colin

i think they are going to run and target worthy and kelce, scheme them open. the d has to be disciplined and hit mahomes (while avoiding flags, gulp) early and often. kc has trash tackles, that's how we make their day long. a turnover early is important and helpful. on the other side, it's about dominating at the LOS. mashing them up and running hard. cook is our all around every down weapon. 100 yards for him and kc has a steep uphill climb. TY on his big breaking plays and ray davis in power runs too. also, i think the bills must be creative on O. they weren't creative enough vs baltimore and vs kc it's necessary. huge huge game.

ya, could be. I think that game was josh and the o going off and just destroying an over matched opponent. to me the two games we had this year were better because the coaches had a specific plan and it went that way, but i get your point.

we went into that game the same way that DC is going into philly. upstart team, young qb, on a heater, all about offense, going further than expected, crazy skill talent, etc. aside from experience, seasoning, and all of that, this year we have the best combo of OL, QB, and Backs in the NFL. it feels insane to say that when the ravens are in the NFL, and henry is head and shoulders better than anyone we have at RB, but we have 3 of them and lamar was frequently impacted while josh might have been once. we need to be healthy on D, and we need our better players to show up and show out just like they did the first two games, and we need a defensive game plan and good play calling and execution and all that, but in terms of lining up, punching people in the face, and imposing will no body can do that like what we have right now on O. i fully expect us to have a lot of trouble getting kc off the field like we did with baltimore, and i also expect us to create some turnovers to compensate for that. this game is going to be won by the O line being the most dominant unit on the field and putting in body work on KC all day. Allen will run on fools, and make allen plays as is needed. i'll call it now, if james cook can hit 100 yards we walk on this

the o was super conservative and the d basically played rock paper scissors. i think it was a well coached game, and the three biggest errors in coaching/planning came on O 1 -- running qb power on 3rd and 2 from the 2. a tush push, or a less predictable play from shotgun was in order. when all you need is 2 and you have power up front, don't give up an advantage by going into shotgun unless you have a good trick. 2 -- first drive out of the half. they should have shown a prior formation and play actioned into something. those type of transitional moments are where you take those shots. a big gainer on 1st down would have potentially broken the ravens, and a td on that drive would have made the game easy. 3 -- second drive in the 2nd half -- again, the ravens were aggressive up close and had a shell behind, a creative play or qb roll out, whatever would have worked. TY Johnson eats those kinds of formations for breakfast. joe marino had a breakdown on D. when we blitzed vs when we didn't was shocking. blitzing is when all the good stuff happened, not blitzing is when all the bad stuff happened. also, on that last drive i think our guys were gassed but they advanced the ball vs linemen who wouldn't make the roster of most playoff teams. maybe there was a way to rotate into having better players out there, but that's tough. this was the second best coached game of the playoffs ever for our staff IMO. the denver game was the best (bad play got them down early, like this one, and they corrected. denver was beat by about 4 mins into the 3rd quarter). we gotta keep it up vs kc.

I do think the bills were too conservative at times. they become a bit predictable in the start of the 3rd quarter, they should have broken pattern a little bit, i think TY johnson should have been involved more, but that D is a bad match up for us. The bills are obviously more conservative on o than they were before, we were what, mid 20s in pass attempts? but one thing i think of is: where is our best talent on O? reflexively we think we have josh, he's the goat, so we have to pass the ball all day. well, if you go top to bottom talent on our O, it's josh, then something like dawkins/brown, cook, torrence, and a mix of other OL, backs, and maybe a TE with one of our Wrs thrown in. all the talent is around the ball, our ol qb and back talent is just a lot better than our outside talent. if it's not the best ol in football, it has been playing like it. and outside of allen, cook is easily our most dangerous offensive weapon, and our other 2 backs are live players too. so if you look at it that way, it kinda makes sense that we don't pass as much, especially when allen can be in the run game himself. its strange to see josh be a game manager, but if he's not throwing to consistently effective targets down the field, it makes a lot of sense.

barely over 6 yards a target and a 60% catch rate won't get him more involved. I think that's the story in a nut shell. the way our O runs, individual players don't get a lot of chances to get hot. and as said above he's not a mauler in the blocking game. i think a guy like likely in baltimore would be a monster contributor for the bills. huge and can move around and get open and catch. kincaid will get more chances to make an impact, but he's gotta be more efficient.

