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Then why wasn’t he at the workouts? Allen was there.

That’s exactly what it is, especially when you factor in the nearly $20 million they kicked down the road via the restructure they just did. There’s a million recipes for prolonged success in the NFL, but they all revolve around finding an elite QB and then drafting well to keep him surrounded with talent.

No Jerry Rice either.

It should have already been done. In 2021, Beane took Basham. The next two picks were Josh Myers and Creed Humphrey. Then in 2022, he traded up to get Elam. The next two picks were Tyler Smith and Tyler Linderbaum.

The Bills were smack dab in between the Chiefs and Bengals prior to the restructure in terms of percentage of the cap spent on offense. Lack of spending on offense as a percentage of the cap isn’t why they scored 10 points against the Bengals. I’ll agree that Beane has a fundamental flaw with the way he builds his rosters, but it has nothing to do with offense versus defense. People on this board talk often about having “stars and scrubs”. That’s not what Beane does. He continually overpays players who are pretty good but not great in order to have a complete roster. That simply isn’t sustainable when you’ve got a QB on a top of the market contract. Ideally, you want to find your stars and then draft well enough to not have to rely on scrubs. That isn’t an option when you draft as poorly as Beane has since 2019. The result is that he’s way overpaying a bunch of JAGs. Taking Allen and Diggs (stars) out of the equation, the top cap hits this season will be White, Dawkins, Morse, Oliver, Hyde, Johnson, and Jones. That’s $81 million or 36% of the entire salary cap going towards mediocre production. Beane’s failures come down to what nearly every GM’s fortune comes down to, his ability to draft well. The Rams are the rare exception to the rule, and their success was fleeting to put it mildly.

They also just restructured Allen’s contract to reduce his hit this season by nearly $20 million which skews those numbers pretty significantly.

4 of their 5 biggest cap hits in 2023 are on offense.

I agree. The question becomes whether those younger players are as good as the aging, expensive players. How many players currently playing on their rookie deals have shown themselves to be cornerstone type players? Groot looks like he’s going to be at least a solid player, and he’s still got upside. Other than that, there are mostly question marks. I liked Elam coming out of Florida, but I don’t know what happened with him last year. Will Davis put it all together just in time to earn a huge payday?

So you really think the Bills are an ascending roster or that Beane is going to somehow figure out how to increase the talent level on the team while Allen and Miller’s cap hits go from $26 million in 2023 to $71 million in 2024? While Diggs goes from $15 million to $28 million and he’s 31 years old? Where is this infusion of young talent coming from? Maybe I missed something, but there doesn’t appear to be a bunch of recent draft picks waiting in the wings to replace guys like White, Poyer, Hyde, Miller, Oliver, Diggs, Edmunds, etc. This franchise was built to peak in 2022, and it did just that. In the middle of the season, they were the odds on favorites to win the Super Bowl. This is the first offseason since at least 2018 that the Bills weren’t buyers, and a year from now they’re going to be full-blown sellers. Unless guys like Epenesa, Basham, Rousseau, Elam, Cook, Bernard, Brown, Davis, etc. are ready to step in and not miss a beat, then roster age and salary issues are going to loom large.

Typical BS from Florio. The Bills began last season with either the best roster in the NFL or the second best behind the Eagles. The problem was that they were an older team, and they wore down over the course of the season while some of the younger teams improved with experience. It’s entirely possible that 2022 was the best roster Josh is ever surrounded by. Not only did that team max out the salary cap, but it borrowed from the future via back-loaded contracts. In the end, Josh led the team to 10 points in their playoff loss. His line didn’t do him any favors, but Allen earned plenty of the blame.

Right? Like, have you ever wondered “what if” about that Norwood kick against the Giants? In a weird way, I feel like the Buffalo Bills would have won the Super Bowl that year.

Why don’t you talk about how unlucky he was to lose to the Giants via the helmet catch? Yeah, it’s way more impressive to lose before getting there. Sure would’ve sucked for Joe if he’d made 6 more Super Bowls and won 3 more championships.

