SoTier

With the Bills, that light at the end of the tunnel always is an on-coming freight train.

I have no specific scuttlebutt about it, but when McCarron was traded away, my first thought was he wasn't happy to be third QB behind Peterman and Allen. I think that McCarron signed so late in the FA period because he was looking for a situation with a shaky QB situation where he had a real chance to be starter -- much like when Fitzpatrick signed with the Bills back in 2009 because he figured that Trent Edwards was the most likely starter to get benched. IIRC, Taylor also signed with the Bills because the team offered his best chance to become a starter.

I know, which is what I'm questioning. How can he say that Allen is in the 3rd best situation when Ledyard himself rates the Bills receivers poorly. Moreover, Allen doesn't even have an experienced QB coach? David Culley is a former WR coach who hasn't coached QBs in like 30 years when he was a collegiate assistant at some small college. It's not like the Bills have a great pass blocking OL or a great running game, both of which are acknowledged to be of significant help to young QBs.

He thinks that Allen is in a better situation than Watson, Darnold, and Mayfield, all of whom have better protection, receivers and/or running games to support them? Seriously?

Juan Castillo and the new zone blocking scheme is what happened to Groy. He doesn't suit the scheme, so he's gone from being at least a serviceable backup to being a turnstile. Maybe McDermott and Beane should have given a slightly higher priority to OL in the last draft and spent more than a late fifth round pick on it.

It's useless to argue with McDermott/Beane cheerleaders. They apparently inhabit the same alternative universe their heroes do -- the one in which the forward pass is viewed as a necessary evil and WRs with speed and good hands are superfluous. ^^^ Watson was averaging over 300 yards a game passing before he was hurt. He's played the last two games with a partially collapsed lung, which means that he could hardly take a breath without pain. He's the real deal. As for Mahomes, I think he's played only about three more games than Allen, but the difference between what he does on the field and what Allen does is light years difference. Part of that difference is that Mahomes has had much, much better coaching and support than Allen, but the talent differential seems just amazing. Mahomes plays like a veteran. Allen plays like a green rookie with poor coaching and a poor team around him.

They wouldn't have been hired in the first place if the Pegulas thought that they would put a team on the field that would get blown out by 20 or more points with regularity ...

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

Are you Terry Pegula's financial godfather (aka Russ Brandon's ghost), making sure he doesn't spend unnecessary dollars to put a competitive team on the field? After all, not only does the tv revenue cover the biggest expense a team has -- player salaries -- but Bills fans have repeatedly proven over the decades that they'll support the team no matter how bad it. Coleman's dead cap hit is $3.5486 million according to Overthecap.com, and it's dead cap money that Bills cheerleaders are constantly using as an excuse for why the Bills can't afford better players, so you are the one "missing the point" -- and trying to change the conversation because you have no real defense for the Bills "process" of replacing talent with trash to save a few dollars.

Well, I'm not willing to wait 71 years for the Bills to make it back to the Super Bowl or 108 years for the Bills to actually win it. Maybe the Pegulas are building a Super Bowl team for the grandkids they don't have yet.

He's a starting LB for the Chiefs. Like so many other NFL fans, I've become a big Mahomes fan, so I frequently watch KC games, either live or on replay (one of the benies of retirement), and Ragland gets mentioned pretty often making tackles which suggests his knee injury is healed.

You left out Stephon Gilmore, Ronald Darby, Preston Brown, Marcell Dareus, and supposed 2nd round bust Reggie Ragland. Your group and mine are all starters on teams currently in the playoff hunt. McDermott/Beane packed off 9 starting caliber players they inherited and replaced all but a couple of them with career backups and bottom feeder FAs who play exactly like the career backups and bottom feeders they are. I suppose that was part of the great "design", too. A team can't keep all its good young vets because of the salary cap but keeping some of them might have avoided the shitshow that is the 2018 Bills.

What's scary is that this is a real possibility based on the track record of the culprits. So? They had a lot of picks this year, too, and wasted a significant number on trading up to get 2 players. With all the holes on this team, they can't afford to only end up with only 5-7 draftees because they became enamored of a couple of guys and trade up to get them. My guess is that the Bills go from the highest dead cap $$$ in 2018 to the most actual cap space in 2019 -- and the product they put on the field will be just as fragrant as this year's carcass. McDermott has control of player personnel -- who comes/who stays/who goes. Beane makes it happen by draft/trade/FA. That's why they are linked together. McDermott is a crappy coach. He's decent the way a front wheel sedan with snow tires handles winter in the Southern Tier -- you think it's good because you've never driven hilly, snowy roads in a Subaru.

