Ed_Formerly_of_Roch

Welcome to the real world! Was reading here a few days ago, people were thinking we could trade Addison for a 4th or 5th rounder I believe it was. LOL

A couple comments. The Bills Tampa game is in Tampa so likely also a CBS game, not Fox In recent year there are some out of conference not held on CBS when road team and Fox when road team, but not many, and usually they involve the early 1:00 games . The late games usually follow the rules so likely will be on CBS. Only likely Fox games would be Atlanta, and Carolina As has been pointed out, won't be any early Saturday games because of college. It's not whether the NFL cares, it's whether that are allowed and don't believe the networks would go along with that. And if the NFL did, by 2022 they'd be college games all day Sunday on ESPN, ABC and NBC, something the NFL doesn't want to get into a war over.

Interesting that 3 of the 4 lowest rated are all from the NFC. They play the NFC South and AFC West, no cake walk there in either case. But they are rewarded for playing eachother so gives them all easy SOS.

While the size of a basketball court is smaller than a hockey rink, relative to a football field they are somewhat similar as is why hockey and basketball often due share facilities. I had been a few times to games at the Carrier Dome, I often stated that I had great seats for a football game (40 yard line) except they were playing basketball and I had great seats for a basketball game (mid court) except they were playing football (upper endzone)

Actually that's one spot I kind of ignored in my initial response. I think Williams played great this season at RT. What worries me just a little bit, is he one of these guys that played great because he was in a contract year? He was fantastic this year WRT pass blocking, but wondering how well he is at run blocking. McD was with him in Carolina, so he should know what makes him tick, but that does make me a little nervous in signing him. It's OK to have some rookies and UNFA at ST which they already had this year, but I do feel they need the couple of more ST aces. The problem the Bills had is they had Roberts, Matakevich, and Jones who were ST standouts, but basically didn't play anywhere else (think there may have been a 4th player I'm leaving out?). Would the drop off from Roberts to McKenzie for a return man be that bad as he also can more contribute at the WR spot too. Gilliam was also a ST ace to a lesser degree, but he now has a year experience under his belt and he also did contribute on the field so maybe he replaces Jones. May need to find a couple more good backups, but who also play ST too as that reduces roster spots, but will plan to use them on the actual playing field either offensively or defensively. Could be the 3 players the Bills have are no different in number of roster slots that most teams carry as never looked that closely, but certainly seems like a lot for no help elsewhere.

Davis can also do things Brown can't do either and never will as in grow in size. At 1/10 the salary hard to justify, even with a 50% pay cut, he'd still be making 5X what Davis is getting. Brown looked great in 2019 when he was the Bills #1 WR. As a #2 WR, not all that certain you're going to see numbers much better than what Davis gives you. To me Brown is one of these guys that became expendable once they drafted Davis. If the Bills were $50 mil under, great keep him, but rather spend the money on FA's that can help make the team better this year. Looking at 2020, there are really only two areas of the team that need little to no improvement, QB and WR, so spend the money elsewhere.

Can't cut Norman, Jones, and Barkley as they are FA's. They should be on the next line with players you're letting walk. Personally I'd prefer to keep Jefferson and let Butler walk as feel he's more versatile. Think Harris will be gone before the Bills get to pick from what I've seen projected. Unless Brown is willing to take a big cut I'd let him go as they have a much cheaper replacement on the roster already. You're cutting more players that you've signed. Realistically if you look at the Bills roster, they have about 40 to 43 SIGNED players likely to make next years roster. Add that many more cuts, you still need to add more players. Letting Jefferson Addison, and Murphy all leave, adding one FA pass rusher and rookies, IMO the D line just got weaker, not stronger.

Yeah but if given to entire defense, then it would be like the kids fighting over the keys for the truck! I did hear yesterday that the last couple of MVP's Brady's won, he gave the truck away to one of his teammates. They were even speculating that he'd be giving it to White. But then the other person commented that Brady's kid is now old enough to drive, so maybe he'll keep this one for him.

Yeah watching game last night was thinking I hadn't seen a QB run backwards like that from the LOS repeatedly in a long time.... last 2 weeks. It was a bit of Deja Vu of watching the AFC championship game.

They're not calling it Champion Bay for nothing! The new New England! Though not sure it's all that sustainable.

Problem is a person gets the award, not a position. Agree was pedestrian effort, but no one player stood out on the defense heads and shoulders above. Can make the same argument about 1 sack and 1 tackle, the rest was just what he's paid for and with the help of others around him. It's very hard for anyone other than QB, WR, or RB to win award as all others are too connected to those around them. What's there been about 2 defensive players all time have won the SB MVP?? Maybe if a CB has 2+ int's he could win it, assuming no one on the offensive side stand out.

Think you have to go to Australia to catch them.

