dorquemada

Hey maybe he is. Do you suppose he's betting on the games? That would explain a lot. You bet on the Jags, make sure they get comfortably ahead, then stage a comeback but go halfhearted at the end, collect your winnings

Right, I'm reading the other thread where Lunatic P. Crazy is suggesting that we start EJ against Miami because it'll be way different this time. I'm all for collective delusion (I'm Buffalo through and through) but enough is enough. We're turning into the Anabaptists at Munster.

Yup then we can go back to focusing on our Billion Dollar Babies on the DL

yeah that's what I'm saying. I think it's safe to remove Dallas from the potential win category. This team does not have what it takes to beat a playoff team, and I absolutely defy anyone to say otherwise

Seems wildly optimistic. 538 gives us probability of beating Miami, Houston, Washington, Dallas (!), and the finale against the Jets. Lets work backwards.... the last game, against the Jets. I can see the Jets contending for a wildcard spot, and us playing for the difference between 6-10 and 7-9. Although familiar territory for the Bills, I can't imagine the Jets rolling over and the Bills showing up for that. Dallas? That's just crazy talk and why statistical models don't always reflect reality. Dallas will run for 500 yards against the Bills, Romo or no Romo. Washington? They're inconsistent but seem to play hard each week, at least in the bits I've seen, so I guess that's probably our best chance for a win. Houston - maybe? Watt can pretty much single handedly own the Bills O-Line. Maybe he'll be out for that game and the Bills can win on a last second field goal Miami - ha fat chance. Miami has gone from a laughing stock softie team to a contender seemingly overnight. Amazing what a hard nose coach can do. Too bad we're stuck with the Big Dumb Face at HC Even if the Bills beat Washington and Houston, we're looking at 5-11, lol what a year

My friend's son has moderate to severe autism. Over the years I've learned how to discuss things with him, and the key is to remember that a lot of time Autists are super literal. A statement like "The Season isn't over" is axiomatically correct. We just played week 7, and there's 10 more weeks left in the season.

lol, nope. We'd get more for just McCoy than bundling him with Dr Doolittle

This is a calm, rational, and correct response to this 'crisis' but not nearly as satisfying as gathering the townfolk with pitchforks and torches and screaming BURN THE WITCHES so BURN THE WITCHES

Indeed. In my professional life, in managing teams, I've learned some things. One of them is, 'average' is a meaningful concept. Unless there are extraordinary individuals on a team (from bottom to top), it's going to be average. All of this new age nonsense that management consultants spew out about everyone being a special contributor is false on it's face, at least in the way they mean. The other thing is that teams are ultimately a reflection of management and leadership. Competent management can mitigate a certain amount of shortcoming on a team. Great management and leadership can lift the team and make a bunch of C players play like B players, or even better, because great leadership can unlock potential in others, or inspire extra effort. That brings us to the Bills. They're a team of mostly C players with a few Bs thrown in. Our DL is Cs right now, and I'll not hear otherwise. Our coaching and general management is built to keep this a solid C team. Because of the vagaries of football stats, 5-11 of 6-10 is more likely than 7-9. I think it's pretty safe to rule out 9-7 or better, so the numbers would tell us that 6-10 is probably where the Bills end up. I might play with the numbers a little more and find something more recent. There's a good article on http://archive.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2007/08/luck-and-nfl-outcomes.html that I pulled that graph from. The net here is, the Bills at this point because of injuries/bad coaching/mediocre talent aren't going to break through that trough and into a positive record (remember last year, it took the Pats taking the day off for the Bills to get to 9-7) and don't have a path with the current team/coach.

Funny thing is, I'm reading the weekly 'winners and losers from week X' columns and they don't even include the Bills any more. It's assumed we're going to lose, and it's not noteworthy any longer. That's something, and earlier in the season than we've seen the last couple years. The Bills are a sloppy, marginally talented team (lets admit this and stop trying to twist reality to make it out that this roster is full of talent) led by a retarded frat boy who looks lost on the sideline, like the game is happening to him rather than being an active participant. I have some faith that the Pegulas can turn this around, but it probably wasn't realistic to expect great things in year one. He had to flatline the Sabres before he figured it out. Historical performance is the best indicator for future performance.

I think maybe the point is, Denver would be winning with or without Peyton. Be that as it may, they are winning, an emotion that is a distant memory for our Bills. Losing is ingrained in the culture here, and this team will always regress towards the mean of 7-9. We got our 9-7 (super bowl!) last year so prepare for a long stretch of 7-9 or below while we 'rebuild'

You're right. I hate to say it, but the Bills built a better team just selecting 7 DBs every year.

Correct, but they won't. Not because TP is afraid to make a move, but because it'll make Buffalo a toxic destination for the kind of coach we would want to lure here, and we'd end up with another Marrone. Mind you, I'd take last year's coaching staff over this one. Last year we wont most of the games we were supposed to, except for maybe the Oakland game. I also just realized looking at last year's record, we had a .500 or above record all season. Rex is quantifiably worse than Marrone.

old blighty

Can't seem to answer the single question I asked, well done. When the waitress asks if you want soup or salad, do you call her a lazy stupid ass? It's a good defense mechanism for someone who can't understand words and context. ok well I withdraw this comment based on your last post. Long day at work today dealing with govt employees

You're spot on. The NFL gauges success by a single metric, all else to the side. That metric is, how much money did we make? If DTV pays the NFL $1.5b per year for the Sunday ticket (number from memory, could be wrong?) that basically means that each game played is around $3m. If Yahoo or google or Amazon offered them $3m and one cent per game, I can tell you exactly what they would do, and wouldn't lose a moment of sleep in doing it. The best hope is that the streaming is otherwise a disaster (tech issues, lots of complaints about the quality of the stream, whatever) and that they think better of it, but I think it would have to be a really bad reaction for the league to stop going down this path. Sure, for people who are already set up to stream, or for the sociopaths that actually want to watch the game on their phone. Maybe I'm an outlier, but most people I know who are NFL fans want to watch on a TV and want to keep the screwing around with the TV/laptop/new device to a minimum.

