SoTier

LOL. The constant excuse of Bills fans for the last seventeen years ... since sainted Ralph ran Wade Phillips out of town. Wade's QBs were Rob Johnson and Doug Flutie, neither one a HOFer. Andy Reid made Mike Vick into a reasonable facsimile of a good NFL QB for a while, and he resurrected Alex Smith at the end of his career. Mike Zimmer in Minnesota has had three different QBs in his four seasons as HC there and is leading the NFCN with an 8-2 record and Case Keenum as his QB. Then there's Doug Marrone. He got the Bills to a 9-7 record in 2014, 1 of only 2 winning seasons the team's recorded since Wade left, with Kyle Orton as his QB. Now he's got his Jags poised to take the AFCS with Brian Bortles as his QB. Keep whining about not have a QB ... while you think about how drafting Andrew Luck didn't bring sunshine and rainbows and playoff wins to Indy fans.

Just because you swallowed the McDermott-Beane sales pitch whole doesn't mean that all Bills did. There were a significant number of fans who were skeptical about the manure being spread back in August, especially after the Watkins trade. I don't know if the OP was among them, but those of us who were got shouted down by all the true believers who jumped on the McDermott/Beane bandwagon. For myself, I compared McDermott to Dick Jauron, although I thought he might be somewhat better because I thought he at least wasn't a play to not lose by too much coach. I was wrong. He's worse because he apparently doesn't care how much his team loses by as long as he loses his way.

The Bills NEVER think the right players are worth paying for but they'll go chasing after big names if they think it will put butts in the seats which was why they signed Terrell Owens and Mario Williams but traded away Jason Peters after a contract dispute and let both Chris Hogan and Robert Woods as well as horde of DBs past and present walk away.

The OP is referencing the Rams-Vikings game on Sunday. Robert Woods injured his shoulder in that game. Jared Goff's favorite WR, Cooper Kupp, caught a pass but fumbled on the 1 going into the EZ. Sammy Watkins again wasn't targeted much. IOW, the Vikes defense effectively shut down the Rams high flying passing offense. Unlike the Bills game, it was a good football game ... I watched it.

This. Hamsters on a wheel: rolling along but never going anywhere. YOU look at the Eagles. Three years ago they finished 10-6 and just missed the playoffs. In 2013 they won the NFCE. Since 2000, the Eagles have had 12 winning seasons and made the playoffs 10 times. When they realized that Chip Kelly was a mistake, they fired his arse rather than give him more time to screw up their team. If you were a journeyman FA, would you sign with this mess if you had any other alternative? NOTE to OP: save your post so that you have a template for future use with the next regimes ... It's now a roster worthy of an expansion team. Yeah but look at it from a business model POV. Which is more likely to generate more revenue? A QB drafted in the Top 5 or a DT, MLB, and C?

If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and it swims like a duck, I'm calling it a duck. Well, McDermott and Beane look like the two of the most incompetent ducks to ever swim in WNY waters, and that includes some real prize specimens, among them Dick Jauron, Hank Bullough, Jim Ringo, and Harvey Johnson. I am out of patience with the bull manure the Bills organization has been dumping on its fans for almost twenty years. When Ralph Wilson was the owner, I accepted that he was an old man and set in his old fashioned ways, but that's not an excuse any more. If the ownership and management of the Bills have some other agenda than winning football games, which apparently seem to do, then I'm done with them. I sure as hell am not going to waste my time watching their crappy brand of football.

Going into Arrowhead where even when the Chiefs are bad (although I don't think they've ever sucked as bad as the Bills did last week) they usually win is definitely worse than playing in that clunky soccer stadium where the Chargers play. Playing a probably very angry, very talented Chiefs team is worse than playing the Chargers who are just good enough to find new ways to lose close games. Luckily for them, the Bills weren't within 3 TDs of them in the closing minutes. Playing a top ten rushing team is worse than playing the twenty-fifth ranked Chargers, especially when the Chiefs have Kareem Hunt. He'll probably ring up 200 yards on the Bills all by himself. It's gonna be a long, long Sunday afternoon. You're assuming it's his decision alone. It's possible it's not. Nothing that the Bills have done with personnel in 2017 has made much sense, so why should they start now?