The way I tend to view the WAR concept as it relates to football is through a very high level mathematical principal. With respect to WAR, does he pass the smell test!! LOL Don't think there's a good way to apply any real hard evidence, just more of a gut feel is the player worth the money or could they find a better more efficient solution. Maybe someone much smarter could figure out a way to actually develop some method to apply WAR, but not me.

I'd argue though of all positions WR and RB still may be the best two positions to look at stats Hmmmm.... interesting in that you say the Bills were 11th in pass attempts, but yet Allen was 6th among QB's. Does that mean that many teams had backup QB's also throwing that many passes that they dropped that far? There is no QB in the top 15 who played less than 15 games either so so hard to figure out that difference between 11th for the team and 6th for Allen?? There's 11 passes un accounted for Buffalo, recall a couple of passes by McKenzie and Brown. And 9 unaccounted for in Pitt. The other posters argument was one game Brown was hurt in 1st half, only played half of final Miami game, so add it all up means he played 8 games and for some reason he said Brown caught 34 passes in 8 games, so for 16 games that would equate to 68 catches. And BTW if as this poster was arguing Brown did have 68 catches, that would be the 2nd highest total for his career, topped only by 2019 with the Bills when he was their #1 WR You getting rid of 4 def lineman? So who are you going to replace them with and find the money for the new guys and how do you expect to improve the overall team. And BTW Murphy's and Roberts are both a FA so there's no saving there at all. Just two roster spots to fill The Bills only have I believe it's around 40 players under contract for the 2021 season so that's alot of bodies they need to find and pay for just to field a full roster. With a team on the verge of winning Super Bowl ,I'd hate to be counting on 6th and 7th round draft picks to make the roster either so maybe 5 draft picks make team. That leaves about a dozen slots to fill with either rookie or vet FA I haven't seen any statistical analysis for WAR, just more basic understanding. Actually most I probably saw was in the movie about the Oakland A's LOL Basic understanding is WAR Wins Above Replacement. You want to sign this expensive FA to take the place of some lower paid player. How many more wins will the expensive guy get you. Much easier to project in a stat driven sport like baseball. My gut tells me though Brown at a hit of $9.5 mil vrs G Davis at $.9 mil. At 10% of the salary Davis comes out way ahead in the WAR game. Think Davis has more chance of improving on rookie numbers than Brown does too. From Wikipedia: Wins Above Replacement or Wins Above Replacement Player, commonly abbreviated to WAR or WARP, is a non-standardized sabermetric baseball statistic developed to sum up "a player's total contributions to his team".[1] A player's WAR value is claimed to be the number of additional wins his team has achieved above the number of expected team wins if that player were substituted with a replacement-level player: a player who may be added to the team for minimal cost and effort.[2] Individual WAR values are calculated from the number and success rate of on-field actions by a player (in batting, baserunning, fielding, and pitching), with higher values reflecting larger contributions to a team's success.[2] WAR value also depends on what position a player plays, with more value going to weaker hitting positions like catcher than positions with strong hitting such as first base.[2] A high WAR value built up by a player reflects successful performance, a large quantity of playing time, or both.

Fair point. But I'd also argue that in the case of lineman either offense or defense, stats are harder to solely gauge off of in general. As you stated who they are playing next to and the system are bigger factors. Also age is a big factor which likely hurt Addison. WR and RB are more stat driven positions and easier to project future based on prior stats. In this case the poster only wanted to include the past two seasons, forget prior years, but also lets include 2019. I'd counter ok you don't want to consider years in other systems, fine, but then lets only look at 2020. Kind of becomes cherry picking when only selecting the best two years. But the more important thing, the poster was making the argument that in a full season Brown was on pace to catch 68 balls. My whole argument was that the only way Brown is catching 68 passes is with guys like Diggs, Bealsey, and Davis catching much less as when the QB is already completing 69% of his passes, there aren't more completions out there. Likely at the end of the year the number of catches, yards, TD's aren't going to rise when they are already at record breaking levels.

From what I've read, one of the issues is if a player retires, teams feel they have the right to get back money for future years, but rarely ever do request the money be returned. Once in awhile you hear about a player leaving on bad terms, i.e. Antonio Brown and they stilt don't recoup the money. I believe part of that is due to while I stated earlier "teams feel they have the right", I believe the NFLPA disagrees with that. So to avoid bad press, particularly when the issue is a retirement, the team lets the player keep the money. It may also be one of these things the team is ready to move one so player announces today he's retiring, team asks for money back, player says I'll think about it, they go back and forth maybe gives back 60%, but took so long to get the money, they already were forced to take the cap hit. Easier for teams to just take the hit right away and move on. Believe I read about this recently in an article about Andrew Luck and was stated that: "Even Indy didn't ask Luck to return the money when he retired."

