mramefa

Considering Ben's dad is a pastor, I think it's 100% that McDermott tries to sign him. Welcome to Buffalo, Ben!

Here was Winston yesterday, using his head as a golf tee Seems like he's really getting ready to be a winner

Kind of ironic that the Simpsons would mock the decline of anything...

Anyone ever noticed that we've never seen Tom Brady and the Night King in the same place?!?

I think it's harder than this. Some people just improve a lot after they're surrounded by better competition. That doesn't happen over the course of a single training camp and preseason, though, and the Bills don't have enough roster space to give time to 10 draft picks to come good. I think they're better off taking fewer, with a slightly higher upside on average, and giving each of them more of a chance.

For everyone thinking that 40 time is a perfect indicator of game speed, just think of Josh Allen. He ran mid 4.7s, and can absolutely take off and outrun players on the other team. His measured top speed in-game was the fastest of any QB over the last several years (outside of Mariota). Running a 40 without the ball and with no padding is a really noisy indicator of what you can do with the ball in a game situation. Singletary is going to surprise people thinking he's slow.

So I know a little about this. Recently, the NFL was hiring a consulting firm to design their schedule, which was actually run by a couple MIT PhD alums specializing in optimization. From my understanding, the NFL's focus was almost entirely on building a schedule to take advantage of the primetime spots, in order to maximize viewership (since that translates to more money in future TV deals and more fans). There's a reason why the Cowboys play Sunday/Monday/Thursday night football every year, and the Bills do not. While I never actually heard the Bills mentioned in this regard, I did hear a couple other teams explicitly named as undesirable. Any unfairness in the schedules resulting from this approach was basically an afterthought, from what I know. It's good that the Buffalo researchers noted schedule unfairness, because I doubt it was really on the NFL's minds at all, but it should be fixable with only a small impact on what the NFL really cares about ($).

Maybe I'm crazy, but I peg the Bills' SB chances at ~3% and think the futures are great value

At the very least they signed a great locker room guy. On his IG post today after signing, dozens of players from a number of teams were wishing him luck. Never seen that much support from other players before.

It depends on their payment contract, which we're not privy to. If the lawyers payment is highly contingent on Colton Schmidt getting paid, then obviously they think there's a case. If the payment is largely hourly, then the lawyers might be taking advantage. In cases like this, it's often the former, so I think there's a good chance the players actually have a case.

Does anyone know what sites this bet is available on? I checked Bovada, but they seem to just have superbowl futures right now.

I don't think that's why they stopped sending you emails.

My take is different. I think 10-15% of variation in passer rating being explained by a single combine measurable is actually a lot. It's not the correlation for a complicated model, just a single measurable. Keep in mind that to some extent passer rating is also a function of things outside of a quarterback's control (offensive scheme, receiver and oline talent). I think teams would be foolish to ignore that measurement as they try and predict prospect success, and I'd be surprised if you could find a single combine measurable that's a better predictor of QB success (I'd guess velocity is also important, although less so). I also looked at nonlinear relationships (e.g. exponential), but the best fit curves were still approximately linear. You can confirm that a linear fit is reasonable from the chart visual.

I've been hearing people discuss pros and cons of wonderlic forever, usually giving data that can only be interpreted anecdotally. I was curious, so I took a few minutes, and compiled a scatter chart of wonderlic scores vs career passer rating (for QBs with over 1500 career passing attempts from Source: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/leaders/pass_rating_career.htm). The results are pretty straightforward. Wonderlic has a correlation of 0.31 and an r-squared of 0.10 with passer rating. That means 10% of the variation in career passing rating can be explained by the variation in wonderlic scores. 10% of success coming from a single metric makes it very important, regardless of the exceptions you might hear about. The chart also shows pretty clearly that wonderlic is not just a good indicator of success below a certain range (i.e. quarterbacks below a score of 16 will not succeed). A higher wonderlic score is associated with a better passer rating regardless of how high the score is (with Fitzpatrick being a slight outlier on the lower side, otherwise the relationship would be even stronger). Here is the same chart with Fitzpatrick removed. The r-squared jumps to 0.15. It's pretty clear that teams should be looking at wonderlic when they evaluate quarterbacks, and it's a very good sign that Josh Allen has a strong score.