Billy Claude

I have to disagree. I don't feel that the Wyatt Teller situation has any relevance to the Cody Ford situation. First, there's a huge difference in the hit to Beane's ego in having a 2nd rounder you traded up for bust versus a 5th rounder. No one is going to say much about a 5th round bust. Second, Wyatt Teller was not a bust in Buffalo. He was a 5th round pick who started 7 games as a rookie, albeit due to injuries. Furthermore, he was looking more and more competent as the season when on. It was a very successful pick by any measure. Cody Ford, on the other hand, has shown nothing in three years. Third, Beane was widely praise for getting more draft capital back from the Teller trade than he used to pick him, so the trade was a boost to Beane's ego not a hit. The mistake that Beane made was that assuming the mostly JAG oline guys that he signed, Winters, Feliciano, and Spain, were better than Teller. By the end of that season Teller was better than all three of them (I know Winters was signed mostly as backup center, but I believe he also played some guard). Finally, what was Beane supposed to say about the Teller trade? That it was a good decision? That would sound moronic. His answer sounds like a trite response to the standard interview question: Name one mistake you made and what you learned from it. If what he learned was that you need to keep Cody Ford around no matter what, just in case he develops, then Beane probably learned the wrong thing. I am not arguing that they need to cut Ford now, but if he doesn't show anything in training camp/preseason they should definitely be very actively looking. Beane is the best Bills' GM since Bill Polian. However, he is not GM god, at least not yet.

OK. Didn't know that he refused to cooperate. In that case, Jackson only has himself to blame.

Hue Jackson claimed he was given bonuses for things like most snaps by rookies or having the youngest roster in the league. So the "independent" investigation can find that there were no specific decisions to incentivize losses without Jackson lying about the specific bonuses that he did receive.

I did not do Kiper and Shay's scores since they are behind a paywall so I don't have access. The CBS and PFF were chosen just because they had all their mocks easily accessible from a single webpage and the other 3 were national sites that came up early on Google. Certainly there are other metrics that one could use and might be better but I don't want to make up my own. I chose Jimmy Johnson's draft points since it is well known and from the GM's point of view drafting a total bust with #2 pick is much more likely to get you fired than a total bust at #32. That should hold for mock drafters also -- but again there can certainly be better metrics.

I didn't know there was a website that already did something like this. I agree that a slight change in the metric would change the order. Moving one pick in the top five mocks would put them first. So I don't doubt the order at the top would have changed if the Bill's secret point value system was used instead.

I specifically chose this method to penalize misses at the beginning of the round more than ones later in the round. A miss by 3 slots in the top 5 is not very good, but a miss by 3 slots in 28 to 32 range is doing a pretty good job.

I thought it would be interesting to see how @GunnerBill ’s mock objectively compared to others. To do this, I used the Jimmy Johnson draft pick value chart and assign penalty points based on how far the mock pick was from the actual pick. For example, if a mock had Derek Stingley picked 5th (1700 draft points) whereas he was actually picked 3rd (2200 draft points), the mock draft was assigned 500 penalty points. This was done for 14 mock drafts. Long story short, it appers that GunnerBill knows what he is talking about as his draft finished first. 1. GunnerBill 6950 penalty points (lower is better) 2. Michael Renner (PFF) 7046 3. Trevor Sikkema (PFF) 7090 4. Chris Traapsso (CBS) 7136 5. Ari Meirov (PFF) 7290 6. Ryan Wilson (CBS) 7586 7. Charles Davis (NFL.com) 7690 8. Josh Edwards (CBS) 8045 9. Chris Collinsworth (PFF) 8546 10. Pete Prisco (CBS) 9080 11. Doug Kyed (PFF) 9577 12. Kyle Stackpole (CBS) 10175 13. Christian D’Andrea (USA Today) 12291 14. Vinnie Iyer (Sporting News) 13445 So GunerBill’s mock was the best match by a narrow margin. One can argue the top five drafts were similar in quality. For example, Michael Renner would have won easily based on the top 31 picks but he had Sam Howell who was picked in the 5th round as his pick #32. Some other points of interest: 19 players appears in all 14 mock drafts. One, Malik Willis, was not selected in the first round. 23 players appears in 12 or more mock drafts. Two, Willis and Andrew Booth were not selected in the first round. Only one player selected in the first round did not appear in any mock draft (Cole Strange) Kaiir Elam appears in 6 out of the 14 mock drafts with the earliest at #25 (to the Bills).

This is a good point. The draft graders to not have access to the interviews or medicals, both of which tend to lower the players draft position. I would argue that a consensus bad draft grade from the pundits tend to be pretty accurate while a good draft grade is meaningless. Over the last few years, the Raiders, Giants, and Seahawks have been generally ripped for their drafts, and deservedly so, as two of the GMs are no longer with their teams.

It is true that they don't have all the information, however, if there is a general consensus that a pick is a huge reach, it usually turns out the draft graders are correct.

It is surprising to me that the biggest reach in absolute draft position during the 4 years is Pittsburgh picking Terrell Edmunds 106 positions higher than predicted in 2018. You don't really think of the Steelers as a front office that reaches a lot. He hasn't been a bust but probably a bit of a disappointment. He was a RFA this year who got no interest from other teams and re-signed with the Steelers for 1 yr at 2.5M.

