dave mcbride
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Posts posted by dave mcbride
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18 minutes ago, GunnerBill said:
I think this IS a draft to take a shot on a day 3 rookie. But most of them don't pan out. So you have to have a vet as well. If a rookie goes to camp and wins the #2 job, great!
Tyrod is now available and is ten times better than Trubisky as a backup. Just sayin' ...
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9 hours ago, transplantbillsfan said:
The more I read about this "anchoring" technique to heal a torn achilles... no.
Tre might actually be participating fully in the minicamp in a couple months.
I think we restructure his deal, which would be smart, but if we get a fully healthy Tre White by minicamp, maybe McDermott and Babbich can transition Benford or Douglas to Safety.
Achilles tears are not the injuries they used to be — at all. I won’t be shocked if he’s fine by camp. We shall see.
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20 hours ago, Logic said:
Confession: Baker is who I wanted in the 2018 draft.
I thought his attitude/moxie/whatever-you-wanna-call-it was exactly what Buffalo needed at that time.
Obviously we'll never know how things would've turned out if he had been drafted here, but...I'm obviously pretty okay with the guy we wound up with instead.
Two interesting things about Baker Mayfield:
One is that the Browns VERY NEARLY took Josh Allen 1st overall instead of him. There were rumors right up until draft morning of the Browns building being split and some pushing very heavily for Josh. Instead, as we all know, the voices that wanted Baker won out, and the rest is history.
Two is that he had a pretty great rookie season, which led to instant stardom and him being in a bazillion TV commercials. He looked to all the world like the next huge NFL megastar QB. And then his sophomore season happened and, well...things went downhill in Cleveland, culminating in his ouster from the team, temporary journeyman status, and his current career resurrection in Tampa Bay. This was the latest example of "don't judge a QB after a great rookie season until he's able to replicate the success in year two". Opposing defensive coordinators have an offseason to study and to take away what you do best, and year two often doesn't go nearly as well as year one.
Anyway...I like Baker Mayfield. I'm glad he's doing well in Tampa Bay, and I hope he continues to do well in his career.I'll just point out that he had a pretty good third season - the year the Browns went 11-5 (95.9 passer rating and 65.5 QBR plus a 14 AV rating via PFR).
13 hours ago, SirAndrew said:Mayfield is the type of QB that’s easy for fans on this forum to like, but he’d drive you all crazy if he was our QB. Mayfield is very average. It seems forgotten that Tampa was only 9-8 this season. I suppose it was a good comeback year for Mayfield, but someone had to win that division. Mayfield got overrated from playing on a really good Tampa roster. Sure, the goat led them to a worse record, but he was completely washed, and didn’t seem mentally with it.
Brady was actually very good last season. They couldn't run the ball at all because of line issues, and that killed their play action game. In the run game, they were literally 32nd in rushing yards, 32nd in rushing TDs, and 32nd in yards per attempt.
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Mayfield has proven he's a pretty good QB. Why the Browns got rid of him remains a mystery to me. He was playing with a significant injury his final year there and gutted it out. The year before, he was good. And he was good this year. Almost rallied to beat the Bills after being down by a lot.
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13 hours ago, Nihilarian said:
Buffalo selected Watkins at the #4 spot before Mack at #5, and Evans at #7. Barr was selected by Minn at #9.
The kid had one season of 1047 yards and 9 TDs, and that was with 96 targets, 60 receptions a 62.5 catch percentage. In three seasons in Buffalo and played in 37 of 48 games.
Mike Evans has played for Tampa for 10 seasons and has yet to have less than 1000 yards in a season.
I am assuming no trade, which is the real issue because they lost a first round pick in the process. Not good.
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2 hours ago, Nihilarian said:
This was because we had a porn watcher as a GM...he was also an idiot. Watkins made most of his yards out of screenplays and Buffalo didn't run those at that time. If that wasn't enough...right after drafting Sammy the Bills stated that they were still looking for a big, tall red zone target at WR. Hello, Mike Evans at @ #7...
LBer Kahlil Mack, OT Jake Matthews, and 13 others went on to make the Pro Bowl in the first round that year 2014. Doug Whaley wanted to bolster his personal pick at QB in EJ with Watkins... who never made the Pro Bowl.
Just to clarify, Mike Evans was gone by the time the Bills would have picked (at #9). Beckham was still on the board, however. He went at #11.
