dorquemada

It's really going to depend on how we do between now and that game. It could, from where we stand now, very well be a run for the busses game. If we're 5-9 or 6-8, It'll be an ugly game with Miami running for another 1500 yards or whatever they did last week. If we're at least 7-7 or maybe 8-6 (lol) then I think the bills show and make a game of it

Or, conversely, if we lose by 20 (seems unlikely give the state of the Seattle O, but let's not sell our Bills short!), we'll get posts about how great Colton Schmidt played, or that the left side of the OL was quite remarkable, as the boxscore clearly shows! In other words, desperate rationalization trying to ignore the fact that this squad is about the same as the last 16 in the ways that winning is traditionally measured.

I don't give us much chance at Seattle and Cinci - they're both just better teams in almost any sense than the Bills, but the Jax game is the measure of this Bills team. If the bills deliver a steaming turd at home against a JV team like Jax, then seriously, the whole team needs to be blown up from the janitor to the GM. Given our collective Stockholm Syndrome, does anyone here think that the Bills stomp on Jax? they're beat up and not playing great but they have a winning culture there. Add that to the fact it's at home, and primetime, and this is the exact game that the Bills havent been able to win for... 16 years

Cleveland is a terrible, terrible team, but they aren't suffering the weight of expectations. This bills team has the fortitude of a stage 4 cancer patient on life support, and if anyone is going to give the Browns some confidence to build on, there's no other team left on their schedule quiet as adept at doing that sort of thing as the Bills, especially in their current formation

There's tons more choices too, everything from Netflix to Youtube, and im sure a bunch of stuff I'm not even aware of. The NFL's model of selling commercials to a captive audience is out of date, and the way the league is run, they're built to stay that way. They're blockbuster video a couple years after people started to get on the internet, which is to say, still making money hand over fist, but the seeds of their destruction are already here. My kids, scions to 2 families heavily into football, will never sit through a game, or even if they're sitting there with me, they're on their phones or pads, not paying any attention whatsoever. When you look at the future, people aren't going to sit willingly and be advertised to, and the NFL model of 3 minutes of commercial for every minute of gameplay doesn't stand a chance with that group

Our Buffalo Bills will pull one upset, either Pitt or Cinci, then lose to Cleveland. Mark my words

and how parts of the team really played well. fantasy football has ruined people's ability to understand that w/l is the only meaningful metric

"schadenfreude" is the word you're looking for

everyone's getting punchy again

I agree with your first sentence 100%. I've had to have hard conversations with direct reports on this very thing. I'm not asking, though, if it's right or wrong, I'm asking if it's happening, and if it's effecting the performance of the D. Different question, and in my mind one worth trying to figure out, but not enough data yet as we all realize that Tom Brady is a literal God King in his utter dominance of whatever D the Bills put out there against him

So maybe this is the point I was getting at but didn't make clear. MD may himself play great. He has, does, and will. Do the players around him, some of whom (thinking about guys like Lorax and the other parts bins players) are making not much over league vet minimum, feel as motivated as they did before? You would hope they do, and are all still playing to their peak potential, but as someone who manages a team of professionals, I can tell you for cold hard fact that when I bring someone new onto the team, if the others find out that person is making more then them, it's always the same reaction, and their expectation of that new person is always in excess of what is reasonable to ask, and they'll fold their arms and put their feet up, metaphorically. This is a big reason why salary discussions are 100% verboten, and a fire-able offense. I realize pro sports aren't the same as corporate office drones, but human emotions exist in both places and people can be super petty

You are correct in a sense. There's truth in that apparently Tom Brady can neutralize a good front 7. My original question was about the D's performance holistically, with MD in there versus when he isn't. I'll wait for more data, then look at it again. On that note, I'll be in Vegas for a work thing next week, love seeing monday night football at 530, and the election returns at a less crazy hour

When you build a statistical model, which is what I'm talking about, it's important to have meaningful metrics. When I built a tool (this was like 20 years ago using SPSS) to predict games, the first thing I did was load a bunch of high level historical data... wins/losses, yards for and against, turnovers, time of possession, and a few others. Then I had to do some modelling to see which of those variables had the highest correlation to wins. With that information, I could weight certain variables, and proceed with the predictive model. That's a long way to say... in effect, that the proof is in the pudding. The DL may have had a good statistical performance, but as part of a system, they failed. Whatever they did do, they didn't, as a system, prevent the pats from scoring. Now, it's been stated above, and we all know it to be true, that the Bills simply don't measure up to the Pats, which is why I said we need to look holistically at the season and the next few weeks, but it will be interesting to parse the data later to see if the D performed better overall with MD in there, versus not, with "performed better" being measured by how many points they allow

Which I did point out. here's the thing, Seattle is a good team too. Do we ignore whatever data comes out of that game? When can we judge what's going on, only when the Bills play sub .500 teams? 41 points is the most the pats have scored on the bills since 2012, and the 4th most given up since 1990. I'll agree that the backfield was the real problem, but that doesn't mean the front 7 were effective, overall I guess im not as much a homer for the bills as I used to be because I see 41 points given up, and I'm not looking for bright spots, but see a systemic failure of the D. I'm sure glad they got 5 sacks though, looks good on the season ending stats sheet.

