Billy Claude
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Posts posted by Billy Claude
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2 hours ago, Bleeding Bills Blue said:
The stats in those 2 ACC games without travis are pretty brutal. 20/46 for 189 yards and 0 TDs over 2 games. Not saying Travis starting is going to blow the numbers out, but they were trying to win and the only way to do that was to not pass the ball.
Not saying there backup qb wasn't horrible, just that a lot of posts seem to imply the backup played most of the season when Travis actually played a cast majority of the games.
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29 minutes ago, eball said:
Forgive me, I apparently should have typed "what competent NFL GMs working in functional organizations..."
I thought that was self-explanatory.
Well, then you should have been more specific. After all, there appears to be many posters that regard the Bills as a dysfunctional organization with everyone under the iron micromanaging fist of Sean McDermott.
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35 minutes ago, eball said:
Please enlighten me with what NFL GMs you believe pick players they don’t think the HC wants.
There are plenty of examples, though they don't tend to last long. For example, Adam Gase was clearly unhappy when Mike Maccagnan was making picks during the first year Gase was with the Jets and Gase got Woody Johnson to fired Maccagnan almost immediately afterwards. The same with Rex Ryan and Mike Idzik before them. Idzik wanted to rebuild and Ryan wanted to pick for need and eventually Idzik was fired.
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5 hours ago, mannc said:
Very nice. It seems that most of the commentary on Coleman is based on his one season of FSU tape, but what do people think about his Michigan State tape? Anyone know why he transferred?
Coleman also said on one of the videos that he regarded being at Michigan State as a two year sentence and that he was a southern boy at heart. Not sure what he will feel about Buffalo in November, December and January.
Folks blaming the backup QB at Miami are talking like Jordan Travis missed half the season. Travis played 10.5 games. He only missed 2.5 games that Coleman played in (Coleman did not play in the Orange Bowl).
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I enjoyed the comment from Coleman to Carter that they never saw the way Duke was playing him before and Carter responding with that Duke changed their defense every week. I guess it is easier to do that at Duke. It does seem the Bills put a high weight on intelligence and perhaps that was why they didn't that Leggette if the rumors were true.
I regard most of the criticism of McDermott as nonsense but the one that I feel is valid is that he doesn't adapt his defense for the opponent but basically plays the same defense all the time This was the same issue with Dorsey when he was OC.
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1 hour ago, Rampant Buffalo said:
I hadn't been aware of Johnson's high sack totals when he was with the Jacksonville Jaguars. I agree with you that that should have been a major red flag. Also small sample size, as you said.
The Bills were in a bit of a desperate situation when they traded for Johnson. Todd Collins had turned out not to be Jim Kelly's successor, and Billy Joe Hobart wasn't the answer either. Even prior to Johnson's arrival, the Bills already had a great defense. So they had to do something at quarterback to try to level up the offense.
Desperate people sometimes do desperate things. Maybe the Bills told themselves, "The good things we saw from Johnson in Jacksonville? Those were for real. But the bad things we saw, such as the high sack rate? Small sample size." That's desperate person type thinking. But still, the Bills must have had some uncertainty about Johnson. So they bring in a guy like Flutie. Flutie had started off in the NFL, then washed out. He then had a great career in the CFL, including three Grey Cups. But he had a chip on his shoulder, and wanted to prove he belonged in the NFL as a starter. He only had a couple years or so to do this, before father time caught up with him. Adding Doug Flutie and Rob Johnson to the team at the same time was a recipe for a QB controversy.
Rob Johnson made the OL look worse than it actually was; while Flutie made the OL look better than it was. If I had the Cowboys' OL of the mid '90s, I'd take Johnson over Flutie. Johnson was the better passer when given good protection, especially on intermediate to deep passes. But with a backup caliber OL, such as the OL the Bills had in the late '90s, maybe you take Flutie over Johnson.
There is also a third possibility, which pretty much no one is going to agree with me on. The Bills OL played better in the second half of games, and typically started looking pretty decent halfway through the third quarter. So why not play Flutie for the first half of every game, and maybe the first drive of the third quarter. Then put Johnson in for the rest of the game. A defense is typically going to prepare for one or the other of those QBs, so you punish them for whichever one they didn't prepare for. Moreover, you're taking advantage of Flutie's best attribute (making the OL look better than it is), when you need that attribute the most. You're also taking advantage of Johnson's best attribute (good intermediate to deep passing) when there may be the pass protection necessary for that attribute to matter.
I appreciate the response. Actually Johnson was remarkably consistent. He was sacked once every 6.5 dropbacks after he left the Bills also. I think the best comp for Rob Johnson is Zach Wilson. All the skill in the world but just didn't know how to play QB.
