Billy Claude

I dislike the double standard. Knox drops a few passes with a broken hand and everybody calls him a bum. Allen has a bad game and it must be injury/oline/receivers/coaching. Allen is a great QB with flaws. If he can ever clean them up he would be GOAT.

I have no problem with winning this game ugly. Every team has a bad game sometimes and good teams pull out the win. If this happens again in New England, then they will be a one and done team if they even get into the playoffs.

The original question I was responding to was has kickers kicked unusually well against the Bills over many seasons? This interested me enough to go look at the data. Considering regular season only, in 2022, FG kickers against the Bills were 21/28 (75%) while Bass was 27/31 (87% - his best year). No one noticed because the Bills were blowing people out. 2019 was the year I remembered there were a lot of crucial miss kicks by opponents. In game 1,the Jets kicker (Vedvik) was 0/1 on FG and missed an extra point in a game the Bills won 17-16. He was replaced after two games. In game 5, the Titans kicker (Santos) was 0/4 and was immediately replaced after the game. Bills won 14-7. This was also the last game Mariota started before being replaced by Tannehill. Since the Bills barely made the playoffs that year each game was important. Overall in 2019, Hauschka was 22/28 (78%) while opponent kickers were a horrible 14/24 (58%). A lot of lucky things went the Bills way that year. I think people want to believe the refs/ league/ universe has something against the Bills but tend to never remember when luck goes their way. Given that, there is no doubt that the Bills have been very unlucky this season.

I don't think this is true. Certainly in 2019 there was a couple of kickers who were replaced right after they played the BiIls because they missed a big kick or missed multiple kicks.

First, later round picks are already behind the 8-ball money wise. Now you are restricting them even further from getting what the market might be willing to give them. Second, teams obviously do not always use their 5th year extensions on their first round picks, now you are allowing them use their unexercised extension on a a player that they were not going to be able to restrict before. In the end, it will be a net lost for the players and a net gain for the teams. No union would accept rules that will decrease their overall pay and flexibility without some giveback from management.

I don't get your point. Your original argument was that the Bills were bad at evaluating vets because they should have kept Teller and Van Roten. The people you listed are JAGs or folks from way before Beane (Hopkins, Greer) or way too expensive (Tremaine Edmunds -- a decent player but not worth the money the Bears gave him). So are you saying the Bills are okay at evaluating vets?

It is true that the Bills have not been great signing vet F.A. until this year. However, I have no idea where this narrative that players leave the Bills to become stars come from. Outside of Teller which was 5 years ago, which players would Beane regret that that the Bills did not resign?

Year 2 = not applicable

I don't know why you are getting such grief. Maybe if you change "somewhat probable" to "least improbable". Of course you would still get hit by the don't speak evil into existence karma folks.

It is true that it is just some random media guy's opinion, however, the fact that anyone outside of his mother/wife believes that he might make the pro-bowl is still pretty surprising considering how bad he was with the Bills and the Jets and how mediocre he has been his whole career.

It takes two to tango. Why would the NFLPA ever agree to something like that?

I don't think you can blame the Bills. Plenty of other teams had him evaluated him as barely a JAG before the Bills released him. If the question was "Which former 2022 Bill would make the Pro Bowl", he would have been pretty low on my list.

This is different from the Saffold situation, Saffold was living off his reputation while Van Roten's reputation was that he was just horrible with the Jets and with the Bills. If Van Roten actually makes the pro-bowl he has to be having the best year of his career.

Did Boras miss any cliches?

Holy confirmation bias. How could Prescott possibly have slid at the last nanosecond if Rapp actually dove over him?

Your analysis is great except for the part about the ST unit not being football "tragic". When the special teams has directly lost two games (and indirectly lost more than two games due to high percentage makeable miss field goals and the lack of confidence in the kicker adversely affecting in game decisions) and your fighting for a playoff spot than that is definitely "tragic" in a football sense.

Agreed. I don't understand how Patricia got the job in Detroit in the first place. The Patriots defense was 2nd worse in yards per play and 4th worse in total yards given up in Patricia's last year as D.C. in New England. Their defense also gave up 41 points to the Eagles in the Super Bowl that year. Partly the stats are due to teams playing from behind but being 31st in an important defensive metric is not good no matter how you parse it.

Every questionable call went the Bills' way.

Obvious solution, offense fumbles out of bounds, 5 yard penalty from spot of fumble, plus loss of down. The same rule applies everywhere except in the offense's own end zone where it counts as a safety similar to the way a holding call in the end zone would. That would give you a consistent set of rules everywhere on the field. If you make it a 10-yard penalty, it would effectively be the same as illegal batting and the referee would not have to judge whether the offensive player intentionally knocked it out of bounds or not.

There's definitely a bunch of games that the Bills were "supposed to win" that they didn't.

Average NFL referee salary is already 205K per year.

I have zero idea why this offside call is even an issue. Toney is clearly lined up offside. Von Miller looks like he is most likely not. This penalty is called all the time as it should. The Chief's 8-4 record was a mirage almost as much as the Steeler's 6-3 record. Kelce has lost a step and a half and their WR group went from mediocre last year to just plain bad this year. If it wasn't for reputation, Mahomes would probably be barely be a top 10 QB in most of the media's ratings this year.

I don't think it is a question of having fast guys on the field, it's that most of the time the guy intercepting the hail Mary gets tackled right away. Otherwise most of the fast guys on offense are on the wrong side of the ball. If the defender doesn't get tackled right away, there's almost no one to stop him on a hail Mary as we saw in the Bills Jets and Jets Dolphins games.

If one is going for the least disruption and maximum fairness, just go to 16 international games and an extra bye week, six games in England, three in Germany, three in Mexico and 4 others in random places around the world. Everyone has an international game so it would just count as a neutral site game and you would have the extra bye week before that game. Of course, the league has shown that they care nothing for fairness. Its amazing that they haven't extracted that extra dollar out and have a Monday night game on week 18.

Anyone expecting a 35 year old coming back from an ACL to look good right away is delusional. The hope was that he would be a positive contributor by the end of the season. Forgetting about the off field stuff, people ragging on him for not playing well are just being unreasonable.