Orton's Arm

By "INTs" you mean one interception, on a play where the offensive line let him get hit as he threw. The Miami defender in the backfield caused the interception, so it should be blamed on the offensive line which allowed that defender to arrive the the backfield so quickly. Likewise, one of his two fumbles was clearly and inarguably the fault of the offensive line. Edwards obviously made some mistakes today, most notably the first fumble. But he also threw for 227 yards on a day when the offensive line did a lousy job of pass protection, even by its ultra-low standards for the 2008 season. The absence of Reed hurt a lot more than many people may realize, and Royal's complete ineptitude as a pass catching TE hurt Edwards' stats as well.

There's a lot I disagree with in this post. 1) You identify Edwards as one of the two main factors in this loss. I disagree with that. With little or no pass protection, a depleted receiving corps, a horrible game from Royal, and receivers who got outplayed by the Miami secondary, and some questionable play calling, how much opportunity do you feel Trent had, today, to win the game for us? 2) You state that the Dolphins wouldn't have scored more than 16 points if it hadn't been for the turnovers. That's not true. They scored 17 points off non-turnover drives. The offense handed them 2 points on the safety, and another three points in giving Miami the ball deep in Buffalo territory. So blame 5 Miami points on the Bills' offense. After the safety, Miami got the ball at its own 42, and drove to the Buffalo 16. The resulting FG is the fault of the Bills' defense, not the Bills' offense. The Bills' defense was responsible for 20 Miami points, the offense for the other 5. 3) You blame both Edwards' fumbles on him, and him alone. I'm with you on the first fumble, but you don't have a leg to stand on with respect to the second. It was a pass play. Between the two of them, Derrick Dockery and Jason Peters barely slowed Joey Porter down on his way to Edwards. Porter barely even broke stride. Edwards got hit from his blind side and fumbled as a result. Why do you place 100% of the blame for this on the quarterback? Don't you think that, just maybe, it would have been nice for Edwards to have received even a little blind-side protection on that play? Or do you think that even a minimal level of pass protection is just gravy, and that a real quarterback doesn't need any pass protection at all to make plays? 4) The Bills committed four turnovers in that game. Edwards' first fumble was obviously on Edwards. Edwards' second fumble was obviously on the offensive line. On the interception, the offensive line once again provided poor pass protection. Edwards got rid of the ball quickly like he was supposed to. But because the defender arrived in the backfield so quickly, Edwards got hit as he threw. The interception that was caused by the defender in the backfield was clearly the fault of the offensive line that let that defender arrive so quickly. Robert Royal's catch + fumble was obviously on Royal. Royal was to blame for just as many turnovers as Edwards (with a lot fewer touches). On a day when Josh Reed was out, Royal needed to come up big. Instead he had three dropped passes to go with his fumble/lost possession. Why no mention of him in your post? 5) You wrote that all those yards acquired by Ginn "didn't really hurt us." You're wrong. Ginn's 175 receiving yards altered field position, helped the Dolphins offense create 20 points, kept the Bills' offense off the field, etc.

I agree with you pretty much across the board. I could envision Royal staying on as a blocking TE, but with three dropped passes, plus that catch+fumble, he's shown once again that he's not the answer as a pass catching TE. The offensive line turned in yet another extremely disappointing pass protection performance. No pass protection + no Josh Reed + Buffalo receivers getting outplayed by the Miami secondary + pathetic Royal performance + questionable play calling = a tough situation in which to put Trent. The Bills are a better team than they appeared to be today. But clearly there are upgrades that need to be made, on the offensive line, pass catching TE, and defensive line, before this will be a top tier team. Let's hope for the best this year, and for those needs to be filled in the 2009 off season!

I'll agree with this up to a point. Unless you're strong in the trenches, the other stuff doesn't matter that much. But once you become strong in the trenches, the other positions matter more. The quarterback situation is a good example of this. When the Bills don't pass protect Trent, he looks a lot like just about any other quarterback who doesn't get pass protection. It doesn't matter whether your quarterback is Joe Montana or Todd Collins, if he spends the game lying on his back. But once you start to provide pass protection, then who your quarterback is, or who your receivers are, starts to matter a lot more. I guess I could sum all this up by saying that being strong on the lines is a necessary condition for having a top tier team, but not a sufficient condition. You hit the nail right on the head! And that's perfectly reasonable. Even the worst NFL GM still makes some good decisions, and even the best one still makes mistakes. To imply that any front office is above criticism, as some appear to have done in this thread, is mistaken. You're exactly right, and I truly, truly, hope that's what happens in the 2009 draft.