you're the kind of guy who goes to a destination wedding and people complain about how much they paid to fly and hotel and paid half and get a free breakfast, aren't you?

keeping to your theme of 4 minute drives, the bills clearly aim to maximize the middle 8 of the game. they were perfect on the first part of that (last 4 min of the 1st half) but failed kinda badly on the second part (our first drive in the 3rd). I thought the play calling was too conservative coming out, but after seeing the end zone angle of that knox screen, it was there all day and he might broken a big gainer. obv elated we won the game, but if he moves on that one play, we might set up another drive like the one in the first half and gotten us ahead 28-10. that likely subtracts the run drive they trucked us in the 3rd for a tub, so it mighta changed the net score by 14 in that quarter, making this a walk away game.

the d is not great, nor did it have a great game vs baltimore by most measures. what it did was turn up the variance on baltimore, but did so generally limiting big plays. it's a high stress way to play, but perhaps the best way for us to face baltimore. basically, we played to maximize negative plays for baltimore, but did so within a scheme that was built to greatly limit the very big gainers. if hamlin found depth on the pass that got to the 2 yard line, that might have been another pick or at least an incomplete, so there was a little meat on the bone. the way i looked at it, the way we were playing D, there was nearly no chance we could stop baltimore on 4 downs, but we could send them backwards or even take the ball away on one single play. that ended up being the story on 3 turnovers (two were good forced ones, one was just a crazy effort play by bernard), and we stopped them on 2 2 point attempts, and that was just enough to win the game. on the other side, we kind of played the opposite. every single play was run with the intent of not making a mistake. i thought it was too conservative at times for sure, but that ball was kept fort knox safe. the play on 3rd down from the 2 where josh ran it out of shotgun, we have run that play like 50 times this season. baltimore knew 100% what we were doing and it had very little chance of getting past them if they didn't make a mistake, but it also had a near zero fumble chance, so i get why they ran it. im worried about our d still, worried about being too conservative on O, and worried about injuries on d, but our coaches have shown more adaptability than before so that's nice.

it's pithy one liners and quick gags, but done in meme cut up format. think of the jokes from airplane (which is obviously much better than this slapped together stuff) but in a silly social media memecentric cut up format. the weird al stuff above is a good analogy, if you think about how robin williams would rip off stream of consciousness stuff, kinda a mix of all of that.

i knew a GI in 'Nam who went AWOL and was found in Cambodia. The locals called him the Tush Plow. It was an ugly scene, I suggest you use a different name.

that's crazy. so are you looking at market place apps or doing footwork and calling people and such? if the snippets of injurie reports i've been reading here go left, we are going to have to run the heck out of the ball. even if we are healthy on d, running the ball well would be a big big help. it's been talked to to death, but we basically need to win the turnover battle. running the ball well is a great way to shift those odds in our favor.

oh dear, are we mash unit again for KC? that would be just a horrible let down.

i legit thought it was a horrible check, i didn't see the replay because i was texting to other fans and whining in the game thread (not sure what the replay showed). iirc, is that the one allen was flipping out at someone about? im thinking now he was screaming and knox for not picking up the free 10 and potentially more yards in front of him.

good find. holy crap knox was just awful on that, the angle on the camera shows how awful his move was. he had room on the right and if he breaks a tackle it is a big one.

man, i really hope we aren't a mash unit at nickel, safety, and lb again facing KC. our smaller defenders always get crunched late in the year. even tho I'm a big fan of milano, and he and von actually had some really good plays, some of the contracts are why we have to these guys are why we have rapp and hamlin as our starting safeties and shakir is our offensive number 1 on a late round rookie contract.

our d, especially the dl, was just flat out gassed. the two horrible drives to start the second by the O and the trucking by the ravens run game on the one long td drive to henry took what they had left out of them. im still not a big fan of the mcd scheme on d, but the full picture here is that our starters are just about average or slightly better, and the back ups just aren't good enough. one thing i liked to do when i was handicapping games is look at the lineups and ask which players on team a would start on team b and vice versa. for these teams i think maybe groot (maybe not), one or in a stretch 2 of our OL, and benford would be their cb2. i think josh is better than lamar, but they wouldn't start him over lamar, particularly with their scheme. such a massive disparity in talent.

