SoTier

37-21, 46-10, and 54-24 constitute the worst three game span in the Bills history. It constitutes a collapse, and it will be a moral victory for the Bills if they can at least be competitive against the Chiefs and Pats in the next two games. Don't bet more than you'd like to lose on them doing that, though.

This was a "middling" team last season. McDermott and Beane have fixed that. They've turned it into an expansion team. Maybe they win 1 more but I wouldn't bet money on it.

NFL Sunday Ticket so I can watch decent teams play good football rather than get stuck watching the Bills get butt-whooped with regularity ...

Belichick never coached a team that got butt-whipped as badly as consistently as McDermott's Bills, either. Hey, ya never can tell ... he might be running last, but if there's a late race caution and everybody's gotta pit for gas but him so they're all a lap down ... It must be something in the water in Allegany County ...

Who the hell cares what media "draft experts" claim within a few hours or days of the NFL draft? Their evaluations signify nothing because they are only based on criteria that are important to media "draft experts" and fans who buy what they're selling. The real proof of how good or bad a team's draft is depends upon how well the draftees actually play on the field in games. In the Bills case, through 10 games, individually and as a group, they are certainly not outstanding. White has played decently for a rookie but Jones hasn't been good at all. That doesn't mean he won't turn out to be a good WR but he's not there yet. Dawkins has had good games and bad games, but many teams would have had him sit for while, perhaps the entire season. White and Jones have been starters simply because Stephon Gilmore and all of the Bills starting WRs left either in FA or by trade. Dawkins has played LT when Glenn's not been able to go but Jordan Mills has started every game at RT. Milano and Peterman are 5th rounders and Vallejo is a 6th rounder. McDermott (the player) was a 6th round pick cut by NE. Elston, Ferguson, Lacey, Towbridge, and Yarbrough are all UDFAs. Milano and Yarbrough have played some. We saw last week that Peterman is not nearly as "NFL ready" as his gushing fanboys claimed. The rest have only played ST I believe although they may very well have gotten in on a few regular snaps. I think I've seen Vallejo in on some regular snaps, too. Feel free to try to prove that the Bills' rookies are significantly better than other teams' rookies if you want.

I stand corrected. It wasn't in his bio.

Who would that be? Just because they've been employed in some capacity by football teams for several years doesn't necessarily make them "FOOTBALL people". Beane's experience is in team administration, mostly in personnel (salaries/benies/insurance) and operations (logistics). He had 1 year of experience as an assistant GM. McDermott has been a defensive coordinator on two teams for about 7 years, again. Neither has had more than some peripheral participation in player evaluation and selection, and certainly no responsibility for it.

If the players come to believe that McDermott is not playing to win games this season, then he'll lose the locker room if he hasn't already lost it. Those weren't just losses, they were butt-whippings, each worse than the last.

I was being sarcastic, which is why I put in the part about extending the drought. I have seen nothing from these two yet that sugges that either one is competent to hold their current position beyond this season, at least not with control over player personnel.

The Bills hired this pair, so they must be worthy of at least 5 years' opportunity to extend the drought beyond its current length.

That presupposes McDermott and Beane have a plan, and that plan is a viable and logical blueprint for moving forward. Neither McDermott nor Beane have demonstrated that their plan consists of anything beyond gutting the team of talent and stocking up on draft picks and scrub FAs ... and making sure that Taylor had virtually no chance at success. McDermott's draft was nothing special, simply drafting to fill holes created by letting starters walk away in FA. If they were going to sabotage Taylor, the least they could have done was found a more talented QB than Peterman to replace him. Oh, so because you need to have your chimney repointed, a new roof put on', and the dry-rotted front porch replaced, you should tear down your house and rebuild it from scratch?

If you think that signing Kirk Cousins and drafting a guard and 2 DTs is going to solve the Bills problems on both sides of the ball, you're delusional. The Bills pretty much need an entirely new front 7 on defense unless they do something drastic like fire McDermott. As with the OL, the DLers and LBs who were at least serviceable in last couple of years are struggling. I doubt that the Bills FO wants to do start over so soon, but if McDermott's lost/loses the locker room, which is a real possibility, then they may have to.