I think that letting Marrone and his assistants escape was probably a major blunder but certainly keeping the powerful suits on the second floor at OBD was a much bigger one. I'm with the posters who think there should have been a "football guy" -- a czar, an independent GM -- who took care of the football side. I think that Donahoe had that role until he was fired but I'm not sure. There hasn't been anybody like that since. Likely, but remember that Belichick failed as a HC in Cleveland and Pete Carroll in NE and in NYJ. I don't think that I'd lobby for Schwartz as the Bills HC though. What I object to is the wholesale purging of young talent from this roster in the name of rebuilding when it was for some other reason entirely. Teams that are rebuilding dump the older, big name players. I happen to think it was for the purpose of cutting costs but maybe it was just McDermott being a jackass. What I do know is that some of the most talented jettisoned players like Gilmore, Woods, and Gillislee were allowed to leave in FA before McDermott had any real opportunity to evaluate how they fit into his "system" or whether they bought into his "process" so that makes the claims that these guys didn't have the "skill sets" that McDermott wanted seem like just so much bull manure. Trading away Watkins effectively emasculated the offense by eliminating any downfield threat. Trading away Dareus at the trading deadline for even less than the stupid Bills got for Marshawn in 2011 spectacularly emasculated and probably demoralized the defense. BTW, if you think Woods has played like a "mediocre over rated" guy in LA, you need to broaden your horizons and watch some good football teams instead of restricting your viewing to Bills low-lites.

Agreed. My guess is that if McDermott hasn't lost the locker room yet, he will if he continues with Peterman.

My thoughts exactly. I thought Glenn was going to go before the trade deadline but I think his ankle prevented the Bills from getting it done. There were just too many rumors and "reports" in the media about rumors that Glenn was on the block for it not to have had some validity. With the Bills, where's even a whiff of smoke, expect a major conflagration to follow. The problem with ankles is that they take a long time to heal, probably because the joint's rather complex. If the Bills brain trust was smart, they would realize that Glenn, Dawkins, and Miller could form a good OL foundation if they returned to the blocking schemes they used in previous years. That might give both Wood and Incognito a year or two longer, too, so that the team could draft and groom replacements. Unfortunately, that's highly unlikely to happen simply because it's too sensible and none of those guys are "their guys" like that gem Ducasse.

Let's face it, it doesn't matter who plays QB for the Bills on Sunday. Does anybody really doubt that KC is going to take out all its frustration at its last four losses on the Bills? Kareem Hunt will probably run for 200 yards himself in a decent Jay Ajayi impersonation.

I'm curious as to why the Bills didn't play Ragland even one snap. What they had out on the field was so superior? Really? Or did he pee in McDermott's cereal and get sentenced to be sent to KC? I'm wondering, too, about why Dareus didn't play more snaps. The claims were that he wasn't "playing well enough" but he's doing so well in Jacksonville that Marrone has been giving him more snaps. One explanation, a very snarky one, might be that since the Bills wanted him gone, they wanted the fans to believe he wasn't any good. Another explanation may be that he's the kind of player who thrives when he's "busy" like a RB who's better carrying the ball 20+ times a game rather than just 5 or 6. A third explanation may be that the Bills FO didn't want to risk Dareus getting hurt when they were desperately trying to trade him before the trade deadline for whatever reasons they had. This is the same warning alarms Bills fans constantly chirped while Marshawn Lynch was racking up yards and helping the Seahags to a Super Bowl. How'd that work out? I think we're already there. It's just that the stats don't accurately reflect current status. Welcome to "the Dark Side" where it's not taboo to call a duck a duck when it looks and acts like one.

If it's such "crap" then why are you so upset by it? Don't like reality intruding on your excuses? The loss Sunday wasn't because of "bad karma". It was because of the incompetence of the coaching staff and the arrogance of the Bills FO.

Realistically, that's not happening. QBs, DTs , and OTs are positions that generally take 2-3 seasons for the prospects to become decent, and probably another year for the good ones to separate themselves from the pack. These are much more complex positions in the pros than in college, and all involve learning about the quirks of individual opposition players, so the learning curve is longer than other positions. If these guys aren't taken in the first or second rounds, it will likely take them longer to come up to speed. LBer is really the only one of those positions that could be expected to be filled adequately by a talented rookie. More importantly, how many positions can be filled, theoretically at least, through the draft and through FA depends upon who's available. The number and quality of players at specific positions vary. Some drafts produce more OLers or WRs than others. The same with FA. Teams that are perennial winners like NE, Pitt, GB, Philly, Minnesota, and KC tend to draft for talent at the top of the draft and more for need in the middle of the draft. They try to maintain a pool of talented younger players around a core of key veterans. The Bills are too busy shuffling their rosters to please their latest HC du jour to worry about building up either a core of key veterans or a pool of talented younger players. They're all scrambling to fill holes they've created themselves.

Yeah, we know ... the Bills only got rid of scrubs and kept the diamonds in the rough. Tell that to Marcel Dareus, Ronald Darby, Mike Gillislee, Stephon Gilmore, Sammy Watkins, and Robert Woods who all look to be playoff bound. Time has already told. They reduced a modestly talented team to an expansion franchise in 11 months. That's probably some kind of record.