Yeah interesting that All was liked, but Jerry always hated. Only difference I can see is Al didn't seem to come on that strong in the early days, maybe because the AFL as a whole wasn't that big. And when Al did come on strong in the later AFL years it was to fight the established NFL and became somewhat of a hero for that. There was something mystique too about the "Silver and Black"

The Bills system he's playing in now is a far cry from the 2019 Bills system. No Diggs who replaced Jones and Foster as the #2. So agree context does matter, makes it easy to cherry pick.

While watching it I was wondering if they were going to make a point of them embracing when Rozelle announced he was retiring, because I distinctively recall that being talking about back in 1989 that people were very surprised that they embraced and the emotion of it. So while Maddog stated it didn't ever happen, at the time many others reported it did happen. Two things stuck me watching it Rozelle smoked like a chimney. At the time there certainly wasn't all the live coverage of press conferences etc, that there are today, but don't recall seeing him smoking publicly. Never saw him standing up there stating: "With the 17th pick in the 1983 draft...." with a cigarette in his hand or having to wipe the ashes off the Super Bowl trophy. After watching this surprised that didn't happen. There was one very quick glimpse they showed of what appeared to be Mark Davis maybe back when he was around 20 years old or so, not too surprisingly he had the same identical haircut then as now! Some things never change!

So you're going to basically throw out 5 years worth of stats to base it all on one and half seasons of data here in Buffalo. Wow this may be the best example I've ever seen of cherry picking data. Every data point that 's not to your liking you excuse away. My point too wasn't to say Browns catch percentage wasn't very good, but more to state there just aren't more opportunities in the offense for more passes thrown or completed. Yeah I'll agree Brown was likely hampered with deep balls from Jackson, but Allen is far from elite with throwing deep balls too. He improved tremendously in the 20 to 25 yard passes, but still struggled with true deep 40+ yard passes. Admittedly a low percent are even thrown much less completed. Well at least we agree on one thing, likely he won't be back.

So do you think they should bring him back? And at $8 mil?? The problem with your extrapolation exercise is no guarantee those numbers work out. Allen completed 69% of his passes and threw 572 passes tied for 6th most. Where do these extra 34 completions to Brown come from? Likely by reducing the number of catches by Diggs, Beasley, and Davis. Over his career Brown has caught 53% of passes he was targeted (less than Davis BTW) so to catch 34 more balls, he'd need to be targeted around 65 times. Do you want Allen to attempt 65 more passes, or again someone else, likely Davis who would be targeted much less and who is making about 10% of the salary Brown is making. If anything could see them passing less and running slightly more next season. Could they benefit from Browns speed, assuming he still has it, sure; Do they need his additional production, not really.

Yeah he played 9 games, but only about 4 of them he looked half way decent, weeks 1,2,9, & 10. If the Bills were about $70 mil under the cap, great keep him, or if he's willing to take a pay cut down to about $3 mil then keep him, but doubt he's worth keeping at anything close to $8 mil unless the Bills determine that the 2020 roster is good enough to win the super Bowl next season with and minus upcoming FA. To improve the team, can't see how they can keep him and improve elsewhere. Yes they said they want/need more speed, but not so certain they were referring to the WR class. They need speed a D-line, LB and RB. The problem is very likely when they signed Brown to a contract, the assumption was in 2020 with a deep WR class we'll draft a true #1. Likely and hopefully within 1 to 2 seasons at most the rookie will become the clear #1, Brown will be an overpaid #2, but that's OK as our #1 is on a rookie contract. Once they traded for Diggs, that all changed and Brown is now making too much money when you factor in the production they get from the rest of the team at the WR position. Football doesn't use the WAR concept, but if they did, he'd look pretty bad!

Really how can you tell, Brown hardly played? In fact could easily argue the offense looked best the last third or so of the season, Exactly when Brown was out completely. If he just picked the top 10 salaries, then where was White, Diggs, and Dawson, plus he did say to keep Hughes and Morse who are also on the top ten. What he did was went down the list of players who have large salaries and pretty big cap savings, and under performed in 2020 for what they are paid. Yes it's speculation, by a person who is looking at it objectively and based on past performance by the Bills front office and also based on how most teams operate. Just like more than half the threads here are all speculation and based on fan emotion.

I think there's a better chance of trading Brown and our 4th rounder if we had one than getting a 4th rounder. With his contract in and injured in 2020, likely would need to give up picks to move him.

I'd rather cut Butler and Addison, keep Jefferson as he can play different positions. Agree on Brown. Think the higher priority though might be signing a good established edge rusher with the savings I'd also keep Ford at guard, draft another inside O lineman for other guard spot, ideally one that also has some experience at playing center. Would either sign Williams or someone else for RT