Richard Noggin

Maybe "good running" contributes to "bad tackling" on plays like this?

I was multi-tasking during the game, unfortunately, so missed evidence of Cook pass blocking effectively. That's likely his last remaining weakness, at least from our limited vantage point. He never had a run like that. Wade had a couple one-cut sprints that flashed. The Evans run today really was Beastmode-ish, broken-field cutting and breaking tackles and running over dudes on his way to the endzone.

Kinda par for the course innit

If a WR's catch % is consistently below average, and also below other receivers that the SAME QB is throwing to, how can that be "mostly on the QB"? You aren't even considering Occam's Razor here. The simple, bigger picture objective truth is that throwing to Davis is Allen's lowest percentage option. (High reward, but too much risk for a high volume of targets.) Davis' avg depth of target, and resulting eye-popping yards per reception, means we really should have more tolerance for lower efficiency numbers, for sure. Gabe Davis HAS undoubtedly flashed some splash deep and red zone plays against man coverage (we can all immediately recall a handful of plays concentrated mostly in a few games). I just can't ignore his bizarrely flawed catching fundamentals at times (that reaching/clapping thing he does when coming back to the ball, especially) and the times when he's just WAY out of sync with his QB when reading and reacting to coverages on option routes (sometimes easier to pick up on in person at the stadium). You see a lack of separation on routes that aren't flags, posts, or flies. He kind of sucks, statistically, doing much else. Drops a LOT of passes. Interrupts an offensive "schedule" too often to be a high volume, true #2 option over the course of a season.

Gave Davis still fighting the football. He is not a natural, consistent catcher of the ball. Will still have big moments because he's a specimen, but his fundamentals are shite.

Doesn't feel like an accurate representation of the sentiment among those who were against re-signing Edmunds. I've found that most fans who wanted the team to move on from Edmunds felt like his lack of impact plays and his ineffectiveness as a blitzer made him unworthy of the contract he'd get on the open market. He's obviously assignment-sound and rangy enough to cover a lot of ground in coverage, but he's otherwise pretty unspectacular. Someone was going to overpay him, and I'm glad it wasn't the Bills.

We should all HOPE that defenses actively "scheme ways to try and take him out of the gameplan." Get Allen cookin with his WRs and maybe move some safeties and/or LBs out of their ideal run fits.

ESPN, of all outlets, threw up a tantalizing infographic (highlighting a VERY SMALL sample size). Unfortunately, I'm suddenly unable to recall exact parameters, but it went something like this: Last/only three teams to add in one offseason two offensive skill players with four or more pro bowl appearances (possibly over a controlled/recent span). Team Acquisitions Outcome 2023 Jets Rodgers, Cook tbd 2020 Bucs Brady, Brown Won SB ??? ??? (very frustrating) Won SB Probably kind of easy to identify the 3rd team that did it (minus my brain fart)...maybe the Rams with Stafford and Beckham?

My view is that for some athletes who excel at head-to-head collision sports, they are tapping into a hormonally life-or-death level of competitiveness. Losing is like chemically unacceptable. Or psychologically, if you prefer, their egos reject losing in a desperate/violent way. I've played with guys who were obviously on another level, and they were often edgy pricks if things weren't unattainably perfect on the pitch.

Following you around here because this is interesting discourse. Could the reluctance to just insert Elam into the defense and adapt schemes to his strengths have something to do with that making his presence on the field a "tell" for the offense? I mean, it sure seemed like the defense under Frazier lapsed often into VERY predictable schemes anyways, and McD's play-calling takeover hopefully hints at a shift towards a more multiple, matchup-focused approach... We all mostly agree that in the playoffs, against high-end AFC offenses, Frazier's defenses seemed to lack the better answers necessary to frustrate those top attacks after putting an entire season on tape. If Kaiir Elam automatically = press man coverage, then that's one problem the QB and WR don't need to solve post-snap. Or in the case of Frazier's schemes, if the Bills D almost always = off-coverage/cushion and light boxes, then that's even more problems the QB and WRs have easy answers to.

Doesn't this particular discussion of "fit" echo what happened with AJ Epenesa in a way? While he fell deep into the 2nd round and his perceived value was sticking out, his best or at least most common NFL projections were as a 2-gapping 3-4 DE; a Pittsburgh Steeler type of guy. Long and strong and edge-setting. So the Bills draft this stout Iowa bull and immediately ask him to become a fundamentally different athlete. Instead of leaning into his well-documented strengths, they seemingly decided that his "very poor" speed RAS and "okay" agility RAS could be made less mediocre by asking him to lose another 10-20 pounds (he had already shed at least 5-10 lbs for the combine), thus for sure eroding his one "great" RAS, which was his size. Longview draft "strategy" (to reference our other ongoing discussion) supports picking AJ Epenesa when he falls to you in the back half of the 2nd round. But then tactically the coaches need to have an actionable plan to utilize said player's strengths, or else that perceived draft value is rendered moot, and Beane could have maybe identified a better fit.

