Dr. K

I'm sure he would like at least one more high quality WR, but I also expect he is somewhat relieved and looking forward rather than backward. It offers him the opportunity to demonstrate that his success was and is not dependent on Diggs.

My point was not that Beane made a bad trade, but that the fact that he made the trade on these terms tells us that no other team was willing to give more for Diggs, and so Beane was forced to give up draft picks in addition to Diggs, with only a second round pick NEXT YEAR in compensation, and no 2024 picks from Houston. It suggests that the Bills were determined to dump Diggs, that they do not feel he is worth any more than they got for him. Whether or not it proves to be a "win" for the Bills down the road, Beane clearly thought it was a win now, or he wouldn't have made the trade.

The terms of the trade, which seem quite bad for the Bills, and the fact that Bills made the trade anyway, suggest that nobody would pay any more for Diggs where he is now in his career. It really says that the Bills REALLY wanted to get rid of him, even if the market for him was not good.

I don't know exactly what "The Process" is, but it can't possibly be to hold onto players when they are in decline or when they are a drag on the locker room. Any process to keep a team competitive must include getting rid of players when it's time to move on.

Diggs was in no way shape or form "the heart and soul of the team." Your saying he was, IMHO, calls your judgment into question. Or if he was, that helps explain why they have fallen short.

I agree, Shaw. Reading the responses confirms that if there's one resource that fans on this board have in abundance, it's arrogance.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I'll just suggest that there is no guarantee your new head coach is going to have the qualities that I bolded in your post and leave the floor to you. I only wish I didn't have to hear the same complaints every day in every thread.

I find this funny. I'm 73 years old. In my experience, the younger you are the more impatient you are and the less willing you are to admit that life is not simple. I'm not on "the good ship lollipop." If you'll go back a few years you'll see that I was one of the most skeptical of McDermott's "Trust the process" mantra in his first years. I think it's possible firing him might work out for the best, but it seems to me that those who are most eager to do this underestimate how hard it is to do what McDermott has done, how many times in life dumb chance prevents a desired outcome, and have a fantasy in their heads that "if they just hire X, then we will win a Super Bowl." For this particular old dude, the repetitive raging that fills this board (and this particular thread) seems characteristic of men (mostly) who cannot face complexity.

It's very clear that they want him to say, "I'm a terrible head coach and I'm resigning." If he said, "I take total responsibility for the 13 seconds loss," they would not be satisfied, of course, unless the next sentence is "I'm a terrible head coach and I'm resigning." That's the only thing he could say that would satisfy them. And they'd still be cursing him as he walked out the door.

The endless ranking on McDermott, in which the same people say the same things over and over again, and nobody raging that he should be fired has said anything new since the 13 seconds game--or at least in the last year--makes me never want to come back here again. The few who want to talk about other things relevant to the Bills and not ride their hobby horses to death keep me coming back here to check in now and then. And the repetitive anti-McDermott whining drives me away again. You can't begin reading any thread without eventually running into the necessary quota of bitter complaint that McDermott will never win a title/is a fool/is arrogant/is lazy/is too conservative/has lost the locker room/is surrounded by his yes-men, yada yada yada. Maybe he should be fired. I don't know. My instinct and life experience tell me that the world is not fair, that time and chance happen to us all, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, that even brilliant people make mistakes, that leadership takes many forms, and that finding success is not as simple as these people insist. But apparently there are a lot of Bills fans who have never been wrong in their entire lives.

You are psychic. Of course, two out of three threads on the board turn into McDermott bash threads. It could not possibly get more tiresome.

Jeepers, guys! Calm down.

I could not care less.

Sure. Let's do that. But not everybody will be able to, so I don’t see this as any solution. In the presence of so many lethal weapons, there will always be enough bad actors around to commit such atrocities. I think the number of weapons and the type of weapons are the fundamental difference between the US and other countries.

Mental health issues are a problem in every country, but no other country on the planet has the problems with gun deaths that the U.S. has. You can't solve this through "better access to mental health treatment" though I am all for that. 350 million weapons in the hands of citizens are the problem. It's too easy for bad actors to murder the people around them. The numbers can't be reduced unless you reduce the number, availability, and lethality of the weapons in our country.

Patriots a 10 Cowboys a 10 Dolphins a 10 Jaguars an 8 Jets an 8 Titans a 7 Chiefs a 6 Bengals a 5 Steelers a 5 Chargers a 3 Lions a 1

If Shanahan defers, SF wins 22-19.

Gotta give it to the Chiefs. I hate ‘em, but they are tough. Mahommes is a killer.

I hate to see it, but I feel like the Chiefs will win this one. Even though they’ve been outplayed, they’re only 7 down.

That's what we need. More of this crap.

All these people freaking out about Taylor Swift, coming up with absurd conspiracy theories, would be funny if it weren't so pathetic--and revealing of oceans of unfocused rage.

Better concentration on catching the ball and he'd be amazing. As it is he's an asset anyway.

What you said ["We want <x> to win, see what you can do."] amounts to a conspiracy in the league offices. Refs make lots of bad calls and miss lots of obvious penalties. It's the nature of the game and of their job. They can be influenced for and against a team by the crowd. Some refs are incompetent.The league should have full time professional refs. But the fact that some players and fans (including me) will say a team "had to beat both the opponent and the refs" is not evidence that games were fixed. I could more easily believe that some individual refs might be paid by gamblers or the mob to make or ignore particular calls (as has happened in pro basketball) than that the league would throw a game to Kansas City because of Taylor Swift. That is idiotic.

If by "fixed" you mean the outcome of games is consciously determined by some conspiracy in the league offices, this is beyond idiotic. But the United States if full of people who believe idiotic conspiracy theories right now, so I guess believing this would just be more of the same brain-dead business as usual.

I remember being flabbergasted back then that they fired Polian when in my opinion Levy needed to be shown the door. However, I'm one of those who is not convinced that firing McDermott is going to result in a better result for this Bills team. I actually think McDermott is a better coach than Levy. Those 1990s Bills teams were loaded with talent, more talent relative to the rest of the league at that time than the current Bills are relative to the other AFC teams.