Richard Noggin

15+ years of playoff drought gave rise to a hopeless rust belt binge drinking display on gamedays; the tailgate WAS the spectacle. So many millennials and Xers don't even remember a good portion of the actual games they attended during the drought. Or so I'm told... That place was really something in the 80s. Can only imagine what it was like in the 70s.

Agree on the positive perception of Hollins' personality, and therefore disagree that he's actually all that weird at all. He's eccentric about a bunch of stuff, no doubt. Portrays a commendable contrariety to cultural norms, but does not come off as weird to me in that he conveys no awkwardness or discomfort while doing so. Actually seems really composed and likeable, quite frankly. More of an oddball than a weirdo. Guess I just read the word "weird" with a pejorative/creepy connotation. Semantics.

Man I loved that show for a short time in my youth. Formative influence on my id-driven early adulthood (late childhood), no doubt.

We know it was at least a door left partially open between Hyde and Beane (with some comments to that end), and that door has not yet been publicly closed by either party. Stranger things have happened. Feels like we've actually seen a fair amount of this sort of late season 30-something vet signing across the league (and with the Bills specifically) for a little while now.

Brady has really meshed with Kromer, among other offensive assistant coaches. You can probably attribute some of that to McDermott's longstanding and now kinda prescient desire to field a balanced offense capable of running the ball (specifically with zone concepts) downhill. He let Daboll run the show in a slightly or hugely different manner for a couple years there, but his vision for winning football has come back into favor this season especially. Think Detroit, Philly, Buffalo.

Exactly. Offensive players aren't technically allowed to "grab" any part of a defender's body, especially from behind. The (really long, like down to his waist almost) hair that was briefly grabbed in this case is just distracting people from basic rules.

Took you that long to attain Pro Bowl nihilism lol? He's definitely been SO much more fundamentally sound and responsible with his helmet placement on tackles since suffering the concussion that caused him to don the Guardian Cap. He's really been a plus starter as the season has progressed. Any sports awards voting schema that includes fans can be nothing more than this.

Whatever continues to push Josh Allen and his teammates towards ending the season with a win. If it's an NFL MVP award, so be it. If it's getting snubbed for that same award, also fine with me. There is only one goal for the remainder of Allen's career, and that is winning championships. The rest is important to the guys in most cases (contract accelerators, FA values, etc.), but still only secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so on when compared to team success. That also gets people paid (on the roster, the coaching staff, and in the front office).

Twiiter post a little while back had a quote like "2017 Steelers locker room must have had airborne CTE" LOL Diontae Johnson another victim?

Agreed on the division opponents and playing a team for a 3rd time. Also agreed on Nix. His smallish hands had all kinds of trouble earlier in the season during a rain game. Like puzzling ball handling issues for an NFL QB. Curious to see how he'd handle the ball in 20 degrees with 10-15 mph winds and flurries.

Thanks for this. I've appreciated some of Simms' analysis in past. But also the podcast/radio space requires a high volume of content, so it's not always A-grade analysis or terribly novel/insightful. Before I give it a genuine go, is this one presenting stuff for even alert Bills fans to chew on?

Tackling by hair has nothing to do with a blocker grabbing any part of a defender. It's legal to tackle by hair, and we know that. It's NEVER legal to grab a defender at all, much less by the hair as he runs past you. Thankfully the refs missed it. That's holding.

Yup. Watched it live, as our seats are looking right down that goal line. No one around me saw it, though.

This is an important point.

Yeah, Johnson has positioned himself as a candidate who will seemingly evaluate the entire situation and his decision(s) will "bear" watching.

Sports radio took it from the stoops and shops and bar room stools and broadcast it over the airwaves, for free, and now online content channels and on-demand streaming podcasts have further amplified the popular obsession with perception and narrative and arm chair debate. Fans really get caught up in "popular" opinion and commentator-driven narratives, as if that matters in some tangible way. We can discuss all that legacy stuff and rank teams and players historically if we want to, and I enjoy deconstructing and contextualizing and arguing as much as anyone--(I'm half critic/know-it-all on my dad's side)--but I know my "takes" don't matter except as part of an ongoing discourse completely irrelevant to the actual sporting contests themselves. **Our takes are for entertainment purposes only.

Could be, depending on Johnson's judgment of ownership and front office. Seems more like Johnson will get to interview the organizations this year, rather than the other way around. Has to be the absolute #1 candidate.

The one win took an act of god and dangerous gamesmanship on behalf of the Phins/NFL. And the Bills were STILL just one errant throw (bad fundamentals/totally gassed) on the last play away from winning. That wasn't the Dorsey smashed laptop reaction, was it?

6 figures ain't what it used to be.

It's not about the field conditions. Almost never about that. It's about the logistics of the event: the ingress and egress and parking of 70ish thousand people in Orchard Park on a Sunday night. It's about snow removal. Road conditions. Parking supply. Human safety on-site and quality of play on-field are not important. Only travel impedes the product. A snowy TV gladiator spectacle has proven to be engaging and even anticipated in certain markets. Personally, I LOVE snow for home games. It's really only wind that interferes with game play, followed by extreme rain and then of course extreme heat and maybe lastly extreme cold. Snow left in the stadium rows is my favorite late season treat. Launching fistfulls of snow straight up into the air to celebrate is satisfying on several levels.

Hard to disagree from a long-time fan's perspective, but aren't jersey options rooted more in NEW marketing and revenue opportunities, rather than the approval of EXISTING/CHURN-PROOF fans? It ain't at all about what're actually "the best" uniform combinations according to fans, although doesn't the org sometimes listen to what the players prefer? I feel like we've been fed that intel at times: that uniform combos are in part decided by player preferences. Fun notion that KC Chiefs players could historically be accustomed to some obscure psycho-somatic boost from wearing a color, Red, that was Lamar Hunt's fallback/2nd choice 64 years ago (when his chosen blue and orange were claimed instead by the Houston Oilers). What a cool little coincidence!

Hasn't Goff in 2024 shown over multiple games a historically-rare efficiency (TDs ≥ incompletions) while also continually pushing the ball downfield? He did have that 5 INT debacle against Cincinnati that the Lions WON, but otherwise, has been like peak Kirk Cousins on steroids. (While also having an incredibly productive and diverse and physical running attack, like Hurts has often had, but WITHOUT ANY RUSHING THREAT from the QB himself.) Hurts is undoubtedly more talented overall, and plays SO well and risk averse in the framework of his system. I just think Goff this year is transcending a bit, given that he is NOT mobile at all, and is stringing together games full of crazy dumb reads and throws. Like Tua and Kirk Cousins but TURBO.