I will have to check this but I seem to remember the Bills signing Flutie before trading for Johnson. I think that was one of the reasons why Flutie was so pissed from the beginning. Definitely agree that the Bills were desperate, also I guess that Johnson also looked very good in preseason games, though so did Nathan Peterman. Definitely also agree that Flutie was not good that season before the Titans playoff game.
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5 hours ago, Rampant Buffalo said:
Your post isn't specific to Beane in particular. It's defense of pretty much every NFL front office for the past few decades.
With that in mind, I'd like to take a trip down memory lane, to the 2006 draft. Marv Levy was the Bills' GM, Dick Jauron was the head coach. Levy/Jauron used the 8th overall pick to draft Donte Whitner, SS. Then, they traded back up into the first round, to take John McCargo, DT. Nick Mangold, C, was drafted one pick later.
A number of fans decried these picks. Many wanted the 8th overall pick to be used on Ngata, a defensive lineman. I personally wanted the Bills to take Jay Cutler, QB. Many, including myself, wanted the Bills to take Mangold.
Whitner was not a bad player, but he never came anywhere close to living up to his lofty draft position. Ngata had a great career, and was much better than Whitner. Cutler played well for the Broncos for a number of years. When they finally traded him away, they received 2 first round picks, Kyle Orton, and some other stuff. That's two more first round picks, one more Kyle Orton, and one more instance of other stuff than the Bills received for the departure of Whitner. Whitner went first-contract-and-out. McCargo was a bust, and Mangold was the NFL's best center for a long number of years. The Bills made do with a backup caliber center, in the form of Melvin Fowler.
In the late '70s, during the middle of a game, Notre Dame benched their starting QB. They put in a backup instead. The crowd started cheering. "What is going on?" asked a reporter from the opposing team. "We just put Joe Montana in the game," a Notre Dame reporter replied. "Now you guys are going to lose." The fans recognized what Notre Dame had in Joe Montana before the coaching staff did.
Excessive knowledge is not a substitute for insight. Sometimes, the fans are right, and coaches or front offices are wrong. Beane is a better GM than Levy/Jauron, and he's not going to do anything as boneheaded as drafting Donte Whitner 8th overall. But even Beane can make avoidable mistakes. If or when a GM or coach makes an avoidable mistake, it will often be pointed out by at least some fans. To broadly label all fan criticisms "Debi from Depew" demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the last 20 years of this team's history.
Sure you can always find instances where the fans are right and the "experts" are wrong but how many times have fans called for the backup QB to start and how many times did it turn out that the backup wasn't playing because he stank. I bet a lot more times than the opposite way.
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On 3/27/2024 at 6:19 PM, SoTier said:
I haven't watched a lot of Fields, but I think he has a skill set reminiscent of Russ in his prime, so they can both work in the same type of offense. My guess is that Russ will start the season with Fields as his backup. If he can't recreate the form he had in Seattle, then Fields will get his shot. Even if Russ excels and Fields doesn't see much playing time, I think that the Stillers may re-sign Fields for the future if he looks good in practice.
I don't see any similarity between Fields and early Russell Wilson. Yes, Wilson was great at the broken play but he beat out Matt Flynn (who was a big free agent signing by the Seahawks) because Wilson had surprisingly great ball placement and anticipation. -- certainly not anything anyone has said is a strength of Justin Field.
Regarding the Steelers, Pickett, Trubisky, and Rudolph is such a low bar to set, I have a hard time seeing that Wilson and Fields will not be better.
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6 hours ago, Rampant Buffalo said:
There were two times that Jevon Kearse rushed untouched to Rob Johnson. Untouched. I mean, I could sort of see that if Kearse was a blitzing safety or something. He wasn't. He was a defensive end. It shouldn't have been a complete shock to the OL that a DE would want to rush the passer. Or course Johnson is going to take sacks on those plays. Any QB would. Those plays generated at least one of Johnson's fumbles.
During the late '90s, the Bills OL had one starter-caliber player: Ruben Brown. The other starters were at a Ryan Bates level, which is to say, quality backup. And quite frankly, I'd take Ryan Bates over Corbin Lacina or Jamie Nails. So you have an OL that's quality backup caliber, except for Ruben Brown. Then you have a sack waiting to happen type QB, in the form of Rob Johnson. But, when Johnson was given good protection, he played at a high level. That's why he was able to put up outstanding numbers for the Jacksonville Jaguars, while being protected by Hall of Fame LT Tony Boselli. When he was with the Bills, he'd often do better in the second half of games than the first half, because in the second half he'd receive some level of pass protection. During the Titans game, the Bills' offensive production came in the second half, due to the OL doing more in the second half than the absolute nothing it had done in the first.
