Offside Number 76

I was going to say yes, and then I saw this. Since you, IMO, know the draft better than anyone on this board, I'll now change my answer to "definitely yes."

I'm of the "draft a QB every year" line of thought, so I hope the Bills will take one in the late rounds, keep Brown, and grant Thigpen his release.

I don't want to start a thread for this. So I'll say that here's the reason we endlessly whine about the cheats: http://deadspin.com/5904127?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_facebook&utm_source=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow That, and the cheating.

Or Spiller...

Thank you. I had forgotten about the second fourth-round pick, and I moved on to the fifth round page after seeing Randle.

Hardy Brown died in a mental institution.

Astro, I likely won't get to listen to your segment. But do you really think the Bills won't take a single offensive lineman? Drafttek's latest mock has it that way.

That misses the question of why it is included.

Hey, I hope he falls all the way down to the Bills' second round pick. They then can take two good players who are being passed over. Floyd, who illegally consumed alcohol, and this guy.

Best answer I've seen so far. Adams is not a member of the union, but still, best answer I've seen.

For my part, anyway, I'm not questioning whether it is a condition of employment in the NFL. I'm questioning why it is a condition of employment. And "because it's illegal" doesn't work for me, for the reasons I gave above. EDIT: It's also not illegal everywhere.

I understand what you're saying, but that's kind of putting the cart before the horse. If the NFL didn't care about marijuana (and IMO, obviously, it shouldn't), it wouldn't test players for it. So there would be no suspension for that and no "terribly stupid thing" like getting caught on an announced test for it. As for arrests, I can't imagine anyone doing time for smoking the stuff, although I never was caught back in the day. Seems to me that possession of a personal use quantity charges seldom result in jail time (so the player won't miss practice or games) even in the rare instances in which they're brought.

You didn't really mean me, did you? I doubt that I ever will have a job where I'm tested for marijuana. And I have NO idea whether Safeway or Sears care about marijuana or why they would. Because... Seriously.

I don't smoke it anymore myself. And the league probably doesn't test for jaywalking or cycling on the sidewalk, which is right about where I put marijuana use on the list of important crimes. Does the league test the (admittedly rare) under-21 candidate for alcohol use? Do other leagues where under-21s are drafted regularly? Doubt it. This is stupid. Not yelling at you.

For marijuana?! Why does the league care about marijuana? This is annoying.

Thanks, mods, for combining the "when will the sked come out" thread with this one. I enjoyed scrolling through 80-some-odd posts before getting to the meat of the discussion. Sometimes, it's ok to leave separate threads separate. Hell, we have 200 individual "my mock draft" threads!

What do the Bills pay in rent, anyway?

For those interested in the "big event" aspect of this discussion, an interview with Dottie Gallagher-Cohen in today's News provides some data and some perspective: http://www.buffalonews.com/business/article811878.ece

And now John Mara wants to eliminate kickoffs completely: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/04/14/john-mara-nfl-evolving-toward-eliminating-kickoffs/

Well, except no one was attempting to play football that day.

I guess Ryan Denney's 31 starts may not be enough for him to make the list here. This is hilarious.

If you want to trace it all the way back, a number one OVERALL pick (Turgeon) turned into Andrew Peters. But given LaFontaine's inability to do much post-concussion, and the fact that the Sabres did very, very well the seasons immediately following the trade, it wasn't as horrible as it sounds.

Indianapolis is the 12th largest city in the country and has the infrastructure (hotel beds being the main component, as JW said) to pull that off. Remember, in addition to one Super Bowl, Indy's suburb hosts one of the most famous auto races in the world. NCAA is headquartered in Indy, and that city hosts the Final Four every five years. It's set up for large events. Buffalo is not. Further to JW's point, I believe that when Detroit (which also is smaller than Indy) hosted the Super Bowl, and people had to stay in Windsor, the situation was viewed as far from ideal. Would I like Buffalo's economy to be more like Indy's? Sure. If that's what you meant by "Buffalo could learn a lot from Indy," then I'm right there with you. (And New York could learn a lot from Indiana, too.) But if your point is that Buffalo should start planning for a future Super Bowl, I've got to disagree. The stadium is relatively far down the list of reasons why Buffalo can't do that right now.

Emerson Etem was speaking the truth about teenagers, for whom there really is nothing downtown. (Here and in a lot of other downtowns, but I don't know about Tampa. How did downtown Saskatoon do with the teenaged set this year?) The grownups, on the other hand, had a blast, and the Convention & Visitors Bureau, which has been significantly overhauled in recent years, did a TERRIFIC job. Greeters at every hotel, all day and well into the evenings, with diretions, brochures, ideas, and everything. It was a massive effort and a successful one. I'm gathering that you weren't here for WJC, just as I wasn't for the Frozen Four.

I didn't live here when we had the Frozen Four, but I'm sure we have the infrastructure for that. We seem to do fine with early rounds of NCAA basketball, and the city did just fine with WJC, too. We can pull off quite a lot here, but a Super Bowl is way, way out of the question.