Fake-Fat Sunny

Definitely the substitute teacher was totally wrong to try to be humorous in a way that ended up being abusive to a child. I'd fire the idiot, but as a substitute it simply means they will never be hired. However, just because the sub was an idiot does not mean MM handled this thing properly as an HC, as a person and unfortunately as a parent. Simply being the HC of a losing team does not justify idiotic comments, but: 1. As an HC, MM is paid big bucks and while stupid comments are not justified he is well compensated and really needs to just suck it up rather than moan/ 2. As a person, moaning about this is a dumb strategy since whining about it to Mora or anyone simply is going to invite more idiots to make unjustifiable comments because they know it gets to him. 3. Worst of all he handled it poorly as a parent because bullies do crap just to see their victim squirm so these cowards can feel better about themselves. By vocalizing about this attack on his son, MM has handled in a way that will unfortunately probably cause more unjustified attacks on his kid from stupid fans. Nice going MM. Just suck it up and use your bucks to help your kid find fulfillment rather than whining to Mora.

Agreed, the main thing we need to do regarding the QB position is not to repeat the same mistake we have made at QB since Kelly retired of focusing so much in eime and cao resiueces on the job thst we have routinely not focused on the things that really produce a good W/L. The list of dumb overblown moves made by the Bills since they failed to recognize Kelly would not last forever and devoted to much belief in the fantasy he would play forever, and since we have made a series of errors to overcompensate which have wrecked this team. Namely, 1. The first mistake was not drafting a late round replacement to be trained for Kelly's ultimate demise in 1994. Even if it was unlikely that a late pick in 94 or 93 could be our QB starter, this approach would have been far superior to over-reaching with a 2nd round choice for TC in '95 when the handwring was on the wall for Kelly's demise (though Ralph did not understand this as he made a handshake pledge he then had to renege on to compensate JK in his next contract. 2. The second mistake was wasting a 3rd round choice to get Billy Joe Idiot when they realized that TC likely was not the man unless they trained him out of his happy feet and Kelly's demise forced them not to be able to even do that. 3. Thanks to AJ Smith the Bills made a smart assessment that Flutie could play NFL ball, but they then panicked and Butler promised DF a fair shot, but then did not give him one by spending an arm and a leg on RJ. Butler's football stupidty and panicked reached heights which killed the Bills from that day on because he foolishly endorsed giving RJ a guaranteed big contract when at the very least he was somewhat suspect on the injury front. Even worse, he then created a recipe for doom if AJ proved to be right in his DF assessment by giving DF a contract (apparently much to the surprise of DF and his agent) which rolled his achieved bonuses into his base pay. It was this formulation which when RJ did prove to be injury prone and DF played as well as Smith judged that gave the Bills a $10 million cap hit for QB in 1999 unless they lowered the DF cap hit by giving him a long-term deal. 4. Cutting DF and keeping RJ was not a mistake as it was clear DF had a short shelf life (though you gotta give the midget some props for the dropkick last week) but this simply demonstrates how badly we managed the QB situation by over-focus leading to panic. 5. Likewise, getting Bledsoe strikes me as a reasonable move initially as AVP was clearly no starter and Jeff Blake or Chris Chandler seemed to be the best stupid options for us. IMHO, acqusition of Bledsoe would have been a wash after he had an outstanding 2002 which was followed by a horrendous 2003. The Bills mistake was not quitting while they were even and cutting Bledsoe but instead TD tried to show his cojones first by extending him and then by cutting him. Neither moved worked out at all for the Bills. 5.5. The jury is still out on the Losman draft choice and given how poor the 2005 QB draft class was picking up JP in 04 and training him to be the QB of the future will be a very smart move (compared to the real alternatives) if it work. However, one must not that again the over-focus and panic with which TD invested in JP being a quality starter in his second year was foolish. The best thing the Bills can do is try to land a Tom Brady (incredibly really incredibly doubtful but this is what you try) with a 5th or 7th rounder and ride JP or Holcomb for what they are worth. Spenidng our FA cap money and 1st day choices on the OL and building the rest of the team are far better strategies than further umjustified focus on QB.