I will say this about Sammy Watkins: before the injuries began to chronically diminish his game, Watkins looked as good as any of those other receivers. People forget how Watkins could at times utterly dominate opponents in his first couple of seasons.
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On 2/1/2024 at 7:52 PM, Beck Water said:
If asked "do I think the Buffalo Bills can win a Championship with McDermott?" my answer would be "I don't know".
But stuff like this...c'mon, @Logic. Logic should tell you that in the playoffs, you usually play a very good team, a team among the best teams in the league, and that is highly motivated because it's "win or go home".
Averaged over the season, we have games against good teams and not-so-good teams.
So it seems probable that any team with a playoff loss is going to give up more points than they average during the season.
Just a quick example:
In their 3 playoff losses, the KC Chiefs gave up an average of 32 points per game. So in their playoff losses, KC was 2 points WORSE than the worst defense in the league! OH NOES! In their 5 seasons since 2018, they gave up an average of 22 points per game. That's two full scores more per playoff loss than they gave up in the regular season - a huge and unacceptable swing!
Again, I'm not taking a stand to defend McD, I'm just pointing out that this appears to me a relatively meaningless line of reasoning. It seems normal to me that in a small number of playoff losses to very good teams (or they wouldn't be in the playoffs), a defense is likely to give up more points and more scores than it does averaged over entire seasons to both good and bad teams.
Oh, and I think if you look at our playoff loss last season and the year before, you will find far more missing playoffs than Von or Tre. For example, in 2022 we were missing DaQuan Jones; Oliver and Phillips were playing in linebacker braces; our starting safeties were Poyer (playing hurt then replaced by Cam Lewis) and Jaquan Johnson platooning with Dean Marlowe. At CB we had Tre' platooning with Kaiir Elam and Dane Jackson, because Christian Benford was out.
13 seconds aside from Tre we were pretty healthy on D I believe.
I'd also add that in 14 non-Bills playoff games since Mahomes became QB, KC has averaged 29.1 points per game. And that includes a 9-point Super Bowl game when they were missing both of their starting OTs (take out that game and they've averaged 31 points over 13 playoff games against teams other than the Bills). Maybe, just maybe, they're a really good playoff offense.
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6 minutes ago, Not at the table Karlos said:
They scored 30 points 3 times last season.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/team/schedule/_/name/wsh/washington-commanders
Ugh! I was stupidly looking at the wrong column (first downs!). Thanks for the correction. The point about the yardage in the final five games stands, though.
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4 hours ago, GunnerBill said:
Washington were 24th in yards, and 25th in points offensively in 2023. I think that is probably a very slight overperformance of their talent but not significant. They had some success early in the year with Sam Howell, but he cooled off as the season went on. I quite like him as a gamer. Think he definitely has a future in the league but probably not as a starter. He reminds me a lot of Baker Mayfield though and with better talent he could have some success.
Bienemy went there to prove he wasn't just riding Reid and Mahomes's coat tails. I think he proved he can coach, he is a credible OC. But he didn't prove himself more than that. I wouldn't be shocked if he ends up sitting this year out, or takes essentially an advisory role somewhere, but he will be back as an OC in 2025. I think his shot at Head Coach jobs are passed though. You are a hot candidate for a relatively short window and once your window is gone it can be gone for good. I always cite Ray Horton for this. He was a really hot HC candidate for two cycles - think it was 2012 and 2013 - he is now coaching in the USFL. Teryl Austin was another - he had three years in the mid-2010s of multiple interviews. He is still in the league as the Steelers DC they finished 6th best this year in points against, but there were zero interviews coming out of it. His moment has passed. Kellen Moore might be going the same way. Had a couple of hot years when he first became OC in Dallas where he had multiple HC interviews. Other than a courtesy interview as a man on staff in LA he didn't have a sniff this year.
The offense got worse over the season, though. In their final five games, they didn't get to 300 yards even once. And they had 10 turnovers in those five games.
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1 hour ago, Shaw66 said:
This is one of those deep dives into stats that I think is pretty meaningless. What are we, or the Bills, supposed to do with this data? Redesign the offense to make sure they complete some deep passes over the middle? To what end?
Think about it: First, remember that all teams have gone to defenses to stop deep throws, and against the Bills they double down on those efforts, because Allen can so deadly. When teams have two deep safeties, throwing down the middle is the last place you want to go, because both safeties have a chance to make a play. The sidelines deep offer better opportunities. I would guess that deep middle throws are prone to higher interception rates.
