Ray

The irony is the Ravens let Heap and Mason go in a "salary cap purge" yet were able to pick up Lee Evans at $3M per year and the Bills sit $25M under the cap. The Bills could have easily kept Evans and if they did not think he was playing well sat him. I do not think people are upset b/c they think Evans is a Hall of Famer. They are upset b/c he is a very good player on a team that lacks them and creates even more holes on a team already full of swiss cheese!! Using the same philosophy of trading Evans they should trade for Fred Jackson too. Trading for a 4th rounder gives you a less than 10% chance of finding a player of equal value to Lee. Therefore, it was a very dumb trade.

Ahhh....I like your optimism and ability to see the bright side of their stupidity.

We are loaded at WR though. So loaded in fact we brought in a guy who has been on about 5 teams in 5 years. I suppose if Buddy's definition of loaded is desperate we are loaded at WR. He got taken to the cleaners in that trade!!! Check your shorts Buddy!

I also enjoyed the Evans comment. Right...who needs a deep threat? The Bills longest pass play was 11 yards going into the 4th quarter. Ask any QB and they will tell you they love throwing the ball with 22 players packed into a 10 yard area. Easy throws to make. I'm sure S Johnson will love being covered by the like sof Champ Bailey every game. That will defintely ensure a great season for him.

Actually, no we don't. I do not think tteams are actually scared of any of our WRs. Hopefully that plays to our advantage but taking away one of the best deep threats in the game does shorten the field for the Bills a lot. Donald Jones does not exactly scare anyone. The Jets now are going to put Revis on S Johnson instead of Lee and that creates a very bad match up for the rest of our WRs. It all remains to be seen but of course teams lose respect from a down field threat with Lee gone. He has more deep TDs than any WR in the league over the past 6 years.

So a guy who headed 2 drafts is responsible for an entire decade? Nice logic. Drafts under him were fair, not great. But he guys they picked under him will be in the NFL for a long time including two guys who made the pro bowl in Lynch and Kyle Williams. Two drafts, two pro bowl players. Guys like Poz and Whitner will be playing in this league for a decade. So he took over for the WORST Bills team in a long time and made it a bit better. The problem with the Bills is constant turnover so every three years a new coaching regime takes over and likes different types of players so that automatically leads to high turnover of a roster. Do you like Fred Jackson, K Williams? Those were pretty good picks over a two year period. If you can get 2-3 quality starts from a draft that is a very good draft. Did they improve the two years he was here....yes they did. Plus taking over a team with JP Losman as your starting QB is a complete recipe for disaster.

PTR is correct about a market like Buffalo having to be creative to make the stadium a destination and a means to other revenue. PTR I believe you are in New England country where I was for 5 years until coming back to Buffalo. They started constructing Patriot Place as I was leaving but by all accounts is a great venue and gives people a lot to do and it is in Foxboro Massachusetts!! People often gripe that Buffalo is a small market but you could easily craft a venue that would do very well year round if you make it a convention center, football stadium, concert venue, Bills HOF, stores,restaurants etc..... Now whether it is at/around the new canalside or NF, NY you would have to make it readily accessible to the HUGE Canadian population that comes to this area on a daily basis. The NF Outlets has turned around from a bankrupt organization to a huge success story with about 50% or more patrons daily coming from Southern Ontario. You could make a very unique destination drawing from a huge area....remember Southern Ontario from Hamilton South to NF is well over a million add, Buffalo/NF, Rochester, Syracuse etc...and that is a very large critical mass. For long term viability of the frnachise PTR is correct because RW does great without debt service but add 30M a year in interest payments for someone who buys the team and you lose money or break even. A creative thinker can/will make the place an enormous destination but it can NOT just be a football stadium and that is how you would have to sell it to bring in NFL money, state money etc....

Bravo to Mr Gundlach. If he bought the team I and everyone else should have NO fear he would want to move the team out of Buffalo. He would be buying the team SPECIFICALLY to have the team in Buffalo. He loves the Bills and would be buying it not as a business move but as a move to keep the team he loves in Buffalo. He said he would buy it to be in Buffalo and it would not be bought as a growth opportunity but out of his love for the Bills. I would think people on this board would absolutely love to have people like this in the Bills' corner. He is independently wealthy, knows a lot of independently wealthy people, loves the Bills, wants them in Buffalo......gotta love his scoff at the idea of changing them to the LA Multitude!! He is just like one of us on the boards here. Here is a guy connected to Buffalo his home town by the Bills and has been religiously following them his entire life and instead of doing who knows what with $800M, he would choose to buy the Bills the team that means so much to him. Quit being so fatalistic people. Be happy about the fact people like him out there exist!! It also gives more credibility to J Kelly's claims he has multiple people ho have the money to buy the team. Again, for the 1000th time JK knows and says he does not have the money to buy the team he is assembling people to buy the team

Again, this topic is waaaaay over analyzed here but he did draft two pro bowl players during his tenure for a whole 2 years as GM. His big mistake was hiring Jauron but not sure Sherman the other candidate would have done any better He left the franchise better than when he took over as this frnachise had a terrible relationship with media, city, fans, etc...and a worse record with Donahoe. He inherited JP Losman as his QB and then MM as his head coach and then Mularkey bailed a couple weeks later. He came in to make the organization respectable again and they were respectable. He let DJ have final word on draft picks just as Bill Polian did for him.....he did make some rpetty good decisions over the years with the draft picks in the late 80s and early 90s.