Thank you for showing a little more intelligent analysis for the superficial thinking that usually infuses posts on this issue. By the numbers of A-A (and qualified apparently based on the W/L and playofff appearances amassed by A-A HC's), though I do not think one can support a claim that the interview policy is working, the reality of the numbers does seem to indicate that hiring of A-A HC's has increased under the "must interview" rule. It is simply the most superficial and really dumb takes on this issue that this rule means that the NFL should have women HC's, some # of Asians, or left-handed smoke shifters. IMHO is what this is all about is the one of the unfortunate flaws on US society in our history is that our country relied upon race based slavery of humans as an economic development tool. It took a whole bunch of deaths and inuries to great Americans from both the south and the north leading to this country abolishing slavery as a prime effect of our regional civil war, but it really was an advance in our culture. Unfortunately, the civil war was so bruising and folks proved to be so insecure that through the failure to use Reconstruction as a good reunification and rebuilding tool, we ended up with stupidity like the Jim Crow laws and it ended up being reflected in the NFL throught the end of the 20th century in the nonsensical belief that A-A's did have the necessities (as Jimmy the Greek and Al Campanis referred to it) of A-A men to be winning or effective QB's and even today HC's at a number which can be said to approach the pool of potential good A-A HC candidates (if folks have not noticed a strong majority of the players are of A-A heritage and though there is no requirement or guarantee that a good player will be a good coach) clearly there is a much larger potential A-A candidate pool that the number of A-A's who even got interviewed. Like it or not, the reality of the numbers indicates that in fact NFL teams routinely passed over even interviewing seemingly qualified HC candidates for years while idiots like Rich Kotite not only got HC jobs but actually failed and got rehired. I like the must-interview policy because its inception and the fine of that idiot Matt Mullen (who ignored the policy and relied on the good ol boy network to hire an HC and then fire him for failure) it has conincided with a small but significant increase in the hiring of A-A HC's who have fortunately done well (My sense is that a team will certainly find an A-A Rich Kotite out there because gene expresssion has nothing to do with HC quality, but because so many qualified A-A candidates had been passed over or made to wait longer than their skills and character merited, you really have a pent up pool of very good HC candidates who happen to be A-A because they were passed over for that silly reason. I am really pleased about the NFL's approach to this because it eliminates the illusion that there are only two choices here, the status quo of letting the free market fail or a draconian solution like hrining quotas which does not work well. The focus on forcing more interviews is a good positve action as best as I can tell.

Peyton's failure to get to even get to the SB and to not even have delivered a lot more playoff W's to the team that drafted him than that idiot Ryan Leaf (Leaf's record of playoff W's for SD is 0 while Manning is somewhere arounf 3 or 4 playoff W's heading into this season) says a lot more about what it takes to win in the NFL and reach the ultimate goal of getting to the SB, than it says anything about how good Manning is as a player. Like Dan Marino, Peyton is clearly one of the best there ever has been at playing QB. However, getting Ws in this game is all about the team. No single player, no matter how good he is at his position is going to get your team to the SB by his lonesome. In fact, the main judgment regarding Manning as far as this goes is that his cap hit has been so huge, it actually has made it difficult (actually impossible) for Indy to build a team around him capable of even making (much less winning) the SB. This year they MAY do it because: 1. Polian has done a great job getting Manning the help he needs in terms of a WR to throw to and an RB to run the ball to even allow Indy to have a productive O even with the best QB in the league. 2. They got the bestD HC in the league to turn the sow's ear of an underinvested D into a silk purse. 3. Polian has done a great job assessing players and negoiating contracts to give them the ST which is just as essential as a good QB to thm winning. 4. The idiot Vanderjagt has been drop-dead accurate. The irony here is that while both good QB play and good play by many other aspects of the are essential to winning it all so Manning is necessary. I can actually see Indy having had an easier time of doing what they are trying to do if they had Trent Dilfer instead of Manning and the extra help his cap value would have provided Polian, than the current high wire act they are doing.

Definitely the D and his work sucked in 2005. However, the D and apparently his work sucked in 2001 and 02 and he made a great improvement and produced good performance in 03 and 04. One can certainly take the easy way out and just say case closed (it may well be if both he an the Bills made a tactical/fiscal decision that it will be better for both for him to leave being promoted to HC or Asst. Coach of the Texans rather than get canned in Buffalo meaning his likely next job is as a secondary coach somewhere). However, how do you explain his ability to make to design and install some great adjustments in 04 with the failures of 05? This is really the key to whether keeping him would make any sense for 06 and provide some reasonable hope that we will see improvement in his results in 06 just as there was a drastic improvement of his results achieved in 03 and he did even better in 04. The main argument against the point of view you expressed in your post is that the reality is simply that the case for Bills fans is not closed at all with simply the firing of Gray, the case is closed when you have a better performing DC to replace him. Who do you advocate be hired as the next DC once you can Gray. My guess is that he will not be hired as HC of the Texans because as much as they need D help, they need O help even more. As Gray is the only DC they interviewed, unless the new HC brings a DC with him, I will not be surprised to see Gray end up as the Asst. HC in Houston. This approach helps Gray certainly as he survives the 05 D debacle in Buffalo with a better job. This approach helps the Texans as they get a new D coach whom they were quite impressed with when the Bills demolished the Texans in Game 1. He also is the only DC they interviewed and they and he honestly seemed to be impressed in the interview but it would seem to be a huge stretch to make him HC after his last troubled season. In addition, it looks for now as if Houston remains committed to Carr and thus will pass on taking Texas boy Vince Young and being able to bring in Texas boy Gray back home and demonstrate progress in African-American hiring (given the NFL's dismal rcord of A-A hiring of HC's given the majority of workers being A-A this is a real issue though not one particular to the Texans) makes the bonuses of hiring Gray make sense. Most important for us Bills fans it works out wonderfully for Ralph fiscally if Gray gets taken by the Texans as an Asst HC because we will escape some significant contract owed Gray (money which if his next job is out of the NFL like being HC of some Texas college he gets to double dip the salary.

