colin

big time. to me edmunds and groot are premium talents, more so edmunds but at a lower value position. neither are perfect and both are somewhat limited, but size strength health and length can't get coached. if you didn't know football and just went to some function and saw the guys in shorts and ts doing athletic stuff, edmunds and groot and allen (and spencer and some other guys) would stand out as big tall long giant athletic guys. you can build on plus athletes if you throw in a game changer or two, and they don't get blown off the ball or crushed like say our lbs or 7 do on every 3rd play.

if you have to ask it's more than you can afford, pal.

i dunno, their play is in line w the record (6.8 expected wins vs 7 wins). the rams, philly, indy, broncos, ne, all squeeked out wins vs bad teams too. we are slightly fewer turnovers or just not sucking so bad on the road from leading the division.

bingo. i think if he stays healthy and plays at the level he's played at since 2024, he was a decent signing, but not a great one. benford to date has been a worse signing. he's been hurt in each of the last 3 years, and at really bad times. bernard was paid less, but he's literally one more injury away from being a total bust off contract. shakir is a good slot player, but he's just a guy who can play, not a difference maker. i think the real issue is we over pay for solid, and horribly over pay for injured, but lack great players (imo a great player is a player who makes players around him better, we have 2-5 of them on the team, and cook and allen are the only elite ones). i think the edmunds comparison is kinda apt. in retrospect, i wish we signed him and let milano and bernard walk

nah, we are playing bad after a hot start (and a bunch of injuries) but if we are a bad team, who is a good team? every team ahead of us in the nfl have losses to lesser teams and sub par performances. the broncos needed lemmony snickets to beat the freaking giants, indy gave the game away vs pitts, the pats lost to who, the raiders or miami or something early, and needed luck and fortune not to drop back to back games to atl and tampa. we are as good or a better team than every team we lost too, and way better than miami and atl.

I'm a chatty cathy and a bit of a peter poster, but i almost never start threads. I was doing a lil lookly loo into the numbers and while i love the inside baseball part of football and all the match ups and esoterica and such, just like in the real world, the bigger picture is very often the clearer one. since 2023 the bills average .12 EPA per drop back on the road and .25 at home. .12 is decent, .25 is elite. in the playoffs our epa per play on O is like .2, which is shockingly good. our expected record this season is 6.8 -4.2, so just about exactly how the games have turned out. we lost 4 games, all of which we were strong to very strong favorites in. it is my belief that the handicappers get it right much much more than they get it wrong, so we lost 4 games we shoulda won, two we were mad favorites in (NE and the fish on the road, 6.5-9pt favs in both), one that was slight (3.5 vs atl) and last night (5-6pt favs). our team plays a goofy frustrating kind of football, where it looks like we are either brilliant or useless, on both d and o, but frankly that's the modern nfl. everyone plays the analysis game and does the things that give them their best advantage even if it's not entirely their team's "identity" so it doesn't look like the kgun bills o or the 85 bears d because all teams mix coverage, formations on o, and teams all go nickel and dime way more often than before on d. nfl football is high level rock paper scissors with athletes and emotions and execution mixed in to muddy it up. now, if i step away from my beloved minutia and numbers, and look at what counts the most, it's a really clear picture. we are a bad road team. we dropped 4 of 11 this season, 3 on the road. atl was a kinda tough game for us at the time, but we took a huge dump there. miami was the same thing, in the end the d epa was atrocious, but the o is what we lean on and it sucked. 3 TOs kills us every time except for tampa where we forced two ourselves and allen went super sayan. houston was our only negative O performance of the season where we had a positive D and special teams (and only 1 of 4 games where we had a net positive d and special teams) and boy was it negative vs what we can do. the only games we've been in where any offense has been worse than ours was last night was carolina and the jests, just like the houston game that was vs back up qbs (altho tyrod is better than fields was vs the jets, they just suck). the jets and the panthers were the only offenses who played worse than ours did vs houston, although the saints were nearly as cheeks. we have two wins on the road, one was at the jets who suck and it was a bills crowd, and vs the back up qb panthers, where it was also a bills crowd. 5 road teams, 3 losses, our only 3 negative epa games on o (turnovers). two wins vs basically back up qbs (the o was good in those games tho). we lose when we turn the ball over we snuck a win over tampa with 3 turnovers, but we got 2 of our own and as said before the passing game caught fire and allen when he's on sets and then breaks nfl records. in our 4 losses, we have 11 turnovers, and the real number is worse than that because we also got stopped a few times going for it on 4th down. we are -8 in those 4 losses. we would be better with a better run d, we'd be better with more talent than the 31st or 32nd WR room in the nfl, we'd be better if we didn't have all these bad injuries stacked up on the DL and CB in particular, we'd be better if our coaches made better adjustments (i will say, when mcd calls the d, the second half adjustments are elite tho). we'd be better if we didn't overpay to extend good to really good players (benford, groot, shakir) and meh to good players (milano, knox, taron, bernard) at the cost of playing rookie contract guys who are close as makes no difference or even better than them at times and having resources to bring in a couple elite guys. we'd be better if we brought in healthy and impact guys (bosa has been impact, but his had is a club, so even tho he's playing he's not healthy). and we'd be way better if we found religion and didn't play down to our opponents (saints and miami in home wins, atl, hou, and miami in road losses). all of that comes out in the wash vs the things we actually do well to make us a top team. we aren't leading the division and vying for the one seed for the simple reasons above -- we suck the bag on the road and we turn the ball over in the games we lose. we are like 1 or 2 games over 500 on the road since 2023, and we've never won a road playoff game. it's as simple as that.

It's that simple dude, we are a bad road team

We all get wrapped up in the drama and minutia (how can you not?) but here is the reality: we can't pass the ball in the road. We laid an egg in a close one vs ne at home, other than that we lost as meaningful favorites to bad teams on the road. Every game was the same -- run d was ass, the run got stopped or we stopped running, and the passing game blew and we turned it over. Our road wins are jets, saints, Carolina. Three awful teams and even in those we didn't really pass well -- those teams just sucked enough that we could run and win and we got some turnover luck. The win at home vs Miami also tells a story -- they sold out to stop the run and it took luck to get us the winning turnover. Levy always said Hitler lost the war because he couldn't win on the road

Awful gut wrenching way to lose a dramatic game. Well, the story is written, if we turn the ball over we lose. It's just that simple

We have a shot!

We'd be down by 1 actually. The missed do at that

Brown needs the bench If we hit that do and kicked on the last drive this would be to tie it

Lol, all of a sudden the d finds Jesus. I guess wimpy 8 going out, just like vs ATL, improves is a lot, just like vs ATL. Also, Houston has cheeks for o and a back up QB

A roll out, play action, lots of stuff would work. Brady has no feel

There was our shot, and we blew it