Mikie2times

Current odds on Bills starting QB? Meh -115 Hate the Pass +105 Good Guy +175

EJ isn't good because he's a bad person

As for Darby Game 1, I will take him against Hilton. Not Johnson. Week 2, he matches up well with New England's wide outs. Hopefully McKelvin is back again and Darby can keep developing. With the way he stays with his man he would be a great Nickle corner this year as he develops. I'm not sure if Rex switches corners, but I'm not overly worried about Darby vs speed right now. I am worried about Darby vs size.

Frank Gifford is dead, wait!!! He's....alivawaitasecond. Nope. Not alive.

Rookie CB playing his first game on an island style defense against some very good WR's. Darby will make me nervous all year against guys like Kelvin Benjamin. I like the fact that he's in position, the rest will come in time with good coaching and more experience.

Taylor can throw a football over a mountain

Taylor prefers you don't get on him.

Judging by the history of our fan base I think we will come to a unanimous decision on who should start at QB

Let TT be himself. He runs a sub 4.5. Be a shame not to run. He't not a run only guy. He will keep his eyes downfield. He just doesn't have any issue gashing you with his legs if you give him the option. He also tends not to get smoked when tackled. Very elusive guy. Closest comparison is Vick when he was with Atlanta. TT isn't as athletic as Vick but it almost doesn't matter when you reach TT's level of athleticism. His maturity and experience are better than Vick. I also think Vick intended on running, didn't even consider options downfield at times. That was his downfall. I feel TT starts pass at all times. If he runs, he has a good feel for the pocket, either exploding out decisively or slowly moving around and keeping his eyes downfield. Big play machine.

EJ has to be stressed. Going to be hard to look good against what we just saw.

Darby will get it. The speed difference at this level is insane. It takes getting beat a few times to respect how much faster the game is.

Anybody else feel like it's ok to be optimistic? I feel as if I couldn't be from conditioning. This just feels different. I don't hope we will be good. I expect it. When is the last time we ever expected anything out of this team?

What TT did on that series almost played out like a book as far as what I thought. If Goodwin only held onto the ball... Massive pressure created by his legs, force the defense to compress. Take your shots. Having said that I did not expect MC to be so efficient. We have an actual QB battle and that's a great thing : )

Once teams start to shadow his runs he will have a much easier time throwing the ball.

I love the fact that MC looked so good, but damn I like what TT can do as far as big play potential.

I almost think I have been underestimating the defense if that's even possible. I knew we would be very good, bordering on #1. But it's just hard to properly factor in the impact of how good this defense has been relative to age. This was a ridiculous young defense that put Pettine into a HC position. Schwartz was a solid DC, but is now an officiating consultant. It's reasonable to assume both these coaches probably fell above average in the pecking order, but I think this young Bills defense really elevated the perception of what they brought to the table. Now the defense is not so young and we have arguably the best defensive coach in the NFL. BB is the only other person in the discussion. This defense is going to be terrifying.

Did Brady Cheat? More likely than not. Is the NFL very bad at this stuff? More likely than not.

I agree with this being a final audition for Cassel and I'm doubling down on TT from back when we signed him. The Bills offense is going to live in a 15 yard vertical box. Romex philosophy will be focused on limiting interceptions. We will run the ball with a lot of versatility. Clay as H-Back, Felton as FB, singleback sets, and shotgun sets. If we go power it's Felton, if we go pass we can go Clay while still having a power look. We will see them both together in multiple sets. McCoy has experience out of spread looks as well and power looks. We will see a ton of screens, short, and intermediate routes to our WR's, all are YAC nightmares. Eventually the defenses will start to compress and we will take high % deep shots. So within such a system who would you least want to face as the QB? With TT more so than EJ or MC, you have more running options and big play potential. EJ isn't stone legged, but TT would probably be one of if not the fastest starters in the NFL. You can tell Rex loves that angle which is likely because he hates defending against it, he's said as much before. I think TT can execute this type of offense at least close enough, if not better vs the other two. The added dimension of a sub 4.5 and agile runner will tip the scales.