I know a lot of folks live in a world where there are only two choices great and horrible, but the rest of us live in a world known as reality where unfortunately life is a bit more complicated that making an easy judgment based on whether you classify a co-ordinator as being totally bad or totally great. Jerry Gray really has striked me as being a mixed bag in his work for the Bills. I think the results clearly indicate this. The results sucked in his first two years under GW. The product improved alot in performance once LeBeau was brought in to install his system rather than the GW system which was simply not a good one for the player talent we had. The product improved even more in 2004 with LeBeau gone and gray totally in charge under offensive guru HC MM. The results sucked again last year. Overall, I would think and hope the Bills could do better than these mixed results. However, there seem to me to be plenty of other reasons in terms of the huge discontinuity of the firings to find opportunities to retain the things that worked well at various points under TD while much of the failed efforts were swept away in the firing. Particularly because there are some things which are going to be kept like it or not (an HC with 3 year's left on his contract, the players for the most part). The question is not one of whether Gray is totally incompetent or whether none of this was his fault. The question is whether given Gray's pluses and minuses, whether one can galvanize the pluses to make it work and most important WHO is a better alternative at DC. Outside of some former HCs who have simil;ar mixed record of failure and success whom I do not see MM being comfortable with having a former HC like Haslett or Capers standing over his shoulder, i simply have not heard or seen anyone make a good case to hire someone else as DC. To me, this is the +/- on Gray- 1. He did not prove capable in his first two years of running a scheme inappropropriate to the players here. The GW scheme worked in TN because of players like Kearse at DE and Bishop at SS. I'm sorry, it just was not going to work with Chidi Ahanatou and Raion Hill. To the extent Gray advocated or bought off on this he is to blame for the results. 2. However, though i expected the continued el foldo from him when he was retained for 2003, I actually was impressed with him doing the play-calling for the LeBeau D and mastering it so quickly. This was an indicator that it was probably GW primarily at fault for our inappropriate D in 2001-02 or at least that Gray had learned the lessons of failure if it was his mistake that Jenkins had something left to be our SS. 3. Gray's work in 2004 was really impressive in that it is a reasonable thought that the D improvement in 2003 is mostly linked to LeBeau's zone blitz. However, it seems far more likely that Gray beat out LeBeau for the total DC job for good reason. If the D had still been top 10 but lost a step when LeBeau left the theory would conform to the facts that the improvement was LeBeau's work. However, in 2004, the gameplanning was all Gray's and the in game adjustments were all Gray's as LeBeau was long gone. The performance in these two areas plus what appeared to be nice work recalibrating the team in the 2 opportunity of the bye week and this corresponding with the winning streak which occured afterwards and got the Bills to the brink of the playoffs last year are indicators of some good Gray skills and work. 4. The results this year are a big minus, but I think leaves open the question of whether the 2006 Gray could repeat the improvement he showed in 2003 and 004 if the overall Bills ship of state is righted. Maybe or maybe not, but we'll have to see what Marv comes up with and how he dovetails with MM to make intelligent judgments about Gray. In the interim we may have no choice if he goes to an HC job with the texans or a college in Texas. it does make fiscal sense for the Bills to see this well-paid DC decide to leave rather than have us pay him big bucks because we gave him the boot (the most credible events that line up with this theory is that his position coaches got the boot). However, overall, Gray has been a mixed bag and I could see how it would work with him under the correct circumstances. Even worse I have seen no one advocate a working alternative or person for 2006 DC under Marve and MM.

The main problem with this theory is that it does not conform with the success the Raiders had with him as HC. The fact is that he was 56-41 in his 5 years with the Raiders and HC'ed the team to three playoffs. In contrast there has been a virtual revolving door of HCs with losing records (Gruden was the exception) since then. If you accept your premise that he ran a terrible team in an undisiciplined way, then you also have to accept that this is the way to produce far better results than the Bills have produced or that other Raider's HC's produced. How do you explain this disconnect?

I doubt Levy will be back as HC, because the HC job when done correctly and when done the way Levy did it before is really about 3-4 hours each week on the sidelines and 14+ hours per day in the film room, in meetings, on the phone, etc. etc. etc. I simply doubt that an 80 year old guy no matter how driven he is and even how young he feels is going to be able to or want to punch the clock of the HC job. Levy deserves a lot of credit (though he and Ralph may simply be deranged) for even taking on the large tasks of being the GM. It involves keeping a firm rein and getting knowleddge about what is happening on the field with the team, but add in all the negotiations with partners like St. John Fisher, ticket agent Tops, contract negotiations (though it looks like Levy will simply oversee Overdorf, which is a large task but at least does not involve direct negotistions), ripping government off for every tax dollar you can get etc. I simply do not see Levy being able to shift gears so quicklly if he wanted to and many a younger man has already been eatern up and failed to produce trying to do both jobs. He could have Alzheimer's nuttsiness at his age, but the fact that one guy has trouble handling simply one of the jobs in the modern NFL just makes if so fundamentally stupid and impossible for Levy to essentially handle both jobs f he tried to return to coaching a few weeks in that there is no evidence and it is not even doable thAt this could happen.

