Avisan

I mentioned this earlier in the thread-- it just isn't a very productive line of conversation? I think our passing offense will rank top 10, production-wise, and that's more or less all I care about. I think we have 4 players that are proven NFL-caliber players, plus Coleman and Claypool, and if either of them pan out we have a top 16 group and if they both pan out we have a top 12 group. If neither pan out we have a top 28 group. The degree of uncertainty with Coleman and Claypool limits the fruitfulness of the conversation. I think the Bills can have solid production with the current group, though.

Genuine question: why? Was our passing offense letting us down during the back-7 stretch of last season? Or were there perhaps games you feel we were not "the better team" but got lucky and won anyway?

Sure thing! Top 6 pace overall in net passing yards if you exclude Dallas, top 14 if you want to count a 31-10 running game beatdown of a playoff team as a mark against our offense. We are currently here.

We own their 2025 second round pick.

How are we defining "not good enough," though? I keep asking and so far the answers I've gotten are "Josh Allen threw INTs", "Destroying the Cowboys via the run game means the passing offense was bad", and "Top 10 isn't good enough" which is at least a real answer but is very different from what most other folks seem to fear will be the case this season. I'm especially confused by people who look at our play in the 6-1 stretch against primarily pretty good teams and think that means our team will fail to make the playoffs.

I, for one, would feel much better about the Bills' offensive investments if they overpaid draft capital for a player like Toney.

Pop quiz: Who is the General Manager of the Buffalo Bills?

Guess we'll find out in a couple of months!

See here's the thing: I'm pretty consistent and specific in what I argue when I am making an argument. I have reframed a few times when for whatever reason someone hasn't accurately translated those specific frames into their perception of my argument, or has otherwise chosen to shift their argument to something else in their response. So when we're discussing production and targets and what to expect/what our team is capable of, and things start veering off into whose WR rooms a given poster decides are better or worse than ours, I don't care. I have no reason to care. Even if I did care, and provided a good faith response, it would devolve into an argument over how I could really prefer the Bills' WR room over x team's WR team, even though it's a purely subjective discussion to begin with. What I do care about is what our WR room is capable of contributing production-wise and how that stacks up against the league in aggregate, because that is ultimately how we are going to measure and rank our passing offense's quality relative to other teams. This is adjacent to, but not the same as, a poo-throwing contest over whose WR rooms can beat up whom's. TL;DR: Names and production are not actually the same thing

I thought the point of this discussion was the Bills' offensive production and overall competency? We have sufficient tools to be a top 10 passing offense and the numbers support that. You expect 10th to 15th, which is pretty reasonable if you're pessimistic about elements of the offense. I think your opinion that top 10 isn't good enough is also pretty reasonable, even if I disagree. The tenor of discourse suggests that the Bills receivers will be awful, though, which doesn't make much sense. They're likely going to out-produce the majority of the units you would rather have. I think we've all cleared that up very nicely, yes.

No, no it doesn't. I genuinely don't care what other teams have in their WR rooms. That's our defense's problem, and their track record is extremely good overall outside of facing the Chiefs in the postseason. Our offense will have 5 out of 6 receivers that have already been productive in the NFL and a round two rookie. It will have dome frustrating games against good defense without a safety blanket but will still be productive over the course of the season. @BADOLBILZ I literally cannot spell it out any simpler The Chiefs were not a particularly good passing offense last season but threw the ball a ton despite that and racked up some high volume stats, enough to land two players in the Top 32 due to target quantities. Thank you for reinforcing the point.

For those somehow still confused, if you threw to five Mack Hollinses 550 times, you are going to breach 4,000 yards of passing offense. 4,037 yards, to be exact, good for 10th overall last season. Well, thankfully our offensive production doesn't correlate highly to your personal opinion of our WR room versus that of other teams.

The point is that being the primary target on an offense gets you the targets and therefore the production to land in the Top 32. You can be a pretty average WR and if you are the primary target of an offense with an ounce of competence, you're going to make it in. If the Bills lack a primary target by offensive design, they may or may not have receivers crack the Top 32 threshold even if they have a productive offense overall. The Bills don't have terrible receivers, and the narrative that they do is frankly bizarre. They lack a top guy, but everyone expected to make the top 6 cut have the talent to play and be productive in this league. Most of them have done it before. Mack Hollins, our expected #5 or #6, had a YPT of 7.34 when targeted almost 100 times on a meh Raiders offense two seasons ago. We're going to be fine. The most reasonable expectation is for the Bills to be a top 10 offense again.

