SoTier

I think Frazier is likely to be the scapegoat and get the axe. IMO, Frazier did a really good job masking the Bills defensive deficiencies, primarily lack of talent, as long as he had Dareus to plug the middle on obvious running downs, but he simply doesn't have the talent now. I don't know if there's more to it, such as Williams and Alexander getting old. As on the OL, there may have been scheme changes that these guys are struggling to adapt to. Certainly Preston Brown played better when he had more talented players around him and a better DL rotation. If Glenn were healthy, I think there would be enough talent on the OL for it to function decently but the players, except for Ducasse, have simply not adapted well to Dennison's zone blocking scheme. Maybe it's not all the players but only 1 or 2 who are struggling but that's more than enough to derail plays with regularity. Certainly, Ducasse doesn't help. He's a scrub who has been a bust on every team he's ever been on as a pro.

Jacksonville.

You noticed that, too? Apparently talent is not part of the "skill set" that the Bills regime are seeking since they've managed to strip the Bills of so much of it in such a short time, and apparently without any regard to the consequences to the product they put on the field. The Bills -- I don't just include McDermott and Beane here because I think they are taking orders from higher up the corporate food chain by those focused only on the bottom line -- have displayed a really callous disdain for their fans and their fans' loyalty IMO. I don't know how else to describe the personnel moves that they've made since just before the trade deadline. There was a real chance that the Bills might have made the playoffs this year simply because of how bad the AFC is, but apparently saving a few million dollars on Dareus' salary was much more important than breaking the 17 year playoff drought. That's how much the Bills -- not the Bills players -- care about winning football games because to the suits in OBD, it's all about maximizing profit. Money ball.

Why are you amazed by what Bills fans continue to justify from OBD after all these years of their putting crappy teams on the field? Any excuse that OBD comes up with to shipping out a player who has supposedly "transgressed" (which lately apparently means making more than the league veteran minimum salary) gets instantly slurped up and regurgitated by the brainwashed legion. Sometimes OBD doesn't have to come with excuses; they just get rid of the player and let the True Believers make up lies to blame the players ... The True Believers will never hear a bad word about the Bills. Every move they make is brilliant. They still stubbornly cling to the myths that trading Jason Peters and Marshawn Lynch were good moves. They're not going to admit that trading Dareus was probably at least as bad, especially if Dareus goes on to have success in Jacksonville.

It doesn't matter. The Bills don't really care about the cap except when they can use it as an excuse to not re-sign their own players. They care about actual $$$ they spend. Taylor is due a bonus of several million at the beginning of the new league year, so he'll be cut before that date. Since the entire NFL knows how the Bills operate, nobody will offer them anything. Money ball.

Why don't they have better options? Oh, yeah, they opted to go with STers and PS refugees on the DL ... and then they traded away their best DLer for a 6th rounder supposedly because he didn't "buy into" the new system although the Bills were trying to peddle Dareus since before the first OTA.

If they do that, how are they going to package those draft picks to move up and draft their Yet-To-Be-Named Savior Franchise QB? After all, if they don't have their franchise QB, what's the whole point of building up the team since they won't be able to win the SB without one.

Jim Kelly never won a SB in 4 tries, either.

Have the Bills suddenly fixed their defense while the fans and the media were focused on the QB change? Of course not, so there's no more hope today than there was 6 days ago. Exchanging one active roster scrub for a practice squad scrub isn't going to do much to improve a defense that gave up nearly 500 yards and 9 TDs on the ground in 2 games.

There's a whole lot of whistling past the graveyard in this thread.

IOW, almighty McDermott lied with a sincere smile plastered on his face when he claimed they were trying to win games while rebuilding. That sounds about right. Con artists are great actors.

I agree with Alphadog's thoughts on Eli, too. I think the most notable aspect of Eli is his streakiness. That has stood out about him since he was a rookie. All QBs can have hot and cold streaks, but Eli's have been spectacular at times and seem to last longer than simply a handful of games. When he's "on", he not only can carry a team, he seemingly makes miraculous plays, but then there's "bad Eli" who becomes a turn over machine.

That's right, and the Bills' business model is to keep actual current payroll as low as possible while keeping ticket/merchandise sales as high as possible to maximize profits. Winning is totally irrelevant as they've demonstrated this season.

Look at the rosters, BLM. Most NFL players are black. It's a fact not an opinion. Young black men, especially those from poor backgrounds, gravitate to football and basketball because they offer real opportunities for talented kids to get out of poverty. Sports are certainly a better choice than criminal activity or just giving up. Most poor kids, white or black, don't have many options. Blacks aren't the only groups in the US that have used sports as keys to upward mobility. At various times and places in the US since after the Civil War, various immigrant groups dominated the popular sports of their eras: Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Hispanics. Young men with next to nothing except their athleticism and talent, and not much help from the larger society, used sports to better themselves and leap into the middle class. In the case of blacks, the larger society has tended to be virulently hostile until relatively recently.

How, exactly, have the Bills proved the national media wrong any time recently ... other than embarrassing those prognosticators who thought the Bills were potentially a playoff team before the Jests game?

The Bills have had all of 21 winning seasons in their 67 years of existence, only 2 of them in this century and none under the current ownership. The Bills haven't made the playoffs in seventeen years, the longest active post season drought in professional sports, and they are apparently doing just about everything possible to insure that their record for futility continues into the foreseeable future. If you don't like the national media insulting/mocking/criticizing the Buffalo Bills ineptitude, I suggest you complain to the people who can do something about it, the Pegulas.

