Avisan

Tom Brady looked bad in games where he was under nonstop pressure by 4 pass rushers. For most of his career he murdered teams that sent 5 or more to try to get to him. His passer rating vs. the blitz was obscene-- some seasons it was like 120+.

That could have been the Bills if Shaq Thompson catches the INT at the end. The Chiefs had some absurdly good fortune like seven weeks last season to come away with dubs.

Does Mahomes make that throw? I'm guessing he does. That's Josh's competition, both in terms of money and expected impact. The whole point of earning that much is that your standard of play needs to be that high. If you don't want the standard to be that high, pay 30 million for a 30 million dollar QB and have the cap space to afford a bona fide #1 on top of tge O-line investments.

Sure, but when defense and special teams hold the opponent scoreless in the second half (prior to the three points at the end), you need to settle the heck down and take the plays that are there. "Josh felt like he had to!" is a piss-poor justification in a game where he demonstrably did not have to.

One additional note: When a team is blitzing relentlessly and refuses to come off of it, the way to beat that is by setting/hitting the hot route over. And over. And over again. The whole point of blitzing is to force mistakes by getting there before a traditional route comes open. Blitzing against Mahomes/Brady/Manning/Brees is/was defensive suicide because they would punish you for it again and again. That level of discipline is something Josh struggles to maintain. He WANTS to kill you with the big play and improv. Disciplined blitzing punishes those tendencies while simultaneously baiting a player like Josh to devolve into them. You have to win with your brain in these games, because the defense is taking away the option of winning with your body.

People here have also lost track of the notion of "NFL open". In the NFL, you will often have a very narrow window to fit the ball into. How many plays do we see every week where a QB hits a tight window pass into a window barely large enough to get the ball to through to the receiver? Or where there isn't really a window AT ALL but the throw is in front of the receiver's knees so they can go down and get it? Or a back shoulder throw? Etc. We have been spoiled by years of incredible plays by Allen, to the point that we've forgotten what it's like to put together an NFL-average offense doing the dirty work with the talent equivalent of spit, duct tape, and a prayer. When you have a 55+ million dollar QB, he needs to play like that QB or your team is probably screwed. Part of earning that much money is making plays to NFL-open receivers where the windows are extremely small.

YIKES

People aren't cars, bruv

The Bills' defense pretty reliably slowing down the Dolphins is a big part of that. Miami has for several years been equipped to win shootouts, and we haven't let that happen. We deliver a backbreaker to them every season. They've thrown their best possible punches at us each season and fallen short despite having decent records overall.

The guard commits a brazen hold there, actually-- just reaches out and yanks Logue by the shoulder pad to keep him from getting to contain. Definite penalty, but executed in a way that makes it hard for a ref to spot and call it.

Yeah, Knox is clearly looking for someone to block, here. Was not expecting to actually receive the handoff.

Ring, singular, competing in a conference without a dynasty, with prime Brees. This is exactly my point, despite these advantages, the Saints just... weren't THAT good, consistently. They were almost always good, but they had years they missed the playoffs and didn't really stand out from the other good NFC teams. Meanwhile, the AFC has the Patriots to deal with. The Brees/Payton teams had comparable success to the non-Pats AFC teams despite not having the Pats to deal with in-conference. I see no reason to think he would have gotten better results than McDermott during the last 4 years.

I mean, bountygate is very much an indictment on Payton's team operation, is it not? Losing playoff games due to bad luck and things going wrong is currently where we're at right now. I guess my larger point is we make tons of excuses for other teams/coaches when things go wrong for their teams but do the opposite for our own team and coaches, and Payton is imo a great example of that.

McDermott turned around a doormat, too. Did Payton have a "crazy run" with Brees? How are you measuring that? He had the best QB in the NFC for basically the entirety of prime Brees. The Bills likely would have been playing for a chip last year if the refs weren't screwing them on spots all night. I think there are fair questions to be had regarding the McBeane regime, but the idea that Payton or Vrabel would waltz in and create a championship team with our roster is super questionable.

I agree, but his way historically ends up with these kinds of mistakes. Defenses play differently than they did when he was in his first few years. Every QB has had to adjust, including Mahomes. Trying to force big play ball when it isn't there leads to stalled drives and turnovers, and the Bills don't have the WR talent to force it to work. Hard to get that WR talent without becoming the Bengals, too.

Sean Payton is always a fascinating response to me. He had prime Drew Brees and missed the playoffs several time and while it's great he walked away with a ring, it was one singular ring while playing in a conference without a dynasty team. I don't think there's much to suggest that Payton would be a guy to take the Bills over the top, the Brees/Payton Saints were a worse overall team than the Bills despite Brees being an elite QB. And I think it would be folly to say that Allen is definitively a better QB than prime Brees.

Bailing from the pocket unnecessarily, misreading the read-option with Ty Johnson, etc. Went away from taking what the Defense was giving. And that INT was a big one, it's a mistake that had largely been gone from his game that showed back up again. Definitely feels like he presses way harder when Diggs is in the stadium.

Tough to say. Losing significant time for both rookie CBs (who seems to have potential) due to injury is rough, and you're likely trading for a de facto rental. Cap space is tight, which makes trading for a big-time WR tricky. Especially since our draft picks are always bottom third of the round. I would say LB or safety just due to cost and relative positional depth, it's achievable and we can pick up a guy that might actually stick around past this year.

Newsflash: We're still on pace to go 13-4 or better The "fire McDermott!" stuff after every loss is kind of amusing, this is two years in a row of Josh getting sloppy with the ball in his hands when Diggs is in the building. Offense couldn't stop shooting itself in the foot, and I was pretty sure something exactly like the red zone interception was coming after the OPI call based on Allen's body language. 3x turnovers is tough to overcome without great play outside of them, and we were strictly okay. Maye's plays were mostly made off-script, which means the script was working. Tre can't quite keep up anymore and we kept getting burned by it. Tough to blame coaching when our biggest struggles came from player deficiencies.

Brother, this is Allen's 8th year, it hasn't been a decade yet. The Bills are unfortunate enough to have ascended at the same time AFC dynasty #2 was getting rolling with the Chiefs. During the Patriots dynasty, other elite QBs had a way harder time making the Superbowl, too. It's frustrating and unfortunate, but them's the breaks.

Before, largely. Did you watch the games the last couple of weeks?

I mean, I suppose I could personally deep dive into every advanced metric to get a feel for their exact ins and outs, but I'm pretty comfortable leaving that to other folks because ultimately it doesn't matter that much. I think it's reasonable to start with a baseline assumption that most teams are facing roughly comparable types of coverage and that metrics are designed to be able to compare like with like, because that's the only way that they're useful. Your position is that Keon Coleman is ranking well in terms of separation metrics because he's facing outlier coverage relative to other receivers, which seems a difficult position to justify in the absence of your own data that demonstrates this.

Do you have any evidence that Keon Coleman is benefitting more than other receivers from facing man coverage?

His separation metrics are pretty good this season, though..? What are you basing this off of?

Yes, without all of our offensive investments, we would indeed be a bad team. This is not as strong of an argument as you might think.