That, too.

No, they'll let him walk away in FA at the end of his rookie contract and pass on a blue-chip QB prospect to trade back to take another first round DB. It's how the Bills roll.

We passed on Brian Orakpo (who's still playing BTW) to take Aaron Maybin, who was undoubtedly the biggest bust the Bills drafted in the 21st century (even worse than Mike Williams, who at least played decently for a couple of seasons). IMO, Marshawn Lynch was the best player that the Bills drafted in the 21st century. Brandon and his henchmen from Jauron through Nix and Whaley to McDermott and Beane, never had/don't have much tolerance for players who marched to their own music, no matter how talented.

We traded up (actually, traded back into the first round) to get him, too, because the Bills just had to draft a first round QB in "the greatest QB class since 1983". It doesn't matter if 10 QBs in the first round become "franchise QBs" if you're the team that drafts the guy who busts. What was even worse about 2004 was that the Bills 2005 first round (part of the pick package to trade up) was #18. Aaron Rodgers was in that draft and didn't go until #24.

I agree with the sentiments here. I left my small home town after HS and only returned to visit family, but I went to my 40th ten years ago and reconnected with some of my old classmates. This past year I volunteered to help organize our 50th reunion which was held this past August. It was a great experience because I not only reconnected with a lot of old classmates and former good friends, I made friends of some classmates who I wasn't friends with back in HS. I think for most people, HS is probably not a particularly great time, which colors people's attitudes towards early reunions (as a lot of the posts here demonstrate) but time really does change people and heal old wounds. If you're an oldie, go to your 35th, 40th, 50th class reunion if one comes up. I think you'll enjoy it.

It's not a "soft tank". It's "money ball", which is what the Bills played for more than a decade under Russ Brandon, only far more incompetently done than even when Dick Jauron was running the manure show. After all, it took Jauron more than 3 seasons to bring the Bills to a similar talentless state that McDermott and Beane have achieved in less than 2. What the Bills have been playing since Whaley got the axe in 2017 is "money ball" run by incompetents with no eye for offensive talent and a mindset stuck in the 1970s or 1980s.

Perfect!!! A passe' MNF opening theme that almost nobody remembers for a Bills team led by a Neanderthal coaching staff and FO that has successfully fielded a 2018 team easily as uncompetitive and outclassed by even mediocre NFL teams as most of the 1970s Bills team. Long live the 1970s!

"Tank" implies that the team is could win games but is deliberately attempting to lose games to get a high draft pick. Unfortunately, the Bills aren't losing deliberately. They're simply so lacking in NFL caliber talent, especially on offense, that they don't have to try to lose. Even their best efforts can't get them wins except when the sun, moon, and stars all align in some special pattern as they did in the wins against Minnesota and Tennessee. If you can continue to watch the Bills manure show, you have a far stronger constitution than me. I can get maybe through the first quarter before I start channel surfing to Sunday Ticket to find some entertaining football.

Bull manure. You need to stop making up stuff. The Bills incurred $32 million in dead cap space by trading away Dareus, Glenn, Taylor, and Ragland. All but Taylor are starting on teams a whole lot better than the Bills. Sure the Bills don't have those players big contracts, but they also don't their talent either. You can't build even a mediocre NFL team with bottom feeder and career backup talent. The Bills also incurred another $7 million in dead cap space by cutting/trading Corey Coleman, AJ McCarron, Marshall Newhouse, and Jeremy Kerley -- all players brought in by the player personnel geniuses named McDermott and Beane and kept only a few months at best. Coleman was with the Bills for about 10 days, and I think Newhouse was the only one who lasted into the regular season.

They also need to stop wasting draft picks on trading up for projects. They traded up for Jones in 2017 and Allen and Edmunds in 2018, and all were "projects" for various reasons. The draft is always chancy -- only about 50% of first round picks become successful NFLers and have decent careers as starters, and the success rate for later rounds plummets after the first round -- so making a habit of trading up is a losing proposition, and trading up for "projects" is even riskier.

I bet he goes to a team with a decent offense and suddenly flourishes -- just like most of the other players McDermott and Beane have cut loose in their short tenure.

I think you've just defined "the process" that McDermott is always yapping about.