Mikie2times

McGahee is a pretty good back, I just think his popularity at the U and injury built his star power more then production did. Back in 2002 and 2003 Travis put a couple good seasons together. He did fumble an insane amount of times, but in many other areas he was as productive or more productive then Willis. That’s not to say that Travis should be here or we should have never drafted Willis, I'm just comparing these players because of similar offensive lines, and because we seem to view the two players overall talents differently. We know now that Travis peaked out, and Willis is still getting better. If at some point Willis can regain his explosiveness to match his power I have no doubt he will become an elite player. It's just that right now he doesn't have that aspect in his game, and his yard per carry average reveals that. The line could certainly help Willis out but then again nobody was singing its praise when Travis played either. The Middle Column represents what McGahee's stats would be if he saw the amount of carries Travis had in 2002-2003. For receiving stats I based the middle column predictions on the average amount of receptions compared to rushes the players had. Willis McGahee (2004 and 2005)...Projected.............Travis Henry (2002 and 2003) 499 Rushes ............................. .656 Rushes.................656 Rushes 2023 Yards................................ 2657 Yards. ................2794 Yards 4.05 AVG................................... 4.05 AVG ...................4.25 AVG 17 TD. .......................................22TD......................... 23 TD 39 REC.......................................51 REC.......................71 REC 288 Yards....................................377 Yards.................. 467 Yards 0 TD........................................... 0 TD......................... 2 TD 5 FUM..........................................7 FUM.........................18 FUM

We win a low scoring game Carolina 13 Bills 17

Teams don't practice full contact at game speeds during the regular season. Offenses only face real game speeds in game situations, so even if you face a talented defense while scrimmaging that defense is really only going at 75%. Plus when you break it down the Bills run game, and run defense don't go full contact, so that in itself really lowers the ability to simulate the rushing attack. In the passing game the QB can't get hit so the line doesn't face the difficult blitz and stunts we see in games, and if they do, real pressure can't be simulated. The one area it can sometimes help is in line play. Individual players can work on techniques with the offensive lineman. If you got a lighting fast speed rusher it can really benefit your LT to see that speed in practice everyday. Then again that also depends on your players contributing to the team in these areas; TO aside most players have no problem doing this.

By design Nate is usually locked up one on one with the teams best WR. He is going to lose some battles under these circumstances. Elite corners get the most difficult assignments, and all of them fail on given plays or games. Nate has certainly had his fair share of miscues, but like I said before he is still the best CB we've had in 15 years or so. By reading this thread you would think he was some bum we can replace with a FA fill in. I bet he shuts Steve Smith down tomorrow.

I'm sticking with Ngata

When you think about the scenario you really start to appreciate just how much of a crap shoot the draft can be. We judge TD on his selections, but who knows how many other stars the Bills nailed down on the value board only to not be in a position to select them. I bet we take Ben at that spot, and from what we know at this moment I would take Ben over Lee, and JP. While it's true that the Steelers have a great running game if you've watched the Batch, and Maddox experience the last few weeks it's clear Ben is not just some play action scrub. He brings a different dimension to Pittsburgh and when he's on they can beat anybody in the NFL. That said we might have even more luck then Pittsburgh if JP Losman develops. He is more physically gifted then Ben, and in term of raw ability (running, passing strength, Mechanics) he looks like a top 5 guy. In addition Lee Evans will at the very least be an incredible #2, and possible #1 during his career, and has some of the best hands in the NFL.

No NFL team will allow one player to hijack them, and certainly not one that has a coach the caliber of Reid. Besides even if the NFL was like the NBA what evidence do we have that he will ever be satisfied with his coach, QB, and team? At first he was thrilled with McNabb, Reid, and the Eagles, just like he was with Garcia, Marucci, and the 49ers. It took a little while for his antics to show up in SF, but not so long with Baltimore, and Philadelphia. He simply has no track record of being happy for any length of time, and lately the length of time has dwindled down to days. Is a team supposed to fire the coach every two years at the expense of one player? Why have a GM if TO's around to make the decisions for you, what an arrogant POS.

Dude read the link Webster Guy provided, the evidence against TO is astounding, and the majority of it is toward Andy Reid, and the Eagles organization, not McNabb. Are you going to now claim that if Andy Reid truly wanted to win he was put his feelings aside and let TO play? You have to draw the line eventually.

Even if it was for entertainment the guy either completely lacks judgment or just doesn't care. I mean how the hell did he expect people to interpret his original comments? Most children don’t crave attention TO does, he’s a 4 year old boy who happens to be a hell of a receiver, and that’s what he will be the rest of his career.