I think Gray has shown a lot of positives (to go along with some poor performances running the GW designed D his first two years and coaching a D rhat I think gave up when they saw that TD had decided to use this season as a training camp for his QB of the future. Gray may well be gone and this will be good for the Bills if we get someone in here who is better. However, I think the good things that Gray has done here make that no an easy person to find. Specifically, I liked about Gray. 1. After the team performed horribly on D in 2002 I would not have been upset at all if Gray was let go as Sheppard was the year before. However, this did not happen because if you can the DC right after canning the OC it reveals the real thing they needed to do which was can GW. However, when the Bills took the figleaf of hiring LeBeau to scrape an inappropriate D for a Bills team that did not have a DE of Kearse quality or a SS of Bishop quality, i was quite surprised to see how well Gray did learning the LeBeau D quickly and well so that it was he who called D signals for a productive Bills D. One must clearly give LeBeau a lot of the credit because it was his design, but learning a nw system and calling it effectively is not simple either and Gray demonstrated to me that our D problems in 01 and 02 were more GW problems than Gray. 2, I as also surprised to see the Bills choose Gray over LeBeau and expected the D to be good last year but to decline in output without LeBeau to gameplan or to help disgnose, design and implement adjustments at half time. Instead the D production improved and given LeBeau's absence and the fact he had nothing to do with game design and th adjustments (not to mention the plaucalling) of the D last year, I think gray showed some great stuff here as well. He demonstrated during last year's bye week when he engineered changes which were critical to last year's streak that IMHO he can ge the job done under the right circumstances.. For me it is a question of whether under Marv Levy with MM hanging on and with the olayers we have whether it is the right circumstances, It well could be and just as when Gray improved his performance in 2003-04 over 01-02 he probably will do so again in 06 as long as his personal relationships with marv, MM and the players are good. If you want someone else, then who? I do not think it will be positive to have an experienced former HC standing over MM's head waiting for him to fail and i think MM is a offensive minded coach and I don't see it working with the inexperienced defensive version of Sheppard coming here. If Gray is canned, then MM deserves to be canned as well.

I think that the team's ineffectivenerss with JP at the helm and the relatively better performance and an added degree of comfidence behind Holcomb who has enough vet experience not to panic has clearly won Holcomb a competition in camp. However, it is the same height of panic which twice saw TB give up on QBs who later went on to become two of the best in the game for the Bills to simply give up on JP. This is not to say JP is a Favre or Steve Young, but he shows himself to be a lot tougher and competent than Rob Johnson and the Bills were quite willing to give RJ every chance in the book plus despite the fact it was pretty clear he was not going to survive long enough to be our QB of the future. My sense is that the Bills will follow the line which Marv laid out yesterday that: 1. The future is now and the Bills will put the player out there whom they feel they can win with this season. 2. The best player will play even if he is a 7th round pick and his competition came in a higher round. While, I still think that the big bucks JP got will be a factor and he will likely be at worst a first among equals with Holcomb come pre-season, the two will battle it out and win it on the field. At this point Holcomb is the better QB, but JP has too much natural talent and Holcomb has not produced a consistent season in his career. It all comes down to whether JP can set himself up for a bust-out season this year. I think he still needs a little more time looking over thecenter at the D to e this time, but his demographics are good enough and Holcomb has never experienced consistent success in his career that I can easily see how JP can pass him by this off-season or with some good pre-season performances. Barring injury I suspect JP will be our startingQB in our first game,

