colin

no, josh didn't do it alone, but i totally fade the argument that qb's are some kind of magical sapling which require special care in order to grow into 200 foot trees. they are football players like the rest of them, and if a guy has what it takes, he'll make it somewhere. if he doesn't, he wont. and i didnt' say to fire everyone, but clearly mcclaps has had a bad year, and im 100% unequivocally saying that dabol and some if not all (o line for sure) of our offensive coaching staff are simply not good, and they are riding high off of the explosion the bills o experienced which is a function of talent. being horrible in the red zone and not making adjustments is a sign of weak coaching, and not having an offensive identity in your 4th year w the same qb (star qb at that) is a sign of poor ability. daboll had trash results prior to the bills, and trash results his first two years. it's one thing to argue about an imperfect oc who has had consistent success (greg roman) but a guy who has only had about 20 or so really strong offensive games of production is simply not the CV of a good OC.

dude, what is your actual point? that the coaches are great and fans don't count? like, you realize this a fan message board, right? you're just coming off half cocked here, you pretend not to understand my point about the coaches doing a poor job, i've made a pretty clear case where and why our coaches have a shortcoming, and you need your head checked if you think allen isn't a rare talent, he did get the biggest guaranteed contract in nfl history, like it's not exactly brave to say he's good. your comment to me about not being important or entitled to anything is telling. you are nothing but a fan yourself, who are you to tell another fan (on a fan message board, where everyone is a fan giving fan opinions, for fun and venting purposes) what a fan should or shouldn't think? lol, you seem like a guy who orders a jersey with the coach's name on it.

bro, this is it entirely. motivation, scheme, basic coaching, and most of all identifying talent and ability. cody ford is trash, but it seems it took some serious failure to figure that out for our coaches. we let teller and spain walk (i understand spain had attitude issues of some kind, but he was good here for a while, and has been good on his new team). we could have dawkins, spain, morse, teller, brown assuming the coaches who would have pushed to keep those guys would be at least a bit better at scheming and coaching them up, that's a killer line. all guys who were on our team, all guys who played. we'd be able to pay teller by ditching williams as of next season, meanwhile he'd be on the roster this year as depth. we could have sacrificed the sanders signing to make easy room for all of this. i honestly think that alone, even w dabol being not my personal favorite (i admit, i've railed on him a bit much) we'd be able to run and protect just enough better in the red zone to have snuck in an extra TD and woulda won vs jax, ne, and likely one of pittz or Tenn. 9 and 3 would have us sitting super pretty, with the ability to actually execute on O oh my, what could have been!

oh dear, im afraid to look. that bad?

all that means is that the coaches are better than the trash we had before. also, w allen on this team, we are and should be judged more strictly, as we have a top flight qb, we should expect top flight results. furthermore, prior history loses relevance in the nfl very quickly, you are only as good as you are right now, and right now we are middle of the pack of the afc. that's not acceptable.

good point, Dopey! said another way: players not being ready to play, be it their personal mindset or schematic implementation or preparation prior to the game, be it a function of specific x's and o's or a more general systemic "culture" prevalent in the professional football club environment, is a function of the effectiveness of the management of that football club, i.e. the coaching staff.

ya, i was impressed with how hard the bills worked to stop it, and go the job done, after getting trucked for a long drive. it was a solid defensive stand.

in an era when RBs are the lowest paid as a % of cap as they've ever been, and are viewed as fungible, it is shocking to me we have 3 rbs on the active roster who either can't run, can't break tackles, or can't hold onto the ball (in some cases several of these at once!). given what we pay addison, butler, and sanders (who while fairly capable, is simply just a guy who replaces a basically equivalent player on O when he lines up, can't block, and it small) who are at best part time players, it's funny that we couldn't sign an OG and a real nfl RB this off season. god williams sucks this season.