Elam doesn't seem to fit as a McD CB draft prospect they should have spent extra assets on, given how zone-heavy (even if it's cover-3 and cover-2 which often function like man post-snap depending on the play calls) they have been. Or, if Elam the prospect was such a good prospect that they felt justified in moving up in the 1st round, why aren't they doing more to adapt to his unique skills and utilize his specific strengths? Why wasn't that part of a premeditated shift towards more press and man coverage? Seems like Benford and Jackson (6th and 7th round picks, respectively) provide plenty of promise in the defensive philosophy the Bills have relied upon since McD's arrival. Is Frazier's departure part of this? Was he hesitant to scheme to Elam's strengths? Or was Elam a bit of a reach to ensure they got the last 1st-round worthy CB prospect in a year when that was a perceived glaring need?

So I think what you're sharing in the provided example is potentially considered "tactical" in that it's specifically influenced by contemporaneous circumstances for a given draft and a given perceived roster need, and does not adhere to a longer term, macro view of maximizing draft value year after year to consistently add cost-controlled, high-end talent. It's heavily swayed by current perception of circumstances, and therefore subject to more flexible and relative and potentially undisciplined or short-sighted use of assets. The repeated trade-ups have cost the roster how many day-three picks in Beane's tenure? No one will argue whatever Allen's pick cost. But what about Edmunds, Ford, Knox, Elam, Dawkins (?) et al? (Didn't we trade up for Dion Dawkins? Memory is foggy on that one.) Draft strategy here seems to be to zero-in on specific players each year and spend more to acquire them, if necessary, draft value be damned, which almost no NFL GMs would actually admit to. Maybe it's just that what seems short-sighted and reactive I call "tactical," and what seems more patient and prudent and value-conscious I call "strategy." Semantics is a fraught endeavor in sports convos.

Man, I was still only on the BBMB back in 2005 when "retatta" was a message board thing here. So I am completely missing the actual reference beyond knowing there was some obviously humorous TBD thread 18 years ago when I was exclusively frequenting the "official" Bills message board when that existed. Anyone care to summarize for us BBMB refugees (or for the many youngins)?

While there have been a few glimpses of explosive excellence, the larger sample size of full seasons (especially observable in-person) shows a guy who requires apologies for his flaws: a guy who isn't often enough on the same page as his QB when reading coverages and adapting his routes, and a guy whose catching fundamentals have been puzzlingly fudged up far too often. The numbers actually support these criticisms. His transcendent playoff performance against KC (13-second loss) I guess refutes them for some people.

For what it's worth (almost nothing) my pre-draft mock draft simulations very consistently presented me with Dalton Kincaid as the best offensive weapon who slid to our pick (or within justifiable range of our pick in a trade-up scenario). Prior to those couple weeks of late-night mock draft simulations, I didn't know much about Kincaid (beyond some smallish school intrigue compounded by no pre-draft workout metrics due to a back injury). It's probably searchable, my various shared mock drafts, but I'm somewhat certain that I picked Kincaid more often than many others who shared their own drafts. Sometimes people are just really good at football, and the pre-draft underwear olympics economy doesn't generate much engagement pointing out such unquantifiably positive opinions. Kincaid is the closest thing to Kelce (the TE) we've seen in recent memory, innit?

The obligatory FIFY

I mean, what do medical professionals know that good ol' common sense and obstinance don't?

It DOES make a difference. What the Bills pay Diggs over his first 5 years with the team and what they'd pay a 1st round WR over that same span is dramatically different. (In the 1st year or two we'd want to assume the production is also fairly different, favoring the acquired vet, but then again, the actual production of that #22 pick since entering the league really drives home the potential value in drafting the player instead of trading for him.)

I just think it's more complicated than if everything is technically healthy. And maybe by "100%" you're also considering strength and flexibility, but the surrounding muscles and really the entire body, needs time to get used to functioning all together again, and to get stronger and more flexible and more SYMMETRICAL again.

We are most of us always taking pay cuts.

Two noteworthy things from those offensive highlights: 1) Beasley's role was HUGE in keeping the offense on schedule when Diggs and Davis were taken away. And 2) McD going for it on 4th down early in the 4th quarter UP 10 points was also HUGE.

That first episode was ALL Rodgers kool-aid, as expected. Cringe-worthy at times. However, I have to admit that, despite my more recent years-long annoyance at the private citizen's questionable information-literacy and smugness, while half-watching the 1st episode I was reminded somewhat of my previous (circa 2nd decade of this millennia) opinion that Aaron Rodgers was the obvious best QB in the NFL. The guy had built himself into the best thrower in the league imho. Really spun it better than the rest with that abbreviated 3/4 delivery (very different from his college mechanics, to be sure). And he had sneaky good movement. And here we see some evidence that Rodgers might be re-invigorated, and for sure that his ego must be newly defended/supported in this new chapter of his career. It is worthy of some concern. The guy is no joke on the field when he cares. My hope is that his tolerance for the violence of the game is diminishing, and that his ability to avoid that violence is now more about scuttling plays, throwing it away, and turtling, rather than escaping the pocket and creating off-schedule as he once did often. Gone I hope are the days of him stepping up in the pocket, then back, then up again before releasing the ball. He was a maestro for a while there.

But the rest of his body can. Sort of. Takes time to stop favoring one side and to build back up all the symmetry and supporting soft tissue. In my eyes it's not really about re-injury and more about injuries from compensation. It's not a black-and-white ACL thing. We all know this. The ACL isn't really the issue anymore. But the rest of the interconnected soft tissues could be, if rushed. More time to ramp-up is better for the REST of Miller's lower half.