colin

our biggest need is nickle corner, lb, and safety, but we have guys to fill most (not safety as much maybe bishop can ball) of those spots when they are healthy. WR is juuuuust behind those, and if we were full health i'd say tied w safety. it likely can't be done due to cap foolery, but if you throw budah baker and devante adams on this team and we get TB, TJ, oliver and von back playing, this team is kinda nasty. to win on sunday we are gonna need samual to be good (i think his toe is holding him back) but a breakout game for coleman would be the biggest get.

He's a bit of a fat body. He could lose 20# of pure slop and still be one of the bigger and stronger guys in the NFL. Our oline seems to me to dominate when they know what to expect, and just bad when they get confused or tricked. even in games they dominated, like vs miami, a couple stunts had edge rushers up the gut just unblocked. i think our biggest issues with both lines is scheme/preparation. when they are dialed in they look great, and the fall off is just huge when they are not. i've always felt like our team under mcd is a bit of smoke and mirrors. i've waxed poetic about the d enough, but i do think brady was caught pants down vs baltimore. we failed to exploit the clear weaknesses of their d. i'm hoping he's learned form it and gets it righted. if we recall last season, we had some real weak sinkers on O (the chargers game really stands out) where we were struggling to score points. in the playoffs our o looked great vs pittz and kc, but the team came up short. so far this season, we have 24 quarters of football. 2+ are basically non quarters because we had starters sitting in blow out wins, 2 quarters to start vs zona were pretty awful, and 4 quarters vs baltimore were trash. So 16 of the 24 quarters we have seen what looks like elite production, but vs craptacular teams. we need some guys to really emerge for me not to think we are smoke and mirrors with an all world talent at qb.

i think our safeties kinda suck, they don't do well running up and tackling people under their coverage, be it shorter passes or runs. this mcd D is totally dependent on that, which is why he kept poy and hyde around past their due dates. nickle corner is really huge for the d as well. TJ is sick, top 3 at the position, but we need him to blast forward and tackle runners, which means when you put in a really marginal nfl player like lewis, you lose out on the pass coverage and the run coverage. i think our degree of difficulty is just too high. no screens and we are predictable on O, and on D we give ourselves match up problems (unless the other team is down and has to throw the ball deep, then we are the best) when teams have a neutral game script. dropping huge money and picks into the DL to have casey toohill play a ton of snaps for our D is also a gear grinder for me!

As a team we simply lack size/speed/power. Too much money on jags and hurt guys.

he was running hard for yards and TDs the first two weeks then he mashed his hand to pieces so that he couldn't even use it for a handoff vs miami. it's good enough for a handoff now, but if you aren't confident holding the ball w the left hand, it changes where you can run, and you don't have that hand to help break tackles. also, he prolly doesn't want to make it worse. so he's likely less super fast than he was years 1 and 2 (i think he broke like 21mph a couple times in those seasons) but still a monster runner. right now he's not running the same cuz he's hurt.

slow and bad at the nfl level. this is a big issue w the mcd scheme. he needs some special profile of people to fill it, who evidently are not fast or strong, and he doesn't seem to like to adjust his gameplan for an opponent. setting up your guys to fail is not good coaching. maybe our roster w injuries was never gonna be good against the bmore O, but the plan coming into sunday night was doomed from the start.

Joe Marino's all 22 breakdown of the game is up on his locked on bills youtube channel. he's always pretty sober and on this one his biggest 3 duds of the game (no studs) were babich, brady, and mcd. basically we got trucked with light boxes and the ball carrier averaged 5.5 yards pre contact on D, and on O it mighta been worse. he blamed the players too, but the reality is baltimore dared us to do "what we do" and we took the bait and the line ran past into space and the back 7 just sucked. o was predictable and weak. i did like the comment by brady that it was a badly called game, that's strong accountability. he's gotta show out vs houston now.

so, one potential sliver lining from a coaching POV, is how much room to improve with little things the O is. w all the blitzing and such, you'd think a screen to super fast cook here and there would get something done. at some point the bills have to just line up in a one read and go scheme and throw an rb screen out of a formation they can also do their slower to develop stuff out of. the constant josh has to dodge a guy, roll around find someone is great sometimes, but there has to be some plays that are rock paper scissors vs what the d is doing, and i think the one saving grace is that there should be some low hanging fruit there.

he's at risk of being another zach moss bust for us (guy has had better play in indy tho). i hope he works out. agreed w the above that says he and our other backs need to cook (lol, pun) more. they need burn and they need rhythm. brady has some real tendency problems -- it did look like cook on first down was making money tho. lots of 2nd and short in the game.