Wow you're something. Let's use 2 examples, maybe you're a visual learner; Family 1: Long time Bills fans, live in Denver, CO. Have had DTV and Sunday ticket for 10 years. Not huge media consumers, but like watching football. Do not have a firestick, Roku, Chromecast, etc. The do have a previous generation gaming console. Family 1 is used to seeing what time the game is on, and either recording it, or planning on being in front of TV. Family 1 sees that game is on early Sunday (weird!) but, doesn't quite catch that it isn't on TV. They turn on the TV Sunday morning and lo and behold, damnit no game. Quick look at your phone and see what channel it's on. Oh wow look it's streaming on yahoo.com. Gee honey can we do that on our TV? I really want to watch the game. Welp, I'm not sure! Let me see, oh the PS3 is saying it needs to do a system update to get onto the PS NEtwork. (45 min later) ok it looks like we can get online. Point the browser at yahoo.com Oh look it needs a different plugin that isn't supported on the Sony browser. You know what, eff it, lets go out to breakfast instead. Lather, rinse, repeat a million times. Family 2: klos63, generally unpleasant personality, tends to watch games by himself, doesn't mind making his living room look like a server room, damnit the cat stepped on my laptop and paused the stream now I have to get up and there's potato chips all over the floor, but I can be smugly self satisfied that this is way better than just turning on Directv and watching the game, like most people have done for the last 20 years Now, do you think there are more NFL watching households that match Family 1, or Family 2?

Weird it's almost as if we've already accounted for those people...who already have a TV and dish and sunday ticket, and watch like most people do, but now when they go to turn the game on Sunday morning will be told to "click on yahoo.com" we should just give them you're number, you seem like you're a really smart guy, brimming with answers. For people who are already set up to stream content over IP, yeah, sure. That's not most people. It WILL be most people, in a few years, but I expect that come mid day Sunday there's going to be a lot of pissed of fans that weren't able to watch the game (or, might have been able to, but tried for a minute or two and said the hell with it). I don't think it's a mistake that the NFL let yahoo stream the game between the Jags and Bills, will probably keep the interested parties to a minimum.

So you're as bad at reading as you are at posting. "Oh, just go buy a firestick, oh, just plug your laptop into your TV" sure why now, that's all way better than just turning the TV on. My point was, and I believe I expressed it clearly, though for the remedial reading crowd I guess not clearly enough, this is dumb to add a bunch of steps for the average fan to watch the game. If you think the average NFL fan, particularly those who aren't tech savvy, are prepared to watch the game on Sunday, you're nuts. My parents, who are 300 miles away, will not watch the game, unless the go to a neighbors house who are already set up with streaming apparatus. Sorry this is so hard for you to understand, I'll type slower next time.

No, I'm actually a Senior Systems Engineer, I suspect I've forgotten more about tech then you're likely to ever know, particularly when it comes to IP and what goes into globe spanning data network. Thanks for asking though, punk.

Does Yahoo have a 'channel' on fireTV? Most of the time devices like that are pointed at things like netflix, youtube, so on, but don't have a browser function. Maybe the newer ones do? Right, again, *I* can do that, and YOU can do that. I don't expect my parents are up for the hassle. By virtue of the fact that we're on an internet forum, there's a certain level of technical sophistication present. There are a lot of people that wouldn't know 16:9 from a hole in the ground, much less HDMI and signal splitting. The NFL has made watching this game sh1ttier by any rational standard.

Yeah I have a browser on my smart TV and the PS4 has one as well. The problem with a lot of web streaming is they require proprietary plugins to the browser... that wont work on TV based browsers typically just IE, Chrome, and Firefox, maybe iOS Safari. I'll boldly predict a lot of frustrated and pissed people Sunday morning.

yeah sweet it'll be like working another 3 hours...sitting at a desk watching a monitor, way better than my leather couch and 65" 4k tv

full disclosure, I work for AT&T, but have *no* insider info when it comes to plans with DTV and the Sunday Ticket. I work in the Government Services segment so don't have any direct exposure to the plans on consumer... having said that.... The model seems to be now to chop content up into easily digestible pieces that can be streamed to any connected device, and offered ala carte. These days, a connected device can be anything from a smartphone to a TV to a tablet to a PC. I believe we'll see, in the next few years,not only a full PPV model for NFL games on a freemium basis, but an escalating price model based on popularity of the team/game. The freemium piece might be, you can watch the entire game in low def for 'free' or maybe the 1st quarter in HD, then have to pay for the rest, or to get it in HD. You might also pay more to watch cowboys/giants than bills/jags. I can see why my employer would want to do this. AT&T hasn't lasted 140ish years by losing money. I hate the whole thing though. I don't want to stream the game, and watch it on my ipad. That sucks. How am supposed to watch the game this Sunday with my family? nobody wants to sit around a 10" ipad, so maybe everyone watches it on their own ipad. yeah, very social, and having 4 full def streams going over my broadband connection should work just great. On that note, I'm not going to watch on Sunday. I'm thinking the game will suck anyways, and I don't really want to disrupt my normal sunday morning routine just to be disappointed again.

The Bills success this year was mostly predicated on the Defense. Fix that and we're fine. I mean, Rex is saying the right things (my defense isn't working, blah blah blah) but can a tiger change it's stripes?