This Nate Clements bashing is hilarious, the guy has ONE horrible game in basically his entire career for Buffalo and now he sucks. If ripping on Nate until the seasons over makes not retaining him easier for people to deal with then so be it, but he is still probably the best player on this team right now. According to this link Footbal Outsiders Buffalo is #4 in the league in shutting down a teams #1 WR. In the meantime Nate has done that while pretty much playing on an island all year. He's routinely shut down #1 WR's for several years, including completely dominating Chad Johnson last season. During his time with Buffalo many top WR's have called him one of the most difficult corners to face in the league, including one of the guys that this thread says will tear him up (Johnson). If Nate truly sucks I challenge you to name a better Bills corner in the last 15 years, and that’s saying something considering the Corners we've had. Winfield and Odoms are probably the leading contenders, and Nate probably sees a contract twice the size of Winfield’s while Odom’s disappeared after he left Buffalo. Nate is one of the best corners in the history of this franchise and this thread really goes to show how extereme people can act based on one game.

Owens, a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, started things off when his comments in the current issue of Playboy became public. In the article, he was asked whether he thought Garcia was gay. "Like my boy tells me: If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it is a rat." A day later he was furiously backspinning. "I didn't say that he was gay," Owens told reporters. "The conversation and the interview were loose. To my knowledge, I'm not sure if Jeff is gay or not. I've seen him out — he had a girlfriend when we were in San Fran. There's been a recent report that he has a girlfriend now. That was the extent of it. Everybody's going to make a big deal out of it. It wasn't like I came out and said 'Jeff was gay.' People asked me similar questions about Steve Young. Everybody is going to have their rumors."

Good post, I was also thinking about how much this ruling could help our situation with Willis. If nothing else it should bring Rosenhaus down a peg, and will probably keep him from doing anything to extreme for awhile.

We all know how it played out, Pittsburgh selected Roethlisberger two spots before Buffalo and we still found a pretty good player in Lee Evans. We then traded back into the first to get JP. The question I'm posing is do you think JP was always the guy they targeted, or would TD draft Big Ben if he’s around at #13? Also knowing what we know at this point, would you rather have Lee Evans, and JP Losman, or Rothlisberger?

He does the "The hey song" very famous for sporting events. Yes I think they should stop playing it, now that I know this I'm sure as hell not going to listen to it again.

Yep, that was the game. My first thought was oh the Lions got the throwbacks on, then oh sheet Flea Flicker. It was funny because I was only 12, yet the surrounding Lions fans talked crap like I was a 25 year old drinking bourbon. Must have been the incredibly pimp Bills starter jacket I owned at the time. Despite the loss Jimbo had a rare 10+ yard TD scramble, and Pete Metzalars hauled in a long TD pass. I would love to do it next year.

It would be sweet if we play our game against the Lions next year on Thanksgiving. I'm going to the game regardless, but I got a chance to go to the Thanksgiving game during the Kelly era, and while we lost it still was a great experience. Plus for once we might actually have a chance at winning a nationally televised game. With our luck they probably give it to Miami.

10 years? You can't be serious; teams can turnover an entire roster, staff, and GM in 4 or 5. We have no idea what will happen with our young offensive players, or future draft picks. If you hate Mularkey, give him one more bad year and he's out for sure, same probably goes for TD. We just got crushed on the road by a much better team, but this is still the NFL, and we have no way of knowing who will turn it around next year, let alone 5 or 10 years from now.

I pretty much agree with everything said, and while I'm in favor of a possible GM switch if TD addresses the lines like he has at other positions then I don't care if he sticks around. Also contributing to our future prospects is JP, he has the skill to be an elite player, but does he ever evolve into that? Even if he becomes slightly above average next year that could bring a completely new dimension to Buffalos offense. The Bills passing game has been awful this season, and it hurts our ground game because teams can just stack the box. Things don't look so bright now but the Bills might be in pretty good shape for next year if JP comes around, and we upgrade the lines.

Thats my list but I also throw Adams in

I'm trying to extract numbers from each line of text in the NFL play by play logs. To give you an example of what I'm trying to do here is a line from one of the logs. 1-10-SD25 (14:56) L.Tomlinson up the middle to SD 37 for 12 yards (L.Milloy, N.Clements) When you copy the play logs to excel each play takes up one line, and it keeps going until the game is complete. What I'm trying to do is isolate the down, in this case 1, and the yardage result, in this case 12, into an excel cell so I can measure team success in certain situations. I can get the down isolated by using the text to columns function, but I can't find a way to get the yardage isolated. The goal would look like this Cell--------------------------------Cell--------------------------------------------Cell Play Log from NFL.COM---------DOWN----------------------------------------Yardage If I could get it in this format it would make extracting the data a million times easier. Thanks in advance if anybody can help.