Something like 70-80 percent of NFL players are black, and blacks make up the majority of players at every position except QB and special positions like kickers and long snappers. Less than a third (10 of 32) of the starting QBs are/have been black this season ... and that includes Brent Hundley who is replacing the injured Aaron Rodgers as well as Jacoby Brissette who was originally subbing for Andrew Luck who was expected to return. That's way under the 16-22 one would expect if blacks were given the same opportunities to be QBs in the NFL as whites, so a casual observer might very well think that there's something to the story. IMO, the problem isn't so much in the NFL as it is in big time college football. Just like there' are few no black HCs at the marquee collegiate programs that produce the majority of professional players, there's a dearth of black QBs starting at many of those same programs, perhaps most. My guess is that many/most young black QBs talented enough to be recruited into major collegiate programs are encouraged (sometimes by coaches but sometimes by family or friends) to play other positions beside QB because they're perceived as offering more opportunity to make the pros. That results in most of the top collegiate QB prospects being white. If you don't think this happens, read the bios of a lot of black pros playing other positions ... a significant number were HS QBs.

Totally agree about Harris. I think he played in a very difficult situation, less so in Buffalo than in some other cities. I remember the way he threw those short passes, too. JP Losman threw short passes the same way, only not quite so hard. Of course, back in Harris' day, QBs didn't care much about short passes anyways. That's what a whole lot of fans today don't understand about those QBs back in the 1960s and 1970s, they played an entirely different game so their stats don't look quite so impressive. If you couldn't heave a football forty yards in the air with some accuracy, they sent you home. BTW, Harris eventually became an exec with the NFL IIRC.

I'm rooting for the Steelers because I like them even if their fans give rednecks a bad name ... and I like the Jags a whole lot more than the Titans anyways.

Who the hell cares what some draft analyst or media expert claims about players? If every single one of the first round picks he touts in a particular draft busts, who the hell remembers a few years down the road? If pro evaluators miss on too many top picks, they're out the door, so I'll go with the pros' evaluations of most of those failed QBs.

Well, Mark Sanchez, Josh Freeman, Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert, Christian Ponder, RG III, Brandon Weeden, and EJ Manuel were by "all accounts" first round caliber QBs in their draft classes, too, but they didn't play like it on the field. I believe that most of them are out of the league now. Brian Bortles, the #3 pick in 2014, looks set to follow their trail. A lot of these QBs that get taken in the first round are the products of high-powered college programs and/or their agents' hype machines. With most colleges no longer using pro-style offenses, it's even harder to separate the pretenders from the contenders because even scouts have to guess if some of these QBs would be effective doing the things pro QBs are expected to do. IMO, if there's a young QB you really like, maybe you ought to take him even if you already have a serviceable QB as a starter. The Bills passed on Russell Wilson and Kirk Cousins in 2012 because they had Ryan Fitzpatrick (also because Wilson is short and Cousins is slight). They passed on Watson and Mahomes in 2017 because they had Taylor even though they weren't sure about him -- and because they were in desperate need of a DB after allowing Gilmore to walk. This is part of a bigger issue than just about QBs; the Bills have simply not planned for the future essentially since Polian left. When they lose players to retirement or injury or to their own stubborn refusal to pay market rate for outstanding players, they have to scramble to fill that hole with either a rookie or a journeyman FA because they never develop their own players. They're always running behind, so all positions are impacted, but probably none so much as the QB position. With all that said, does anybody really believe that they won't take a first round QB in 2018? Not me. I said back in September that they were going to jettison Taylor and draft a rookie in the first round, and everything continues to point in that direction.

What if there is no QB that's worth a first round pick when the Bills pick? That's my only disagreement with the idea of your statement, "they need to draft QB with their first round pick". There's absolutely no guarantee that just because you need a QB (or a LB or DT) that a good one will be there waiting for you. The 2018 class might well be a dud like 2013. The biggest pitfall of drafting a QB in the first round is that he's going to prevent your team from drafting another one in the first round for the duration of his contract most likely. It's just a fact of life. There's 1 starting QB on a team who gets most of the reps and the coaches' attention. Any other QBs get crumbs. When the first round QB is struggling to become a first rate starter if he can, he gets all the attention. The team isn't going to invest another first rounder the next year or the year after to sit on the bench and vegetate. Even QBs on rookie contracts are more expensive than OLers or DBs, so the team may very well miss on much better prospects if they take a QB in the first round just to say that they took one. IMO, that's what they did in both 2004 and in 2013. They missed out on Aaron Rodgers in 2005 for JP Losman, and they missed out on Derek Carr because they'd drafted EJ Manuel in 2013. It seems to me that they're prepping themselves to again draft a QB in the first round just because they think it will excite the fans not that the kid they take is a real blue-chip prospect, which removes the draft selection from the realm of rational decision making and puts it over in the pure chance, lottery winning realm. Maybe they'll get lucky, but probably not. Not many people win big lottery jackpots, either.

This. Just look at how many of their first, second, and third round picks, almost all of them starters, the Bills have shed since last season. Look at who they replaced them with: JAGS, STers, practice squad refugees, busts. Yeah, every once in a while a low round/UDFA guy comes along and becomes great, and many part timers play important roles on winning teams, but the reality is that the Day 3 guys and UDFAs generally have less talent than the guys drafted on Day 1.

Probably for the same reasons that the Bills haven't had an NFL-caliber WR corps and why Vlad Ducasse is their starting RG: they couldn't find anybody to meet their standards of character as determined by how much they "buy into" McDermott's "process". How can a Bills fan believe there is a god ... unless he/she/it is a vengeful one?

Agreed. He's probably safe next season, too, since the Bills will draft a QB in the first round in 2018 and likely rush him to play ASAP, which means that most offensive problems will get blamed on the rookie not on Dennison.