My apologies if these articles have been posted before. http://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/blog/2015/the-new-england-patriots-mysteriously-became-fumble-proof-in-2007 http://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/blog/2015/the-new-england-patriots-prevention-of-fumbles-is-nearly-impossible http://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/blog/2015/the-wells-report-may-have-uncovered-the-tip-of-the-iceberg As the author points out statistics don't say why, they only can allude to something occurring, when it started occurring, and the likelihood of it occurring at random. The last 3 parts of that sentence all have very interesting information regarding the Patriots since the 2007 rule change. A couple things as they relate to me. I handicapped baseball and ran a service for about 4 years. I was not a sure thing as no such thing exists, I did have enough market influence to move a total very quickly. Take what I'm saying at face value or not, to prove what I'm saying I would have to provide my full name which is not something I'm doing on this site. I'm only giving you background because I feel pretty well positioned to discuss the merits of these articles. In the process of running my service I made acquaintances with some baseball minds that are very active in the Saber world. I learned a lot to say the least. For example in Colorado the ball just doesn't travel further, it also breaks differently depending on what type of pitch you throw because of the impact of air density on a baseball. In fact baseballs break differently in many ball parks across the United States. I actually stay in contact with a gentleman that is working on an air density controlled batting cage for the Colorado Rockies players to use. Reason is the Rockies can't travel home to away and endure the additional movement on pitches. The mental effects of a ball not traveling are hard enough, try dealing with that on top of a ball that was barely moving at home and now is dancing all over the plate away. Even worse, the west coast air density has the most pitch break out of any geographical location in the Majors and the Rockies deal with a lot of H to A situations to the West Coast. The Rockies already have known what I'm discussing for some time. They're are at a competitive disadvantage where they play and are doing everything they can to neutralize this. Sabermetrics has dozens of revelations scattered in it's history that provided teams a competitive advantage even if it was just for a long enough time until everybody else copied them. Those revelations all fell within league rules and just about every major baseball pundit applauded these discoveries as genius. Again, we can't draw a direct line to anything based on statistics, but I have my thoughts anyway. When I read these articles my feelings are Bill Belichick and Tom Brady were both aware of the impact air pressure has on a football and probably have been for decades. When I hear BB discuss his complete lack of any understanding on the topic it's comical. As a high school football player that did kickoffs (thankfully I did more) I could kick a soft deflated ball incredibly further than a hard one. The difference you felt on it's impact against your foot was instant. I even asked my coach at the time if we could use a special kickoff ball to which he replied sure and he knew exactly why. So even my high school coach knew about air pressure in footballs. Once the rule change went into effect in 2007 I think Brady and Belicheck did everything possible to get the air pressure on the balls as low as possible. I'm not willing to say they deflated to the extent to intentionally break the rules, it did in fact probably reach that level at times, knowingly or not. I'm saying they were aware the lower the PSI the more of an advantage they had and they did everything possible to capitalize on this. To me it's no different than the Rockies trying to even the playing field with an Air Density chamber or the Sabermetric discoveries that propelled the Athletics into the spotlight. I imagine to BB and TB it felt no different either. It becomes different because I think they were the only ones willing to push the air levels as low as they did. Unlike baseball in which revelations got copied nearly instantaneously, aware or not, I don't think any team was willing to try and copy what the Patriots were doing out of fear they would violate league rules. As far as competitive advantage, read the articles. I would rather be a coach going up against 52 players juiced like Frankenstein than have to always be at a disadvantage with fumbles.

Carpenter will be fine and we sure as heck need him. For a kicker one of my favorite Bills. The way he ended the Lions game last year, very hard kick, had already been hit with the laser before. You could tell he felt nothing other than wanting to send 70,000 fans home in tears and he did.

Good for him, a person shouldn't be condemned for saying they believe or don't believe. It's very unpopular in this country to not believe in god, it's so unpopular it's hard to even say that to a close friend or family member. For a public/athlete to say this on a national forum took a lot of balls.

I don't understand the obsession over PSI levels. Even if that is the main arguing point, circumstantially based on the findings it would be more likely than not the balls were tampered. If you want to form a kitchen sink debate by saying because the balls did not get tested in a laboratory setting thus rendering all tests invalid so be it. Let me know how that logic works with the misses if you ever come home smelling like lotion because you were at the strip club. "Honey, it can't be proven beyond a scientific doubt that I smell like a stripper, you're using all of your senses, logic, and reason to form that conclusion but none of those things are infallible in science so why are we arguing?" This whole incident is circumstantial, but when you include the findings, the texts, and all the circumstantial evidence you would need to be bordering on completely incoherent to not reach the same conclusion as the Wells report and the exact language it used. At which point what is and isn't fair? We know a player pressured subordinates who likely would not have jobs had they not complied to push the limits of the PSI thresholds. We see texts joking about it, employees feeling pressured, abnormal interactions. Even if Brady never desired for the balls to go lower than the PSI threshold his actions are what created a situation in which that could occur and he is responsible for the repercussions.It's really that simple and if you want to make it more complex or scientific, I would absolutely love to hear the probability of the Patriots level of fumbles over the last 5-6 years being a just a statistical anomaly. I would bet my kidney the odds of that being an anomaly in data are infinitely more unlikely than the odds of PSI levels being grossly inaccurate. Maybe the Patriots just learned a new way to carry a football.

It doesn't really sound like analytic type discussion. If they use that word to describe that behavior that would be sort of silly. I also find statistics like that relatively meaningless. That said I'm a big fan of analytics, both in sports and in business. Even the most rational and level headed individual is incapable of zero bias. Real analytics take the bias out. For me, I like to take the bias out and after that let my mind spin it a little to how it fits my world view. Look at WAR in baseball which is exactly what you discuss, Wins above replacement level. In football, I enjoy Footballoutsiders, as they take the field position, down, distance, score on every play and they compare the result to the historical average outcome for that exact situation. Both stats have very fundamentally sound methodology and both also say "This is how good A is, this is how Good B is compared to A". So that method is very nice for predictive based purposes. Having said all this, the more moving parts, the less accurate the method will be as far as capturing the parts within the parts. In my opinion the new Analytics side of football players, not teams, has some value, but it will inherently be flawed, because many times it's up to the viewer to interpret the correct assignments of the players.

Agreed, lots of advantages. Practice, under perfromance, injury. I think it becomes even more important for teams without an elite QB, even more, without a named starter.

The second perception is uniform and without bias nobody will talk about analytics. Until that point it will only grow in popularity.