Rob Johnson was sacked 7 times in 35 pass attempts when he was in Jacksonville while protected by the HOF LT. That is 1 sack every 6 dropbacks which was a little worse than in Buffalo where he was sacked once every 7 drop backs. That is not a sustainable way to win games or stay off the IR. His so called "outstanding" numbers in Jacksonville occurred in a sample size of one game where he threw for 294 yards out of his 368 total yards with the Jaguars. In a sign of things to come, Johnson had to miss most of the third quarter of that game due to injury though he came back and played all of the 4th quarter (nobody said Johnson was not tough).
Flutie was sacked about once every 23 dropbacks when Flutie and Johnson were on the Bills together, so at approximately 30% the rate Johnson was sacked. The Bills offensive line wasn't great during that time but it wasn't as bad as it looked when Johnson was QB.
There should have been all kinds of red flags when the Bills traded for Johnson but it was before any form of analytics. As Flutie supposedly said when he left "I may not be a great quarterback but you can't tell me that I'm not better than that guy."
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I assume this leak must have come from the someone in the Patriots organization. I never remember anything like this when Bellichek was in charge.
Definitely a sign of a poorly run organization if these types of leaks continue (see Whaley, Doug).
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4 minutes ago, Bangarang said:
They likely gave Allen a list of WRs they had high grades on and told him to watch their games and pick one he'd like to work with. Obviously we did not have Worthy graded that high.
I agree that they probably prepared some stuff for Allen to look at but I would hope that they asked him to pick 6 or 7 that he would like to work with and not one.
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9 minutes ago, DCOrange said:
I guess this depends on the definition of low-floor. There's plenty of WRs that come out every year that have nothing to fall back on if they struggle to get open in the NFL and end up washing out of the league very quickly. In the very least, Coleman's run blocking and red zone ability should keep him on NFL rosters for a long time. The key with Coleman IMO is that he's a raw prospect but because of the run blocking and contested catch ability, he should be able to make an impact right away while he hopefully learns the finer points of the game and continues to ascend.
I am sure you are right that he can contribute in that manner. What you described seems to be a low floor to me for a draft pick at the top of the second round.
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After watching that video, the answer to the OP's question appears to be "Fact: Keon Coleman is not a separator". He is covered pretty tightly on almost every pass. Some of it might be due to poor QB play but definitely not all it.
The more important question is can he become a separator with better coaching. I assume moving from school to school and changing coachng staffs didn't help but sometimes Beane is unduly confident in what the coaching staff can do.
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8 hours ago, Bruffalo said:
You don’t want your all star QB to give feedback on what receivers he thinks would make him the most successful? You think it’s so bad, in fact, that the GM should be fired for listening to his most valuable asset?
Sorry, I just don’t see the logic.
The scouts spent hours and hours evaluating each player, watching tape, interviewing the player, talking to their coaches, looking at combine data, discussing the player with each other, comparing the player to other players etc.
How much time did you think Allen spent on this? They probably gave him 10 minute highlight video and a one page summary of seven or eight guys and asked him for his impressions. Maybe a three hours altogether tops. He was probably okay with most of them since it is hard for me to believe that Bills scouts wouldn't be able to rule out guys that definitely won't be a fit with their QB.
Do you get feedback from your franchise QB? Sure, but I definitely hope that they didn't decide on passing over Worthy and Legette because Allen was banging the table for Coleman. That is not Allen's job. My guess is that he would have also been perfectly okay with Worthy and Legette and the "Allen wanted Coleman" business is just a bit of stupid but relatively harmless PR.
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2 hours ago, Bruffalo said:
This is where I'm at with the pick. It seems like Allen had a lot of influence on who he thought would fit best into this new Brady offense, so I'm going to defer to him and trust that they've made a good decision.
Time will tell but I can't pretend to know better than Josh freakin' Allen about WRs.
I certainly hope that Allen was not involved in this pick. That is not his job. If the Bills picked Coleman because Allen wanted him then Beane definitely needs to be fired. My guess is that the involvement by Allen was prefunctory, sort of like King Charles officially has to approve all legislation before it becomes law.
Coleman fits the high ceiling low floor profile of most early round Beane picks. Except for the 40 time, he is a freakish athlete whose college stats are not super impressive. Examples include Allen, Edmunds, Brown, Knox, Elam, and Rousseau. They are betting on that can teach him to separate in the pros. Hopefully they are right.
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No to more Jets oline rejects. Every one the Bills havehad has been beyond terrible.