I see two viable alternatives to the minority interview policy fo the NFL. As bad or stupid as the current minority interview policy may be, these other two options strikes me as worse. A. The NFL could leave things as they are and in this state of nature the free-market would result in fair treatment of individuals based on their talents and skills. The status quo is a viable alternative simply because change is hard in our society. However, one is simply naive if you believe that an actual free market exists in the reality of the NFL where a person is judged only or mainly on the stength of their character and their ability to succeed and not within the good old boy network that has some ideas and actions which simply do not hire people capable of doing a good job. In order for someone to honestlly maintain that the status quo or our alleged free market for hiring NFL HCs works to hire an individual w/o regard to non-skill factors race, then the person has the uphill (actually impossible) task of explaining why there have (and still are) so few African-American HCs relative the pool of potential candidates as a majority of the forner NFL players are A-A. Being a player is not essential to being a good NFL HC, but it certainly is one important factor that creates the pool of potential coaches. I can easily see how there might be a fair result where there were actually even substantially fewer A-A HCs than A-A players, but the results have been that up until Art Shell became the first A-A HC lwess than 20 years ago (and unlike Rich Kotite despite having a winning record as an HC he never has gotten rehired after he got canned despite leading his team to the playoffs) there had been no A-A HCs despite the NFL having a long history of training A-As as players. When you look at the current roster of A-A HCs, and compare it to their record of achievement as meeasured in W/L while obviously your race does not guaranttee success, the real question here is an explanation of the discrepancy between the # of A-A HCs vs. the number of HCs in the hiring pool of former players based in some Jimmy Greek/Al Campanis "some of my best friends are Blacks" exolanation that through nature or nurture A-a simply lack some of the necessties to be a successful NFL coach. The record of making the playoffs amassed by the relatively small numbers of A-As HCs in the NFL shows that clearly A-A can suceed as HCs in this league when given a fair chance. Racists have been reduced to demanding that there is no proof that A-As have the right stuff until one wins an SB and that we should go merrily on our way with A-A candidates have greater than the usually tough road to get one of these few jobs. Clearly the stutus quo of letting the allegedly free marker create quality in non-racial HC hiring has not worked at all and is unfair to individual and has resulted in less qualified idiots like Kotite (and dare I say non playoff making as an HC Gregg Williams) get their shot while Marvin Lewis has to settle for an Asst HC job until he finally gets a shot and does a great job with Cincy. The argument we need to here from those who oppose the current A-A interview policy is not whether it is good (its not) but whether it or the alleged free-market status quo is better. i think when one looks at the issues of fairness to individuals (I'm sorry that Rich Kotite has not been rehired but him getting denied a shot becuase of his race is simply less on an issue than the potential that Marvin Lewis (used as an example so comment though not fixation on this case would be appropriate IMHO) would clearly have been denied his shot due to race not to long ago and given the statistical results there is a case which demands action that race MAY have played a role in his not getting a shot even under the current system. B. the seond potentiallty viable system would be some form of quota where the NFL committed itself to some how find a way to hiring more A-A HCs. Even though the results of this idiotic system may well prove to be more fair or produce better results than the status quo, IMHO it would be so stupid and intractable that I do not even consider it. From my standpoint the minority interview policty of the NFL is not a good one at all. However, dumb options like enforced quotas or taking no action and living with the alleged free market of the status quo are so bad and so indefensible that even the dumb interview policy is much better. I actually do have to give the dumg interview policy some credit however, as I think without it, not only would a talent like Marvin Lewis been still frozen out if the situation of only a few years ago still reined, but a producer like Lovie Smith HC of Chicago probably would not have even gotten an interview in today's NFL without the mandate. Ckearly there are idiots like Matt Millen who are generally non-successes at GM work who have not gotten the message that life must and will change and he needs to fined to get him to even fairly consider all candidate based on their skills (it is ironic that having avoided fairness to get the HC he wanted he then fired hio choice). So claim the current HC minority interview system is stupid. i aggree. However, i think it is the best viable system the NFL can come up with to address this problem in the real world. Do you think that the status quo of the alleged free market produced better results or a more fair outcome where folks were judged based primarily on the job they could do? I do not think that you or anyone can make a logical or demonsterable argument that is the case. I'd love to hear a better alternative, so if Jerry Gray gets in the door because of thi policy and wows somebody, then more power to him.

Just cause Kelly is a great player does not necessarily mean he would be a great coach. In fact, given some his past moments of interaction with his teammaes and the public: 1. His role in the "Bickering Bills" where because it takes two to tango he was one of the parties at fault. 2. Persistent discussion of his predilection for being a party boy which could be trumped up but could be a true relection of him as a person from the talk of his getting bombed before the 1st SB loss to throwing drinks in the face of obnoxious women. 3. His business here going down the tubes and them pullin off a midnite Baltimore Colts like Mayflower van skedaddle which was the way to save business profits but left a ton of Buffalo small business vendors in the lurch holding bad paper for cleaning the restaurant towels, providing services, etc. 4. A weird episode where he crashed a plane while in the Alaska outback outgunning some bambis and his story of his "dramatic" efforts to save his life made no sense when compared to the physical evidence or the pilots story of them crashlanding in ankle deep water. He showed a lot of strength dealing with the Hunter tragedy and maybe he finally has become an adult due to this unimaginable horror/ However, Jimbo would have to show a lot of growth and that he has exceeded the personal development he showed as an athlete before any Bills fan is as comfortable with him as a coach as we were overjoyed with him as a player and on-field general.

I still hold it against Carroll when the Pats under Carroll lucked into a last second win against the Bills and he gave the choke sign to the Bills as they left the field. It was a classless juvenile act and I took great pleasue when the Bills beat them in the future and when he got canned early in his pro HC career when he failed at NE.