Second, if the Bills were reasonably successful on the 15 deep balls they threw in the middle, that's like 40%. So that's six more completions on the season, and if each was for 30 yards, that's 180 yards, or on average 10 yards per game. Now, I'm just as interested as the next guy in getting 10 yards more per game, but how much time should Bills invest in deep middle throws to get those ten yards?
Third, has anyone looked at the stats? I haven't, but I'm sure some other team had an abysmal record on deep left throws, and some other team did on deep right throws. These throws are a sliver of the offensive attempts in a game - one or two plays out of fifty, and that smaller of a sample size is always going to generate interesting - but not meaningful - outliers.
I would expect that the Bills have seen this data, and I expect that they are studying it, like everything else, to see whether anything meaningful is behind. But as I said, if there were something meaningful and if it were corrected, at best it's going to have incidental impact on production. Yes, of course, the team should improve in every area, but this hardly should be a focal point.
Fans wanted to get rid of Tyrod Taylor when he had bad numbers throwing into the middle middle. Should we now move on from Josh Allen because he has bad numbers in the deep middle?
Slicing and dicing data into smaller and smaller pieces rarely leads to any useful knowledge.
He had bad numbers THIS YEAR and not because he’s bad at it. He’s had tons of great throws in that area over the years. But if you are 0-15, that’s not marginal, and it’s a big part of the field to surrender.
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1 hour ago, PBF81 said:
Davis was our only regular deep threat this season.
Nearly half of Shakir's yards were after-the-catch.
Our play design and play-calling, presumably in the interests of "complimentary football" clearly have something to do with it, the extent to which can be argued.
Relatedly, Allen's Completed-Air-Yards/Completion are the lowest they've been since he's been here and down about 20% from last season.
Yards-After-the-Catch for Allen's passes are up 24% from last season and also the highest of his career, spread fairly evenly among Diggs, Cook, Kincaid, and Shakir.
Allen's Yards-After-the-Catch/Completion are the highest that they've been since his rookie season.
So it would seem that it's by design.
I get the design, but 0 for 15 is still pretty ugly.
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It's now starting to make sense why the Steelers didn't cover Kincaid on his TD in the playoff game and why Shakir ran free on the second-down play on the Bills final possession in the divisional round game. The Bills proved all season that they're terrible at connecting on deep middle throws. The only success they had was the Kincaid catch in the playoff game! In the regular season, they were an unbelievable 0 for 15.
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"The Jets lost five games by 20 or more points and extended the longest playoff drought in the four major North American professional sports to 13 years."
The Sabres saw this and want their streak back.
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8 minutes ago, HurlyBurly51 said:
Wasn't it a 45 yarder? Seems Nate is massaging his stats to support his case.
He is.
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19 minutes ago, DCOrange said:
Apparently re: the kicker, their kicker is literally the worst in NFL history from that range and he hadn't made a kick outside of a dome all season lol. Seems they didn't really take the position seriously because they always intended to go for it a ton this year and therefore didn't have faith when the time came where they might want a good kicker.
Huh? Badgley is 37-48 lifetime between 40 and 49 and made 9 of his last 11 (and also 2 of 3 from 50+) going back to last season. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/B/BadgMi00.htm
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3 hours ago, DCOrange said:
San Fran was near dead last defensively in similar situations this season. Detroit was near the best offensively. One, the play worked and the WR just dropped it. The other, Goff had multiple guys he could have delivered the pass to and just missed it. Sucks but it seems like it was a fine decision in the moment and a fine play choice too. Kicking the field goal would have been a fine decision too.
I see the argument, but I just don't see how you don't trust your kicker to make a 45-yard FG in moderate conditions that puts you up 3 scores. in a game where you're facing a defense that's perennially top 5. As for the drop, it was a moderately tough catch and Goff was pressured (and Goff was 0-8 under pressure last night). And as for the analytics argument (not saying you're making that, btw), I'll repeat what analytics OG Billy Beane famously said: "My sh*t don't work in the playoffs."
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23 minutes ago, GunnerBill said:
I saw the White Stripes at Blackpool Winter Gardens. One of the best live gigs I have ever been to.
Aso for the people who don't think it is a classic... well I'm gonna fight 'em off,
a seven nation army couldn't hold me back!Thank you! I saw the White Stripes on a tiny stage many moons ago and they blew me away. (One of my wife's best friends produced their first two records too.)
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3 minutes ago, Peter said:
This also seems like a good place for this:
Meh ... you gotta include the playoff games here.