I looked up Montana's career stats. He averaged 7.5 yards per pass attempt. His TD-INT ratio was 1.5. This season, Trent Edwards is averaging 8.0 yards per pass attempt. His TD-INT ratio is 2.5. Note: I'm not saying Trent is playing at a Montana-like level, yet. Trent doesn't look as polished as Montana, nor is he at Montana's level in terms of hitting receivers in perfect stride. The reason I mention the numbers Trent has put up this season is to show that he's further along in his development, and playing at a higher level, than some may realize.

After I'd read your post, I thought to myself, I don't really need to make any comments here, because Boone has already done quite a good job of making my points for me. In some ways a better job than I would have done myself. But then I decided to flesh out a few things in order to further defend my position that the current regime has demonstrated far more interest in drafting defensive backs than in offensive linemen.

You express yourself well, but there are things within your post with which I disagree. For example, you wrote that we weren't going to draft a QB at #8 or Ngata, which meant that it was either going to be a SS or LB. At the time, I wanted the Bills to either stay at #8 and take a quarterback like Cutler, or else trade down and take a center like Mangold. Denver had offered us its second round pick for trading down, and Mangold has turned into one of the very best centers in the league. So we had legitimate options with that pick other than just DB or LB. More generally, I'd like you to look at the Bills secondary and how it's been addressed in the draft. They've used two first round picks on it (Whitner and McKelvin), a third (Youboty), and two fourths (Simpson and Corner). They could get rid of McGee and Greer and still have a starting secondary where every player was at least a fourth round pick--even the nickle back. Assuming they keep either McGee or Greer, you're looking at a long-term situation for our secondary where a fourth round pick had been used on the dime back. Using a 4th round pick on the dime back position is worth noting, because the highest pick this regime has used on the OL has been a 5th rounder: Brad Butler. And it's not like the offensive line hasn't been a need area throughout this regime's tenure. When we first brought in Fowler, I expressed the view that he'd fail to provide a significant upgrade over Trey Teague. He's done nothing since then to change my mind. In addition to obvious and gaping holes on the offensive line (such as the center position), this team also has lacked a legitimate pass catching tight end during this regime's tenure. But at least we used a 4th round pick on that position this past draft, demonstrating that having a good pass catching, starting TE may be (almost) as important to this regime as being rock solid at dime back.

You were right to be of two minds, because it was a little of both. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that the Bills "always draft DBs." However, I'm pretty sure that if the current regime had a choice between filling a hole in the secondary and filling a hole at some other position, it would have a moderate to strong preference for the former.

No, I addressed the underlying issue, which is your personal vendetta against me. Evidently the passage of time hasn't weakened its fervor. I'm not going to attempt to have a civil discussion with you, because my past attempts at doing so have merely led you to ridicule my intelligence whenever I disagreed with your position. You continue to ridicule my intelligence, despite the fact the passage of time has proven me right with respect to at least three of our past disagreements. 1) Losman. Obviously. 2) Back before the Takeo Spikes injury, I argued the following. 1) the Bills were in rebuilding mode whether they knew it or not. 2) Because they were in rebuilding mode, they should trade away older players who still had trade value. I mentioned Spikes and Fletcher as two potential candidates. 3) Jay Cutler, whom you thought would be a bust. I would have hoped that my being right on those occasions would have resulted in you rethinking your disrespectful attitude toward me. We could then have had reasonable discussions, instead of wasting bandwidth by calling each other names. Evidently you rethought nothing, and are perfectly content to continue your petty crusade against me. No one can stop you from doing that, but you need to understand that my purpose for being on this forum isn't to engage in petty personal squabbles. If you're ever interested in relating to me on something other than a petty personal squabble level, please let me know.

Thank you! Glad to see someone has a sense of humor around here. Someone else who hangs around this thread evidently does not . . .

Given that you've already posted 11 times in this thread, I don't see why you choose to complain that its underlying topic is irrelevant and uninteresting. On the other hand, I suppose I should point out that many of those 11 responses were merely a continuation of your personal crusade against me, and had nothing to do with the 2009 draft.

Typical.

My poll was about what the bills will do with their 1st round pick in 2009, not what they should do with it. My own personal preferences are 1) OL, 2) DE, 3) TE, 4) LB. The absolute last thing I want to see this team do is use its pick on a member of the defensive secondary. That said, this administration's draft-day priorities seem to be as follows: 1) defensive secondary . . . 2a) the rest of the defense 2b) offensive skill positions . . . 4) offensive line Given this set of priorities, we have to ask ourselves will there be an excuse for this administration to use its first round pick on a DB, come draft day? I believe it will have several potential excuses, as I alluded to in my original post. Take the position of cornerback for example. Since 1993, the Bills have used first round picks on the following CBs: Thomas Smith, Jeff Burris, Antoine Winfield, Nate Clements, and Leodis McKelvin. To a man, every player on that list either is in his first contract or else has gone first contract and out. Given this team's consistent refusal to pay the market rate for CBs, I could easily see the decision being made to let Greer and McGee both walk. And given its penchant for using first round picks to replace whichever CBs just left in free agency, I could easily imagine a first round pick being used to shore up that position. The other two most likely scenarios are drafting a safety to start alongside Whitner, and drafting a LB to replace Crowell once he goes first contract and out. Believe me, I'd love it if I was wrong about this. I'd like nothing better than for the Bills to use their first round pick on a center like Mack. Maybe I've become jaded and cynical because of fifteen year of the Bills dumping first round positions into revolving door CBs while failing to build the offensive line, or a core of talented players to stay with the team for their entire careers.