Well put my mark down in the heretic column as though I agree with folks that Gray's wprk certainly was not productive at all this year, his work in 2003 and in 2004 was quite impressive IMHO. I think he is not the perfect coach as his initial work as DC for GW was not prodyctuve and his work within the madhouse run by TD and MM this year also showed that he does not have the ability to overcome a bad context snd the great ones make their own context. However, Gray impressed me with these specifics: 1. The Bills D under Gray was horrid in 2001 and 2002, but as the team was going through cap hell giving them a mulligan for 2001 (particularly with the injury to Cowart and the dumb contract work of cutting JH and HJ). Gray also deserves to be reamed for his role in buying into or promoting the idea of Robinson having enough left at LB and Jenkins having enough left at safety. I blame GW the most for these assessment errors as the HC who used to coach these guys should have known better if this was Gray's error out of some misplaced loyalty for old teammates, but if this as primarily GW's idea then I actually give Gray a positive mark for managing well with these players who could not cut it. 2. I started becoming impressed with Gray with the 2003 finish of this D in the top 5 statistically in the league. This was clearly driven by the switch to the LeBeau run-blitz scheme from the GW 4-3 scheme which did not work with the Bills not having a Jevon Kearse talent at DE or a Blaine Bishop at SS. Gray impressed me because though I assumed he retained the DC title only so there was no clear demonstration that GW deserved to be fired after his second year (despite the O dragging the team to an 8-8 record after GW's first choice Sheppard got canned). However, Gray demonstrate an ability to master the LeBeau scheme incredibly quickly as he did the day of game playcalling effectively with a totally different D than he was trained in. 3. The again suprising decision to me that LeBeau was gone and Gray got the full reins in 2004, i think really was a tour de force in great work by Gray in 2004. If in fact, the D sucess was all LeBeau' work, I think we would see some real signs of that in 2004 in its production. LeBeau was not going to be around to gameplan each week nor would he be there to make adjustments at halftime to deal with places where he gameplan wa not working. I really expected the statistical production to drop into the top 10 at best without LeBeau here, instead the D performance improved and I think it is not credible to not give Gray some of the credit for this importance or attribute this gain to all to LeBeau (not to mention GW as giving him credit for this D's spotty good performancs is simply silly). Gray showed a great ability to diagnose, design and implement adjustments (the tour de force was the run D adjustment against Miami which shut down Sammy Morris who shredded the team in the first half). Though sometimes the gameplan was not great, he easily balanced this and produced good results with some great midgame adjustments last year. Gray also was very impressive last year with some coverage changes he designed and implemented using the bye week last year and it seemed to be a key part of the greatly improved Bills production in the second half of last season as they started 0-4 but then peeled off a massive winning streak until they ran into LeBeau the master in Pitts in the last game. This brings us back to this year and the piss=poor performance. I have no problem with the Bills moving on to another DC. The key to this league is producion and what have you done for me lately. The D did not produce this year and with that Gray can reasonably be gone. However, to simply declare him incompetent simply strikes me as the usual disppointed whining of hurt fans and ignores the fact that Gray can play a very good role and do great work if the other facets of the team are also working well. The Bills need to right the leadership of state for this team at GM, and with a good GM who is not passive/aggressive scared of getting fired again by an HC he hired I think as in 2003 and 04. Gray has demonstrated he can do th job productively after a bad start. With a good GM, I think he could do the job in 2006.

The structure you describe makes sense if some moves are made by thie relatively the same front office IF it makes some moves to show that there is a big difference between how they think and operate and how TD thought and operated. My sense is that if you want big changes in your ultimate W/L then you need big changes in how you operate. As in real life, staying the course makes little sense when staying the course is producing bad results. Will this braintrust be different: Modrak- He clearly was involved in building a winner in Philly and has made some reasonable personnel judgments for the most part in making choices for the Bills (MW was th big mistake and everybody makes some mistakes and it is simply unclear how much blame he deserves for mistakes like MW or good calls assessments which were made like getting Peters as a UDFA). I think he can be different the question is will he be? MM- There was a reasonable fear he was Dr. Jekyll at the beginning of last season but he proved to be Mr. Hyde as he stayed th course and results turned around last season. However, Jekyll (and maybe Heckle) emerged this year as he lost control of the team. However, if the decision to go with JP was MM's idea this is bad as i think the team saw the job being handed to JP as a declaration by the team that their first priority was winning in 2006 rather than 2005. I'm not saying that Bledsoe was a winner we should have kept, but that JP should have earned rather than being given the job. Whn he was given the job I think the players (who ultimately determine whether you win or lose) simply played like this was training camp rather than going for it. The Moulds situation was interesting in that it seemed that the players did not really come to Moulds defense in this situation (though they did not come to MMs defense either as Ralph left him hanging). Clements- He is another guy who has showed past production as a QB coach and in his first OC year who showed nothing this year. If MM surivives and there is a reasonable explanation for why he sucked this year, I can deal with him getting a mulligan for this year. Gray- Despite the grief he gets for the horrible D performance this year, I think he has shown great positives once he escaped the GW shackles and the team D was in the top 5 satistically as he quickly mastered the play calling with the LeBeau run blitz. Last year he demonstrated a great abiliy to design and implement adjustments that squashed positives for opposing teams from the first half (remember last season how Morris gained 80+ yards in the first half for Miami and next to nothing in the second half). He also engineered some general changes during the bye week which were critical to the second half turnaround last year. However, the D simply sucked this year and the problems were much larger than simply losing Phat Pat or even TKO to injury (the run D sucked with him in for 2-1/2 games and Crowell was no TKO but played credibly as a replacement. So blaming Gray for the D failures (and Krumrie for the DL failures) is not unreasonable. However, he does still seem to have a good relationship with the players and if he stays because the HC is comfortable with him, and there are big changes in the Modrak approach then I'm willing to see him get a mulligan as well. Again the key is big changes in W/L has got to meansome big changes in attitude and operations as staying this course would be a dumb course.