I’m not sure where you got your stats, but the source you used must have been from about 2016 because it leaves off three trips to the Super Bowl and two rings for Brady. Basically it omits a HOF career worth of his stats, and Brady’s accomplishments STILL dwarf Montana’s.

That’s an interesting point you bring up about wondering how Brady would fare in different eras and with different rules. The reality is that he’s been in the league for 23 seasons, so you don’t really have to wonder. He’s played in multiple eras with all kinds of different rules, and he’s dominated all of them. He’s won in ball control offenses. He’s won in wide open offenses. He’s won in offenses featuring multiple TEs. He’s won while making countless little white slot receivers look like world beaters. I feel pretty confident that he’d manage to win throwing to Jerry Rice, John Taylor, Roger Craig, etc. while Bill Walsh was calling the plays.

You can’t compare eras, but you can compare how QBs performed relative to their peers. Montana led the league in TDs twice (once in a shortened season when he threw 17 and another when Marino was blowing him away until he got hurt) and never led it in yards. Brady led the league in TDs five times and four times in yards. Brady set passing records in the one and only season he played with an elite WR. Montana played a large portion of his career with the best WR in history, but his career high was 31 TDs three years after Marino threw 48. So yeah, I think Brady would have done just fine in any era. He’s the GOAT by a mile.

I’m literally typing this from Kansas City. I watched every game Montana ever played as a Chief, attended several, and know a handful of his teammates personally. He had an extremely talented team around him, and he was supposed to be the missing piece to take him to a championship. Great as he was, it failed…unlike when Tampa brought in Brady.

The Chiefs were 10-6 the year before Montana arrived. They were 11-5 Joe’s first season when he exploded on the scene for 13 TDs and 2100 yards. He went 9-7 his second and final season. The Chiefs were 13-3 the next year. In his two seasons in KC, the Chiefs were 20-12. In the two seasons sandwiching his time there, they were 23-9.

The Patriots were 12-4 when Brady left. He dragged that terrible roster to a division title on his back before leaving to join a 7-9 Tampa team and immediately win another championship. I’m not entirely sure why people arguing that Montana was better than Brady are using the fact that Montana had a stacked roster when he left compared to the garbage that Brady had, but it doesn’t exactly bolster the case for Joe.

I know. You came into the middle of a conversation and decided the discussion was about something else entirely. Young went from looking like a bust to an immediate all-pro by moving from a crappy roster to an historically great one. Montana played nearly his entire career with loaded rosters and won 16 postseason games and 4 Super Bowls in 15 seasons. Incredible as his career was, it’s absolutely dwarfed by Brady’s. You could literally cut TB’s career into 3 sections and any one of them would be HOF worthy. You put a rookie Joe Montana on the 2000 Patriots, and he doesn’t end his career with 10 Super Bowl appearances and 7 rings. The same can be said for literally every QB in history other than Tom Brady.

You’re so close to getting it. Playing with a historically great supporting cast makes QBs look even better. Even with that roster, Montana was 16-7 all time in the postseason. Brady is 35-13. Brady is the greatest football player in NFL history, and it’s not particularly close. Denying that is akin to denying that Gretzky is the GOAT in hockey.

WTF? Lamar isn’t under contract with the Ravens.

The same Steve Young who had 11 career TDs and 21 INTs before he came to SF and threw 10 TDs and 0 INTs his first season there? Having a HOF coach and one of the greatest supporting casts of all time doesn’t hurt.

Didn’t hurt that the team also had Jerry Rice, John Taylor, Roger Craig, Ronnie Lott, Charles Haley, Michael Carter, Bill Romanowski, Wesley Walls… Montana was arguably the GOAT before Brady came along, but Brady ended any legitimate debate.

Montana left the 49ers, and they kept on rolling. Brady left the Patriots, and they’ve been mediocre at best since.

Remember when Steve Young, Drew Brees, Dak Prescott, and Kirk Cousins played on the franchise tags and it ruined them financially and professionally?