Orton's Arm

I don't know where Hollywood Henderson formed that impression from. Certainly Bradshaw hasn't seemed egregiously stupid from what I've seen of him on T.V.

Well, if Al Davis hasn't been well-behaved recently, the NFL could always make the Raiders fly all the way out to London for a "home" game!

I know what you're saying. It's hard not to think about whether the Bills could have made the playoffs in 2004 if only Holcomb had been under center. But deep down, I know the 2004 Bills were flawed enough that even if they'd made it to the playoffs, they wouldn't have advanced very far. Still though. A playoff game or two would have been nice.

I agree continuity and schemes are critical to an OL's success. But continuity without talent will only get you so far. John Fina, for example, spent almost his entire career here, but he wasn't exactly an Orlando Pace. Because continuity is so important, I'm a big proponent of building the offensive line through the draft. That way, you can keep a given player on your team for his whole career. If you sign players halfway through their careers, obviously you'd be replacing them twice as often. There are no Bills' draft picks starting on the current line. Guys like Teague and Villarrial are getting on in years, while Anderson should never have been brought here in the first place. There isn't any way to avoid serious disruption along this line over the next 2 - 3 years, because of the Teague and Villarrial age issues. A few years after that, it will be Anderson and Gandy retiring. Those four guys aren't great players anyway. Since there's going to be disruption anyway no matter what the Bills do, it would be best to get it over with in one big lump. Draft a bunch of OL this year, maybe start working them into some games in 2006, and by 2007 the line could start to gel. Assuming you drafted the right players, you could leave that line in place for the next ten years, and it'd be fine.

An excellent post. I like your thinking: that you should go with the guy who has a chance of greatness, instead of a merely competent player who fills your most urgent need. I feel the Bills should be working to create good pass protection, but as you point out, if Da Brick is off the boards, they'd be better served waiting until the 2nd or 3rd rounds to go OL. But once you have good pass protection, you need to put it to use. That's where an elite TE could come in. Look at San Diego. If memory serves, their lines were a mess a few years ago. Do you think anyone there wishes they'd taken a merely competent DT or OL instead of Antonio Gates?

I'm sure when you posted this you knew someone would disagree. Well, looks like that someone happens to be me. Some time after the 2004 season had ended, TD said something to the effect that good offensive line play is more a matter of coaching than player talent. He obviously felt he'd found the right position coach in the form of Jim McNally. As his words and actions make clear, he felt he could get away with shortcuts on the OL. Now he's out of a job. During his five years in Buffalo, TD used two first-day picks on the OL. Of those two picks, one didn't work out, and the other was allowed to walk in free agency. Should TD have matched San Francisco's offer? Of course not. He should have extended Jennings' contract before he hit free agency. Hopefully, Levy will place a stronger emphasis on finding talented OL than TD did. If there's an offensive lineman with a bright future ahead of him sitting there when our 2nd or 3rd round pick comes up, I don't want the Bills to walk away with some linebacker or TE or RB. They need to take the OL.

You make him sound like the second coming of Vince Lombardi. If he was, why didn't other teams hire him after the Raiders got rid of him? Race? Look at all the other black head coaches hired by teams after Shell was fired. Clearly at least some GMs were willing to hire black coaches. So either Shell has some weird personal issue we don't know about, or else NFL GMs have a different opinion of Shell's accomplishments than you seem to.

Yeah, I'm obviously going out on a limb by saying the NFL MVP may have had something to do with his team's success that year.

Obviously, Pace has contributed to the Rams over a longer period of time than did Warner. But during the one year they won the Super Bowl, Warner's dominant play was the biggest single factor in that team's success. Warner was named the NFL MVP that year, and rightfully so. How many Super Bowls do you think the Bills would have gone to without Jim Kelly?

Bingo

Are you honestly trying to tell me Orlando Pace deserves more of the credit for the Rams' Super Bowl win than Kurt Warner?

Let's say Nate wasn't on the team. The biggest obstacle to having a successful cover-2 defense would still be the defense's inability to generate consistent pressure with the front four. If downgrading the CB position gives you salary cap space or draft picks that could be used on that DL; well, you'd really have to consider that. This is especially true if trading away Nate could help you get an elite player. Elsewhere I've suggested the Bills should examine the idea of trading away Nate, and using some of the draft pick value to trade up to take Mario. This assumes, of course, that Mario has the potential for greatness.

This is your third post in this thread complaining about what you feel is my anti-JP crusade. There's still some chance I might not have understood your feelings about this, so why not write ten more?