Marv took over a team and franchise at its lowest in 20 years including right now. The fan base was criticized by Donahoe, he was adversarial to the media (more than others) and it was horrendous. Marv's problem was hiring Jauron....although Mike Sherman I do not think would have been much better. He did two drafts and two of his picks made the Pro Bowl so he could not have been "brutal" like some said. Also, every regime looks bad b/c they are gone after a few years and someone with another philosphy takes over making prior players expendable in a new system. This year looks good in terms of the draft but who knows. If you get 2-3 solid players from each draft you are doing well. Last years draft was suspect, the conversion to a 3-4 when obviously dumb with the personnel we had so before anointing te new regime "awesome" let us give it time to play out. People love to re-write history here but nobody goes back to see what was going on at the time, who else was on the team etc.... Keep in mind John Butler's last draft was the worst draft in the past 15 years for the franchise.

Fitz is NOT a bottom third QB. He is on the top third of QBs, at least by his performance this year. He was a better QB than Mark Sanchez this year. In regards to the topic you are completely correct. One of the things he does as well as any QB in the league is identify coverages, understands protection schemes and that is invaluable in a QB. His teammates and coaches noted this all the time and credited him for recognizing what the other teams were doing, changed protection schemes and gave the Bills a chance. He can be inconcsistent but he would be a QB upgrade on over half the teams in the league!

Jim Kelly missed two playoff games with the same injury......one of the games he missed was the Houston comeback game

It was NOT the Bills who made JP Losman a bad QB, it was JP Losman. He never succeeded anywhere else, in fact was out of the league for a year. Good QBs will find themselves playing. Aaaron Rodgers would be a stud in Buffalo or wherever he went. The idea they would not be good QBs in Buffalo is just false. How did Big Ben do with Jonathan Scott as his LT? I thought Trent never was good b/c of his line? No, he is/was not good because he is NOT a good QB. Quit making excuses for bad QBs. The Bills OL is as good as two-thirds of the lines out there as are their skill players. They have had putrid defensive and QB play for the better part of a decade and when we had good QB play we had horrible defensive play and when we had good QB play at times this year we had horrendous defensive play. This team has never been a good "team" They have had bits and pieces with the biggest missing part a quality QB.

The offense was pretty miserable without Lee actually......it is probably no coincidence that the worst passing offense was when he was out. He still commands a lot of respect from the opposing defenses as they know he has great speed and that keeps the safeties honest. You are NOT going to get that with anyone else on the roster right now.

Nice for some perspective to sink in now. Last year many were saying the Bills were a horrible organization and now the Broncos have some people refuse to interview. Yes Mike Mularkey does not want to be their coach. Or Greg Williams and they will reportedly interview Perry Fewell. I thought the Bills just find horrible people to coach yet it is amazing coaches for the Bills are actually pretty highly regarded in the league. Miami has a HC and went and interviewed J Harbaugh who has never coached in the pro game as a HC EVER. So both the Dolphins and Denver have people refuse them and the national media does not seem to blast them as much as B'lo last year.

Fitz will outplay any rookie QB and outplayed all rookie QBs this year including Sam Bradford who plays against awful competition and plays in a dome. Tom Brady makes 25 other QBs in the league look like Ryan Leaf. Fitz will not be T Brady but he is arguably the best QB ever to play the game. Jim Kelly is not/was not as good as T Brady.

