CincyBillsFan

I think Wilson was throwing it away - he was under great pressure. That catch was simply incredible.

Damn! And here I was just about to post how Allen reminds me of Jack Kemp!

Sure none of these are perfect apples to apples comparisons but: * Buffalo was a playoff team in name only in 2017. Backing in on a miracle win by Cincy and then laying an offensive egg the size of the rock of Gibraltar the next week at Jacksonville was hardly an endorsement of that teams skill. * In fact I suspect that the offensive talent around Allen last year was every bit as bad as the offensive talent around Manning in his 1st year. We were not a 1 - 15 team because of our defense. So would I. But the 4th quarter comebacks tell you something good about a young QB like Allen. But it's fair to say that Chandler was way better then Clay was last year.

I'm starting to get there to OrediggerPoke. It's like they're just waiting for Allen to screw up so they can say "I told you so". Do these people not realize that if Allen is in fact a bust the Bills are set back by 3 - 5 years? To be clear I'm not saying people should view everything Allen does through rose colored glasses. Criticism is clearly warranted on some parts of his game. But folks have to maintain perspective when talking about a young QB who has about one season worth of games under his belt. I do know this if the Bills give up on Allen to soon, and IMO that means less then 3 seasons, we're looking at a San Diego/Brees situation. Luckily for us I think the Bills brain-trust is way to smart for this.

On the broadcast Fouts showed replays of a couple of those plays and our receivers looked to be blanketed. Where Allen missed "open" receivers appeared to be on the quick throws where he opted for the deeper passes. On the plays where he moved around NO ONE seemed to get open - which is its own problem.

Would I be cheating if I asked the Football Satans, you know the devils that Belichick & NE worship, to let him play Sunday?

I'm not saying Dabold doesn't know what he's doing I'm saying we haven't run many traditional RB screen plays in spite of being blitzed a whole lot in the first 4 games. As to the reason: * maybe our O-line can't get out there to block or it doesn't block well in space. * maybe our RB's aren't very good at disguising the play, making the catch or they don't have the elusiveness/acceleration to break a screen open. * And sorry the games outcome was way more complicated then "Allen sucked". A punt blocked for a TD when you lose a game 16 - 10 might have something to do with it. So might squandering TWO TO's early in the 2nd half on dumb challenges. Or maybe missing a 49 yard FG and having a 22 yard punt contributed to the final score. Or how about the decision with ELEVEN MINUTES left to play to go for it on 4th & goal from the 3 rather then kick the FB. Or all the penalties at critical points of the game. For sure Allen contributed to the loss but you're kidding yourself if you think he was the main reason we lost. Sometimes winning games 16 - 6 or 12 - 10 is just as good as winning a game 42 - 28. Just ask the Bears & Saints after the weekend.

Fair enough and in the end it should average out over 16 games. My sense is that Jackson is benefiting big time from that after 4 games. As an aside, QB's on good teams may not see as much garbage time yardage/TD's to pad their stats as QB's on teams that get blown out. But I can't see an easy way to incorporate this data without adding a potential bias.

We tried ONE screen. That's not exactly an aggressive way to counter all that blitzing. Against NE and given the amount of blitzing that went on we should have thrown 5 - 6 screen passes at minimum. Through the first 4 games how many screen passes have we even attempted? Less then 5 from my memory. Is it that we don't have an O-line that can get out and block for a screen? As for WR screens we don't have the size or speed at the WR position to be particularly good at this play. Are Beasley or Zay really going to effectively block for a quick screen to Brown? And when we spread Gore & DeMarco out on the same side of the field you kind of lose that side to screen to. Also how many times have we kept a RB in the backfield and had him slide out for a dump off pass? I remember a couple of flair passes to the RB's but not a whole of dump offs. And before we blame Allen here I don't remember the RB's being available for the dump off. Last night that was a play used by Pittsburgh multiple times for big gains.

Just like Favre in his 3rd year (19 TD's & 24 INT's)!

It's not good to play QB for the Miami Dolphins. Also with a small sample size it hurts to have played the NE Pats. Serious question - do you factor in junk yardage? Jackson is very high on the list but the last two weeks he's thrown a couple of TD's and gained a lot of yardage AFTER the game was decided. Do you take that into consideration or is it just to subjective a parameter to assess? As an aside I like your system.

Maybe I'm full of it but the solution is pretty simple - throw screen passes. Why we haven't is a mystery to me. And it's also not a good idea with a young QB facing a lot of blitzing to constantly empty out the backfield. Extra pass protection never hurt and when it all breaks down the RB drifts away and the QB dumps it to him. See the Carolina Panthers & McCaffrey or NO Saints & Kamera. The loss of Singleterry may be a much bigger issue then we thought. I know I sound like a broken record here but did we counter the blitz with screen passes in those games? I don't think we did. And we kept running the spread which removes pass protection. Sure Allen owns some of this by not getting the ball out fast to the hot receiver but when we don't call screen passes and we can't line-up with 2 TE's and pound the football on the ground the problem goes way beyond Allen.

And this is why we should be encouraged long term. We even moved the ball on the Pats to the tune of almost 400 yards. And this isn't garbage yardage piled up after we were down by 4 TD's. In fact this kind of stat is expected with a very young & inexperienced QB and an offense with 9 new players including as many as 4 rookies on the field. It's a hell of a lot easier to get better at ball protection then it is to start moving the football up & down the field. TO's are a solvable problem but learning how to move the ball with your existing talent when you haven't been is a lot tougher nut to crack.