The Bills need to make a big change in the front office if they are going to have a reasonable chance at making big changes in next year's W/L. I think the chances are far more likely that they will return at least to thw winning record that this virtually same team (minus Bledsoe was the biggest change and I think that it was more of a minus the way it was handled than in on field performance) achieved just last year. There is far from a gurantee that this TD crew will be able to embody the changes necessary so that the players believe they can improve (I think this was the bad element this year in that the players did not perform in 2005 at even their 2004 levels because they believed that the front office and TD in particular had given up on this season with winning as his first priority and instead he was using this season mostly as a training camp for JP and if the D carried him then great). Modrak will need to show that he is committed to winning now either by putting his stamp on the team or by turning it over to MM for real and MM somehow signaling that TD's departure liberates him to win now.

I think the most correct answer to the problem you are bringing up is simply: Don't single source for news! Why do folks seem to insist that there is one single best source of news when actually any one outlet be it a newspaper, TV, radio, blogs etc consists of a bunch of folks. Some are good and some are bad and no single outlet covering a wide variety of newsbeats is the "best" all the time. Even tougher for us news "consumers" is that even the best have bad-hair days and do not quite get the story right. We as news readers (viewers or whatever) have a very different job than news providers. They work for businesses who do want to make you subscribe solely to their outlet and give them all of your nickels. If you do subscribe to one outlet or one point of view they will be happy as they have all your news nuckels but guarantee you are going to be misinformed or at least missing a lot of stuff. Is Fox or Cnn better? Is TV or the newspapers better? The answer to these and similar questions is neither.

I aggree with what Sully says here but as far as his writing it just shows that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The point I am making has been misunderstood before so I'm not surprised that the evidence you site and seem to indicate that it goes against my view actually supports my point. The key is that rather than drafting a QB in the 1st, it seems a team is better off spending a late pick for their QB and hope they catch Tom Brady as lightening in a bottle or if he sucks at least he is cheap. Then. if you decide to go with 1st round or a highly drafted QB, there will likely be a Plummer, Dilfer, Steve Young or favre on the market and you can get the advantage of someone else going through their growing pains and losing and you can get them and win. Of the 12 playoff teams only 4 ) the Mannings, Palmer, and RoboQB in Pitts can honestly be said to have been led by their 1st round QB pick. The other two 1st round QB choices are the damaged Leftwich and Grossman who were useful cannot be pointed to as essential facets of the team's making the playoff run. I think the key here is that folks seem to get so exercised about the importance of QB that they many must judge your 50/estimate as being too low. One of the Bills major problems since the loss of Jimbo is an over-focus on the QB position. This false sense of importance has led to us: 1. Over-reaching in spending a 2nd rounder on Collins and then rushing him a long to start before the happy-feet were trained out of him as best could be done. 2. Spending a 3rd in desperation for Billy Joe Idiot when Butler realized TC was not the man. 3. Paying a huge bonus to RJ before he proved himself and giving the QB jpb to RJ without competition even though he had promised Flutie a fair shot. it got even stupider when it turned out Butler had agreed to roll DF's achieved incentives into his base pay which forced us into a $10 million cap hit at QB. 4. Resigning Bledsoe after his horrendous 03 when TD should have just accepted this as a wash allowing for cutting Bledsoe after he had a good 02. One need only look at the dozen or so teams to appear in the SB to see that drafting a QB in the first round is not a necessary or even a good strategy for getting to (much less winning) the SB. Peyton may well do it this year with the help of Harrison, James, a great D coached by Dungy and a great ST assembled by Polian and giftred with that idiot Vanderjagt, bot it seems clear to me that the record of success indicates that one builds a winning team in some other manner than drafting a stud QB in the first and Peyton is little more than the exception that proves this rule.

Based on the fever pitch many fans seem to have about drafting a QB one would suspect that a team MUST draft a franchise QB in the 1st round if they expect to have any chance whatsoever of even making it to not to say winning the SB. However a look at the playoff teams once again is consistent with the FACT that no team has won an SB with a QB they chose in the 1st round since Dallas chose Aikman in 1989 and he led them to consecutive SB victories during his career. Last year was actually a banner year for team looking for SB glory and drafting a QB in the 1st as their mechanism for getting there. However, McNabb's appearance for Philly in a losing cause marked the first time since McNair led the Titans to a loss in the 1999 game that a 1st round drafted QB even led his team to a berth in the final game. It is simply a fact that if you bet against a team who picked a QB in the 1st round to win the SB you'd have over a decade of correct choices. The closest a 1st round choice has come in that time of being a key part to an SB run is none other than Drew Bledsoe who did play QB in the majority of a must win game during the SB run of a team that was actually led by a 6th round drafted QB. I'm not saying that all 1st rounders suck, I;m simply saying that they are better found and trained through other mechanisms such as Trent Dilfer leading the Ravens or delivered to you when Indy 1st round choice Elways fiorced his way out of town. This year's playoff gang includes the usual retinue of 1st round drafted QB studs like Peyton Manning, but as is typical in almost all years the majority of playoff teams are led by QBs acquired through some other means than spending a 1st round pick on that player. Go figure.

