dhgold

+1 for Ed Oliver

He's not Bill Walsh (who is?) and 13 seconds will probably haunt me to my grave but the bottom line is that in the 17 seasons before McDermott the Bills went to the playoffs zero times while in the six seasons he's been the Bills head coach, they've gone to the playoffs five times. Overall, a job extremely well done.

Bad organizations e.g. Cardinals will continue to sign bad contracts, good teams e.g. Ravens will be more cautious. Desperate teams e.g. Browns will make desperate moves.

I actually like Shannon, but on the show he does with Bayless it seems that most of their discussion concerns two topics, the Cowboys and Lebron. Grows old pretty quickly.

IMO, the Chargers are a very talented team with a below-average coach. On the bright side for Bills fans, the Herbert Chargers have always played the Chiefs close, e.g. losing by three in both games this year and splitting with them last year. I think it's quite possible that if the Chargers played the Chiefs in the division round, the AFC championship game could end up in Buffalo after all.

I think the league did a pretty good job of "splitting the baby in half", given the circumstances. As a Bills fan, I feel the Bills came out of the situation pretty well. If anything, the Bengals have might feel they got the short end of the stick. Up to the moment it became apparent how serious Hamlin's injury was, I was preoccupied with how Burrow was carving up the Bills defense and the prospect of the Bills falling to the 3 seed. If the Bengals end up coming to Buffalo for the divisional round and lose in a close game they're likely to feel that they would have won if the game had been played in Cincinnati -- that they were screwed by circumstances beyond their control.

Romo's blabbermouth causes him to make a lot of idiotic pronouncements. After a play that backs the Bills up to their 1 yard line, "that was a game changing play". Two plays later the Patriots have the ball back in better field position. If the game changed at all, it was to the Patriots advantage.

NFL MVP voters tend to go for the most prominent player on the team with best record. As far as who has been the most valuable player so far this season I think it's either Allen or Mahomes, who have both carried their teams, but the mindless voters would probably go for Hurts at this point in the season. From what I've seen of Philly, their offensive line is the team MVP.

I agree with the original poster. I don't feel nearly as good about the Bills as I did after the first 6.5 games of the season. Particular areas of concern are: The loss of Von Miller which makes the defense look like last year's not-quite-good-enough unit. The offensive line which doesn't create enough holes for the running game and doesn't protect JA well enough. From what I've seen of the Eagles they would be a very tough match. The Eagle's offense seems far more complete than the Bills'; IMO, the Eagles' offensive line is the league MVP. Reasons for optimism beyond the obvious (JA): As Tra'davious White rounds into shape, the defense could improve. Having played by far the hardest schedule in the league, the Bills will go into the playoffs battle tested.

+1

Rushing four (or less) on passing downs is not getting it done.

No. The league should go back to six teams from each conference making the playoffs with two of the six getting byes.

I've wondered the same same thing as the original poster and came to the same conclusion as Pine Barrens Mafia -- that JA was concussed at some point in the first half. The play show in the video posted by Einstein sure seems like the sort of collision which could result in a concussion. My WTF moment was the red zone interception he threw in the 2nd half against Green Bay. This intimation of negativity was confirmed when he threw a similar pick against the Jets. Josh needs to make sliding an ingrained habit. As it is, he reminds me of my late, great dog who had a great respect for barbed wire when he was in a calm state, but when his blood was up, say when he spotted prey on the other side, he would run right through it. (Trips to the vet and time on the IR often ensued.)

Tripling down is a worse idea. OJ's playoff game was against the Pittsburgh's ferocious Steel Curtain defense which contained around 8 Pro Bowlers and at least 4 future Hall of Famers. Considering that OJ was the know-to-everyone focus of the offense, I'd say he didn't do too badly. I can't believe your egregious take is making me bash Thurman Thomas, my all-time favorite Bill, but OJ's stats in his playoff game compare favorably to Thurman's against the Redskins in Super Bowl XXVI.

I'm glad to see so many people sticking up for OJ (the football player). Eleven years after he retired, OJ was still the standard of running back excellence.

I repeat, OJ Simpson. He had a strong case for being the best running back in college football history (pre Barry Sanders) He ran on a world record 440 yard relay team. He won the TV show The Superstars in its third year when it could attract top athletes. He had a five year stretch when he was not only the top running back in the NFL, he was arguably considered the best player in the league. He wasn't just otherworldly in the 2000 yard rushing year (reminder: in 14 games!); two years later, he averaged over a combined 160 yards per game rushing and receiving and set a league record for touchdowns in a season. If you'd watched him, I doubt you'd argue. While I acknowledge Barry Sanders' greatness, I don't feel he was better than OJ. Paul Zimmerman, the late, great Sports Illustrated writer, who was sort of a one-man Pro Football Focus decades before PFF came into existence, in the edition of his book The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football which I read in the early 90s, listed OJ and Marion Motely as the second best running backs in NFL history, behind Jim Brown.

OJ and Bruce Smith.

Does T White's situation remind anyone else of Bruce Smith's in 1991? That was the last/only time there was this much optimism about the Bills. Smith, the team's best player and reigning DPOY, had a lingering knee issue from the previous season. He played at the start of the season but was a shadow of himself so the team didn't play him at all for most of the season (IIRC, going on injured reserve precluded playing for the rest of the season) with the goal of him being at full strength for the playoffs. He played at the end of the regular season and in the playoffs but was not fully recovered and not his dominant self on the field. The Bills with the supercharged K-Gun offense still made it to the Super Bowl where Washington stomped them. The Redskins (I'm not rewriting history and changing what was their name at the time) won so easily that #78 at the top of his game probably wouldn't have made a difference but still one wonders. I hope history doesn't repeat itself and that Tre'Davious returns to the field at 100% sooner rather than later.