You are correct and the draft is a crapshoot. Nobody knows who is going to be good and teams we "hear" draft well like the Pats simply have sooo much room for error b/c of Tom Brady plain and simple. The guy covers so many failures/deficiencies of other players. When your offense is a threat to score 30 points every game it makes the other teams defense and offense plan differently. People act like Whitner is an awful player....the guy is a good safety. Not great or an elite 5 safety but around a top 10 safety. He is NOT a bust by any stretch. If you pick a guy as the 8th pick overall and he plays in the NFL for 12 years he is a very good player. A team will pay DW about 7M a year like he wants. The draft is very unpredictable and on this board I hear/read all the time how horrible drafts were with Marv Levy etc....He picked a pro bowl RB and a pro bowl DT....who cares if John McCargo did not pan out.....I don't care. Why would anyone care that J Hardy did not pan out but we got S Johnson in the 7th and he did. If you get players who can play who cares when they are taken. If you really go thru every teams' draft you will find a whole lot of misses! Trust me the Pats and the Colts would not be playoff teams with their 2nd string QBs playing

The last two interior DL deemed "unblockable" by many scouts and NFL personnel men I have heard went onto be darn good DL. Ngata and Suh were both described that way by people I listen to...not that that is worth much. But I agree the guy looks great, great athelte inside and pair him with K Williams instantly makes this team defense better and much harder to run against. Ironic how Luck not declaring probably costs us Fairley

Fitz showewd he can be a very good QB. He plays for a team with the worst defense in the league. That makes it a lot more difficult as an offense. He needs to be more consistten but there is no way anyone could watch the massive transformation in this offense from what it was to what Fitz made it. They moved the ball well. He does a lot of things other QBs in this league do NOT do well in terms of reading defenses, adjusting protection schemes. Completion percentage is 57%....well Trent Edwards always had a very good completion percentage so who cares? This upcoming seaon we will get to see just how good he is as he will start, get the preseason to start and prepare. If he stinks then someone else comes in same as before. But if he was a 1st round pick playing everyone would be pretty happy with his performance. People do not expect him to be good b/c he was a 7th round pick and been on a couple different teams. Look at Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme when they came on to the scene. They had poor pedigrees but outplayed 90% of QBs in the league. Fitz has outplayed at least a dozen 1st round QBs (Losman, Akili Smith, Alex Smith, D Carr, J Harrington, etc....).

You are absolutely correct. Any QB that comes here to play states that they admire what Jim Kelly did as the winds make it very difficult to play and throw. Tom Brady just played here and he is the most accurate QB in the game yet completed on 55% of his passes against the worst defense in the league or one of the top 5 worst defenses in the league. That does impact completion percentages. That said, Fitz can certainly do better with his accuracy but he is average to a little above average in NFL QBs in terms of accuracy. He made throws this year with literally an inch or so to spare (Nelson vs Miami TD, Evans vs Baltimore TD). So to say he is not accurate is pretty ridiculous. He can be inconsistent and needs improvement on that more than anything.

I think he would be a great DC but I agree it will not happen. The upper management team does not "know" him personally and they want their own people....even though they are inferior. Gailey probably does not want him or does not want to fire GE yet. Mangini is a very good DC and he consistently knows how to at least compete and beat Belichik......he crushed the Pats this year. That is right his teams actually beat the Pats evven when they stink like in NY and Cleveland.

For those at the game watching it Evans WAS missed. I like the yound guys but there is no speed as a threat whatsoever with the other guys. They rolled Merriweather repeatedly to S Johnson's side. The WRs did not have seaparation on the go routes Fitz just threw them and they had to make a play. They are a scarppy bunch but for those who say the team does not need Lee they are delusional. Even if he has 40-50 catches he draws respect of the other defenses as they know he can beat them on any play. His cap figure is about 4M next year for and provides you a very good WR as a 2nd WR. You are not going to get good value in a trade. If you watched the game you could see they missed a legitimate number 2 today.

Agree 100% but the idiot refs blew the whistle! The guy caught it, turned around which is a foot ball move and then fumbled. That makes the game 28-14 and is a 10 point swing actually as the Vikings went and scored a FG on that drive. The Vikes 1st TD was also a blatant offensive interference which they did not call but then called McKelvin for an incidental contact as defensive pass interference. There were a lot of points "given" to the Vikings today as at least 17-20. I do agree the way the Bills looked today they would lose but certainly a more competitive game that gave one team an enormous advantage early

If Fitz is only a back up then why is he outperforming 70% of the rest of the QBs in the league? He is not Brady or Manning. But watch other NFL games and you will see Rothlesberger overthrow WRs all the time. Flacco make bad decisions and bad throws. Yet, since they were drafted high it gets excused as just a bad throw when they do it EVERY game too! Fitz has some accuracy problems sometimes as does almost EVERY other QB in the league. He has things like putting guys in the right position, making the proper adjustments, leadership abilities that you will not get at all from a rookie for another 3 years. Gailey gave all the credit to Fitz on the FJ TD shuffle pass as he made multiple adjustments to change guys assignments on that play. He has played well enough to win in the majority of games and that is all you can ask for your QB. He is a top 10 QB in the league right now so I'll take it!

Who cares....let's win some more games and draft where we draft and get a good player regardless. R Fitz was sa 7th rounder, F Jackson was undrafted and they are outperforming 1st round picks. There are 7 more weeks in the regular season to go. What is the Bills go 6-2?