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1 minute ago, Cash said:
Excellent post. And a great point about sample size.
I’ve seen this a couple times, but not many: what the models should be spitting out is the “break even” probability for going for it. (And with all of the assumptions, approximations, and missing variables, they should probably be rounding to the nearest 10%.) If I’m a coach, that’s what I want to know. Do I need an 80-90% chance of success to be worth going for it, or is it closer to 50/50? And comparatively, how much do I trust my offense/playcall/QB against their defense right now?
And on another note, the advantage of being up 3 scores vs 2 is significant. If the model (or the coach making decisions based on the model) didn’t take that into account, that’s a major problem.
Yes, the three score lead vs. two score lead is definitely a huge factor. It's not like they were trying to go from 17-14 to 20-14.
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I'm very sorry to hear this. My thoughts are with you.
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18 minutes ago, Chaos said:
I am a huge believer in making decisions based on analytics. But I don't thinnk football head coaches in general have demonstrated mathematical genius ( I am not saying I am). The 4th and 3 play call with a 14 point lead in the NFC championship game, I think is an example of not properly understanding the math.
I will start with an analogy. Imagine a dice game, where the rules allow you to pick either of the following situations A) rolling 1-5 pays you even money B) rolling a 6 pays you 100-1. If I tell you you get to roll the die 50 times, the expected return for A is that you would roll 1 to 5 5/6 or 42 times $42 dollars (assuming a $1 bet each time and the expected return on B is that you would roll 6 eight times and get a return of $800. Any rational person would select B as there choice. While the numbers are extreme this is similar to the 'analytics' of going for it on fourth and 3 on the opponents 20 yard line. Over a large number of interations, the correct statistical decision is to go for it on fourth and 3.
Now imagine if after your fifty rolls, you have collected you $800 based on your selection of B. You made the wise decision. However, lets say the rules of the game change (like in the second half of an NFC championship game). Now there is only 1 roll of the die. If you roll a 1-5 you get to keep your $800. If you roll a 6, your $800 grows to $900. A rational person would always select A in this scenario. However I feel as though Dan Campbell was confused by the excitement of winning with analytics over the course of a 17 game decision, and tried to apply a season long anaytic concept to a very small remaining set of plays. And he made a mistake. Not quite as extreme as my dice example. But a field goal from that spot is probably 90% plus successful (2.7 points) , and a conversion was probably 70% likely (4.9 points expected value, if we assume the conversion leads to a TD 100% of the time). The difference in expected points between 2.7 and 4.9 was not worth increasing the likelhood of zero from 10 to 30%.
The other issue I always raise with regard to the situation is the opponent. The 49ers are not the Commanders. They finished first in defense last season and 3rd this season.
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10 hours ago, Simon said:
45+yrds FG on bad grass can be dicey propositions and we didn't see what the Lions crappy K was doing pregame, so I don't think either of those calls was necessarily "wrong"
Well, situationally it seemed pretty wrong to me. Here’s why: first, going up by 3 scores is huge in a game, and if you’re presented with the opportunity to do it, you don’t gamble it away. The Lions’ kicker is decent enough, and you have to assume he’ll likely make that kick in not-terrible weather. Second, you have to consider the opponent: an elite defense that ranked first last year and third this year. In other words, they weren’t playing the Commanders. Success on a fourth down try is less likely against a great defense than an average one, which goes without saying. It seems obvious to me that the you have to kick in those situations. Maybe he misses, but it’s the sounder strategy in terms of probability.
I also thought the Chiefs were unwise to go for it against Baltimore on 4th and 1 from the 13 because failure meant giving up a chance to go ahead by two scores. The ravens D was #1 overall.
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22 hours ago, GunnerBill said:
Mario Williams was the last truly elite game changer we had up front. I think Ed was pretty close this past year. Yes Sunday was not a good game for him, but I have confidence he will build again next season.
Thuney had a 99.1 percent win rate this season, so I can’t really fault Ed. Thuney was off-the-charts good this season. The bigger question posed by a very close friend who is a diehard Pats fan (going back to the Grogan/Sam Bam Cunningham days) is why Belichick let him go. Yet another terrible personnel decision by BB.
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Sending positive thoughts right now.
Bills fans dropped to No. 20 in latest fan rankings
in The Stadium Wall
Posted
Seems like the sort of study that’s going to be a classic example of the replication crisis in the behavioral sciences. I don’t believe these findings to be even remotely accurate.