colin

The d has been less bad than the o for about a month of poop football over which we are 2-2 and cratering. The d is still horrible, obv, but the o is fixable at least. A change in coaching on o might be a bigger boost, cuz Brady is terrible

I'd love to have a clear inside picture of what thoughts are shared when the bills pick players or plan their scheme. How on earth are benford and Groot and Bernard extended for big dollars on a team that drafted Walker and Spencer Brown and Josh Allen? Like, slow lower ceiling and often injured guys vs raw super power hi risk how reward guys. And why do we have these crazy heavy jumbo sets that do well but then run the weak trash we ran vs atl and ne? Like if the d just decided to overload and play the run hard, we force balls to 0 (appropriate number) and palmer? This team just throws stuff against the wall man

All true, but the d has been better than the o for large portions of the last 4 games. The o just lost palmer and kinkaide, but ow has been full strength. The whole o, including our MVP QB, has been cheeks. They are simply unprepared. I get fire babbich, but I raise you fire Brady

Ok, that game was disgusting Babich being fired and replaced by literally anyone else in the building is an improvement, but the O has been worse than the d the last few weeks. That is just shocking, the d is a mash unit and don't my bad based on mistakes and silly penalties and things like that. Every single aspect of the o is getting worse. No continuity, no identity, on penalties, turnovers, blocking and Allen sucks too The play of the o and particularly the play calling has been a level below and it's gotten worse for consecutive weeks. I think mad is forcing the o to ball control and what not, but the three wr set plays are laughable. The team does not buy into what the coaches are calling

This team is totally reliant on game script and our QB being the goat Not prepared, poorly built, cap problems with no play makers, extensions to slow injury prone corners, small injury prone lbs, and ends who don't pass rush well are out biggest extensions. 55mm per year on benford Groot and Bernard, not a impact player on the lot

Was that a hip drop that injured Palmer? No flag in it

Bad coaching, poorly formed roster. Finesse team that's slow and not smart.

This d just commits cheap little penalties to allow points Not good enough

DB is such a bag of shower man. Didn't he hit the zempic and lose weight before? He's back up to his chubby biggest. Not a man with self control

I thought Palmer would be a plus addition, and he might still be, but so far he's not much. We'd have been better off keeping hollins. Familiarity, outside size, and plus blocking for pretty cheap. Separation doesn't mean as much for tight ends because they can post up the body more easily than someone running an outside wr route. I'm convinced we need health on d and to just bully the NFL out of our mutli back and te sets. Baltimore and new England have had a ton of success in those formations (be back in the day) and if they slow down the run we pass to our te squad, cook, one wr who lines up, or Allen just runs it. No one is stopping that from 30 over 4 quarters.

knowing this, and seeing the film of the last drive from the NE 27 where we chuck 3 dumb balls to WRs in no position to catch and make a play is maddening. if we went jump w two TEs and had kinkaid run up the seem the whole middle of the d would follow him leaving the other TE wide open for a first with room to run, bang we are inside the 12 w a new set of downs. we can walk that in over the 8 downs we'd have there, and milk the clock like a bell cow.

a corner and/or a safety could go a very long way in helping this team. it could be the difference between a playoff exit and glory

my big gripe w brady is he's so arrogant (shades of mcd). no thought toward self tendencies, run when we are under center, pass when in shot gun. no concept of lining up for your best advantage vs the opponent, he just calls what he feels like all the time. most of all though, he is so so resistant to having an offensive identity. asking allen to just be superman is NOT a coaching feature, it should be seen as a coaching failure if it has to happen to win (way too much). multi back and te sets, extra OL, why the heck are we not running that until someone stops it? out of those formations with cook as a cheeky outlet we coulda had an extra 100+ yards and at least 7 more points vs NE, even with all the other bad stuff that happened. instead we ended drives with incomplete passes to covered WRs even after allen steals an extra 5 seconds of time behind good blocking. you don't have to be a pro scout to see what NE is good at and what they struggle against. it really shouldn't be this difficult given the talent we have on the O side of the ball. 5 targets to him last sunday, sacrificing forced trash attempts to covered wrs, prolly gets him another 40-50 yards on 3-4 catches.

we've actually had a sick pass rush, and it looks like groot just woke up from his slumber (think it was a knee). adding back ed will be a huge gain. if we can also get tj, obiwankenobi, and hoyt (sadly, not till the next week and likely not fully operational until after the bye) we might actually have the d we are supposed to.

agree, but i thought babbich and the D were pretty solid on sunday night (vs prior weeks). great pass rush, did well on 3rd down and vs the run, just total disaster in the back end, and i think that was on the players (rapp basically lost his courage, and tre is not nfl level). the 4th quarter total flop was weak, but we were a couple slightly better plays from the DL (who played really well over all) from shutting them down. to me, the OC was baited into a trap and ate the cheese with his tail caught for more or less the entire night.

