Dr. K

I watch the games with a circle of friends from WNY here in Raleigh. Before the game everyone was pretty pessimistic and I asserted the Bills would win, and it would not be close. Just a dumb feeling.

If you guys had been around during the first two years of Moulds' career, you would have called him a complete bust and cut him.

You know I don't always agree with you, but this place would be less without you around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra9d45Iy1WY --from the Morells, the greatest bar band ever

So what if Cassel is injured and that helps the Bills beat them? That's what happens sometimes. The Bills are going to face plenty of teams that are not handicapped by serious injuries, so they'll get tested eventually even if it doesn't come in the first week. You play the team that's on your schedule, then play the next one. I don't think we have to worry about the Bills sneaking through the season by getting lucky.

Overall I'm encouraged by the new roster. I was not happy about the Lee Evans trade, and the o-line seems thin to me, and we're depending on some key players like Merriman to stay healthy. But I like the general direction, the turn to younger players, the willingness to prune unproductive players. Though I don't want him in pass coverage, I think the knee-jerk Kelsay haters are out of line. And there are young players behind him who may move up and take his place. In general, I like that the most--if any significant number of these young guys improve with experience, we could have the makings of a first rate team here. At any rate, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when the real games start.

I feel sorry for the guy. He's got the money he received when he was drafted, but I'm sure he's wanted to be an NFL player for most of his life, and he was never docked for effort. I can bring myself to feel gleeful about his getting cut.

I'd be nervous if they went into the season with only the players they have now. I wonder if they will pick up a center or another cornerback. But then some others have to be cut.

Easley has played in only a couple of preseason games for the Bills in his two years here, and in one of them he looked very good against a first-team defense. He's inconsistent, and has had some drops, but it's way too soon to cut him. I'd like to see Aiken make the squad, but I don't think Easley gets cut. We'll find out soon enough.

It's because Ralph is from Detroit and HE wants the Bills to play them.

It wasn't piling on. Those duplicate posts were all made simultaneously, at 3:17 pm. None of us knew than anyone else was posting the same response at the same moment when we hit the "Add Reply" button.

Did Chan say he was STARTING at left tackle, or just that he would play there extensively in the game?

This thread says more about you than it does about Fitzpatrick. Yes, he should do better on interceptions, but you've vastly undercut the credibility of your opinions by the one-sided nature of your postings here. You are not making a rational argument; you have an axe and you are grinding it.

Gray Anderson was in no way a #1 draft choice. Also, he said he did not want to go to the mid-1980s Bills and when they drafted him he deliberately tanked his training camp. He missed EVERY FIELD GOAL he tried in his pre-season games, with the expectation that after he got cut, he would be picked up by somebody else. He was right. One of the greatest satisfactions of my life is that, when he was the kicker for the Vikings he had a perfect season for the best scoring team of all time (to that date)--went all season without missing a kick--until their playoff game against the lowly Falcons where his miss at the end lost the game and knocked the Vikes out of the playoffs. It only took some 12 or 15 years, but it was sweet sweet sweet.

I think you may be right about this, Kelly. Moats is a fan favorite based on a few things he did last year, and I think he has some skills, but he is not showing much so far this year. Maybe you could blame the move to the inside where he may not be as suited to play, but I think it will be a close thing whether he make the final roster.

So are you on board for 0-16?

I was trying to come up with an exaggeration, a negative comment about the Bills so stupid that everyone would realize that it was making fun of negative comments, and I realized that I couldn't think of one! The board has gotten to the point where you could say anything negative, no matter how absurd, about the Bills and you'd be taken seriously by somebody here. It's like that Monty Python routine where the old farts are sitting around talking about how hard things were when they were kids, and how easy everybody has it today. "When I was a boy, we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road." "That's nothing! A shoebox in the middle of the road? We would have been ecstatic to live in a shoebox in the middle of the road! When I was a boy, our father would come home every day and kill us with an axe!" "And if you tell young people about that today, they won't believe you..."

You just xeroxed last season. It may happen this way, but I doubt it.

I think it's an eminently fair question. The answer is sixteen, right?

For God's sake, they looked bad in their second pre-season game. That's it, that's all of it. The coach is moving players around to motivate them and to see if some other arrangement might help them get better. I expect them to play at least as well as they did in the second half of last season, which is by no means as well as we ought to hope the o-line to be. But I don't see a lot of bulletproof o-line play around the league at this point in the pre-season, or even in the regular season. How many teams are happy with their o-line play? There's a dearth of exceptional o-linemen relative to other positions in the league; hell, first rate-LTs are rarer than first rate QBs.

Point taken. But shouldn't our young players improve? This is a very young defense. Shouldn't we expect more than we got last year from Carrington, Troup, Batten, Moats? That alone should help performance. Then, if you add in Dareus, Barnett, and Merriman, and the fact that Mcgee is healthy, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect top half of the league--we're not talking top 5 or even top 10 here. We're going to find out soon enough, and I'm very interested to see how it goes.

Thank god for some sanity here. Great post.

I agree that he looks great, and I have the highest expectations for him, but I didn't see him double-teamed by Chicago. I saw most of the double-teaming going against Williams.

The article was well written, the independent movie metaphor was interesting, and he was right in general about the difficulties with the o-line and run defense. I even agree with his overall judgment taht the Bills will have trouble gaining ground in their division. But the particulars are frequently off, and he says things that just aren't true with such calm assurance that it undercuts his credibility. I bet he only ever watched the Bills play the Jets. He got lots of details wrong: Saying Fitz holds the ball too long. In fact, his entire description of Fitz's playing style is completely wonky. He says Fitz isn't cerebral when he is very smart, that his pre-snap reads are "average at best" when his reads are one of his strengths, describes him as "sandlot" when he very much works the game plan and takes what's there from the defense, says he extends plays with scrambling when I can't remember him doing much of that at all. He says Fitz will have to get used to the 3-step drop when he was doing this all last season. This paragraph alone makes me call into question his judgment even when he says things that are reasonable. Saying the management is "cool on Parish" and views him as "a return specialist" when the reality is just the opposite--they were the first coaches ever to use him properly as a receiver. Saying Bell was a liability in pass protection, when he's been quite credible in that area; his weakness is run blocking Saying Gailey is a "run-oriented traditionalist" (think George Halas) when his rep is for creatively using whatever methods he can for getting the most out of his offense. Actually, he may be right in his final assessment, but if you are going to assume a tone of "knowing-it-all" then you ought to get the details right.

I agree, except it was Wood, not Urbik, who whiffed on the block of Urlacher on that play, which would have left the entire middle open for CJ. Urbik did have that terrible whiff on the run play to the right that got CJ tackled in the backfield.