dave mcbride

Just saying: it is effing outrageous—as in worst call of the year in the nfl—that there was no penalty called on that darnold sack. That sort of unnecessary violence should be eliminated from the league. And now they call something on quinnen williams? Omg.

Great, informative piece. Thanks for posting.

Darnold is getting a bad rap right now, and he's not playing well. But he is a talented QB and is in a truly awful situation. Worst receivers in the league, no RB, A middling-at-best o-line (which was awful last season), and a coaching dumpster fire. He's better than he's showing. He's too good to be a backup. He'd be a productive player on a better team. Put him on Pittsburgh (if, say, Roethlisberger retires) and he's immediately better than every qb on that team.

It's effectively an iron law!

It was an injury (broken foot bone) but also famously a case of player getting massively paid and deciding that he didn't really like taking punishment anymore because he was basically set for life. Before that contract, he had had five seasons in a row of over 1600 yards from scrimmage and at least 16 TDs (he had 98 TDs over five seasons, which is insane). After he got paid, his ypc went immediately from 5.1 to 3.6, and he was gone from the league within two years.

That was PI. Textbook.

See my other posts. LA went to a short passing game that negated the rush completely.

Are you watching tonight’s game? The Ravens’ defense is excellent, and they are being completely shredded. This is today’s NFL, when good defenses facing elite offenses consistently fail. That is the sort of offense the Bills’ D had to face yesterday. the Pats’ D is probably the best in the league, and they were eviscerated by Russell Wilson.

You watching this game? The Ravens’ D is legit excellent. Seriously. Think about it.

Not once!

It’s an offense-first league now and teams with good QBs simply can’t be held down for too long. Belichick is the only coach I know of that can maintain it, and even he can’t do it all of the time. Just look at SF in last year’s SB — a great defensive unit with a great plan, but a good offensive mind with a great QB eventually figured out what they could and couldn’t do, and then Mahomes and co. were basically unstoppable. Also, think about the chiefs/pats championship game in 2018. The pats D had smothered KC in the first half, but even BElichick couldn’t maintain it. KC’s offense exploded, and they should have won that game. This sort of thing happens all the time, and to repeat, the Rams have great offensIve gameplanning plus a very, very good QB. They aren’t the Jets or the Broncos. The problem with the Houston game is that we couldn’t score. Holding Watson at home to 19 points in regulation should absolutely have been enough to win. But as we all know, Allen didn’t play very well in the second half of that game.

I think your take about the second half yesterday has been a little too simplistic. Here is my view: I felt like McDermott went into the game with a really good plan—do not give up longish passing tds by getting tricked by play-action. Basically, through the first rams’ series of the third quarter, the rams had their way running the ball, but that was by design. The Bills were not going to give in and bring their safeties up to stop the run. Hence when Goff did do play action, he was looking downfield and the plays weren’t there, particularly when the rams were on the bills’ side of the field. After starting 5 for 5 (with most of his completions occurring in their own end of the field), he went 5 for 12 with a pick, no tds, and a failed fourth down attempt. The Bills had the answers in the passing game, and basically the strategy of allowing them to run and maintaining focus on the intermediate to intermediate-long passing game completely bottled up the Rams in the sense that they couldn’t score. So it was a good plan, and normally it would have been enough to win the game. However, there was a problem: McVay is a really, really good offensive mind and a great playcaller. The Rams basically continued to run, which was fine, but they completely changed their approach to the passing game, relying primarily on very short throws off of play action where the Bills’ secondary was playing much deeper back in coverage. That led to a lot of chunk plays. The combination of the still-effective run game and the radically altered passing game approach (which negated their pass rush too) meant that the Bills D was screwed. Plus they were clearly tired. Finally, Jared Goff is a very good QB. He is really accurate, and he knows how to run that offense well. He is not the best QB in the league, but he is upper echelon. This league right now is built to support excellent QB play.

Post of the day.

Not true. They absolutely mentioned it.

