Mikey152

I actually think the Bills subbed WAY more than average teams. Top DE play 80+% of snaps all the time. Top DT play 70+%. That is pretty normal.

To that point, the Dalton Kincaid fan club has grown exponentially this year, too. People will point to his health, but it isn't JUST his health. It's all the 12 and 13 with the intent of passing the football. Also, we should probably be giving some props to PCj. Im sure his presence has had a significant impact...so when I say Brady, I really mean coaching.

I'm sure there are some pro-McDermott folks...but I think most of the people that are pro-Mcdermott these days are actually Beane haters in disguise. As for the defense, if it makes you feel better...Nico Collins didn't play last week. He is clearly very important to what they do on offense (there is that irony again, lol). Of course, he is also by far their best player on offense.

Maybe this will save us all another 40 pages of arguing about WRs. I've never argued that better WRs wouldn't make the Bills better. Of course they would. I've argued against the idea that WR was the primary thing preventing this offense from becoming something more. We had arguably the best QB in football, an excellent offensive line, the NFL's leading rusher and a team that won a lot of games. At some point, saying “imagine how good they'd be if they just had better WRs” becomes a little too easy. Resources aren't infinite. Adding more somewhere means taking them from somewhere else. But my bigger skepticism was always whether McDermott even wanted to play the kind of football people imagined those WRs unlocking. His entire philosophy was complementary football. Protect the football, run it, play defense, don't make any one player bigger than the team and win collectively. That's not criticism masquerading as fact. It's how I interpreted what he consistently said and how his teams played. So I wasn't convinced that dropping another expensive WR onto that roster suddenly turned Buffalo into an offensive juggernaut. Maybe it would have. Maybe McDermott would have unleashed Allen with better weapons. We can't know. What we can observe is what happened when they actually changed the coach and philosophy. And that's the part that has changed my opinion. I didn't want McDermott fired. I thought the risk of replacing a very successful coach outweighed the uncertain upside. Now that I've seen the team after the change, I think they probably needed it more than I realized. DJ Moore absolutely helps. Other roster changes help. Brady helps. I'm not pretending I can assign percentages to any of this. But when the entire team suddenly has a different energy, Allen is being treated differently, players are talking differently and the offense is behaving differently, I have a hard time looking at all of that and concluding the primary variable was finally fixing the WR room...especially when we've been searching for evidence to support that theory for about three years. That's really my disagreement. I'm allowing what happened to change my opinion of what came before. I'm not particularly interested in finding a new explanation every week that allows my old opinion to remain undefeated.

Nobody is arguing it isn’t a combination of factors. We’re arguing about which factors were driving the others. Your position still seems to be that McDermott coached conservatively because the roster required it. My position is that the roster and the way it was used were largely products of the philosophy McDermott wanted to play with in the first place. That’s why “but DJ Moore” doesn’t really answer the argument. Moore is a very good player and obviously helps the offense. He also didn’t catch a pass last week, and somehow the entire team still looked like it had been shot out of a cannon. And this fanbase has been doing this with WRs for years. Cooper was going to unlock everything too. Now it’s Moore, including from plenty of people who weren’t particularly interested in Moore when he was available this offseason. So yes, it’s a combination of factors. The disagreement is over causality, not whether more than one thing happened. And there is still something wonderfully ironic about repeatedly announcing how balanced your view is while telling everyone who disagrees with your weighting of those factors that they just aren’t considering all the factors.

Oh, I know what irony means. The irony is that you’re lecturing me about considering all the relevant information while seemingly being unable to entertain the possibility that DJ Moore isn’t the primary explanation. I’ve never said Moore doesn’t help. I’m questioning the idea that adding him explains why the entire team suddenly looks more energized, why Allen looks and sounds different, why the offense is being run differently, and why players are openly talking about feeling freer. Moore didn’t even have a catch last game. Bills fans have had the pitchforks out over WR for several years now. And the funny part is, it didn’t even have to be DJ Moore. Half the people making this argument didn’t think he was good enough when his name came up in the offseason. Now that he’s here and the offense looks better, suddenly he’s the obvious explanation. We did this with Amari Cooper too. Every improvement became evidence that the missing WR was the problem all along, even if their actual contribution (Cooper played less snaps that Mack Hollins) was substandard. Half the people making this argument didn’t think he was good enough when his name came up in the offseason. Now that he’s here and the offense looks better, suddenly he’s the obvious explanation. That’s confirmation bias, not “considering all the relevant information.” Hence, Ironic.