Talk about a misleading tweet. if you click on the link and read the article (shocking, I know) it essentially says that Florio and Simms is pushing this story but the writer does not believe it since the Dolphins are more than a QB away (since they would not have enough draft capital to get Tyreke Hill if they traded a first for Sean Payton). So is screwing over Belichick really enough motivation for Brady to want to join the Dolphins?

Absolutely. I was pretty sure all that stuff about becoming Bills fans was temporary. Of course, the outrage will come back if the Browns don't win.

Revenge porn is illegal almost everywhere although I am not sure sending the pictures to two "celebrities" count. From ballotpedia: As of February 2021, 46 states and Washington D.C. had passed laws prohibiting the distribution or production of nonconsensual pornography. Nonconsensual pornography refers to the distribution of sexual or pornographic images of individuals without their consent. This may include images taken without consent or images taken with consent but later distributed without the consent of those in the images. These images are sometimes referred to as revenge porn. Yes, it is a pretty slimy thing to do if Von Miller actually did this No, I am not outraged but it is certainly disappointing. However, there is no need to defend the guy's actions just because he is a Bill. We are reaching the point in society that people are willing to defend anything someone does as long as the person is on their team.

They seem to have forgotten to mention that the Detroit Pistons were the third worse team in the NBA this season. No one wants to watch a team if they are fairly certain to lose even before the game starts, not even Sabres fans.

Agree that the numbers might have been down the last two years due to Covid but there was a clear downward trend even before 2020. Here are the 5 year averages and standard deviations 2000-2004 42 +/- 2 2005-2009 60 +/- 10 (max 71 in 2006) 2010-2014 52 +/- 6 (61 in 2013) 2015-2019 33 +/- 5 (pre-covid min of 28 in 2016 and 29 in last precovid year) 2020-2021 19 +/- 2 (probably affected by covid) In any case, even 33 out of approximately 2000 players is still much lower than expected for that number of 21 to 30 year old males though probably higher than those that make over 150K. In general, 21 to 30 year old males do a lot of stupid things independent of whether they are NFL players or not.

I would think the Saints would be more appropriate if those were the shorts.

A whole lot more than you think, given that there were 10 million arrests in the US in 2019 including over 1 million for DUI. It would be even more likely that an employee would be arrested if most of the company consisted mostly of males between 21 to 30 years old. See the overview from the FBI in the middle of the page: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/persons-arrested

I feel that the outrage expressed in this thread is purely due to taking numbers entirely out of context. As I noted in the Carrington thread, if you click on sort by year, you will see that the number of arrests has gone down systematically from 61 in 2013 to 18 last year. This is out of 2200 NFL players (including practice squad) consisting of mostly 21 to 30 year old males. This is extremely low arrest rate for this age group. As a comparison there were 860,000 arrests in the 21 to 24 year old age group in the US in 2019 out of a population of a bit more than 8 million -- this is the arrest rate is more than 1 in 10 young adult males. This arrest rate for the 21 to 24 group will be larger than the 21 to 30 year age group as a whole but not by that much. It is clear that the NFL arrest rate has been systematically going down (though it will most likely be higher this year based on YTD numbers) and that it is substantially less than the comparison age group. I wouldn't be surprise if it is not that far out of range of 21 to 30 year old makes making over 150K (practice squad salary).

If you sort it by year there has been an systematic decrease in the number of arrests from 61 in 2013 to 18 last year (although based on YTD it will be higher this year). All in all, 18 arrests out of over 2000 males in the age group between 20 and 35 is not very large and the NFL is to be congratulated in getting the numbers down.

It is true that owning the Bills are not a great rate of return although it is completely unfair to not include appreciation. However, you have to include risk factors when evaluating an investment. Owning a NFL team must be one of the lowest risk investments you can make since costs are controlled (versus the NBA, MLB or soccer). Even if they lost money in 2020, I bet they made up for a lot of it in 2021 due to the lower salary cap. I do agree that most owners are primarily in it for the ego trip. Profit is important but secondary.

I appreciate the Pegulas for keeping the team in Buffalo as much as anyone but your are making it sound like they plunked down 1.5B purely for altruistic purposes. Obviously they will still be making a lot of money just not as much as if they move the team somewhere else. The person who should be getting most of the credit for keeping the team in Buffalo is Ralph Wilson and his family who made it difficult for new owner to move the team and thereby, costing the estate a significant amount of money.

True, although the Wentz trade was pretty inexplicable even at the time.

Baker is a better QB than Wentz or Darnold who also were in bad contract situations. The Browns messed up incredibly badly if they end up with a 7th rounder for Mayfield when Wentz and Darnold went for seconds.

I think the Trent Murphy signing must be up there. It was only for about half the guaranteed money but at least you got a useful player with Star while Murphy was injured half the time and pretty much worthless the rest (except for the one playoff grame). I know everyone hates PFF but at the time they rated the Murphy and Star signings as the worse FA signings of that year and they may have been right.

Ok. I checked and there was speculation from the press that the Brown were deciding on Mayfield vs. Allen after they did the last minute shift from Darnold. So it appears I misremembered. ALthough one of the Browns VPs came out after the draft and said he had Allen ranked 5th https://www.bardown.com/browns-executive-explains-what-changed-from-not-being-able-to-change-his-mind-on-darnold-as-pick-1.1072699