I think this was the insiders take too. the ravens have a sick and power o, awful for our d, but if we scored a few TDs it woudla changed the game script. lack of focus and intensity, poor execution, and some really bad scheme and play calls did us in on O. i look at the kc game last playoffs, that kc team that night was better than the ravens last night, this bills team didn't show up as much as that one did. they did whatever they wanted on O to us, but we kept up and had a luck TO in our end. if bass hits the fg, maybe we make them punt and steal a win. so as much of a nagging negative Nancy ninny pants as i am, i think they way forward is to get the O smarter and executing at a high level, and patch up the d enough to just not get trucked. It's just annoying that it's the old pile but a different day sometimes. very fair point Mango. my gripe w sean is not his in game adjustments -- they are never radical but there have been lots of bright spot, but the fact that he knew about this game months in advance and just didn't really show what i thought was needed. someone made a comment about the bounce back against houston will tell us a lot, i think that's a second gut check of this season.

I was on the fence for a while, and the injuries on D, how well allen played, and the missed fg vs kc gave me some hope, but at this point i have to think mcd is just cut out to lead us to the chip. one thing that bothers is his selection of coordinators. frazer was a vet, but a scaredy cat who worked his way out of a job. dabol, dorsey, and now brady are all raw green ocs, brady did have a sliver of experience, and dabol had some too, but none have had any nfl success at all. the hc having the goat at qb and bringing in guys like that is just not a good strategy. harbaugh in baltimore is clearly a superior coach, and has a good qb, and we see how hard it is for him to get past kc. how are we gonna do it with these consistent just set up to fail moments? the optimist in me hopes mcd can go down like the GB now dallas coach, who kinda fluked his way to one w rogers just lighting the world on fire.

Their d will look strong vs our silly o, but will make plays, their o is a dumpster fire and they commit so many penalties that we might win a close one

I've often thought and prolly commented that the bills play down to their competition. That's really not been true for like 3 years. They obliterate cream puffs, and rest starters late in those games, or at least one phase turns into a pumpkin vs tough teams. When we look at just this season, the d was cheeks vs zona and so we're the special teams, but Josh Allen became magic and we beat a bad team. Miami was a story of our d lighting them up because similar to us they are a one trick pony, and we played efficiently on O. The jags are a dumpster fire and that showed when we played them. Baltimore is exactly the kind of team we lose to and look weak doing so, even when the game is close like it was in the playoffs last yr vs KC. Physical and dirty on d, talent on O. We take away the deep pass always, even vs teams that won't even try them, and hope our small slow zero talent lb and safety squad can slow down the run. We also love getting misdirected. On o, we don't have anything on the outside and like to just not involve cook and kinkaid, our only talented weapons, and nothing excites is more than having no answer for blitzes and stunts. How did we not have any screens or quick outs to tes and rbs all night? Why did cook come off the field on running downs? Our coaches think they are smarter than the rest of the NFL, and they are not, they just do great smashing the trash

I actually think he's more like the fat guy in Dallas when he was in GB w Rogers. A QB who shoulda won 4 only got 1. That team was better built than ours tho. They never had Hamlin and Lewis as starters in games in multiple years. Also, even that fat slug would have kept running cook when it was working

We gave up what to KC in the playoffs, 7.7? Exact same thing. Lack of talent in the gut and a scheme that gives good teams and ez mode win. There is never a question of what will the bills do on d, its always the same and the blueprint is etched in stone.