The problem is real life. The next time a QB wins an SB leading the team that picked him in the 1st round to an SB he will be the first QB to do this since Dallas chose Aikman in the first round in 1989. McNabb leading Philly to the SB and getting a loss was the first time a team even smelled the SB led by a QB they chose in the first round since McNair led the Titans there in 1999. This stat is to some extent an anomaly that it has proven to be he rule for so long, but it is an anomaly which is based upon a 1st round stud QB who is good weighing so heavily against the cap that a team like Philly could not afford to get good WRs that McNabb needed to get over the top. It was only due to the fluke of Philly obtaining a stud FA WR last year that empowered them to make the Game, but we all saw this year the meltdown that led to as Owens demanded a ton more money than his cap restrained FA deal that bought him to Philly and they melted down. Indy is interesting this year because they have made the huge cap investment to the offensive side of their game to hang onto Manning and also keep Harrison and James who play a key role in Manning being such a stud. They supplemented this O talent by having Polian who has cut some excellent deals to maintain the ST, gotten and held the best kicker in the game, and hired the best defensive HC in the game to balance out the overinvestment they had to make in Manning. The irony may be that the suicide of Dungy's son may only serve to keep this anamoly going yet another year.

We are in a strong negotiating position with NC. We can franchise him at a cheap price relative to replacing him. We can easily afford the large one year cap hit which comes with the franchise tag as the cap number is going way up with the new TV contract. We need to resign him because he is probably the best CB on the team, but he has come no where near his claim of being the best CB in the league so we can negotiate within the framework of salaries being paid today even though we can afford to pay more than that. I think all parties are aware that the tag option is quite doable for us and it makes more sense for NC to cut a long-term deal which will both pay him near or above tag level money upfront and bind him to us for the forseeable future.

A look at the overall standings in the league gives me a very strong sense of it being a league of haves and have-nots. True, there was some final weekend suspense as to who would make the playoffs, but this tension consisted of whether a few teams would fail to make it with double digit win production or not as the league has really divided into a fair chunk of teams being simply bad and having no chance whatsoever for the playoffs while a few teams balance them off by simply walking through the last few games of the season trying to get healthy for the playoff run. The competition in the final weekend really was in a couple of games with KC falling short with 10 wins and the NFC East with the Boys falling short of 10 wins and missing out. Maybe it is just the same as last year with the Bills failing to win their last game and falling a game short of the playoffs, but the added wildcard for next season is that I think next year is going to see a huge jump in the salary cap of teams which is going to take the locked in payscale of teams generally constrained by the cap and allow teams to sign exorbitant contracts for a few players. I suspect this will result in an even more bizarre discrepancy between the high and low ((actually a low NFL salary is still extraordinarily high by human standards) salaries within teams. To the extent this also dovetails with a bizarre discrepancy between high and low performance of teams in terms of records, this is simply going to be a bizarre off-season. The Bills may be leading the charge in terms of bizarre situations. There will be a tendency for teams to want a quick fix glitzy contract for the team, but the Bills are not going to see their problems solved by any quick fixes. We'll see what happens.

Under the rules of the CBA, the Bills will be able to hold onto Peters for next year with no raise and will even be able to hold onto him after next year with only the most minor of qualifying offers. There is not need to lock up Peters with a contract since by rule he is totally locked up for next year (his third) and will be locked up defacto his fourth year though de jure (by rule) an opponent could make him an offer which the Bills could almost certainly easily match or be compensated for losing him far above his market rate. It is only after four seasons (2008) that Peters will have the market leverage to walk if the Bills do not lock him up.

I find it hard to intelligently answer questions about whether MM, Gray, Clements and even some of the players should stay or go depending upon what decision Ralph makes about whether to keep the team's fate in TD's hands or not. If TD goes I'm alot more comfortable with the new GM deciding that he does not have a good enough relationship with MM letting him go. However, in general, I think that it will be fine if MM stays and actually that the team will reach the goal of making the playoffs quicker if they are building upon what MM has done well the past two years rather than building from a total new start. However, if TD stays then I think it is almost essential that MM goes because there simply needs to be some type of major housecleaning to wash the 2005 failure out of our system. I cannot see however, giving TD yet anoher chance to wreck this team after his huge failure in hiring GW as HC instead of going after Fox or Lewis. He got his mulligan when he hired MM after having to can GW. Having failed to make the playoffs again he is out of mulligans. He has done a great job with the business side of the game, and some outstanding individual moves like drafting McGahee, ot trading Peerless. and recognizing that a team is probably better off trading its first pick than making it. I can see Ralphie hiring another football guy to run the team and relegating TD to business if he will accept that (I doubt it so good bye TD). If the new GM is comfortable with MM I can see keeping him (and thus much of his braintrust), but if TD stays then Ralphie needs to suck it up and eat a bunch of MM contract and I'm not sure how he can force TD to manage this team correctly with his 3rd HC hire in his reign of error.