if allen had at least one free arm he woulda flipped it and it woulda been a cook TD. he didn't flip it because he couldn't (without a horrible risk reward ratio) but half a second earlier or whatever if he had his arm free he woulda and i think it would be 6.

im 50/50 on that. the punch out was a low % but high leverage play, and bernard has done it before. he's really good at launching a fist into the ball. conversely von gave the back a golden shot at the strip from behind, the hardest to stop, and his strong azz grip prevented it. on the damar fumble, it was a poor snap and a press play by lamar, but that's what lamar does, he makes plays buying time, so he's not going to stop. at least half the air yards they got were from lamar just moving around and buying time before the pass. now, i do hear you on the bad snap and such, but tbh, our DTs actually showed up and were impacting the raven's C in the first half. dq did his job and ploughed the c into lamar on the "sack" we got by touching lamar down. plays like that impact the C and make them rush and goof up snaps. i really really want our d to make guys punt, and they made the ravens punt in the first game somewhat decently, but got just dogged and trucked on every other drive it seemed like. im happy we are the best at making turnovers happen, and i also think it's not reliable. kinda reminds me of the daboll years of big play only on O. the difference is, we have the talent to win on O with other kinds of plays, vs a team like the ravens, we pretty much have to go for the turnovers.

i credit the bills for the plays they made, but we forced zero punts and got absolutely trucked on the ravens late possessions. in spite of bad conservative play calling way too early (3rd quarter), the bills won because of turnovers.

if they converted, they'd kick it deep (they'd rather have their d on the field to force overtime than rely on their kick coverage) and we'd have the ball at the 30 w 93 seconds and two TOs. we'd need to get to the 34, 56 yards. I say we'd have put Ty Johnson on the field, he's who we go with on these high leverage downs, and he can run it, block and make great catches (he was criminally underused, cook is great but we just lined him up and ran and they crush that). Allen would buy time, run the ball and Ty would find space on broken plays. i think we'd have gotten to the 20s with a quickness, rumbled allen for a first down, and kick it from the 10 or so with no time on the clock. i honestly think more Ty (baltimore is just bad vs rb passes) in the 3rd quarter we run an extra 4 minutes off the clock in the first two drives and score between 7 and 14 extra points. the game would have been won after the ravens 2nd 2nd half possession with some time burned and a FG. just like vs detroit, the coaches actually came out with some solid game plans (way more on d than o last night) but got way too conservative way too quickly. the ease we made those first downs to win those games with plays to the outside tells me it was always there and we coulda taken it early.

i sort of touched on it in my above blabbing post, but we play nickel D or dime about 90% of the time and we have two players in total back there who would start for other teams in the playoffs (taron and christian), and they wouldn't be top 3 (maybe taron could edge in, but he'd be 3rd at best).

johnson isn't as good as he used to be, he's older and has been hurt a few times, and his size works against him as he gets banged up over and over. he's tough as nails tho, a gamer, and has shown in the past at least a nose for huge plays. he's still a quality player. the frustrating thing for me w mcd and his d is that they really rely on everyone reading and communicating and being in the right place and making plays. it creates a lot of vulnerabilities and we've seen that basically every play. the plus side is it has guys playing fast and hard and if they aren't gassed they have a chance to hunt for negative plays and turnovers. i love the bills and their will to win and all that, but when josh was talking about people saying that we were too small, too slow, and not talented enough there is a lot of truth to that. our best play makers are two undersized LBs, one who is over 30 and coming off 2 really bad injuries, a small nickel corner and whoever shows up out of our way undersized 3 tech, a big and long but not sudden DE. allen and the OL and cook are real ballers, and a couple of our guys on D are at least solid, but this team could really use some of the freaks that teams like baltimore have an embarrassment of. if you throw a higgins on this o, a crosby on the D, and just not have so many jags or cast offs in a couple other areas, this team would be an all timer.