Contend for what? The overall #1 pick? The Bills haven't had one of those since 1985, so they're due. It may be pointless but it looks to be the new "Bills way" which is apparently even stupider than the old "Bills way" of previous regimes. They'll probably trade him for a 4th or a 6th that could become a 5th. Watch Clay and Glenn go, too, for bargain basement prices. All the "Whaley's Mistakes" gotta go -- they make McDermott's scrubs look bad. Ducasse has failed everywhere else he's been, even as a backup OG. After 8 or 9 years in the league, he didn't "blossom". That he could possibly be rated as the best OLer on the field even for one game is an indictment of Castillo the OL coach and Dennison's zone blocking system. It doesn't fit the guys they've got, and the OL is too important to just throw away decent OLers because the OC/OL coach aren't bright enough to adapt to the players they have on the roster. I totally agree about Cordy Glenn. Ankle/foot injuries are always problematic because both are complex structures that take a lot of stress, and usually take a long time to heal. Unfortunately, I think that Glenn's be sent packing because, well, there's a consensus among the personnel mavens on TBD, sports talk radio, and at sports bars that he IS accident prone ... and he's a hold over from the Whaley era ... and he makes a lot of money that he's not earning because he's hurt "all the time". How, exactly, do you figure it's possible to get "a lot of the guys we need next year"? I believe that the bust rate for players taken in the first three rounds of the draft is about 50%. The success rate for players taken in rounds 4-7 is maybe 20 percent, and a lot of that "success" will be as STers and backups. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that players that fill the Bills needs will be available when they draft ... of course, at the rate the Bills are making holes in their roster, just about any position will fill a need by the draft. Oh, and that's assuming the Bills don't send a truckload of draft picks to take a shot at a top five QB.

What a crock! The Bills have been "involved in a major rebuild" for 17 years, and are further from achieving any kind of success today than they were January 1, 2017 thanks to McDermott, Beane, and the Bills FO.

I'm 67 years old and have been a Bills fan since 1963 ... what do you expect?

This is the kind of BS that causes observers and black players to raise accusations of racism. It uses the same phrase ("the chosen one") used repeatedly by race-baiting bigots against Obama. Of course, we all know you don't hate Taylor because he's black, you just hate him because he's not Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, right? Bigotry is never personal. He was "okay" with a loss under Peterman but he "wants" losses under Taylor. I think that speaks for itself.

At least the Browns are competitive. You can't say that about the Bills in the last three games ... and likely not into the future, either. What good would the #1 pick do the Bills? They would probably draft a DB or RB or trade back to the middle of first round for a couple of thirds and a sixth that could become a fifth.

Don't confuse True Believers with FACTS! If they believe the situations with Prescott and Peterman were the same, then they were the same.

So, why aren't you frustrated cretins taking out your frustrations on the culprits responsible for the 20 years of failure instead of blindly defending them as if they can do no wrong?