I just used a similar stat to look at the SD game. All it does is break down the amount of plays each offense faced at 3rd and 6 or longer, and how often that team converted. BUF Ran- 49 Rushing and Passing plays SD Ran- 67 Rushing and Passing plays Of the Chargers 67 plays 2 plays came in a situation of 3rd and 6 or longer, they converted both. Of Buffalos 49 plays 7 plays came in a situation of 3rd and 6 or longer, and they converted once. One more stat I looked at combined performance on second and first down, and it looks on par with what you would expect with the 3rd and 6 numbers. The stat credits a team 1 point for converting a first down on the first two downs, or one point for putting your offense in 3rd and 3 or less. If the team fails to achieve either one of these objectives they lose 1 point. The points are then all totaled up and you can find each team’s success rate in these situations. For a little more detail pretend you have a team that received 10 Positive points, and 5 Negative Points. That means we have a total of 15 occurrences that this situation happened in. Just divide 10/15 and that’s how I came up with the success rate for these situations. SD- Had an 89.3% success rate in this category Buff- Had a 50% success rate in this category.

Again great idea to convert it to a per play ratio, that really shows the impact how often Buffalo is getting in these situations. You can also convert the percentages on 3rd and 7 and longer into the per play format. Those would look like this for the Colts and Bills on 3rd and 7 or longer. 1 out of every 5.9 plays the Bills will convert a third and 7 or more 1 out of every 2.8 plays the Colts will convert of third and 7 or more

I agree that many of the good offenses won't even see a third down to begin with. So to take into account a good offenses ability to avoid third down all together we could compare the amount of 3rd downs an offense has to the overall plays it runs. Buffalo has 563 passing and Running Plays Indianapolis has 636 Passing and Running plays Knowing already how many third downs each team has attempted, and how many of those 3rd downs are 7 yards or longer we can get a much better overall picture of the offense. 22% Of Buffalos plays have come on third down, and of those 3rd downs 59 or 46% have involved a third and 7 or longer situation. 18% Of the Colts plays have come on third down, and of those 3rd downs 43, or 36% have involved a situation of third a 7 or longer. While 4% doesn't seem like the world, a number like that probably has a big overall effect on a team’s offense in the scheme of things. Then when you factor in the other numbers I had in previous posts you can really see how much more efficiently a good offense operates compared to Buffalo's. I appreciate the comments and tips.

I spend a lot of time analyzing statistics for handicapping. At the end of the year I'm going to do this statistic and several others for all the teams by going over the play by play logs. Just so we have some point of reference on how a good team does in these circumstances I also did the Colts. They have a stat line that looks like this. GOOD= A conversion of 3rd and 7 or longer BAD= Not converting 3rd and 7 or longer, excluding penalties, turnovers, and sacks. NEG= A 3rd and 7 or longer that involved an offensive penalty, sack, or turnover Total 3rd Downs: 118 Total 3rd Downs 3rd and 7 or longer: 43 (36%) GOOD: 15 (34.9%) BAD: 22 (51.2%) NEG: 6 (14%) So what is probably the leagues best offense gets in these situations about 10% less often then Buffalo, and is 18% more likely to convert then the Bills. The other one I was interested in doing is something I'm going to call First Down success rate. This will measure the frequency in which a team picks up at least 4 yards on first down. Maybe I'll throw that one into this thread later tonight.

A successful offense is required to score points, and gain yards, but in order to accomplish those things a team must put themselves in make able third downs. For a team with a weak line it is even more important because a 3rd and long puts you in predictable pass situations. Predictable pass situations will get you blitzed, and a below average line will look even worse. If you can’t convert on third the trickle down effect will even extend to your defense. You will likely lose the time of possession battle, and see much more of the opposing team’s offense, and with a bad defense to begin with you could get yourself in trouble fast. What Buffalo doesn’t do well is get themselves in make able third downs, and when this happens our defense either must force turnovers, or pray, because we aren’t good enough to stop teams consistently. I broke down plays Buffalo has had on 3rd and 7 or more, and the frequency in which a third down was 3rd and 7 or more. The results will probably not surprise anybody. The following is how I did it GOOD= A conversion of 3rd and 7 or longer BAD= Not converting 3rd and 7 or longer, excluding penalties, turnovers, and sacks. NEG= A 3rd and 7 or longer that involved an offensive penalty, sack, or turnover Total 3rd Downs: 127 Total 3rd Downs 3rd and 7 or longer: 59 (46%) GOOD: 10 (16.9%) BAD: 37 (62.7%) NEG: 12 (20.3%) EDIT: I made a mistake on the amount of 3rd down attempts for the Bills. It's actually 127, not 118.