The Bills do not have an NFL caliber roster period. McDermott and Beane have seen to that by getting rid of virtually all of the Bills young talent since they arrived on the scene.

Get a clue. I criticized your lame attempt to absolve McDermott of the responsibility for his poor decision, not McDermott himself. I'm not even sure it really was his decision, but as HC, falling on his sword to protect his superiors' butts when they do something stupid is part of his job description, so he has to own the decision and face the consequences. The decision was wrong for several reasons, not the least of which was that it told the players that the coaching staff had given up on the season themselves. Inserting a rookie QB as starter is something that teams do when they have no hope of having a winning season not when they're sitting as the sixth seed in the playoff races.

McDermott is not that much of a noobie. My guess is that Tyrod has likely decided that the Bills aren't good enough for him, either. You can bet that guys like Gillislee, Gilmore, Woods, Watkins, Dareus, and Darby are all ecstatic that they were lucky enough to escape. They didn't "inherit" a tire fire, they created it. Zach Brown, Ronald Darby, Marcel Dareus, Mike Gillislee, Stephon Gilmore, Marquise Goodwin, Sammy Watkins, and Robert Woods all left, via trade or FA, on their watch. If the decision to start Peterson was truly McDermott's and not somebody higher up the corporate food chain, then it was truly bizarre. NFL HCs don't give up shots to win games or make the playoffs; it's not in their DNA. Even ol' Dick Jauron would put winning ahead of auditioning a QB when a team was 5-4 and was holding a playoff spot.

I disagree. This team has been much worse than any Bills team has ever been over the course of any three games in its history -- and that history includes some pretty terrible teams, and no, this wasn't the team that "we thought we'd have at the start of the year". Most fans thought that the Bills would at least be competitive with most teams even if they didn't win a lot. This team is uncompetitive, and it's uncompetitive because it's been deliberately stripped of almost all its younger talent in a matter of months, and that talent has been replaced by rookies and scrubs. A poster yesterday stated that the team was the equivalent of an expansion team, and that seems about right. It's going to take a whole lot longer than a couple of years just to bring the talent level up to where it was when McDermott and Beane came on the scene, especially if they're the ones doing the talent selection.

This is nonsense. The Bills got the crap beat out of them three straight games. With his team holding the sixth seed and with a record of 5-4, McDermott changed from his veteran qb to a rookie qb who had never started an NFL game before. That rookie qb was unprepared to start an NFL game and had a horrendous game, throwing 5 ints in just the first half, and you think McDermott being criticized by the press is an "odd crucifixion"???? In what universe do you reside? Why the hell shouldn't a professional football coach be held accountable when his team plays terribly or when he throws an unprepared player out on the field for any reason other than dire necessity like injury?

McDermott and Beane have stripped the team of talent the way Jauron did. Chan inherited Jauron's expansion team and actually added some talent. Whaley added more ... and McDermott and Beane have remedied that in short order.

Why are both teams "talent starved"? Oh, yeah! Because those "serious professionals" jettisoned almost all of the best and youngest talent on the teams in order to fill them with scrubs. Those "serious professionals" are simply playing money ball.

Ummm ... Marrone was hired before the Pegulas bought the team. The Pegulas have nobody but themselves to blame for Rex Ryan and his clown show since they wanted him even though Whaley wanted somebody else, supposedly Hue Jackson. I believe that the Bills used a search committee to select McDermott, and that Beane was hired after him, after the draft, possibly with McDermott's input. Nice revisionist history, though.

Watkins would have been here this year, and he never said he wouldn't have re-signed with the Bills. He's a WR drafted high in the draft ... they are ALL prima donnas, and they complain all the time. It's more than likely that the Bills weren't interested in re-signing him at the market rate for WRs. And Dareus wasn't a distraction. There was never any whisper about him causing any kind of trouble in the locker room. Somebody on the Bills wanted him gone, and since the Bills had been trying to peddle him even before OTAs, I doubt it had anything at all to do with whether he "bought in" to McDermott's system. My guess is that Dareus realized that he wasn't wanted on the Bills, and that affected his attitude or his work ethic. Obviously, he feels wanted in Jacksonville.

The Bills needed bodies to fill holes, so they took what they could get, especially since they didn't want to pay too much for them. Except for Benjamin, I don't think the other two had much, if any, recent injury history. Players get hurt, especially DBs and WRs since they tend to be somewhat smaller than many of the guys hitting them. If the Bills got duped, it's because they essentially swapped their late mode well equipped Subarus and Toyotas for older model stripped down Fords and Dodges simply because they were cheaper.