BritishBill

Been a Bills fan for 16 years and I appreciate that makes me still a baby in terms of what people have gone through. This season has felt like the one of the wildest so far in terms of just never being sure of quite what we are. We seem to have gone from Super Bowl contenders to utter deadbeats from week to week. After every disappointing defeat, we’ve gone and won our next game. And each time we get our acts together and look like possibly Super Bowl contenders, we drop our level in the next game and look like a team that don’t even deserve the playoffs. We’ve thrashed some excellent teams and lost to some absolute dirt. We’ve blown teams out and lost (and occasionally won) impossibly close games on key moments. We’ve had massive injuries, a trip to London, beaten the reigning Super Bowl champs in their stadium and been beaten by the worst Patriots team in decades. We’ve had an OC change, our HC splitting the fan base down the middle, our best WR causing disruption, and our awesome QB balancing improbable TD numbers with league-leading turnovers. Is it just recency bias or does this season feel improbably crazy to people?! Would love to hear about other crazy seasons that compare or even beat this one!

Merry Christmas Bills Mafia! feels weird to be starting Christmas morning here in the UK by celebrating a Pats win!

Whenever everyone piles on about how good we are we seem to believe it and just assume we’ll win. so frustrating. Still a long time left to go in this game though. We’re easily good enough to turn this around. But need to get our acts together

Missing tackles and committing penalties. Stuff we didn’t do last week. come on boys. Wake up

Well done Rudolph comet the hour, comet the man

Bengals really should try blitzen…

Chargers feels like a classic banana skin game. Everything about it screams that we should wipe the floor with them. Hope we just get it done!

Great to meet you all and thanks so much to @BritBillfor organising. back at our Airbnb in time to watch Everton on match of the day!

Milano needs to be careful in this game. I reckon EB is going to cook up some stuff to try and negate him as much as possible. Heed the advice, Matt....keep your friends close, but keep Bieniemy even close

Apologies if it's been said already - just waking up here in the UK and getting my head around the highlights and box score. But we had 41 pass attempts and only 22 rush (6 of which were by Josh) but we averaged 4.4 ypc. Josh threw 3 picks. Is it fair to say we might have been better with a more balanced attack? Or am I over-simplfying it? Haven't see the full game. Also, getting a bit tired of us relying on Diggs for 40-50% of our total receiving yards and no-one else getting more than 30-60 each week. It's not sustainable - and it's not really necessary either.

It's a street which is absolutely full of curry houses. Remarkably, pretty much every single one has won an award.

Injured? Knee problem?

Update - staying in Wood Green on the Saturday. Easy reach of Tottenham itself and a fair few pubs around. If anyone is up for a few pints on the Saturday evening it'd be great to say hi!

Has Justin Shorter featured much/at all at camp so far?

Is there any sense on where lots of bills fans will be congregating on the Saturday night for drinks etc? will be coming down from Liverpool in the afternoon and would love to meet some of you good people!

Me and my fellow scouse Bills buddy managed to get two tickets - sat nowhere near each other! But we’ll be there and will probably make a weekend of it and come and see where the party is! kudos my my mate who was 150k in the queue and was teaching a class when he finally got let in. He hastily handed the lesson over to a student teacher and sorted the tickets!

Each to their own! Must just be me, then!

Might be a British/American humour thing, but I find him likeable but not particularly funny at all. Actually that's unfair - I find his reaction skit videos unfunny in particular.

I like Local Hero but it’s no Z-Cars.

Von Miller...Deandre Hopkins...Calais Campbell.... The Bills are really going for it and this could well be our superbowl window! Unfortunately for us, it's Superbowl 50....

He's one of those guys you can trust. You need a yard? He'll get you a yard. You need 2 yards? He'll get you a yard

I did say the patriots were “dominant” and the bills are only “good”….

All those years the Pats were dominant and none of the rest of the AFC East could get it together. now the bills are good and everyone is sorting themselves out! going to be a really tough season - but we still have the best QB in the division and will continue to.

This reminds me of my beloved Everton FC in the Premier League - perhaps a cautionary tale for some Bills Mafia (apologies for the long-read) Back in 2002 Everton hired a manager (Head Coach to you guys) called David Moyes. He was an up and coming young manager with ginger hair, stern demeanour and a defensive mindset. He took over a club in a mess, with scant financial resources, and started building. Over the next decade he took Everton from being a bottom half of the table team, flirting with relegation, to being pretty much always in the top 6 teams in the league and challenging for trophies. He produced miracles in the transfer market, constantly signing young players at just the right time - or rescuing players from the scrap heap and revitalising their careers - turning them into highly sought after world stars and selling them for big profits. But the thing was, Everton kept falling JUST short of true success. They would get to semi-finals and even finals and find ways to lose. Often, fans would blame Moyes and his negative tactics. In one FA Cup final Everton took the lead after just 27 seconds - but tried to defend for the rest of the match and lost 2-1. The general outcry from the fans was that Moyes had taken Everton as far as he could - we'd never get to the promised land of a trophy/Champions League qualification because he was just not offensive enough and didn't have what it took to get the team over the line. Eventually, in 2012, he left - to go and manage Manchester United. And a new manager came in - Roberto Martinez. In his first season - building on 10 years of great squad building by Moyes, Martinez's team was brilliant - achieving Everton's best ever points total in the Premier League, and playing some great football. Finally the fans were being proved right - Moyes had been holding the team back - Martinez would lead them to glory. Except he didn't - for all the improvement in our football that first season, the team still only finished 5th in the league. And over the next few years, things declined very quickly. Whilst playing nice attractive football, Martinez simply didn't have what it took in terms of player recruitment. He made some spectacularly bad purchases, and the squad got weaker and weaker, never again getting close to the level Moyes had them. Martinez was eventually sacked, and since then Everton have basically circled the Premier League drain, hiring and firing a series of bad managers (and losing the odd good one to bigger clubs), and making some of the worst recruitment decisions you could ever begin to imagine. Frankly, it's been a long, slow car crash since Moyes left. I guess what I'm trying to say is you have to consider the whole picture, when it comes to McDermott. Without a doubt there are super-frustrating things about some of his decisions - including his backing of his DC and OC who have blown in a big way in big playoff games - and to some extent mistakes McDermott and his team have made have probably held this team back from a Superbowl. But, overall, the journey the Bills have been on since he came in is undeniably a positive one. We are light years away from the tyre fire he inherited, and the way he and his staff have changed the culture and expectation level of the Bills Mafia is incredible. With some obvious exceptions, good recruitment decisions have been made, and will continue to be made. You feel this squad will be there or there abouts in the playoff mix every season. And as long as we're in that mix, hopefully our ducks will line up and that glory year will come. I'm not saying there's not a better coach out there - but just that the grass isn't always greener, and I think it's a massive risk/assumption that someone would just come in and take over and do a much better job. There's as much chance - if not higher - that the next guy takes us backwards rather than getting us over the line and into a Superbowl and winning a Lombardi. Personally, my preference would be to make changes at OC and/or DC and trust McBeane to recruit some of the missing pieces we desperately need this offseason.

This is inexplicably bad. but maybe we’re seeing the reality….we’re an average team with a great quarter back who papers over a lot of cracks