I remember JA's year two as a mixed bag, showing considerable improvement from year one but still quite lacking as far as precision, consistency and poise. I loved his leadership and intangibles and the fact that he got the heretofore suck-ass Bills to the playoffs but at the end of the season I was on the fence as to whether he was the long term answer. Sometime around the end of the 2019 regular season (JA's year 2), I had a conversation with a relative who'd recently played in the NFL at a pro-bowl level and who spent a good part of his retirement watching the league. I asked him what he thought of Josh and he said "dude can't play". I tried to defend Josh on the basis of intangibles and improvement while acknowledging he still had much room for improvement, but my relative wasn't buying it. (At the end of Josh's year three, the same relative considered him an elite NFL QB.) The only person I can think of who was convinced JA was the answer after year was Adam Schein.

Credit to the Raiders for a strategic masterstroke. By acquiring Davonte Adams and signing him to a mega deal, they gave themselves the best three-deep receiving corps in the league while their above-average QB is playing for below-average pay. It seems like Adams' contract made it untenable for the Chiefs to extend/keep Hill. Within a week the Raiders acquired the two-years-running PFF top rated receiver and forced the most explosive weapon in the league out of their division. Meanwhile, Dolphins get demerits for strategic stupidity. Trading for Hill seems like the Dolphins' version of the Bills trading up to draft Sammy Watkins. Apparently they think it will make them a contender but I doubt anyone else does. However it seems like the trade for Hill would give the Dolphins a puncher's chance in any given game. It would just suck if the Bills miss out on home field advantage because Hill, in an otherwise disappointing for the Dolphins season, manages to have one or two game-changing lightning bolt plays against the Bills.

I haven't read all 53 pages of this thread, so maybe the topic has been covered, but as a Bills fan who has lived in Denver since before Von was drafted, I wanted to mention some local anecdotes that indicate what a special athlete Von is (hopefully not was). Repeatedly over the years, local sports talk people have related being at practice when Von was "on" and how he was at least a level above anyone else on the field. Orlando Franklin, an all-decade Broncos right tackle recounted a training camp incident where near the end of practice, a running back took a shot at Von which Von considered cheap. This fired Von up and terrified Orlando who was lined up against Von. For the remaining few plays of practice, Von destroyed Orlando and wrecked the offense. Despite being an above average NFL starter, Orlando was powerless against him. As far as baseline talent think Bruce Smith.

When he's not reminding me of Elway, JA sometimes reminds me of Cam Newton whose rushing attempts through four years are quite comparable to Josh's. While I foresee Josh having a better career than Cam's (JA's intangibles strike me as very good while Cam's were his Achilles heel), sometimes when I watch JA take unnecessary hits, the way Cam's body broke down and his career collapsed comes to mind.

IMO, Mahomes' best, so far, is better than JA's. For that matter, I thought Mahomes played slightly better than JA in the recent divisional playoff round shootout. (I thought the differentiator was the magician-like way Mahomes escaped pressure on multiple occasions.) However, as a Bills fan, I take heart in my sense that JA is still improving while the same may not be true of Mahomes. But that's just an aside, my main point in this post is to state JA's other significant weakness which I forgot to mention in my previous post. He is fairly slow to read the field. He offsets this somewhat by his ability to buy time, but combined with his accuracy issues, this is a noticeable limitation on third and shorts where the kind of quick, precise move-the-sticks throw that Brady, for example, built a career on, is barely in Josh's repertoire. I'm trying to be objective here, not critical. (Burrow, Herbert and even Mahomes have flaws in their games.) Josh at his best reminds me of John Elway at this best. Having lived in Colorado for 30+ years, I'm quite familiar with how that style of play can make a team a contender year after year and get you to the Super Bowl repeatedly.

Lifetime Bills fan here who thinks the arrival/improvement of Josh Allen is one of the three best things ever to happen to the Bills, along with drafting OJ and the talent infusion of the Kelly/Smith/Thomas era. Still I have to keep it real and say that while I'm just amazed at how good Josh has become, I'd have some reservations about picking him over the other three. (BTW, I live in Colorado and have seen a lot of both Mahomes and Herbert.) JA stands out in terms of physical gifts, competitiveness and desire/determination to improve. While his passing accuracy has improved it's still not nearly as good as the other three. When I've watched him, Herbert has routinely rifled passes 20+ yards past the line of scrimmage into tiny windows. JA's receivers lose a lot of YAC because the pass often doesn't hit them in stride. My other concern about JA is the sustainability of his physical style -- he takes far more avoidable hard hits than the other three; he seems to be learning to avoid hits in less-than-critical situations, but still, he took a pounding in the last four or five games of the season. (Burrow takes a beating too, but because his offensive line stinks, not because he seeks out contact.) I believe that the objective viewer could make a case for any of the four.

A little bit off topic, but I've long thought that Marv Levy's fatal flaw was his loyalty to Walt Corey. The Levy/Polian Bills wasted the prime of their talent cycle (at least as far as winning Super Bowls) by keeping Corey around. I remember reading in a national publication (don't remember which) words to the effect of "the Bills defense doesn't always play up to the level of its all star pieces". Corey was let go after the '94 season, replaced by Wade Phillips and the defense immediately improved (albeit with some significant additions such was Washington and Paup). I'm not trying to draw parallels to the current state of the Bills; if anything, I think the current Bills defense outperforms its talent level, 13 second nonwithstanding.