colin

does anyone else get ole miss vibes back when aj brown, kc metcalf, and dawson knox came out with LSU this year? it feels to me like their 1 and 2 wr's both look like they have a shot to be a number 1 in the nfl. maybe im wrong, i dunno.

the nfl is a regulated trust, and they should not be permitted to do things which are consumer predatory, but they always do.

getting out of the diggs contract and maybe getting any kind of value for him (dallas trade? just my imagination) would be a coup we need to hit on at least 1 wr in the draft, and restock the DL and safeties with el cheapo fas and rookies. ideally we have diggs return to 2020 form and draft a rookie, but im wondering if he's long for this team.

so what is the word? is something like a trade to dallas where dallas sends picks/players and eats some of the cap hit we'd take possible?

I welcome Jim's rants to the board! we need people with different takes and particularly who challenge feel good trash themes on here. I saw a podcast w shannon sharp and charles ochocinco. the short of it is ocho was being fairly dovish talking about how guys coming off of injury need time and we have to accept their poor performance, and shannon was being militant saying there is an expectation that post injury or not, when a player plays there is an expectation of their performance. von has been absolute trash, tre was bad but maybe not trash at the end of last season (certainly not good) and was ok to start this season but obviously got hurt again. in this podcast, examples of heroic returns of some great players, and rapid returns to play no less, were cited. guys coming off acl in the same year to ball out. 20+ years ago. tre also expressed concern about covid, and playing during the covid thing. he's cleary got concerns about health, which is not ideal for a football player coming off of his second massive season ending injury. he's also not starting out as the fastest cb either, so these injuries won't help that at all. kc wouldn't keep this guy, why should we?

im of the radical opinion that we should just give much more playing time to our young guys like elam and williams who actually make plays (along with mistakes) instead of old and injured guys who allow 7.7 yards per play type numbers in our annual defensive playoff collapse exits, but i'm a silly extremist fan who wants to win and stuff.

so joe marino had a couple good breakdowns of kcs roster and ours. they didn't REALLY draft so much better than we did since like 2019 or 2020 -- better but they had more picks from trading hill and such. anyhow, the real difference between us and them is they let aging vets walk. i don't know that knox counts as an aging vet, but they also let some above replacement guys walk if they think they can replace them w picks. bass, knox, poy, hyde, diggs, these are contracts that they almost certainly would not have gotten trapped under. i think white back when he was extended would have been extended by them as well, and i think us signing von is similar to the top dollars they have paid for OTs. they have also traded picks for players just like we have, and they have had hits and misses on picks like us. i think they might have skipped out on long deals for von aged guys, but we will see w chris jones and the like. so our teams are super close, but our cap is not because mcbean love love love old slow expensive d guys. i think part and parcel of that is his allergy to playing young guys, hence dorian williams only had a chance to stop one drive in the divisional round while aj klien hummed jimmy buffet songs from 5 yards back. 5 yards back from the correct gap, mind you!

i agree with the implication (which i read as we would not have a chip if all that changed was we got mahomes instead of allen). i think mahomes is great, and an all timer. i think allen is better. the one game mahomes had on the big stage with poor protection (vs tb when his tackles got hurt) we saw him not make plays even though he had an all star roster of targets when he was running around. we expect allen to run around every couple snaps and make the big play. we are obviously not as good as the chiefs because we lost to them in the playoffs, but it's pretty simple: our D was like wet toilet paper. SF has a much better d than we do (at least in the super bowl vs our last game this season) but the folded too eventually because they were predictable and gassed and kc just called simple plays to beat them over and over again. to get over the hump we obv need a playmaker on O to emerge (davis is meh, but no davis is worse than having davis), and just find a way for the d to be like average in the playoffs.

trading the mahomes pick was obv a horrible move, but im convinced allen is better. in the TB super bowl, mahomes didn't have good protection and couldn't buy a play even with hill and kelce. once the OL faltered, so did he. allen makes plays with unblocked guys every sunday, and allen is the only guy bring the heat in the playoffs on this team. kc has had brilliant roster management and lots of luck and great coaching. our biggest issue is staying old and expensive on D, not to mention that aged and costly d folding so hard every playoffs.

kc won last night because san fran choked and made mistakes and kc didnt, it's is just that simple. the poor kick in the extra point, and the fool up field blocking while the punt returner was yelling peter, which was a gift wrapped 7 points was the game. obv kc has better coaching and a better qb and etc etc etc yadda yadda yadda. kc gets suffocated for the entire second half if idiot san fran adjusted their play calling, or more importantly didnt' make awful amateur errors. kc beat us because we had the ghost of aj klien starting (with a fresh rookie riding the pine, smart!), and they beat baltimore because playoff lamer choked and handed them 7 w a foolish fumble (and that fool wr got a 15 yarder and made up for it with a silly reach fumble short of the end zone). this is all exactly like new england. kc is winning tight games because they are better prepared and make fewer errors.