There are three different scenarios I can envision here: 1. The Bills decide to let Greer walk this year, and McGee the next. The long-term plan would be for McKelvin to man one starting CB spot, the first round pick the other CB spot, with Youboty at nickle. 2. Free Safety. The Bills appear unsatisfied with Ko Simpson, so using a first round pick on a free safety should be considered a strong possibility. 3. Strong safety. The plan here would be to move Whitner to free safety and to use another first round pick on a strong safety.

Are you saying the Bills should give up on drafting offensive linemen early, because of that particular player? Maybe a better approach would be to do a better job of finding out which guys are passionate about playing football than they did in his particular case.

The two games to which you're referring were some of the very worst games, weather wise, in the history of Bills' football. And that's saying quite a lot. The other teams' QBs put up very bad stats, as one would expect when conditions are just too terrible to have much of a passing game. As hard as it was for the other teams' veteran quarterbacks to deal with those conditions, for Trent it was even worse. 1) Prior to last season, Trent had not played in a cold weather game. 2) Trent was a rookie. 3) Fairchild didn't do Trent any favors: he kept calling timing routes on a day when the snow prevented timing routes from working. With timing routes, the QB has to be able to predict exactly where a receiver will be at an exact time. On that day, the ground had enough snow that the receivers kept slipping or otherwise experienced unpredictable instances of getting slowed down by the snow. That's why timing routes on a day like that just won't work. If your goal is to set Trent up for failure--as it may well be--you couldn't ask for anything better than those two games. I find it odd that you need to fixate on something negative about Trent a day after he delivered a 25-for-30, 261 yard, 1 TD/0 INT performance. But just as a drowning man will cling to anything that floats, I suppose you'll continue to cling to those two games in support of your negative view of Trent.

Obviously the time of possession advantage was huge, as was Trent's ability to masterfully execute the passing game. But you've brought up something that bugs me. When the offensive line pass protects, as it did against San Diego, the Bills are very good at passing the ball. But they haven't been good at running the ball, mostly because the run blocking hasn't been there either this season or last. So why should the Bills use more than half their plays on doing something they're very bad at, while using less than half on something they're good at? I went through the play by play, and I counted 19 running plays on first down and only 9 passing plays. That's a little more predictable/Fairchild-like than I'd like to see. There were two cases of run-run-pass. The first resulted in a 3rd and 6, the second resulted in 3rd and 7. Fortunately for Schonert, Trent bailed the offense out of both of those situations, but I don't see why it was necessary to have created them in the first place. When we played the Cardinals, their passing game was working a lot better than their running game. They responded by calling a lot more passing plays than running plays. That worked out okay for them. If we have a Cardinals-like passing game--which we do, at least when the line pass protects--why dilute its effectiveness by squandering so many downs on running plays?

The Arizona game was going to be a loss regardless of who was in there. But over the course of a season, a team with a Trent Edwards as its starter will, all else being equal, see better play from its defense than a team with a J.P. Losman as its starter. This is because of the reasons mentioned earlier: Edwards is good at keeping the other team's defense on the field and at sustaining long, many-play drives. Today he showed exactly how good at this he can be, when the offensive line actually pass protects for a full four quarters. If they could do that consistently, and run block too, this offense would be among the very best in the league.

I'm about as pro-Edwards and anti-JP as they come, but let's be realistic here. Warner played a masterful game. To have won, Trent would have had to have done better: much better. So much better, in fact, that his play would have canceled out Warner's play, plus the advantage the Cardinals received from their better offensive line, plus the advantage they got from their superior defensive effort, plus the advantage they got from their superior receiving corps. Do you honestly believed that Trent could have outplayed Warner by enough to cancel out those three Cardinals' advantages? The bottom line is that the Bills, as a team, got dominated by the Cardinals as a team. No one player could have changed that fact--or at least not by enough to have affected the outcome of the game.