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29 minutes ago, Pine Barrens Mafia said:
You have a QB that's a Maserati. He's built for bombs away. But instead of building your offense for that, you build it for plodding, 10 yards at a time max, 10 minute drive offense. So I ask, what is the point?
What's the point of having a guy who's designed by nature to bomb the football deep and whose weakness is dink and dunk stuck in an offensive scheme that is built to do just that?
Why not offload him for someone who's better suited for that kind of thing if you refuse to play to his strengths? That's what I can't wrap my head around. It makes no sense.
I do worry that the front office is not paying to Allen's strengths. Allen does not like the short game. He loses patience with it too easily. It also requires a lot of pre-snap reads and ball placement which not his forte. Allen displayed more patience at the end of last season, maybe he will keep it up.
However, Allen is also not great at the long bombs. Yes, you can find instance of crucial drops but it is not all the receivers fault. He just doesn't put enough air under the ball. In any case long bombs is not a strategy any team can rely on consistently.
What Allen is great at is the intermediate 10 to 25 yard pass. Until recently Diggs had been pivotal in that role. Hopefully they have a replacement. It is certainly not clear that is the case.
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2 hours ago, Sweats said:
Yes sir.
They are trying to own the middle of the field......create mismatch nightmares and rely on YAC......more like death by a thousand cuts.
Aren't these the things that Josh Allen is not very good at? Are they trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? This is what is puzzling to me. It was like when Dennison came in and decided to run the WCO with Tyrod Taylor.
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2 hours ago, Alphadawg7 said:
I would say this aged pretty well and I was pretty spot on. And here is Beane basically echoing the same things tonight after round 1 where he said he never even tried to trade up and no one called him either to try and initiate us to trade up. He even directly references wanting to get a 3rd back as I mentioned above and how now we have pick 95 and the pick we gave up for Rasul was like pick 91, so we essentially got that pick back.
Like I keep saying, all you have to do is listen to Beane and pay attention, he is about as straight forward as they come. Or don't and rely on bogus twitter nonsense designed to create buzz and clicks...but I think you will find Beanes own words to be more accurate than anything on social media.
Agree. Beane usually gives you a good idea of the broad strokes of his thinking and very rarely tells an outright lie. Definitely much less likely to tell a bald face lie than other GMs. The only exception I can think of is the Kair Elam year when he claimed the Bills were not lasered focused on a CB when they clearly were.
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53 minutes ago, dave mcbride said:
They were better in 2022 than in 2021, actually. The only difference in outcome is that they won an extremely close game vs KC in the AFCCG in January 2022 and lost an extremely close game in the AFCCG in January 2023 (on a personal foul call, of all things).
The Bengals were incredibly lucky in 2021. Every Bengal playoff game was incredibly close. In the wild-card game, the Raiders had three shots at tying (or winning) the game from the Bengals 9-yard line with 30 seconds left. In the divisional game against the Titans, Tannehill threw two 4th quarter interceptions including one with 40 seconds left at mid field that set up the Bengals game winning field goal and in the conference championship, one could argue the Chiefs were emotionally spent from the 13 second game.
The 2021 Bengals were probably the weakest AFC team in the Super Bowl in about 20 years.-
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13 hours ago, Gregg said:
Looks very similar to what they wore in their early history. The Giants uniforms from 1924 to 1933.
Perhaps a little context.
First, it is not official, it is just a rumor.
Second, the Giants are celebrating their 100th year next year and as pointed out by Gregg, these are their uniforms from 1933, so this is likely a one time thing as a part of the 100th year celebration.
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Bad idea. When is the last time a nostaglia hire has worked? Lou Saban?
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42 minutes ago, TheWeatherMan said:
Did this idiotic trade create cap relief for the Jets?
The Broncos are picking up half of Zach's salary of 5.5M.
This was the surprising thing to me. I would have have thought any trade would have resulted in Jets eating at least 4M of the 5.5M.
https://sports.yahoo.com/jets-broncos-split-zach-wilsons-193402288.html
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3 hours ago, Mr. WEO said:
day 3 of the NFL draft includes rounds 4,5,6,7.....
But yes, if your are, at best, potential 7th round talent--might as well take a few thousand bucks a year in college, because you're never getting to the NFL.
Well, not to nitpick, but you were the one referring to how much money Mr. Irrelevant in your original argument.
2024 Buffalo Bills Roster - All 91 Spots filled
in The Stadium Wall
Posted · Edited by Billy Claude
The Jets obviously feel there are enough snaps to go around. They are bringing five QBs to camp: Rodgers, Taylor, and rookies Jordan Travis, Andrew Peasley (Wyoming) and Colby Suits (UL-Monroe).