in the nfl, especially now, the qb is most important guy on the team. you can argue that great coaching and a decent back up will mean the qb1 is less valuable (like how the back up scored a near 100 yard drive for kc vs jax in the playoffs last season!) but for any non qb to get that award, the impact on winning of that non qb going down vs the qb doing down has to be stand out. so like, if hill drops is his team worse off than if tua drops? maybe, but hill clearly isn't as important to his team winning as lamar is for the ravens, or allen for us. my thing w lamar is that he is so not clutch. his back up nearly beat cinci 2 times last year, and lamar lays the same egg at the end of every playoffs. he's just too limited of a player.

i don't think it could possibly happen, but given where we are at lb and dl, it would be interesting to see the bills go to a 3-3 nickle base. we'd need a couple massive plugs at nose, and another big strong DE or two, but the upside would be we'd not have to platoon as many old over priced DLs all the time, and we'd have more room to be creative in the pass rush. im thinking it's all cyclical, and edge guys and off ball LBs have become super sought after at high prices in the nfl, so big strong lbs (say in the dorian williams mold, rather than some 1995 style DT that lines up 3 yards back) and massive space eating monsters in the guy are cheaper now. also, guys like groot and oliver are near ideal 3-4 ends.

he has a couple of well mentioned bad habits, but unless they persist over time we have to assume they can be corrected. he was super productive for us, and we had really good drives where we featured him. he might not be as "good" as a lot of guys (say 12? i dunno) but at the end of the day we need production. he's very productive. that's why knox kinda blows and kinkaid is great, dawson doesn't produce and Kinkaid does. that's also why diggs' contract is so bloody concerning (von miller too obv). in the case of stef, he is still really good over the last season, but his production late and particularly in the playoffs is cheeks. this is also why we'd like to keep floyd and or aj, they are productive albeit not consistently and clearly not game changing players. i think KC copied the rams model, when we kinda have to copy, where you focus on a few total super stars and rely on them, and then everyone else can get filled in by whoever performs, including rookies and cheaper FA players. KC even let a true super star (hill) go because they realized the cost of keeping him (30 a year!, like 25% more than we pay diggs but for a player is much more than 25% better IMO) vs what they get getting rid of him (a pick from miami, and all that juicy juicy cap space). our signing of miller and so on obv ended up hurting us, but i really think our biggest mistakes were in contracts we paid to extend guys we already had (diggs, knox, keeping poy and hyde a season too long, etc).

it's all quite cyclical, and defenses always catch up, so you really have to be able to do a few things to be a killer O. this is why i think we are going to draft (hopefully later) a real bruising power back. we are going to face nickle d's who want to crowd and body up on the wrs (frankly, that's the way you play to stop the bills), and having to tackle a big powerful ball carrier a bunch of times hits differently late in the 4th quarter.

brady was passing game coord at LSU, right? if he's worked well in that kind of a structure, then it's likely a good thing to replicate what he is comfortable with on our team. im not really sure why, but i feel like allen working closely with different people will make him better. he's the goat in terms of talent, but he's not had the highest level of guys to learn from and work with, so exposure to more should be fruitful.

wrestling has a very high number of participants in the USA, even on a per capita basis compared to most countries. it's analogues to weightlifting (the stuff the do in the olympics) in that it's super hard, has weight classes, requires insane work and requires/develops very very high level athletic skills/traits. they both also have weight classes, drug/doping history, and big asian and eastern euro dominance. They are both also close to but not quite much much more popular sports/activities. hundreds of millions around the world lift weights, do strength training, and most people see doing that as a good thing, but almost no one weightlifts. lots of people enjoy watching MMA, but no one really cares about wrestling (it's constantly at risk of being taken out of the olympics and such). mma is way more popular and relies on wrestling in a big way, BJJ has a much broader base of participants outside of organized school activity and is essentially a different version of wrestling/grappling. cross fit has people actually competing in weightlifting lifts, and has orders of magnitude more competitors and way way more growth. the down side of wrestling (similar to weightlifting) is that it is hard and brutal, unforgiving, involves weight cuts for young people, just destroys people's bodies, no one really cares about it unless they are involved in it somehow themselves, and in large part the culture turns off lots of kids. for a lot of kids involved in it, it's learning to swim through drowning, and it's really not fun if you can't win or are just getting trucked constantly. in eastern europe, they systematize it a lot more and teach young people skills so you don't end up having the slightly faster matured kids just over powering the slower to mature kids all the time and forcing them to quit. Judo has way more participants than wrestling, its another brutal sport, but lots of people are involved in programs and it seems like every man woman and child practices it in Japan. It's also a lonely individual sport that very few people care about if they don't do it, and most people don't even know who looks like a good wrestler unless they are suplexing and tossing someone making it obvious. it's also kinda diluted w folkstyle, free style, greco, and things like mma, sambo, bjj, and judo sort of divide the grappling world up too. i've always wondered if a sort of grappling decathlon type thing where people all compete in the different sports/rule sets wouldn't make it more interesting, but everyone who does one of the above tends to really want to specialize, so maybe not.