I agree about how the game goes if Singleterry is on the field. And your 2nd point is why Gore can't be the #1 RB. RB's get in a rhythm. They break off a big run and two plays later they break off another. Gore is to old to be the guy that lugs the rock 20 - 25 times when he gets hot. IMO Gore & Yelden are very limited as a one-two RB combo.

I agree with everything you posted except for the part of why we got rid of Shady. That was primarily a cap move and a good one for the long term benefit of the team. But if management truly thought that this was our year they would have cut Yeldon and kept McCoy. Shady still has gas in his tank and we could have used him against the Bengals and yesterday against the Pats. Singleterry made some big plays in the Jet's game and in the 1st half of the Giants game. I'm confident he'll be a very good NFL RB. I'm even keeping my fingers crossed that he'll mimic two other recent 3rd round RB picks that emerged as studs - Hunt & Kamera. But we need to see if Singleterry can continue to make big plays when he gets back from his injury. My point is that when we're forced to use Gore & Yeldon as our 1/2 RB's we're fielding one of the worst RB duos in the league. I get Gore's positive impact on the culture and in short yardage/goal line situations he's a valuable asset. But looking at almost every other NFL team I would take their 1/2 RB's over Gore & Yeldon. That changes if we're talking about Singleterry/Gore. And it's important that Dabold moves Singleterry to #1 assuming he picks right back up where he left off before the injury.

No I'm speaking about in general with the caveat that Gore & Yeldon are in the backfield. I agree that Singleterry likely would have made a huge difference. And when he's played the early returns are promising that he'll be a difference maker in our run game. But Singleterry just hasn't played enough for us to see how big a difference he'll truly be. But with Yeldon & Gore in the backfield we don't run the ball well; we don't get good production from the RB's in the passing game and for some reason we don't run screen passes with them. I think it's a combination of Gore & Yeldon not being among the upper half of RB's in the league and a scheme which puts our RB's in the spread far to often.

Question for the docs posting, and thanks for sharing your expertise it's much appreciated. What should we conclude, if anything, by Allen running off the field to the locker room? I would have thought if he was still "loopy" they would have had a trainer escort him rather then let him go on his own. Should we be more or less hopeful that this was a minor concussion?

I thought your original response may have been sarcastic but I wasn't sure - my bad.

That was NOT my point. But Marino went to only one and Mahomes has a way to go before he sniffs Marino's career stats. It takes more then gaudy stats to get to a Super Bowl and win one.

Maybe they are but going off week to week performances isn't going to tell you that. I mean the Bengals only lost by ONE POINT in their game AT Seattle. And in that game Cincy had twice as many yards and twice the TOP! So that would mean that based on tonight's result when Pittsburgh plays the Seahawks they're going to kick ass becasue they obviously have way more talent! Wait, they did play two weeks ago and Seattle won. Never mind!

Living down here in Cincy I'm not surprised by this. Pittsburgh has the Bengal's number big time.

I'm of the opinion that the Pats let Gore run wild because they knew he wasn't a threat to take it to the house and that he wasn't a threat to carry the ball 20 - 25 times for 150 - 200 yards. Against a lot of other NFL teams yesterday's Pats defensive scheme would have been shredded by a relentless ground game. But we don't have the ability to run the ball effectively. Sure we got a couple of big plays but the Pats were willing to pay that price in order to keep Allen in the pocket and to blitz the hell out of him. As for Yeldon he's not done anything of note in the passing game. In a league where RB's routinely catch 7 - 8 passes per game a couple of flair passes out of the backfield is underwhelming. I'm as high as you are on Singleterry's POTENTIAL. But he's missed the last two games and all we've seen is a flash of brilliance. And running screen plays are called plays NOT check downs. Yesterday, in spite of playing a Pat's D which blitzed on almost every other play, the Bills only attempted one screen pass. Football 101 demands that you throw screen passes to defeat the blitz. Why didn't we? I believe that in part we don't throw screens because with Singleterry out of the line-up Gore & Yeldon just aren't very good at it. And while we're on the subject of checking down to your RB's how the hell is Allen supposed to do that if his RB's are NOT in the backfield but lined up in the spread? They ran empty backfield sets all game. Pittsburgh makes it easy to check down to the RB because that's what they want to do. For some reason Dabold thought we could slice the Pat's secondary up with intermediate & deep routes.

More then half his 1st half completions were to RB's. I think part of our problem on offense is we may have the worst set of RB's in the NFL - pending whether Singleterry is the real deal or not. We just don't know about him yet but the Gore/Yeldon combination is weak - very weak.

That was pre-Madden when wins were more important then stats. I agree that in today's NFL no QB with those stats would sniff MVP. However, QB's with those stats could win a Super Bowl. Which is more important?

But that's not on Allen. Screens are called by Debald. For whatever reason we don't run them. I suspect that once Singleterry is healthy he will be our screen guy. Yesterday, against all the Pats blitzes we should have run several screens. But look at our RB's, do they strike you as the type of guys that can make the initial moves and have the acceleration & vision to fully exploit a screen? Gore is a bruiser but not a great screen guy. Yeldon, IMO is wasted space with the exception of the flair pass. An honest assessment of yesterday's offensive debacle has to move beyond folks claiming Allen was terrible. He was but there were underlining reasons that aren't getting the attention they deserve.