the honest answer is no. the flip side to that is if you don't protect the ball, you will lose to lesser teams. the ravens are the 6th best nfl team of all time based on DVOA. they are also huge fast and physical, which is an advantage vs everyone and in any scheme, so they aren't as game script dependent as other all time nfl teams by DVOA. they lost because of turnovers way way more than we won based on anything we did. if we came out and scored 10 points on our two first 3rd quarter drives instead of a 3 and out and a 4 and out, then i'd argue we clearly played better and took advantage of mistakes and hammered the nails in when we needed to, but that didn't happen. we really just made fewer mistakes and held on to win.

some good points about the culture war issues w lamar in this thread. the thing for me (the football thing, there are culture war/race/whatever issues in sports media, but sports media is oddly politically charged and shockingly shockingly dumb so I'll ignore it here) is that the big rub for those of us who think josh was mvp over lamar, and that lamar was sort of gifted his prior MVPs is that lamar plays qb on easy mode, and josh plays qb on hard mode on the ice level of the game (those are always frustrating). lamar (for most of his career, but let's just focus on this season) has a silly level of talent around him on his team. their d fell off early but ended on a strong note. their secondary has a soft spot in it, but the rest of it is crazy (top guys in humphries, and a legit positional mutant in hamilton). their LBs are really really good, and smith in the middle is around the best in the nfl (they traded high value picks for him considering he's an off ball lb, and aj klien, LOL). their DL are a deep squad of monsters, and they got KVN to be an edge monster late in his career, oweh has not produced sacks like they wanted, but he's a size weight speed freak (i know those guys are "lbs", but they really are DL in my opinion) and really the mix of talent they have up front is a crazy match up for everyone. On O they get solid play from their OL (big strong and dirty but the refs barely ever seem to call them, how did they not get holding flags in that barn burner of a game?), have very solid TE talent, hall of fame RB with a back up RB who is a dangerous guy, and their mix of WRs (flowers being out hurt them this season) who have enough speed and shiftiness to scare you. Their kicker is literally the best of all time for his career, and they always seem to return and cover well. Their coach is a champion and while their DC is a rookie, they never seem to have too many unproven coordinators or position coaches. the ravens really are the monster team who are built to win tough physical games, the less stuff get called the better it should be for them. when you hear ex nfl players talk about who they played with, the crazy men who scared people with their strength of speed, the guys who were grown man size at 16 and always dominated, and the nasty rough confident guys are always the ones they talk about most. fan favorite plucky freddie jackson guys who went no where for school and just somehow got it done besides being maybe undertalented never get the good stories. that's not who always win championships, but that's who you'd instinctively see as the biggest threats. that's the ravens top to bottom, they draft based on size speed and temperament, their "process" is about getting as many scary monsters on the field as they can. Lamar is like that a little bit at QB. he's small and not a fast processer, and doesn't have the tightest fundamentals, but he's super confident, the fastest and most athletic guy to play qb since vick, and a heisman winner to boot. the ravens coaches have engineered a system where they have their team playing advantage football. the vicious hard hitting way they play (reminds me of the 2012 era seattle team, they foul on like every play but only get called sometimes), the speed and size they have all over the field (300 pound mutant fullback, fast guys outside and at qb, and rb, 6'4" and fast safety, no team looks like them!) is hard to deal with at all times. when you see the ravens line up, and you see the bills line up, you really think the ravens should beat the bills to a pulp and in every way except turnovers and the score just like they did last night. qb's get credit for the whole team, so it's natural the sports media lauds qbs based on great coaching and well built teams. lamar has what is almost certainly 3 mvps while only having 3 playoff wins and not one solid playoff campaign to hang his hat on (this one was his best ever, and his mistakes cost his much more talented team the win today). he's obviously much better than most nfl qb's, but if playoffs and championships is what matters, he's simply not had success in the post season and he doesn't have the allen narrative (itself being something that many in the media hate about allen, because their preferred narrative is that he's a disaster in waiting who will play basically how lamar played today) of balling out and being the best player in the playoffs despite his team losing. im pretty confident to say that if allen were on the ravens, and lamar was a bill, they'd both have success and playoff appearances and division wins, but allen would have some chips w baltimore and this board would talk about how we need a player more like josh allen who play better when the stakes are higher. that's why so many of us discount the lamar mvps and think josh should have some. in the end it's hard to really establish who the best or better or more clutch player is in a team sport, but narratives capture interest more than complex analysis, and the narratives on both lamar and josh are so overdone and charged up and interesting that mud is gonna get thrown no matter what happens.