so do we get a comp pick for this?

i dunno if it is related or not, but statistically what stands out on the bills over the past few years (aside from josh, obv) is that the D is a dependable monster and diggs is a production machine. the thing is, both of those fall to total crap in the playoffs. kinda hard to say exactly why in all cases, but it's happened way too many times in a row for it to just be a random event. that kind/level of drop off is too much. based on that, if i had a no cost out o diggs, i'd take it, which is wild because i'd totall swap his contract to sign tee higgins, who just has never performed as well as diggs over the course of a given season. im just hoping he sorts it out and we add some talent at wr so our playoff offense doesn't come down to a sumping diggs catching a perfect bomb from 17, or number 16 butter fingering balls in the corner (or davis the prior year).

i think we will sign a vet Safety and a vet DL or two (likely more heavy on tackle) because there is no way mcclappy will roll with rooks in 2 DL positions and 2 S positions. i expect our first rounder, or our second rounder perhaps w a trade up, to be on a WR. i also expect another WR later on. i really think it's been proven that you can fill out a roster in a draft given the players we are losing are much closer to replacement level than studs, if we can get a bit of juice out of the DL and not completely flop at safety, our D should be about what it was last year, but some wr talent and kinkaid and cook and shakir growing will make our O pretty much the best.

miller had his best game vs kc, and we have only like 4 dl on contract next season. as much as i think we might want to move on, i think there is a chance he comes back to form next season and the front office won't give up on him.

to me the question is: would you sign diggs today for what he would cost and what you know about him, or would you not? im really not sure how much his antics play into his value in the team, but i'd suspect at this point it's a slight negative, if it registers at all. he's been basically cheeks in the second half of every season, and just about every playoff. he isn't getting double teamed and he really doesn't make players round him better. we will know who we drafted, and have some idea of who will be signed come june 1st, so i suppose there is a decent shot we move on from him, but i think we trade up for a real star wr, and draft a wr later, and keep diggs for one last shot. diggs cook kinkaid, shakir, allen and some top flight rookie wr along w the line we have is easily the best offensive roster in buffalo since the kelly years, and light fools up.

im under the impression that diggs and knox have unworkable contracts, and von has a nearly unworkable one (at least for the upcoming season). i'd expect to get rid of tre, hope von improves, ride diggs and knox due to contract (knox is likely gonezo as soon as a window opens tho). i think it is 50/50 on morse, he's a good player but old and expensive and if bates is nearly as good it's not a stretch to just ride w "the master" lol. poyer im thinking the keep on a small contract just because mcd is allergic to a young D (pause, lol, funny post this is!). reflecting on the first post in this thread -- we have a really old team and the O isn't that old at all (morse, dawkins, 28 who's leaving, diggs is like just 30), so as we all know, the d is geriatric. imo this is a big part of why our d breaks down horribly at the end of every flipping year in the playoffs. re staffing the d w some cheaper younger guys should leave us absolutely no worse off come the divisional round, and maybe better.

i keep thinking we make a fairly big trade up for the wr we want. i expect OTs and QBs to get run on, with a few cbs in for good measure, and maybe someone the FO has ranked as like 5-10 at wr drops to like 15-20, so they throw some picks out to get him.

i think this is a result of our talent and our scheme/coaching. we have stone handed clowns in knox an davis getting lots of passes, and we have late in the year changes w the new oc and a complicated system, so guys have to think and react a bit more than in say a shanny system where the guy goes to the one spot and gets a ball at one exact time. i suppose the coaches could also like train these guys to catch better, but at some point it's set in stone and doesn't have much room. davis and knox are both just not natural pass catchers. cook just has a terrible habit of not looking the ball in.

id take ridley at 10 for next year over a long term 22+ a year deal for higgins.