i admit, i thought he was a round earlier. still -- we have holes at CB and S, last year it was DT, this year it seems to be LB and most def WR, but we keep throwing reasonable picks (im not knocking the cook pick, i was a booster then and even more now, talent matters more than position) at a position we already have a platoon at, and one of the easiest to find a replacement level player at, leaving huge depth holes in the roster. being down a single corner (albeit our best one) and a safety basically took us out of the afc chip game, but if we brought in a practice squad guy over davis or whoever at arb, what difference would it make to our O? that's my gripe.

walker is a good bull rush away from being a 5 tool type player, and if we get our ish together and have hoyt and bosa rotate at DE, groot and epenesa at the other, oliver and TJ at 3, and DQ and walker at 1 tech, we might have the best pass rush since shwartz

i think the concussions and such have him scared. remember the non angles he took on henry in week 1? he's just not an nfl level safety at this point.

our biggest needs corner safety outside plus player at WR. we have the rookie who hopefully recovers at CB, i thought we had a rookie who might be able to play safety for rapp, but maybe not, and my one issue with going in for a WR is it will give brady ammo to get out of our dominating formations which he already likes to avoid (multiple TE/backs, few or no WR). based on that, if we can get a JAG at corner for cheap we should because it's just too big of a hole, if we can get a plus safety for cheap that's another slam dunk, and i'd love to have a guy like brown or someone to light it up outside, i don't think that's possible.

our scheme has the secondary playing much more as a unit than as individual players unless the O can isolate a corner (and it will always be tre). bishop IMO is at least OK this season, tre is really bad, benford is below his average but still a flat to plus player, rapp is legit awful and scared to hit and just floats super deep, and tyron is not so good as a slot corner.

our d is set up to protect the heck out of the trash secondary, gun for negative plays and stuffs on the run, and hope the pass rush gets there for turnovers and incompletes. it stank in the 4th quarter on sunday night with milano out and strong with a horrible neck issue, but over the course of the game it was more than good enough to win. the real strategy failing was putting palmer, samuals, colemna, and shakur out to try to beat the strength of the NE d while the TEs and backs who can dominate them got a total of what, 9 targets? it was also so obvious when we ran or passed.

if we run and gun out of jumbo sets we walk on small and fast atlanta. our d will have its struggles, but vs NE they cleaned up the tackling some, much better on 3rd down, decent against the run, and just so so awful in the back end, shallow lbs and deep safeties and putrid corner play. they just have to not get toasted in the turnover battle to do enough IMO. we will be getting back the rook corner, rook DT, roid DL, and ed oliver in short order, and our LBs will get more healthy too. i think our d will look good soon enough, we need to control the ball and score long drives, which we are the best in the nfl at doing.

the only answer anyone has found vs our jumbo set was a psycho big front miami had against us, and really we shoulda passed instead of run it against that. a couple passes to cook and ty out of that formation would have extended our drives and broken up the 3 and out middle of the game streak we had, and we'd have walked away early. brady needs "if it ain't broke don't fix it" tattooed on the back of his eyelids.

so, i think we have 90-95% of what we need, and have had that for at least 3 out of the past 6 seasons. that last little bit we need can be had via a very good few moves/decisions. the 13 seconds coaching issue, the not forcing kc to punt w aj klien hobbling at lb while dumb but talented rook williams was on the bench (who led us to a punt, our only forced one of the day), and lately the refusal to line up on O with our clear and present maximum advantage (tight ends and backs, and mixing up passing and running with that personnel grouping, 0, 1, or 2 wrs) vs the pats when ish was hitting the fan just lowers my confidence that we will find the answer when we need it most. as far as the d goes, im a mcd hater, but honestly this is the nfl now. teams start at what, their own 32 on average? that's 35 yards from FG range for like 15 NFL teams. one single big play means points in today's NFL, so everyone is deep shell and nickel as a base D (as opposed to Base D, w 3 or 4 LBs depending on 4 or 3 DL). short efficient passes and running with misdirection and a rotation of running backs is the standard everywhere. denver cinci and minni are the only teams who seem to want to push the ball deep today, philly sometimes but their o is a disaster. from this POV, mcd is a leader in how the Ds of the nfl are coached, so i can kinda see keeping him. we are short ed oliver, hoyt, african anabol (never remeber his name), two LBs, rookie TJ, and our only fast corner on D. we have a pretty great pressure rate and a reasonable sack rate, along w some usually weak run and 3rd down d, but i think we do have something to work with. it's not fair, but the nfl never is. mcd is going to be a shottenhiemer joke or an all timer based on if he can win a chip in basically 25 or the 26 season. based on that i'm basically 50/50 on blowing it all up for a new FO or rolling with what we have and hoping to find that next 5-10% to win it all. looking back, the house shoulda been cleaned after 13 seconds, i think we'd have won one by now with about 5 or 6 different front offices, and we'd have had our pick that season.

when we were multi back/tight end we ran almost every time, and not super well, and we passed twice and it was for good results. passing out of 10 or 11 we didn't do so great, because NE has great outside corners and we have weak wrs, also we are predictable based on how we line up. brady took an ish in the bed. the rag tag d fell apart in the 4th quarter, but if we stuck to multi back and tight end formations and mixed up the pass and run, we woulda walked to 30 points, which we have done in ever other game of the season, and won the game boat racing them. it is so frustrating being a fan of this team sometimes.