You aren't arriving at the same answer, though. You're drawing comparable conclusions from different answers. That you attribute significance to the similarity of your conclusions doesn't change that they are definitionally coincidental. This is pretty straight-forward stuff and a prime example of why I hold the approach I do when it comes to discussions with other laypeople, and why I do my best to shut up and listen when interacting with an actual subject matter expert.

We have no idea who that person is, and based on the comments made they seem to value pre-snap elements of the game highly. Given Allen is weak relative to his top peers in that area, that seems to be the basis of the opinion. I happen to disagree that he's overrated as a QB, but ultimately that means nothing. Allen by the numbers is pretty boom or bust, but he's been a huge bright spot in my tenure as a fan and I will trust the experts on our team that opted to make him our franchise QB. The results have reinforced that trust so far, and other subject matter experts have pointed out that things Allen does do very well on numerous occasions. If it came out that the statement came from Bills' leadership personnel, my eyebrows would raise a good bit. But that seems extremely unlikely.

That's absolutely a coincidence, though? If you have different methodologies and reach the same conclusion for different reasons that's the definition of a coincidence.

Relative to actual experts immersed in this stuff? He doesn't. He knows far more than the average fan, and most other posters here acknowledge that his opinions have thought and effort behind them, but at the end of the day he's still a layperson.

It pops up in the WR thread, too, where we have a group of provably average NFL talents with Josh Allen throwing them the ball and a certain segment of fandom is convinced that average WRs and Top 3 QB means we're actually doomed to a terrible passing offense Like okay maybe you get "lucky" and things do actually go off the rails but pointing out that things were statistically fine, not great, but fine, is somehow treated as absurd I dunno guys, kinda think that you might not be smarter at football than the GM/Coach combo that has ushered in a pretty amazing run of sustained success

I mean... Spiller was a genuine NFL talent whose peak included a whopping 6.0 yards-per-carry season with over 200 attempts. His career on the whole perhaps didn't warrant a first round pick, but that's true of almost every single RB in the modern era. I wouldn't hang your hat on this one. Did you have inside knowledge regarding his substance abuse and mental health issues? He was a strong talent with two good seasons for us that self-destructed out of the league. His second year with us had him at over 10 yards per target. These really just highlight GunnerBill's points. You got "lucky" and think it's because you're smarter thsn GMs, and not because any of us schmucks can get lucky from time to time.

Really excited for all the goal-post-moving and insisting that they were never wrong to hound on the people who are pointing out all of the reasons why our passing offense is going to be fine Extra shouts out to the folks that don't understand that targets are a function of being a wide receiver on a football team and cannot comprehend that playing more snaps means they will get more targets since the Bills are going to continue passing the ball because this isn't 1920

Most likely that these folks are operating in bad faith and would much rather be miserable than happy

Okay sure, but it's accurate enough for our purposes here. Feel free to point out any obvious outlier games from the top 10 teams that would impact rankings here.

What? We're not snipping it because it's a bad game, we're snipping it because it was a great game for the Bills that involved 18 recorded passing plays and 49 recorded rushes. Including that clear outlier in a small sample size does not provide an accurate picture of what we can expect the passing game to look like with Brady. It's an outlier among NFL teams generally. Like, we beat the daylights out of them, and we stuck to the ground because they couldn't stop it. Using that to then indict our passing volume stats is peak bad faith.

Correct, including the Cowboys game where we neglected the passing game because kicked the daylights out of them by running 49 times instead. Still confused why you are using the statistical skew created by that game as a negative about the Bills' offensive capabilities. You still have yet to give a straight answer regarding your prediction of next year's passing production ranking. Why is it so difficult to put a rough number on it?

I think the room is pretty equivalent to the back half of last season (whatever the heck was up with Diggs really impacted his quality of play), and as discussed further upthread the Brady games were actually pretty productive, passing-wise. The Cowboys game skews it because we just ran all over them because they couldn't stop it. I don't think the Bills will improve overall passing production either, but I would be less surprised by a moderate increase than a dramatic plunge. Increase likely means Coleman or Claypool really step up, which would be a very pleasant surprise. A plunge to 25th means things absolutely fell apart, though. I don't think the evidence supports Brady being a train wreck, and the WR group lacks a superstar but should have a starting lineup of NFL-caliber players.