The irony of this post…I don’t think anyone anywhere thinks DJ Moore makes the Bills a worse offense. Literally nobody said that. And nobody is mad at McDermott. Most of us are grateful that he helped bring us out of the dark ages. What we are all annoyed about is this unrelenting need from a contingent of Bills fans to prove that the roster drove the vibes and strategy and not the other way around. The team was rostered and played the way it did because the coaches wanted it that way. Just take a second and really think about how McDermott talked about Josh Allen for a second. Do you ever remember him talking about Josh like Brady does? You don’t, because he didn’t. McDermott was a very team first, complimentary football kind of guy. No player is bigger than the team. There is nothing wrong with that, and in certain situations it is exactly what a team needs. But do you know what comes with that? A lot of players that do their jobs and are considered pretty good but not great. Higher floor, lower ceiling. It’s pretty much the hallmark of almost every team ever with a defensive coach. For a long time, I thought it was our path to a SB. That solid plus Josh could get it done. But the league is changing. Young, players coaches are in. It’s only gonna get worse with all the NIL kids. The Bills needed to get younger and younger kids weren’t gonna listen to McDermott and his conservative rhetoric. They are playing better because they feel free. They are literally saying that. Does DJ Moore help? I’m sure. Is he the main reason the whole offense looks and feels different? Doubtful. We are finally embracing our final form.

Can I ask a rather basic question? I mean, I get that all the WR truthers like to cling to this idea that WR was the missing link and DJ Moore (who is now clearly a bonafide #1 and key after all off-season hearing we needed a real number one but he is fine as a two) is proof they were right…but why do we dismiss what the players are saying so easily? What the coach is saying? What the team said when they made the change? It’s fine if you don’t believe us, but why don’t you believe them? they all like DJ Moore I’m sure, but I haven’t heard any of them mention his name when asked what is different.

The tried a deep shot or two to MVS, missed it, and decided to cut him. I think you’re missing the whole point…it’s not the plays, it’s the attitude. Almost every defensive coach in the league is gonna be conservative. I mean, of course McDermott isn’t going to say “don’t take wide open shots at the end zone” but unless there is a blown coverage, that just isn’t how it works. If you’re running on first down and usually on second down, a deep shot on third down kills a drive so you better be sure. That’s not going for the jugular or being aggressive, that’s just another version of being safe and protecting the football. A lot of the explosives in that Texans game were balls he wouldn’t have even tried to throw last year trying to play it safe. If you can’t see the difference, I don’t know what to tell you. This offense has looked different all season, including preseason, when Dj and Josh weren’t even on the field. It is clear they are attacking all levels more with a lot of the same guys as last year. Does Moore raise the ceiling? Of course. Is he the reason? That might fit your whole WR + McDermott wasn’t that bad narrative, but it reeks of confirmation bias to me. DJ Moore had zero catches last game. Nobody said he was bad. Just conservative. Like 95% of defensive coaches

This is a bunch of cope, IMO, for what was really just a missed oppotunity. If it was really just the fact that we were missing a "downfield threat" then why did they cut MVS? You might say "Mike, MVS sucks", and you may even be right. But in 6 games for the Bills in 2024 he had 2 catches for 26 yards and no touchdowns. After we cut him, he signed with the saints and with no practice time and a considerably worse QB he put up 17 catches for 385 yards and 4 touchdowns. At some point, "they just didn't have the receivers" stops explaining what happened. Maybe the bigger missed opportunity was an offense that wasn't particularly interested in using the receivers it had that way.

It wasn’t tweets…it was a series of reaction videos that week. He and Buffalo Plus were brutal.

Seriously? He was destroying them for firing McDermott.

I don't have any trouble believing that you just think they stink. I'm not arguing that everyone who dislikes them is resistant to change. What I don't really understand is the intensity of the reaction to them. If they had put the Bills in purple and orange, slapped some completely unrelated logo on the helmet and called it "Nickel City," I'd understand people wondering what the hell they were looking at. But that's not really what happened here. Gray/silver is at least a pretty obvious visual interpretation of nickel, it's combined with Bills colors, and the helmet is using a variation of an existing Bills design element. You can absolutely think they executed all of those things poorly, but none of the choices strike me as particularly bizarre or incoherent. That's where I think some of this crosses over from "I don't like them" into treating personal aesthetic preferences as though they're design defects. The stripes meeting in the back bothers you. It doesn't bother me at all. You think the gray is ugly. I think it looks pretty sharp. You think red, white and blue would look better. Fine, but then we're basically asking why an alternate uniform doesn't look more like the regular uniform. And "nobody asked for this" is particularly strange to me. Nobody asks for a new uniform until somebody designs one. That's sort of the point of trying something new. So I'm not confused that people dislike them. I'm confused that a reasonably coherent alternate uniform has inspired this much outrage. "Not for me" seems like a perfectly proportionate response. Some of the reaction makes it sound like they replaced the charging buffalo with a picture of Josh Allen riding a nickel.

I think people are getting a little carried away trying to turn a completely subjective reaction into some kind of objective design critique. If you think they’re ugly, fair enough. Uniforms are almost entirely a matter of taste. But once we get into “the colors don’t work,” “this doesn’t look like the Bills,” “the design is terrible,” etc., we’re mostly just finding more elaborate ways to say “I don’t like it.” Personally, I like that they tried something different. I don’t need every alternate uniform to look like a slightly rearranged version of the regular uniform, and I’d rather they take an occasional swing that some people hate than make everything so safe that nobody has much of a reaction at all. Give it a few games, too. There are plenty of uniforms that looked strange in a reveal and completely different once you saw the whole team wearing them on the field.

I don't think SJ was lying when he said nobody ever really taught Keon how to be a WR.