SoTier

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.

What the hell is the point of purging a roster just to purge a roster???? This was not a 1-15 dumpster fire team in 2016, and it had a decent talent level. The argument that "well, they weren't good enough to win more than 6-8 games a year" is pure bull manure as so much of that talent that wasn't good enough for McDermott and Beane are not only starting and playing well for winning teams, but are shining in some cases. Of course, now it's likely to be a 1-3 win team with such a lack of talent that it's going to take another 3-5 years to get back to mediocre, especially since McDermott and Beane are clueless about how to build a competitive NFL team much less a successful one. I'm sick of the excuses constantly being made for McDermott and Beane; they created this mess with their own incompetence. The longer they remain in charge of this team, the longer this team will suck big time.

Incorrect. Whaley was a lame-duck and his staff were lame-ducks on Draft Day as Whaley was fired the day after the draft, and his staff fired shortly after Beane was hired. Rumor has it that Whaley wanted to draft Deshaun Watson in the first round. McDermott won the power struggle with Whaley, and he passed on both Mahomes and Watson to draft ANOTHER DB. White may be a good CB -- he might become a great DB -- but the great DBs are almost a dime a dozen compared to great QBs. FTR, the Bills have drafted a CB or S in the first round since 1996 (Jim Kelly's last season) in 1999, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. The Bills drafted a QB in the first round in 2004, 2013, and 2018 ... despite not having a quality NFL starting QB except when they drafted Losman in 2004 when they had Drew Bledsoe. IMO, Losman, Manuel, and Allen were all drafted in order to placate the fan base. Both Losman and Allen were the worst of the best top QB prospects in their draft years, and the Bills traded up to get both of them. Manuel wasn't even the best prospect in a terrible QB class in which none of the QBs were good enough to be NFL QBs. If the Bills REALLY had a plan to build a respectable modern offense around a franchise QB, they would have sought to replace Wood and Incognito with better FAs than the bottom feeder OLers they scrounged from the NFL scrap heap and drafted other offensive players in 2018 before the end of the fifth round. Even if Allen can be a good/great NFL QB, he's probably doomed because of the simply awful offensive team around him. Sadly, it's likely that Mahomes would suffer the same fate if the Bills had drafted him.

Let me guess. You're Sean McDermott's mom ... or one of the Pegulas' kids.

Sorry, but it's hard to find an NFL-caliber starting QB when you never look for one. Jauron thought that offense was a necessary evil, and that the job of the offense was to not make mistakes, so he favored risk-adverse QBs like Trent Edwards. My guess is that Shady had so few touches in this game because of his rib injury, but your observations about Allen are dead-on.

Keep being disingenuous. McDermott won the power struggle with Whaley before the 2017 draft, and hasn't relinquished his power over the roster since. The claim that McDermott and Beane "are joined at the hip" is simply code for McDermott making personnel decisions and the GM doing the legwork to acquire said players.

I agree. McDermott is a decent coach but he should never have been given control of personnel. Beane has absolutely no experience in player personnel, and the scouting staff brought in to replace the scouting personnel who were fired shortly after Whaley was canned are apparently incompetent.

As I said from the beginning, Allen has been set up to fail ... and that's what he's doing. You cannot expect a rookie QB to flourish without good protection, without NFL-caliber WRs, and without a running game. Actually, no QB, no matter how great, could.

According to the Bills cheerleaders on TSW, McDermott and Beane should get at least 5 years, maybe even 10, no matter how incompetent they prove to be.

There's nothing that can be done this season. Even if the Bills had more cap space, there are virtually no quality players available, and even if there were, McDermott and Beane wouldn't go for them unless they were rejects from Carolina. Why would any rational person "trust" McDermott and Beane to fix the disaster that they themselves created? That's what a competent HC/GM duo would have done. Instead, McDermott and Beane stripped virtually all the talent from the offense, and put Allen in a position that sets him up to fail. The Bills need to significantly upgrade the OL by adding at least a couple of higher caliber interior OLers in FA. They need all new WRs. They need a starting caliber RB. What I expect the Dynamic Duo of McDermott and Beane to do in the off-season is to spend most of their FA money and draft capital on the defensive side of the ball. "Tank" assumes that the Bills could win but don't try. Sadly, that isn't the case. Unless they catch teams being over-confident as the Vikings were, they're essentially dead meat every game.

You are assuming that because Manuel ended up being a bust that his play sucked from the very beginning and because Allen has done well in his first two starts that he's going to be successful. That's not how things go -- as numerous posters have shown by their examples. It takes about 3 years to determine the quality of a starting QB, and that evaluation can be distorted by a number of factors, including coaching and team talent. Furthermore, it's not as simple as either a QB is great or he's a bust. Very few starting QBs in the league are great, and the busts don't last long as starters, so the majority of starting QBs are on a spectrum from very good to mediocre to solid-backup-but-not-really-a-starter. I'd put guys like Tannehill, Carr, Winston, Mariota, Keenum, Cousins, Smith, Prescott all in this middle group. Complicating matters is the fact that QBs can look really good or really bad for a short time or an extended period, frequently because of the team around them and coaching. The definitive example of this, of course, is ol' FitzMagic himself, but JP Losman had a respectable season in 2006 and looked to be on his way to being a decent NFL QB before the wheels fell off his cart.

The problem is that, in reality about half of all first round QBs are busts -- they'll never be better than expensive backups. Even for consensus first pick QBs, 20% fail. Add in the first rounders who aren't busts but are disappointments (I'd put both Mariota and Winston in this category), and the chances of getting a true franchise QB is probably maybe 3% (1 out of 32) since most drafts yield, at best, only 1 excellent QB, and great ones are even more rare. Some drafts, like 2002, 2007, and 2013, don't produce even 1 mediocre QB. What happens if there is no potential franchise QB to draft as your current franchise QB is at the end of his contract? What if your guy is only in his fourth year, and you see this great QB to draft ... but if you do, then you'll have to trade your starter early or waste a year with your new QB. This theory is simply unrealistic.

I'm not sure that McDermott and Beane understand the very basic offensive concept that even the greatest QBs need protection and targets. If they don't believe that, then they should ask Tom Brady. If they do, they don't act like they do because they seem to be totally disinterested in really doing anything about providing their QB with either ... and this goes all the way back to the FA period in March. Maybe that's the real reason that the Bills have such sucky WRs: it's the nature of WRs to be primadonnas, and the better they are, the more likely they are to want opportunities to catch the ball. Good WRs who are team-first guys are few and far between, although it's easier to convince them to be team first guys when they're on winning teams like the Chiefs, Eagles or Pats. Coaching can't compensate for lack of talent.

The Bills have been claiming that they can't "afford" to keep the best players they developed because of "the salary cap" for the last 20 years while numerous other teams have repeatedly managed to do just that. Some teams have built and maintained dynasties during that period. Others have built juggernauts loaded with expensive players that have produced multiple successful playoff seasons. Most other NFL teams have at least had a few seasons where they won more than 9 games. The Bills haven't done that yet in the 21st century ... and even with new ownership, new coaching, new FO organization, they are still trotting out the same lame excuses which their fans faithfully repeat to defend the same old manure wrapped in new paper. No, the Bills couldn't afford to keep Goodwin, Woods, and Watkins, but they certainly could have afforded to keep one ... and their WR corps would be 100%, maybe 1000%, better than the excrement they've got out there now -- and if they didn't waste so much cap space on players Beane brought in and then shuffled out, they would have more $$ to invest in better players.