I'm trying to figure out what changed. Obviously playing the Pats is always going to be a problem for the Bills as long as brady is around, he's far too much man for them. I do a lot of work with statistics and will at some point start feeding data into an old model I built to predict games, once MD has been back for a few games and tweak it until something pops out.

I'm not sure we can say anyone played "well" given the result.

modnote: I did a cursory review of open topics and didn't see this specific thing being discussed. If I missed it, please delete this or merge it. Thanks I had a thought after watching the tape on the pats game. Is this team actually worse from a holistic perspective, with MD back in the lineup? He's obviously a super talented guy, and earned his big paycheck, but it just seems like the front 7 isn't playing nearly as well with him back in there, and for that matter, since he started practicing again after his suspension. I want to state that I'm a fan of his and want nothing more than for him to succeed within the context of Bills success. I went to Alabama, and cheered when the Bills took him, so this isn't some kind of agenda against him. As we observed earlier this season, before the bills reverted back to form the last 2 weeks, Rex can piece together a good to great D with mostly midrange players, with some right out of the parts bin. It seems counter-intuitive that adding MD into the mix would lower overall performance, but that's been directly observed, so either there are confounding variables that are causing the Bills D to be worse, or something about MD's presence is causing the decline in play. Realizing that we don't have much of a body of evidence to work with at this point, it'll be interesting to see over the next few weeks which Bills D shows up.

Yeah, the world has changed and the NFL model hasn't, or only gotten worse. I won't watch commercials any more, if there's any possible way to avoid it. Again, not to get on a soap box about it, but sometime maybe in the 90s, it became the cool and edgy thing to make the adult male be an idiot in every single commercial. Welp, if that's what you think of me, maybe this idiot will just skip your commercial, and the rest of them while I'm at it, because I have the tech to do so, and there's nothing happening in the football game that's so critical that time shifting it by 2 hours will make any difference whatsoever. While that's true, i have to imagine if the league asked the networks to avoid coverage of it, they would. There's no promise of free nationwide tv coverage for your idiotic protest in the constitution. The NFL is way too far up their own azz to realize this, so we'll continue to get wall to wall coverage of players sitting out the national anthem.

It's unwatchable because of the flags and commercials. I was waiting for a wedding to start yesterday and the Jets/Browns game was on. There was at least 3x more commercial minutes than game broadcast minutes, and I don't even mean actual game play, I mean, time on the TV when it wasn't a commercial. I think my dissatisfaction has been percolating for a while now, and the Colin Kaepernick stuff just put it over the top. Now you're putting a shtty product on the field, and packaging it in such a way to make it even less enjoyable, then you're shoving it in my face how admirable you find a spoiled rotten millennial's 'protest' against law enforcement? OK whatever, it turns out there's lots of other things to do. If I didn't get the Sunday Ticket for free, I doubt I'd renew it next year when I can just look on the web for the 2 minutes of actual highlights that come out of each game. Realizing that, and having easy access to those highlights, it becomes a fairly simple calculation, basically the only part of pro football I enjoy are those highlight reels because they've ruined the rest of it. Yup. Get outside of the lib echo chamber and a lot of the middle of the country are pretty pissed about it, and voting with their remotes.

When you have a data driven prediction mechanism, that's devoid of context, the blowouts against terrible teams make the Bills seem better than they are. I used to dabble in this, and ended up writing a routine that would only consider the first 13 points in a victory to try to control for that.

show us on the doll where the hot sauce touched you

she's got the first 6 digits of my phone number dialed and her finger over the last digit, but she knows as well as we all do that MD will find a way not to play Sunday

ha i didn't know that happened, I listened to it on a dumb transistor radio. now I have technology so I can watch them suck at 1920x1080

beating dallas in 84 was my alltime favorite bills memory...greg bell for an 85 yard run if memory serves now. that team had more heart than this one, even if they weren't very good at playing football

and that bills fan was....Albert Einstein