Avisan

BuT tHiS gAeM hAd No DeFeNsE

Drive was fine, it was one great defensive play away from potentially sealing it It's an interesting choice for obvious reasons but they were all high-percentage plays

Nostradamus up in here

That call just gave the timeoutless Rams an extra 40+ seconds for this last drive

TBH if there is any fixing I'm more inclined to believe they called it to give the Rams a chance to respond to the inevitable TD to maximize the drama/entertainment levels

This stuff is just rampant lately And of course if you ever call it out you're the REAL bad guy But seriously somebody please point me to where someone ever said, say, Andy Dalton or Andrew Luck are "smart when they want to be" or "can't truly read defenses" when they occasionally struggle or make boneheaded plays The common denominator is pretty glaring

Dude, just take a break. If you are straight-up unable to post without being condescending, stop posting.

... Seriously?

This is ridiculous, being on the sideline isn't the same as being on the field but you can learn plenty. Learning in part by watching is completely standard for literally everything else in life, but somehow that doesn't apply to NFL quarterbacking?

Not a flattering look for Pegula if Reid's remarks here are accurate: https://mobile.twitter.com/_JasonHuber/status/1056651680803184641?s=20

4 picks in a closeish game including a pick 6 just prior to the benching

He's baaaaack 72-yarder to Evans

The O-line was probably about 60% complete with Fitz, and he marked a lot of its deficiencies via the speed with which he got rid of the ball. Even during FJ's monster season he was only averaging like 1.5 yards before contact and had a stupid high YAC average. Dude was unstoppable before he got hurt that season, that season's implosion was extra tough to watch. Nelson's big thing was his sure hands, he got a case of the dropsies even before the injury and the injury mostly just cemented things. The Goon Squad years were certainly entertaining, though, I'd take that Chan Gailey offense in a heartbeat over the current iteration. Here's to hoping Josh Allen manages to put it together somehow.

Cheers bud, thanks for chiming in. I think Marrone was the best HC we've had in a while. I think Hackett was still taking his lumps, and Saint Doug is a colossal a-hole on a personal level, but he was a really solid overall coach and I think his Jags performance bears that out. Not great, but solid. I wish he'd stuck around. Rex was a tire fire, and I think the Ryan Bros are the perfect example of how a league can pass someone by. Neither one of them are particularly detail-oriented, and you can't get away with that in the modern NFL. Losing Schwartz in the process was some unfortunate salt in the wound. The struggle to find a HC that can manage both sides of the ball has been maddening. While I certainly don't think the rebuild was necessary for the reasons I've outlined, the idea of a unified HC and FO forming a complete team in their image is certainly appealing due to our 21st century futility. I'm skeptical of this rebuild in part due to the inexperience of its executors and mainly because of the massive talent disparity between the old crew and the new crew on offense. We need two or three new starting lineman, a completely new WR corps (maybe Zay can continue to find a role?), a new TE, and our QB is a major question mark. It's a rough look moving forward, and in the time it takes to rebuild it we'll likely lose K. Williams, J. Hughes, and a few other pieces. I'm just really disappointed, because even if everything goes perfect we're still 2+ seasons off from being competitive. Even moves like ditching Kerley bug me because he's forged a successful career on being unimpressive but reliable. I really hope you're right and they pull this off, and for now we'll just have to wait and see. TL;DR While I like the idea of a minor rebuild, the execution concerns me.

Eh, I'm going to try to give you the benefit of the doubt for a second here and pretend you're posting in good faith. You live(d) in Japan, right? You're overly reliant on print media relative to the average Bills fan. Few people outside of Buffalo care enough to write a serious, non-comedic, autopsy about the Bills with much knowledge, we're not a particularly relevant team. Radio/TV segments mentioning the Bills in passing or a national-level figure making a guest appearance in local media is about the best we get. A "musing" is not a wave of print articles, it's a pondering, or a contemplation, which is where you've moved the goalposts already. Those of us who were around under the Rex regime were exposed to more non-print discussion of the status of the team, and his performance with the roster we had. I'm not the only poster to ever point out the fallacy of this team "needing" a rebuild. That idea is routinely challenged, and outside of a few dogmatic posters, is rarely doubled down on, because people who lived here know it isn't true. You'll note the poster I actually quoted isn't the one defending himself tooth and nail here. My post, however, and the viewpoint it represents, challenged your perception of the team at said point in time, so you jumped in. I said something that "didn't make sense" to you, so you couldn't help yourself. I could, if I wanted to, spend hours digging through the internet archives to find relevant media segments to support the specific claim of musings. They're there. I know they're there, because I heard them and saw them. Most posters here have been exposed to them, too. The idea of a bloated Whaley roster is relatively recent-- the power rankings you yourself posted almost universally express puzzlement at the rebuild decision! But that would take hours of digging, and as I said, it's not even a little bit worth it to me. You jumped into the conversation, and when I opted not to fully engage with you, you rebumped the thread. My point was made to those it was intended to be made to, and I'm content with my post regarding 2014 and 2016 stats and the context behind them as a proxy support of my claim. I don't need to prove myself right to you. Again, I could, but the time investment isn't worth it to me, and everyone else got the memo. I don't expect you to accept this. You'll chalk this one down as a W and get whatever temporary psychological boost you need out of feeling that way. You do you, man. This conversation is utterly unproductive, nobody else cares about it, and I've hit my effort limit for it. Cheers.

