I think. I've been moving in that direction for a while. I gave up my season tix after the 2008 season when Jauron was given an extension despite the team's collapse in the second half of the season. I even toyed with the idea of getting them again in 2014 because I originally thought that new ownership would usher in a new course for this team. Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong! Despite all the changes in names and faces, the Bills continue to play the same "money ball" game they've played for the last quarter of a century. They remain as uncommitted to fielding a winning team now as they ever did under Ralph Wilson's ownership and Russ Brandon's last dozen years of stewardship, perhaps even more so. I don't watch entire Bills games any more because I refuse to subject myself to that kind of torture. I have NFL Sunday ticket so I can watch real football games played by real NFL teams, not that crap that the Bills serve up with regularity. I'm skeptical of every move the team or its staff makes because I've seen and heard this same bull **** again and again over the decades. I'm sick of seeing players who were supposedly "not good enough" for the Bills starring and/or playing key roles for playoff contending teams while the Bills fill their roster with trash gleaned from various NFL dumpsters. I'm sick of seeing the Bills plodding along in a horse-and-buggy (and a very SLOW horse at that) and crying poverty while the rest of the league zooms by in SUVs and does just fine on the same budget. I'm tired of waiting for "next season" when "next season" never gets any better than any of the other previous "next seasons" in this century. Of course, the cynic in me says that maybe the Pegulas' real plan for the Bills is to make the team so bad for long enough that many fans will give up on the team -- or die off -- and there won't be much hue and cry if they sell the team to some other billionaire for a fat profit so that he can move it to London or Mexico City or Timbuktu.

Shades of Dick Jauron's penchant for finding "steals" while diving in the NFL's dumpsters a dozen years ago ... with perhaps worse results.

It was actually Chip Kelly -- Chad is Jim's nephew -- but yeah, even he didn't get rid of as much talent as fast as McDermott and Beane have. Josh McDaniels in Denver and Nick Saban in Miami both went the same route. McDaniels was canned, and Saban quit to run back to the NCAA after a year or two. I think the common denominator among Kelly, McDaniels, and Saban was that they came from backgrounds where the HC pretty much ran things on a "my way or the highway" basis. That's frequently the norm at successful NCAA programs and that's how Belichick has run NE. Dick Jauron also dismantled the team he inherited in order to bring "his guys" and he was another "my way or the highway guy". McDermott seems to be cut from the same mold but even less tolerant of players who don't fit his criteria since he's accomplished the dismantling of a better team than Jauron inherited in a much shorter period of time. "My way or the highway" type coaches can't work in the modern NFL because of the salary cap. Teams cannot simply shed talent without regard to the cap implications of such personnel moves the way that the Bills did in 2017 and 2018 preseason because it leaves them exactly where they are in 2018: so limited by dead cap space that they cannot replace the talented players who left with anything but bottom feeder FAs and low-level draft picks and UDFA rookies. Add in poor pro player decisions, most aggrievously, trading for Benjamin and Coleman and trading away McCarron, and questionable drafting such as Zay Jones and Nate Peterman, and you have a prescription for an ugly situation that doesn't look to improve any time soon as long as McDermott and Beane remain in control.

Not ALL old fans are lost in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s etc. Some of us actually watch teams other than the Bills and realize that the game has changed. IMO, this team's FO and coaching staff would be incompetent in any decade since the merger.

17-0 Titans. The Titans have a pretty stout defense.

Except that the Bills don't even have a running game thanks to the crappy OLers McDermott and Beane brought in.

Excuses, excuses, excuses. We've heard all this bull manure time and time again since the end of the Glory Years (about 1995). Disingenuous clap trap. This is 2018 not 1979, although McDermott and Beane's "offensive concepts" seem to be stuck in the 1970s.

So, when Aaron Rodgers takes 2 seconds to throw a pass from the pocket, it's added to his "time to throw" the same way as when Josh Allen dodges defenders for 4 seconds before being sacked is added to his "time to throw" stats? Or, is it, when Tom Brady takes a sack after 2 seconds because he doesn't run and Josh Allen evades sackers for 4 seconds, he's credited with "more time to throw"?

There is nothing about Mahomes' game that's like Kaepernick's. Kaepernick's success was always based on his being a threat to run. He lacked a lot of the skills required of an NFL QB, including being able to read defenses, and he was not particularly accurate. There is no doubt that Mahomes is a QB first and foremost. He uses his running ability to escape rushers, and he's deadly accurate whether he's in the pocket or outside of it. It's early yet, but he seems to understand what he's seeing, so that says he is able to read defenses, and if he's not as good as a guy who's been in the league for several years, it seems likely he'll get better at it as he gains experience.