the way we are built, we are weak against the run, it's just that simple. last night it showed when we got trucked a few times, and most of all on that long td run. i give our d a ton of credit for playing balls out all night and doing everything in the power to help us win. the goal line stand was essentially heroic. our d has laid two big eggs today, indy and tenn. those losses are on them. the rest is all on the O, and to a lesser extent on special teams (pittz)

hes another one of our just above replacement level rotation guys on the DL. the depth really does help our pass D, they don't get a lot of sacks but they can get some pressure while not totally falling below their normal standard vs the run (not the greatest standard, but still a very good overall D) the issue i have with him and groot and boogie and even oliver is that they are on the bench the majority of the time on D because of our rotation, while brown being out meant we had disasters at 3-5 of our oline positions. just poor allotment of draft capital, not to mention vet contracts.

exactly. im not sure of the mix of play calling, motivation, or simply just practicing and designing the necessary stuff to win these situations, but whatever the coaching staff have spent the entire season doing, it doesn't work at all. most dangerous run/pass qb in the nfl and i can tell you from my couch what play we are about to run in the redzone 8/10 times, and you know nfl d's figured it out. urban meyer made a disparaging comment about what we do on O, and he was 100% right. we are a lame spread O. he d'ed us up like one, and we folded like a cheap suit. and jax absolutely sucks.

we won 10 games in 19, woudla been 11 but we sat guys in the last game. we won 13 last year, most we are gonna win this season is 12, and that's with an extra game (and i don't think a single person on this board thinks we are gonna win 12 this season). Our talent is better than 19, and i don't think you rationally say it is worse (in fact, it is kinda obviously better, less the tre white injury of course) than in 20. all we have done this season is crush cans, snuck one over kc, and gone .500 at home including two total let downs on O, and a total team blow out. mcD in every season before this year had at least one total run for the bus game (NO when we had tyrod, several in Josh's first season, a couple in 19, tenn kc in the play offs last year, indy this year). so he's conservative in a way that doesn't prevent blow out knock down losses. allen is easily the best thing on this team, and about 29 or 30 other nfl teams would step over their own mothers to get him. he's the only reason we did well at all last year and this year. I agree mcd is coaching poorly this season, but he's the HC and he's on contract, and the D is solid and his shortcomings aside, he's got us this far. we absolutely need a better offensive coaching staff, and i wouldn't look past upgrading our D staff either. we might not have an overall great roster (not as good as we thought) and it's clearly not balanced or tough, but my goodness our redzone o is just so shockingly our biggest issue that if mcd wants to keep his seat from heating up too much he is going to have to address the O coaching. i don't think he has the eggs to fire daboll midseason, so it's likely in the offseason.

im banging the cover off of this drum, but not being prepared every other week is indicative to me of a coaching/culture issue. either they players don't buy in, they slack off, the scheme's get lazy/crappy, or some other issue hits us and we simply aren't good to go.

facts. sometimes i think being a bills fan itself is malicious compliance.

and they walked teller out of town, and they signed spain, who then quit, and they signed williams, who fell off. motivation issue? blocking scheme? the results suck poop, so it's time for the coaches to get replaced.

yes, that is a random assortment of plays that if they went better for us we are in a much better position to win. but you'll get those anywhere, and in any different way. the thing about the redzone issue is 1) it is consistent. it is a repeating thing, and it goes back to some of our games last season too 2) it is not a random occurrence, or a random situation or play, it's a basic element of football 3) we got to the red zone calling and executing plays to beat the opponents on D. it's not a fluke, its not unexpected, and you don't pull a card out of a deck and just line up in the redzone. you have to make plays to get there, and in that area, you have more pressure cuz a play results in a TD with much more likely hood than in another part of the field, and it is a compressed space so you need to run your O a little differently. the point of our red zone woes is that even with your list of broken and bad plays above, if we had scored one, or maybe two, tds in those games with multiple redzone trips that all came up short, we win the freaking game. it's just inexcusable for us to be this bad in the redzone. yes we have a bad oline, and they've been injuried, yes our running backs are dirty cheeks. i get that. but as far as i am concerned, if you have the weapons we have, the qb we have, and most of all, a qb who can run and get it done all on his own (which he has, consistently throughout his career) then a good OC will scheme up some kind of way to make scores in the redzone happen. not on every drive, but not 0 for 3, 0 for 4, and so on. frankly, if we look back to the houston playoff game, where we had way less talent (that 37 year old RT, and ford at RG were holding down our line, and we had gore and motor at RB, and no knox, and no diggs, we had just trash), it was the same story. i think this is simply a fundamental flaw of our O, and that's on the coaches.