I see a huge difference between Edwards' level of play this season and what Losman has given us in the past. It's nice to know the players have picked up on this as well. Based on Whitner's comments above, as well as some things Schobel has said, it's clear Edwards is the X-factor for this team--a guy who can change the dynamic of a football game. That said, I disagree with Whitner about the Cardinals game: the Bills would have lost no matter who they had playing QB. But I see Whitner's comments as overconfident, not as excuse-making. My reason for this is because I came across some other comments of his where he admitted the defense got dominated. He might even have used the word embarrassed, but I'm not positive of that.

You and I haven't always agreed on everything, but I'm with you on this one. The Cardinals played well enough that the Bills would have needed a complete team to have won that game. We were, as you point out, an offensive line and a defense short of having a complete team. And considering that the offensive line had played like chopped liver in the first 2 - 3 quarters of the previous several contests, it's reasonable to suppose it would have continued to play like chopped liver in the Cardinals contest, regardless of who we had back there at QB. [Tangent] Obviously they managed to get a lot of their pass protection problems straightened out over the bye. The Preston upgrade over Fowler clearly helped.[/Tangent] To address your other point, I agree with you that a Losman-related discussion is off-topic for this thread. It could distract from some of the other things we should be talking about here, such as Duke Preston. Should the Bills start him the rest of the year? I believe they should . . . Fowler has done nothing to earn a starting position, and it would be nice to know what we have or don't have in Preston. I firmly believe Preston played better today than Fowler would have, had he been starting.

I think it's worth noting that the numbers Trent has put up over this five game stretch are better than the numbers Kelly averaged over the course of his career. But this isn't just about numbers, because a lot of starting QBs can get hot and put together a few good games. What I find inspiring is how Trent has gone about putting up those numbers: he processes information quickly, and he isn't afraid to go to his #3 or #4 option if the others are covered. He spreads the ball around. When the offensive line provides good pass protection, this style of quarterbacking can be very hard to defend against. Brady is a practitioner of that style of play, and how much success has the Bills' defense had against Brady over the years? The kinds of things you see Trent doing are very difficult for a defense to take away (again assuming the pass protection holds up). If we continue to receive the same kind of pass protection we saw today, or anything that's even close, I would expect Trent to have a long and very successful career. As far as Jim Kelly goes, he was a very good quarterback, but there's a tendency among Bills fans to make him larger than life. As good as he was, I'm completely open to the possibility that some other Bills quarterback might prove to be even better.

I completely agree with what you've written. Take the Oakland game. When the Bills' defense gave up that 78 yard TD pass, my reaction was, that play didn't matter. I have absolute confidence that Trent will drive down the field, and that he'll score a TD to balance out the one the Raiders just got. There isn't a doubt in my mind that the Bills will win this game. If the offensive line can pass protect like it did today, and if we avoid too many run-run-pass play calls, this Bills' offense can give us an opportunity to beat any given team we might face.

I looked up the career stats for Kelly and for Trent. Kelly averaged 7.4 yards per pass attempt, and had a 1.4-to-1 TD-INT ratio. This season, Trent Edwards is averaging 7.8 yards per pass attempt, and has a 2-to-1 TD-INT ratio. Granted, we're just talking about a five game stretch here. But based on the numbers Edwards has put up in those five games, and on how he's looked while doing it, he clearly has the potential to seriously challenge Kelly's status as the best Bills' QB ever.

I strongly disagree with this post. First you appear to be giving TD credit for having made a good choice with Henry--a "Pro Bowl talent" in your words. Then you give TD more credit for "having realized the error he made . . . with . . . Henry," because of Henry's mental make-up. You're making it sound like there are two TD success stories here: the drafting Henry in the first place success story, and the moving on in a post-Henry era success story. I don't see how using two high draft picks on RBs, in the space of three years, can count as one success story, let alone two. We only got four years out of one RB and three years out of the other. Both the Henry and McGahee picks were symptomatic of TD's instinct to look for quick fixes and short-sightedness. A better GM would have seen the draft as a vehicle for building a long-term core of very good football players, and would have acted accordingly. The Bills' last Super Bowl appearance took place after the end of the 1993 season. Starting with the 1993 draft, the Bills used 6 first round picks on DBs, three first round picks on RBs, and only two first round picks on OL. Without exception, every first round DB taken during that time is either in his first contract, or else has gone first contract and out. Also during that span, no Bills' starting RB has been with this team for more than four years. The reason the Bills haven't had much success since the Super Bowl years is because we never built a core group of players that could compare to the Super Bowl teams' core. And the reason we failed to replace the Super Bowl era core is because so many first round picks were squandered at revolving door positions like RB and CB. There were some first round picks used on non CBs/RBs during that time. But because so many first round picks were being used on revolving door positions, there were very few picks left over to draft core players like Ruben Brown, Eric Moulds, or Lee Evans. With so much draft day potential being siphoned off by revolving door positions, this team didn't stand a chance of even coming close to rebuilding its Super Bowl core. TD was part of the problem, not part of the solution.