dave mcbride

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/sports/football/josh-allen-buffalo-bills.html Have at it.

Ryan has had some great years, was an MVP, and by all rights should have been super bowl MVP if Shanahan doesn't call an incredibly stupid pass play on second and 11 from the NE 23 with 3:56 to go and up by 8.

Cassel was a very, very stiff player with a slow release. Jones is more compact, more fluid, more accurate, and already better at digesting quickly what's in front of him. He's not Michael Vick, but he's clearly better on his feet than Cassel. Cassel had a couple of attributes, but the limits on his game were more numerous than Jones's. Don't forget that the 2008 Pats' roster was coming off a 16-0 season and completely loaded still.

He looks quite good to me. I don't like the fact that he's on the Patriots, that's for sure. Saying he's rag-armed or being set up for success seems akin to whistling past the graveyard to me. He made a lot of great throws at Bama last year that demonstrated he could play. Disagree. The Pats roster is very strong top to bottom and as I said, he looks good. The Bills can definitely win the division, but they're not a shoo-in. He looks much better than Cassel to me.

This seems like a more convincing assessment to me than the Kubiak evaluation. Kubiak didn't even mention the late third-quarter near pick on the McKenzie throw.

I know it's only two games, but he's averaging 8.0 ypa, has a completion rate of 68.5 percent, and has a rating of 100.5. I always liked him coming out of college, and I think that the Jets situation totally warped people's view of his talent/potential. He is now with a functioning organization, and this is when the judgments of him based on his play will be more or less accurate. What the Jets dumped on him was just ridiculous, both in terms of personnel and Gase's horizontal passing game.

I was wrong about that - I misremembered. He didn't fumble in that game. Sorry!

He's gotta stop the fumbling. Three fumbles in two games (and just 29 touches) isn't really acceptable.

Actual evidence?

Yet with no evidence.

Does that include the throwaways that go out of the EZ? I'm less concerned with the completion percentage (although it's certainly a decent proxy) than with the accuracy percentage. One of those throws was to Sanders in the Pitt game and accurate, although the defender (Pierre) was in position to make a play on it immediately (and did). The lofted throws to McKenzie and Diggs were both accurate, although they resulted in incompletions because they shouldn't have been lofted. But yeah, a bunch of off-target throws so far. On a few, the coverage has been good enough to cause an incomletion.

I've long said that Darnold was a lot better than the Jets situation made him look. He has real talent. He's a classic example of a bad organization ruining a player's ability to perform at a high level. It didn't seem to ruin his potential, though, and the Panthers are the beneficiaries.

The lofted pass to McKenzie was bad, but I wonder if that was the product of the bullet that sailed badly over the head of an open Singletary earlier in the game. That would have been a 25-30 yard gain. Point is, he seems to lack confidence in his velocity. The 3rd and 1 play last week that was lofted and defensed should have been on a rope, but it came shortly after the low-arc bomb that sailed over Sanders. Might that earlier miss caused him to lose faith in his deep-rope accuracy? A couple of nice things to see, however: the short TD pass to Diggs yesterday was peak Allen--a really strong throw on a busted play--and the late bomb to Diggs was something I've been militating for for a while: a bomb with air under it that gives the player the time needed to adjust to it and make a play. The early deep throw to Sanders was great, although that's one of those throws that he's bound to occasionally complete due to the law of averages. That was a pretty typical deep throw by Allen, and he misses a lot of those. Anyway, there were some good things with the bad yesterday. To me, the main issue has been consistency with regard to accuracy and velocity/arc choice as well as platform mechanics. I suspect he'll get it sorted out before too long. We all know he's capable of being a consistently elite producer.

Yup. Just look at Tom Brady's ypc lifetime! Granted, he's hardly a runner, but he's better than 1.6 ypc lifetime! I bet you half of those 637 carries of his are kneel-downs.

Brissett got them into FG range a number of times but they always went for it or turned it over on downs.

The thing that most impressed me on the run was that he didn't fumble. The Dolphins DB made a textbook-perfect strip attempt right before he crossed the goal line.

I thought Brissett played pretty well except for the pick. The number of drops of good passes was ungodly.

They had a ton of players go down yesterday. Factor that in.

They did go 12-3 in 2016 before Carr got hurt. In their playoff game vs. Houston, they didn't have a functional QB and got steamrolled.

Indeed he was. Just discovered this story, which is fascinating: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/24259653/the-play-pushed-bill-belichick-football-temporarily-new-england-patriots

You are preaching to the choir. (But at least it’s an ethos!) Btw, re: the uniforms, you know that Hugo Boss was a designer of them, right? A real ad:

An uncomfortable but true thing.

Seriously, read it. It’s very interesting.

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/09/18/bill-belichick-offers-1500-word-discourse-on-long-snappers-off-the-top-of-his-head/

Good point about Epenesa. I do think it’s way too early to tell with him. A lot of pass rushers who turn out to be good players need time; there’s so much technique and expertise that goes into the position. It’s kinda the opposite of RB. Except for a handful of freaks of nature and the Watt brothers (and JJ is a freak), the best years tend to start at year 3 or maybe 4. Melvin Ingram, Zedarius Smith, Haasan Reddick, DeForest Buckner, and Shaq Barrett are good examples: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/I/IngrMe00.htm; https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/B/BarrSh00.htm; https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/S/SmitZa00.htm; https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/B/BuckDe00.htm; https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/R/ReddHa00.htm. Just look at Reddick. It took him a while, but he blew up last year and had 1.5 sacks in game one last week. It’s kind of a mid-career to even late-ish-career position in terms of peak. Indeed, Bruce’s technique and conditioning by 1995-1996 were outstanding, making him virtually unstoppable. I know you disagree, but I believe his best, most complete football was played in those seasons because he was an absolute demon against the run by then too.