I've had just about enough of this trash. I started the thread by pointing out something I didn't know about before--that JP's Wonderlic test score had improved dramatically between the first time and the second time he'd taken it. I'd also learned that Akili Smith was suspected of having cheated to have achieved his dramatic improvement. I suspected that either JP had cheated also, or that there was some extenuating circumstance that would have caused his first score to be low. I was open to the possibility he'd been extremely hung over or something. My first post ended with me asking a question about whether others knew more about the JP Wonderlic score. How on earth this is acting like a know-it-all is beyond me. By starting this thread, I learned that many of the questions on the Wonderlic are about general knowledge (such as the hours of daylight in various months of the year), and not about general intelligence. Obviously, studying for a knowledge-based test can create dramatic improvement. Hitherto, I'd been under the impression the Wonderlic was designed to test mental aptitude. Now I know this isn't the case, I don't feel it's as strong a predictor of success. You accuse me of not respecting others' opinions. But when others brought in new pieces of information to the discussion, I listened. Consider the low Dan Marino Wonderlic score, or the link to sample Wonderlic questions. If you want me to change my opinion, show me something I didn't know before (such as those things), or some line of reasoning I hadn't thought of before. Don't expect me to adopt an opinion merely because it's widely held.

I agree with your implication that football is a team game, and that Pittsburgh has had a good team for some time. Of course your team should have a good OL, and a good defense. But there are teams that have these things, and also have good QBs. If you don't have a good QB yourself, it's awfully tough to get past those teams when the playoffs come.

I've written there's a chance JP will become the real deal, and a chance he will not. I've also written that the chance he'll succeed is smaller than we might like to think, so the Bills shouldn't be adverse to taking a QB early in the draft if a real winner is available. This isn't "running JP out of town" because I think JP should start, while the rookie QB learns on the bench. If JP takes advantage of this opportunity to prove himself, he'll do to the new guy what Brees did to Rivers. But the way I figure it, you're better off having one too many good QBs on the roster, than one too few. Your remark about due diligence is a serious temptation to talk about the factors that have led me to conclude JP's chance of making it is slim. But at this point, I sense some people don't want to hear negative things about JP--especially not from me.

I agree that neither I nor zonabb established statistical correlation, and that neither of us attempted to do so. The right way to prove my statement would be as follows: - First, randomly select some NFL quarterbacks. The more you select, the easier it will be to achieve statistically significant results. So let's say you select 50 QBs. - Second, watch these 50 QBs for enough games to evaluate each one's ability to read defenses. Do this without knowing their Wonderlic scores. - Third, establish whether the Wonderlic score is significantly correlated with the ability to read defenses. If so, determine the r-squared. - Fourth, publish the results on a Bills message board, only to be derided by those who argue my biases prevented me from objectively determining quarterbacks' ability to read defenses. Expect to see plenty of emoticons when discussing alpha levels and standard deviations. Anyone smart enough to do these tasks well should also be smart enough to know it would be a waste of time to do them.

A valid point. In fact, they'd be better off just testing the speed of all the players' reactions. There's a very strong correlation between reaction speed and intelligence. Studying to make your reactions faster is all but impossible. Also impossible (or nearly so) is cultural bias in such a test. Also, there's an obvious connection between having a quick reaction speed, and doing well on the football field.

All right all right. I'll give you an answer, though maybe not one you'll like. First, let's start with the assumption JP's improvement was due to excessive studying as opposed to cheating. Let's say he learned that September is the ninth month of the year, that .33 is less than .88, and that September has about as much daylight as March. Clearly this new knowledge didn't improve his underlying intelligence. But the fact he didn't know these things the first time around is not a good sign. Granted, there are smart people who aren't that familiar with months and hours of daylight and things like that. There are less intelligent people who do know these things. That's why the Wonderlic doesn't do that good a job of measuring aptitude. However, a smart person is likely to know more about months and decimals and so forth than a rather dim person would; which is why JP's first score is a better guide than his second. But quite frankly, I'd feel much more comfortable with giving him (or any player) a more standard IQ test.

If that's its objective, it leaves a lot to be desired; at least based on the problems I saw. They were either too easy (especially if you had some general knowledge, like how to work decimals, etc.) or too long (like the time-chewer). What you want are questions that take some degree of intelligence to solve, and don't rely on general knowledge. Questions like 1, 2, and 14 require a little intelligence to figure out, but not very much. But if you're going up against a Belichick defense, you'll need more than just a little intelligence to figure out what to do.

I felt Zonabb's post did a pretty good job of that.

A good link. Unfortunately, many of the questions on this Wonderlic don't seem to be geared towards finding general aptitude. Question 4, for example, asks you to look closely at paired words to see if they're spelled differently or the same. Questions 9 and 12 are based on factual knowledge of months of the year. Question 11 is designed to chew up a lot of time for the unwary, and is easily an order of magnitude more difficult than some of the other questions on that test. Assuming the questions posted on ESPN's website are representative of Wonderlic questions in general, the test is poorly designed.

A good post. I didn't know about Marino's Wonderlic score. Of course, there's the chance the test has changed substantially in the 20+ years since Marino took it. But assuming it's fundamentally the same, the Marino example would show you can have a low score and still read defenses. Still, I feel there's a strong correlation between a high score and the ability to read defenses. Not a perfect correlation, but a strong one. I guess what I'm saying is that, on average, a guy with a high Wonderlic score will be better able to read a defense than a guy with a lower score.

You bring up a valid point, and I agree.

Which is why paid professionals such as NFL general managers suspect Akili Smith of having cheated to have obtained his dramatic increase. Those guys are paid professionals, and if they smell something fishy, maybe they're right.