It really is coaching. We are built small, so a bully like Baltimore is gonna beat us more often than not. Our coaches really make sure we cant win by being just so easy to read. If the bills don't dial up the right exact call on d (playing rock paper scissors) then schematically what will beat us is just too obvious. Misdirection, power runs, and anything that finds the hole in the zone is always gonna be there. On top of that our zero talent middle of the d is very welcoming of big runs and yards after catching. On the other side, our wrs don't match up, so they need longer to get sched open vs talented and physical ds, and our oline (and QB, josh is pretty awful at reading where the pressure is coming from pre snap vs aggressive ds) just simply cannot pick up blitzes or handle stunts. This game looked just like the cinci playoff game. They knew what they were gonna do, back up linemen on o were just gonna blast forward and they used quick misdirection to bait the dl up the field and have our tiny back 7 get out of position early and it was a wrap. The whole MO of a mcd team is to have the d frustrate the opponent who will then make mistakes and just give the o enough possessions for super josh to invent points out of thin air on broken plays. He's so bull headed that he can't dial up a different way to slow down and opponent. It works great vs crappy qbs and coaches, but as soon as a team has some ability to scheme (coaches and players alike) he has no answers. If we didn't allow the big run to start the game and had better execution on O then this loss would have looked like our KC playoffs loss last year -- we get steamrolled constantly and Josh has enough magic to make it interesting leading to the awful play of our kicker losing the game instead of just being sad. We are a poor man's version of the packers of the 2010s -- HOF QB who can do it all and an unconfident team built to dominate bad teams but simply cannot deliver vs a talented and well coached opponent.

The bad to me is our front office. We have bad players who are a scheme fit on D, and mcclap simply can it adapt. He'll play Hamlin or AJ klien over people they started high because he thinks his scheme is rocketry and should never be changed. Baltimore is a well coached team and they saw what we tend to do and prepared a way to beat it and of course our brain trust has no answers. We were gonna lose this game w our trash guys on d and smoke a d mirror o not working vs actual talent, but mclap and go made extra certain we'd never have a chance. The trick play was just the exclamation point.

The ravens identified what works vs us and did it, our coaches decided "I'm much smarter than the rest of the NFL, I'll just do what I do instead of what might actually work and have rapp and possibly worst safety in the NFL Hamlin play a nice shell and bite on misdirection". And the offensive play calling was worse!

Even if he's not ready for the exact scheme mcclap is sexually stimulated by (guy has a nickel fetish), why not make adjustments to get your best players on the field in a position to win? Like Williams not playing over AJ flipping Kline vs kc. Literally taking a husk of a slow guy to lose the way he wants rather than chance winning w some differences. Reid was right to fire his azz

He had a good rook year but he's a few more games like this from being a bust right now. Sloppy fat body and a weak mind aren't a great combo

Coaching sucks, blocking sucks, and we start more familiar players and run our idiot scheme instead of trying to win. How is it this staff just can have the d do anything different ever? All those picks and all that money and they decided Hamlin is an NFL player, and our deep safety Nicole was gonna stop Baltimore

Ya, agree. I see these insane calls as a strange form of cowardice. Same as having rapp Lewis and Hamlin start. Instead of taking the risk of changing from the familiar, mcclap puts in trash players so he doesn't have to change his fragile scheme. On o, instead of adapting to what hurts the ravens, they run the trash we saw in the first half, and when it gets better they make this idiotic call. It shows a lack of confidence and ability to adapt, instead just throwing it up against the wall and seeing if it sticks. Low IQ front office.

I 100% agree, but the fact that we can all tell that confirms to me this team is just smoke and mirrors and too precious. Personnel and coaching decisions just remove the resilience from the team. There is no reason for us coming out with soft front vs Baltimore, or not having any solutions on o. Baltimore sucks protecting the edges on passing and can't cover tight ends, they maul up front Their o won't pass outside, they use misdirection every other play So we come out doing "what we do" like a one note band. Billicheck would never just set his guys up to fail like that, having rapp and Hamlin fail miserably while executing this trash. The trick play was the icing on the s h eye t cake they baked for us.

Terrible coaching and the oline took the night off. I just can't get over that trick play and how mcclap has Hamlin and rapp in with bishop and other dude on the bench (Ingram?). Reminds me of Peterman over josh, cook not getting burn, Milano taking a while to start, and Williams being benched in favor of flipping AJ klien's corpse rotting in the divisional round. He has this mentality that consistently leads to slow small and weak guys playing over better players.

This is not a good football team in the traditional sense. This is the goat QB with a total rag tag set of weapons, a decent RB and te, two good tackles and 3 interior barely jags. On d Hamlin, Lewis, rapp, Spector, and our Dt not named Ed are liabilities, and the rest arent too far above average.