POINT. SET. MATCH. You absolutely nailed it ... as did the original article. As for Peterman, it seems to me that he was set up to fail, too. In addition to the limited prep time he had, the game plan he was asked to execute simply wasn't what a sensible HC/OC would provide for a rookie making his first start. Instead of a simplified plan emphasizing lots of running, max protections, and limited, safe passes to protect the rookie as much as they could, they had Peterman slinging it behind an OL that has been and is playing poorly ... against Joey Bosa and Company ... way too much. Are they that stupid or did they have another agenda? I am not a conspiracy theory believer by nature. In fact, I tend to be just the opposite. However, the Bills have made so many bizarre moves since they put the McDermott-Beane regime in place, that I'm convinced that winning football games -- now, in the immediate future, or ten years down the road -- is simply not on their agenda. I don't know what their agenda is but obviously it's not winning. I have no doubt that the Bills -- FO and coaching staff -- have done their best to sabotage Taylor, and I think that throwing Peterman to the wolves in LA on Sunday was part and parcel of it. They wanted him to throw downfield more than any first time starter should be asked to throw in order to "prove" that the Bills conservative offense in previous games was all Taylor's fault. It blew up in their faces, and I'm glad of that ... but I'm sorry that Nate Peterman, Tyrod Taylor, and all the rest of the Bills players suffered such humiliation because of the asshats in charge. I am also beyond angry that the Bills organization has shown such disdain for Bills fans and their loyalty over the years as to not even TRY to win games in a year when making the playoffs in the AFC with a 9-7 record is entirely possible ... and with the Bills even holding some tie-breakers. And for you cretins who want to B word that the rest of the Bills players ought to have played better, understand that most of them simply can't. They don't have the talent. Most of the younger talented Bills players from the last couple of years -- "Whaley's mistakes" as you cretins call them -- are scattered around the league playing on playoff bound teams. The Bills in their infinite wisdom gleaned from seventeen, soon to be eighteen, straight years of avoiding the playoffs, replaced them with scrubs and rookies. It's not reprehensible for a football player to lack talent. It's the way it is. It is reprehensible, however, for a football team to not even try to win a game when they are seeded for a playoff slot.

Assuming that the Bills make the playoffs any time before 2030 might be a tad optimistic given the brilliance of the current coaching regime and the team's play on the field.

What it says to players is that McDermott and the Bills are NOT committed to winning, and NFL players want to win, and win now, not 3-5 years down the road ... maybe. The average NFL career is only about 3 years, and any player could suffer a career ending injury on any play. The only FAs interested in playing for bottom feeders are players with very limited options because of lack of talent or age ... ie, scrubs ... or guys just looking for pay days.

More continued beat downs like the last three weeks and there will be many fewer Bills fans who care if that happens ... Do you really think that the Bills aren't going to start "hemorrhaging fans", too, if the current team continues to play as badly for the rest of the season as it has for the last weeks and McDermott and Beane come back next year? Well said. Be prepared to get dissed by the True Believers who swear that Russ Brandon has no say in the football operations, though.

Why is the Bills OL so bad this season? This was a good run blocking line the previous three years, and it was adequate at pass blocking. In fact, it was generally thought that LG John Miller, drafted in 2015, was a promising starter who would solidify the line of Glenn, Incognito, Wood, Miller with second round OT Dion Dawkins switching over to take the RT spot. When Glenn can go, Dawkins does, indeed, move over to RT. While it's true that Cordy Glenn has been out a lot this season (contrary to claims by some posters on TBD, he hasn't missed significant time previously), the real problem here is that at least some of the Bills OLers don't seem to fit the blocking scheme that they've been forced into. This has been an issue since TC. That veteran OLers like Incognito and Wood are STILL having trouble with the scheme suggests that it simply doesn't fit what most of them do well. It certainly has been a disaster for Miller since he's been supplanted by Vlad Ducasse, an OG who has failed on every single team he's been on. A competent coaching staff would be smart enough to understand that the OL is the foundation of the offense, and would adapt the blocking scheme to fit their personnel when they come into a situation with a decent OL, not try to remake it into something it's not for no valid reason other than this is what the coaches want. Of course, a competent coaching staff would also understand that having at least one WR capable of stretching the field has to be an essential part of modern day offenses simply because modern defenses are so much more sophisticated than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Then again, a competent coaching staff would not only make sure that a rookie QB making his first NFL start was properly prepared, they would draw up a game plan designed to protect him as much as possible by featuring lots of running plays, max protections, and as safe as passing plays as possible. Riddle me this, McDermott supporters, why the hell wasn't Peterman protected by a simplified, limited game plan? Your hero screwed that kid by throwing him to the wolves in the persons of Joey Bosa and Company with a game plan that he couldn't have success with even if the Bills had better talent and had played better.

The OP is absolutely right about "drought psychosis" reigning supreme, especially in his own mind. I don't doubt that Peterman likely starts on Sunday ... just like I don't doubt that the Chiefs could very well ring up 60+ on the Bills if he does.