dave mcbride

“They lost because they scored less” is tautological. You are not isolating a cause.

He played with an injury all year last year, but that appears to be in the past now. He is only 29, and big DTs often play well into their 30s: https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/kenny-clark-plans-to-prove-what-kind-of-player-he-is-after-playing-through-injury-in-2024

They did lose because of the drop, but making the catch wouldn’t have guaranteed a Ravens victory. I get that. However, the drop did guarantee a loss.

How many more do they have to cut at this point?

For a UDFA, he has had a good career: 7 years and with starts in every one of them. He just turned 30, so while he’s no spring chicken in NFL terms, he’s not THAT old. He played in 13 games and started two for a very good Denver defense last season.

My guess is that it’s nowhere close to $32 million per in reality.

Agreed, but I do think it’s a bad matchup for the Bills. The Ravens kinda dominated them in the playoff game and lost due to turnovers and an unbelievable drop, and they slaughtered them in the regular season. I certainly think the Bills can win, but if I had to pick a winner straight up, I feel like I’d be foolish not to lean toward Baltimore. Home field will help.

Now that it’s so easy to transfer, I expect most of the excellent players to move to bigger schools midway through.

The Bills sat Spikes there to remind him that he’ll always be a Bengal.

He was wildly productive with the Raiders too. It wasn't just Rodgers. I'm also not being critical of Beane; I understand why he'd say he really wanted Cooper after he obtained Cooper. What's he supposed to say? I would have done precisely the same. But in no world was Cooper a better solution than Adams, a multi-time first team all pro. I get why it didn't happen, of course.

I should be clearer: this is more a meta discussion about what it means to go all in. To do that, you have to be willing to pay a high price. For example, the Ravens traded second and fifth round picks plus AJ Klein to the Bears for Roquan Smith. To be sure, they haven’t won a SB with him, but they became a better team immediately and have not regretted the trade for a moment. He’s truly elite -- first team all-pro in all three of his seasons with the Ravens. Adams was simply the best WR available for a WR-starved offense last season, and I suspect that if the price were right, Adams would have been fine playing with arguably the best QB in the NFL on a dominant team. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Adams was and is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Cooper. I am NOT saying that this was the likely outcome or that the Bills were on even terms relative to the Jets. It’s more food for thought. But at least in terms of draft ammo and willingness on the part of the receiver, I believe they could have done it. The tricky part is the cap, and that’s where the Bills were kinda screwed. So maybe it wasn’t viable from that perspective.

The Bills could have offered more: a second and a 4th, for instance. Or maybe their first (unlikely) or even their 2026 first. So it’s not as if they couldn’t outbid what the Jets offered. They just chose not to, which I get. Again, I keep coming back to the fact that Adams was the most productive receiver in the league over the last five games of the season, and for a bad team.

I get all of that and I don’t think I’m oversimplifying. The issue I keep coming back to is that the Bills settled for a significantly worse player in a SB-window season where the glaring hole was WR. But maybe it was never doable given the Bills’ cap situation.

No one cared because it was the Jets, but Adams was GREAT late last season. In the final five games of the season, he had 36 receptions, 510 yards, and 6 TDs. Extrapolated over 17 games, that's 122 receptions, 1,734 yards, and 20 TDs. Agreed, and he was more than productive -- he was really good still.

We don't know yet, so let's wait and see.

The D and C had a story about it. Also, OF COURSE Beane is going to say that afterward. But he's no dummy - and there's no way he could believe that Cooper was a better solution to the Bills' WR problems than Adams. To reiterate, Adams is clearly the better player. It's not debatable. Yeah, I realize that. I was just wondering whether their was a financial path to obtaining Adams. Maybe not, and I'm not one of those people who believe the cap is a fiction (it isn't). Ultimately, I was just thinking about what the eventual outcome would have been with Adams playing the X rather than Cooper. I think they would have beaten KC.

Prior to the Tampa SB, KC lost both their starting tackles late in the AFC championship game vs the Bills when it was already out of hand. The line was playing well before that.

The Bills were in on the trade and discussed it with the Raiders, so it was a possibility, at least in theory. And Adams did not have a good relationship with the Raiders. There were reports that they thought he was using his injury to get out and he complained about the offense too. Most importantly, he was NOT happy about them dumping Derek Carr - the reason why he chose to go to Vegas in the first place: https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-davante-adams-los-angeles-rams-sean-mcvay.

Sure, but Adams didn't have total control over his destination and moreover he presumably wanted to win a championship. The issue is that he's a better player, and the Bills settled for the lesser player. Should they have gone all out given that they were clearly in a SB window? I realize that it may have been too difficult from a financial standpoint.

Everything I read last season suggested that the Bills were in on the trade action for Davante Adams once it became clear how limited their receiving corps was. After Adams wound up with the Jets, they essentially settled for Cooper. A couple of questions: could they have made the addition of Adams work financially, or was that impossible? My recollection is that the Jets had a lot more space and wiggle room on the salary front, but obviously the Bills were a better team with a real shot at a SB--which would presumably make them more attractive to an elite player who hadn't reached a Super Bowl. Secondly, knowing what we know now, would you have given up more -- a second, say, rather than a third -- to obtain Adams? He had the connection with Rogers, but the Raiders were always going to take the best deal they could. I am of the belief that he was and is a significantly better player than Cooper (who was a good player during his prime, mind you) and showed as much last year: 85 catches for 1,063 yards and 8 TDs in only 14 games. Adams played well for the Jets, and I think he's the sort of player that might have given the Bills the extra juice they needed to outscore KC and win the game. Cooper certainly wasn't that guy last season. I know it's water under the bridge and hindsight is 20/20, but I've been thinking about it lately.

Bishop played the full season last year and was available for all three playoff games. He missed time in camp last year and also a little time this year, but I don't think it's fair to say he's injury prone.

People forget his great catch on the 2-point conversion late in the 13 seconds game and also the fact that he blew past Cincy's defenders on the Bills' first possession only for Allen to badly overthrow him because Roger Saffold got eaten alive by DJ Reader on the play. A more accurate pass (not Allen's fault) may well have resulted in 6 -- Diggs was THAT open.

In the Minnesota miracle play, he displayed his trademark great footwork to retain his balance after the catch, shift on a dime, and accelerate rapidly so that no defender had a chance. Many receivers would have drifted out of bounds on that play, especially given that it required a back shoulder leap to make the catch. I think it was a truly amazing play by him while acknowledging that other factors played a role in the outcome. Both things can be true. In any event, any evaluation of Diggs's overall career, including the postseason, that doesn't include one of the most famous plays of this century is doing it wrong.

He has incredible footwork. Some of the best I've ever seen. That's why he gets open so easily.

Agreed. Like you, I wish the safeties were better, but at the same time, when your shakiest positional group is safety, that's the definition of a first-world problem.