funny but sad, more than any other coaching staff that gets celebrated, the bills staff really don't adapt, it's a my way or the high way approach. after this loss, i was thinking of who this team reminds me of. this team reminds me of the ATL team of about 5 years ago. they had a great record, and a massive lead in the super bowl, but their inability (and really, it came down to not being willing to) run the ball a little bit and kill some clock lost them the worst come back in super bowl history. top flight qb, skill position talent (they beat us all to hell w the rbs tho) and speed on d, but not big and strong. to me that's our ceiling at the moment, and those coaches had a rigid our plan is the best plan approach, and our guys do that to a fault.

every game we lost, with the exception of the indy blow out, could have been won with a conversion of one of our multiple fruitless redzone trips. exact same story (pittz, jax, tenn, and ne). w josh allen and who we have on O, to me an OC who can't get 1 td a game out of these trips (ignore tenn, just the other 3 listed) is just not good.

lol, you said it. he's huge, super fast, athletic, moves around well. he looks like an all pro like half the time, and he makes just plain old errors the other half.

so first of all, yes 100% the buck stops at the head man in charge, and that's the clappy one. i think the case for daboll being good, or even above average, as an nfl OC is simply flimsy. he had trash numbers his first couple of years, and good numbers last year and this year, but that's on the back of allen and diggs just being much better than other players. he can't scheme up something creative to get us tds with multiple trips in the redzone, and every fan and the entire d of the opponents knows exactly what trash gut run or obvious forced short pass we are doing on way way too many downs. we put ourselves behind the sticks, and beg allen to cast a magic spell. so ya, mcclaps leaves me with a lot to be desired, but daboll is the weakest link (honorable mention to our just bottom of the barrel dirty cheeks trash OL coaching too).

we have plenty of talent issues, we are not balanced, that's for certain, but no one is perfect. the pats had a freaking rookie qb who they didn't even ask to throw the ball. we have the highest paid d and dline in the nfl, and the qb with the most guaranteed money in the history of the game. 1/4 in the redzone, 3 filthy points, is disgusting. that's on coaching, that's on not being prepared. yeah, our OL is not good, our RBs are cheeks, and our WRs are too small, but we have josh freaking allen on the field, and no one else does, and we simply couldn't figure out a way to set him up ONE BLOODY TIME for a TD is entirely on coaching. everything we run on O is either known by the d ahead of time, or it is simply asking allen to be super man and just will us some points. our front office is our biggest problem right now, and our coaching on offense is not good.

we have played like wimps for like half of the season, last night was no exception to that. beyond the weather tho, it is true that we simply don't have a home field advantage. we don't play better at home than on the road. 3 afc losses at home so far this season. our offense didn't show up for any of them, and our d got physically trucked in all of them (although actually overall fought hard and played well enough to win in two of them, indy was a run for the bus shart fest). a team that doesn't play better at home, who crushes cans, and who can't score in the redzone is simply an team without confidence who is poorly prepared. that's who we are.

obviously i want my team to win it all, but at this juncture i can't say the bills deserve to be in the playoffs. we are just can crushers who fold hard when it gets tough. mcd bills teams have had this every season, every season we get just trashed in a game or two where it all falls apart. we don't make adjustments (in fact, the coaches have said they don't really plan them, lest it lowers confidence in what the game plan was) and we make dumb mistakes. the drops last night, 49 and even poyer getting the gap wrong, running backs who might be blind just running into their own linemen. this is not a prepared team on a week to week basis. this isn't good football.

he has a ton of talent, he just makes way way too many mistakes. simple as

lol, 40% pats mush us, 35% we mush them, 25% is left. 20% of that is us getting the win by some kind of struggle, 5% is them getting the win by some kind of struggle. 40 + 35 + 25 (bifurcated into 20 and 5 in my post) = 100 I'll write it in reverse polish notation 40 35+ 25+ see?!?!