Keep waiting I don't care enough to dig up every radio or TV segment I listened to or every article I read several years ago It just isn't worth my time and you'll move the goalposts anyway, because you're not actually here to do anything but stroke your own ego You literally pointed to over a dozen links to post-regime-change power-rankings in a discussion regarding the state of the team pre-McDermott because being right on the internet is more important to you than staying on task My original post was challenging the notion that it was a given that the team needed a total makeover, because very few people thought that in 2016. I stand by that idea, and I'm content to leave it at that. See a couple posts up for the 2014 and 2016 stats/context for that belief. Cheers, and stop clogging up threads.

Yeah, this is why I don't do this with you The team underperformed relative to previous years by every objective measure, and you got hung up on a semantic glitch because that's what you do, despite it being pretty clear what I was talking about, and you proceeded to do what you always do, which is making ridiculously long-winded arrogance-laden posts because somewhere in your mind you think devoting more time to winning arguments on the internet makes you smarter You're an absolute toxic presence, and masking it in long-windedness and verbosity only exacerbates the way you make every discussion you enter an exercise in exhaustion You don't learn, you don't change your mind, your sole reason for existence on these forums is to tell people they're wrong with a higher word count than anyone feels like dealing with

To continue along this point, here's the team stats from 2014, where it was widely accepted that Hackett's inexperience as an OC was hurting the offense on top of our lack of reliable QB play. Our stats from 2016 demonstrate the consensus at the time as well-- bad game-day decision-making was amplifying the issues of an outdated defensive scheme (see Ryan Bros' struggles the last few years of their careers despite reasonable talent on defense), leading to an underperformance by the Bills despite finally having returned to having a solid offense. The cap situation wasn't ideal, but it was certainly manageable without a total teardown. Better game-day decision making would have kept us in the neighborhood of 9-7 every year, and finding an efficient passer would have cemented our contention for a wildcard spot. The other pieces were in place already and were roughly sustainable until the cap room opened back up in 2020, in time to re-sign the next wave of core pieces. Instead we jettisoned all of our talent and opted to neglect the offensive side of the ball to the point that it's historically bad. We're suffering blowout losses at an unprecedented rate. If the current regime's drafting and FA haul isn't WELL above average next year, we're screwed.

(Citation needed) We've had elite defenses and solid offenses with roughly the same quality of personnel as we had at the end of the 2016 season. The team had been mediocre because various coaching combinations have been ineffective on either side of the ball, not because the core of the offense or defense was fluctuating wildly in talent. If you for whatever reason believe this to be the case despite the several seasons' worth of evidence to the contrary it certainly explains your resistance to the idea that the Bills were close to being perennial playoff contenders (not Superbowl) a la the Bengals, but now we'll never know.

Oh Thurman. Just couldn't let it go. Never can. Thinks he's so smart, but fails to grasp some pretty basic aspects of the conversation because he's, you know, standard intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, but you should at least know it, Mr. Dunning-Kruger. Team Rankings O/D/ST Check out those ranks. Average defense. Atrocious offense. And we didn't underperform relative to previous Bills' seasons with better performances? We've hit 9-7 in the past as well. This team backed in the playoffs off of lucky bounces and good fortune (about darn time, tbh). I'm thrilled about having gotten the monkey off our back, but we didn't earn that spot with our top-12 play on the field. Let's pick out some quotes from the linked articles here: You're right that nobody expected much from the 2017 season, but that's because we'd already begun the teardown, and people were unsure about the rookie HC and FO. You'll notice a common theme of "who knows why they decided to do *x*" amongst the articles that happen to have explanations for their rankings. Expectations were low because the team was clearly not trying to go far leading into last season.

Yeah no Our WRs were fine and vastly more talented than what is currently on our roster, our O-line was solid at worst and had provided excellent running seasons for us, our LBers were similarly solid, and our D-line was expected to continue to be good. Average defense at worst. On offense our WRs were fine, as mentioned, our RB stable looked great, TE was looking pretty good... what we were missing and have been missing is a productive, efficient passer and good overall coaching decisions, the Bills' not being considered as annual contenders is specifically because we've been missing those elements I really don't feel like doing the Thurman-thinks-he's-smarter-than-everyone-even-though-he's-of-pretty-standard-intelligence dance with you because it's exhausting and completely pointless but in a nutshell we underperformed relative to previous years on both sides of the ball last year but the way things shook out we made the playoffs anyway, and now the complete gutting of the roster is kicking in, yielding the atrocity we now see on the field

Do you understand how odds-making works?

He looks... totally fine? Stats are a bit lower across the board but he still looks pretty competent and the Redskins are currently 4-2. Not bad for jumping into a totally new system with all-new players.

Next season? Sure. Carr has experience in the league, our RB stable is fine. Add 2 WR and we're looking at 9-7, maybe 11-5 if the defense can stop crapping the bed every other game. Josh Allen is going to take a while to get to a level of basic competence, much less franchise-level, assuming he progresses at all.

This is absolutely revisionist, FYI Buffalo consensus and national musings were that we were good coaching and competent QB play away from being annual contenders for the playoffs, and we backed into the playoffs with a 9-7 record (not our first time) due to a miracle play by the Bengals. The Bills' run defense tanked after the Dareus trade (and the Jags' was significantly bolstered, fancy that), and we went one-and-done in truly embarrassing fashion against the Jags. Is it nice to have the monkey off our back? Sure. Is it a testament to the current HC and GM? Hell nah. Leadership has made several efforts to provide the team with offensive talent, the issue is that they absolutely stink at correctly valuing offensive talent.