I think we might be overrating this play. Yes, it was a terrible call. No doubt about that. However, if it had been ruled correctly, the Bills would have had first and 28 from their own 7.5 yard line. Assuming they don’t get a first, they punt, and the Rams get the ball at roughly the same spot - maybe 5-10 yards further back. That extra yardage would have helped, i admit, but the bills couldn’t stop the rams anyway.

The rams offense is seriously good and well designed.

Isn't part of it that Allen has made a bunch of wildly inaccurate throws when he runs to his left? He badly overthrew an open receiver early in the Miami game when he ran to his left, and he missed open receivers in the EZ twice when he ran to his left in the Jets game (Knox and then Brown).

Wentz was terrific last season. The roster is decimated by injuries this season too. Plus the receivers are old and breaking down. He's a good player.

I don't want to swap him at all, but I do believe he has the "want to." He's just in a bad situation: a team with a bad, absentee owner, a brutal media market that has it in for the team for historical reasons, two years of terrible offensive line play on the books, lousy receivers, a nutcase as a coach, and a megalomanical DC who you just know is biding his time. Bad scene. They gotta get rid of Gase. Tannehill's performance in TN is the proof. I'm not sure people are paying attention, but in nearly one season of play there he has been historically great - a rating of 118.5: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/T/TannRy00.htm. No Bills fan thought he had that in him because of his meh performance in Miami. That said, I do think the Jets will take Trevor if they have the opportunity.

This is so true. Speaking of good commentators, I listened to Riddick on ESPN last night, and my god is he good. I had always liked him, but man can he watch a game and pick up the little things and then articulate his point clearly and quickly.

Agreed. That said, I gotta tell ya: Fitzpatrick had an incredibly good game on Sunday. If not for that dropped TD (on a ball that was perfectly thrown), the Bills may have lost that one. We couldn't stop him. He was 16-17 over the middle and averaged 11 yards per attempt with 2 TDs.

Just a PS - the Jets are so stupid that they unloaded a Brinks truck for a RB who is a malcontent, sat out a year over a contract dispute with a team that always wins, has one season-ending ACL tear in his medical history, and got robbed blind by hookers who left him naked in his own bed. I really believe that if Darnold were on the Bills, we'd all be saying that he's the best QB we've had since Kelly. At this point, I like Allen better, but Darnold is not bad. It's the Jets who are bad. They are such a terrible organization. I mean, they trade their best player (Jamal Adams) for a box of rocks, and then Greggo has the gall to say he won't like playing for Pete Carroll because it's too simple there. I mean, wtf???? And another thing about Gase: Since Tannehill left Miami, he has become one of the best QBs in the league. Think about that.

They are an analytics outfit, and will be the first to tell you that there can be outliers. Most QBs who put up Allen's numbers in college wash out in the NFL. It's a probability/prediction based thing. As opposed to PFF, which at this point seems to want Allen to fail to prove a prediction that is looking less and less credible every day, FO follows the data that's on offer. When the facts change, they change their minds. They are very up front about this in the piece and basically say that their prediction, which was based on data, was wrong. And bear in mind that all of these big-armed guys (Locker, Boller, Mallett, Cutler etc. etc.) -- have some contextual issues that explain away some of their weak college stats--just like Josh. The one thing I'd add is team situation too. The Bills have built a good team for him. To be sure, he elevates it because he's really good. But then I look at a guy like Darnold, who often looks good, yet has no real WR threats and who has a coach calling five-yard throws until the fourth quarter when they are down 24-3. That organization may well destroy his career. He is better than he's showing, and that's because of the organization.

Agreed. FO is simpler and might miss some context (ie., drops by Brady's receivers this week), but overall it is more believable and more likely to pass the "do I believe your Rube Goldberg machine stats or my lyin' eyes" test.

Wins are more important than losses that might help you out in tiebreaker situations. If that loss becomes a win, the tiebreaker disappears as an issue. In other words, the fact that a win is against an NFC team ONLY matters in tiebreaker situations. I'm for avoiding tiebreaker situations.