Cash

I don't really disagree with your main point, but here's why I stand by what I originally said: How many times in recent history has the Super Bowl been won by a QB making roughly top 5 money who wasn't arguably a top 5 QB that year? Only one I can think of is Peyton Manning in his last year, which is a weird situation - he had been a top 5 QB up until that year, and had definitely been worth the high-end $$$. Maybe Eli in his 2nd Super Bowl win? I don't have time to look up his contract details, but it easily could've been in the range I'm talking about So basically, what's the point of having a Flacco type who can make the plays under pressure, if he costs so much that you'll never be able to get him to those pressure situations? I think you're better off trying to find the next Flacco than paying an existing one in the hopes he takes a Rich Gannon leap.

All of these teams overpaying for top 15 (but not top 5) QBs will eventually regret it. I don't agree with this whole "you have a QB or you have nothing" mentality that's so pervasive these days. I'd rather have a bad-but-not-horrendous QB at a cheap price (Josh McCown?) than a good-but-not-great QB at an expensive price (Smith? Cousins? Flacco? Stafford?). Basically, I either want a guy so good he can drag a bunch of stiffs to the Super Bowl (i.e., Aaron Rodgers, prime Peyton Manning, etc.), or a guy who comes cheap enough to build a Super Bowl contender around him. If there was a real QB middle class, where you could sign a guy like Flacco or Dalton for like $14 million/year, then I'd be up for that as well, but that doesn't really exist right now.

Same here. Was also very similar to the Bills' attempts to hold leads this year. In both cases, it's hard to truly know how much of that is on the playcaller (Hackett/Rico) and how much is on the conservative head coach (Marrone/McDermott). For me, the damning part is not being conservative, it's being hyper-predictable. Every 1st down for the Jags was a run from shotgun. If those were working, that's okay, but they weren't. So do something else. If a coach can only protect a lead with players that get him 4 yards a carry even when the defense knows it's coming, that coach is worthless at protecting leads. You or I could win in that situation.

Unrestricted Free Agents QB Joe Webb - keep if cheap enough to cut in camp RB Mike Tolbert - let walk RB Travaris Cadet - keep if cheap enough to cut in camp RB Taiwan Jones - keep if cheap enough to cut in camp WR Deonte Thompson - keep WR Jordan Matthews - let walk WR Brandon Tate - let walk WR Jeremy Butler - who? OT Seantrel Henderson - keep if cheap enough to cut in camp DL Kyle Williams - up to him DL Cedric Thornton - let walk LB Preston Brown - let walk? Depends on who they can get instead. LB Ramon Humber - let walk CB EJ Gaines - would like to keep, but might be too $$. He'll probably want to be paid as though he'll play 16 games. CB Leonard Johnson - keep CB Shareece Wright - let walk S Colt Anderson - headed for IR S Shamarko Thomas - keep Exclusive Rights Free Agents TE Nick O’Leary - keep TE Logan Thomas - keep DE Eddie Yarbrough - keep CB Lafayette Pitts - who?

Guys, I know you hate Tyrod. That's fine, go ahead and hate him. Knock yourself out. But enough with the Peterman nonsense. He's a 5th-round rookie who has looked bad every time he's played a meaningful game. (I guess he was okay in Saints garbage time, but that wasn't exactly meaningful by then.) He lasted till the 5th round for a reason. Maybe he eventually won't suck. I hope so! But right now, he does suck. You might as well have a hypothetical scenario where McDermott pulled you out of the stands to throw the winning TD pass.

I think he should be, but I voted that he'll stay. I hope that McDermott tries to upgrade that spot in the offseason. My thought is that unless McDermott's idea of the perfect guy is available, he'll go for continuity, but another year like this will provoke a firing regardless. I am very encouraged by McDermott's press conference today - saying he's unhappy with the offense overall, not pinning it all on Tyrod (he's part of the problem, not the whole problem), and not giving any sort of vote of confidence to Dennison. I feel like Dennison basically needs elite talent across the board, or at least at QB, for his offense to be successful. That could be worse; he could be so bad that he'd fail even with elite talent. But I'd like it to be better. People who want Dennison to come back: where do you think he ranks out of the 32 offensive coordinators? Personally, I would think he's somewhere in the 20s.

I was just thinking today about how often Marrone said he wanted to "smell the breath" of his players in his first few press conferences. That's weird, dude. Don't go around smelling people's breath!

I'll eat that crow! I predicted 5-11 and I've never been happier to be wrong!!!

AHHHHHHH

One clarification: #2 still gets us into the playoffs if we TIE rather than WIN. So there is potentially value to McD's hyper-conservative OT strategy if it comes to that. But a tie doesn't help us in scenario #1, so if the Bungles look like they're pulling off the upset, it's probably best to just go all-out for the win.

I said keep things the same, but if Watson hadn't gotten hurt, I probably would've said to pick him. He was great for like a 4-5 game stretch, but might lose a lot of athleticism once he comes back, plus you can't be sure he would've kept up that performance. RG3 had the best rookie season of any QB ever, but that doesn't mean much now. If the Bills offered Tre White and KC's #1 next year for Watson, any chance Houston would take that deal? No, and I wouldn't blame them. But I also wouldn't kill the Bills for turning it down on their end.

After watching the press conference, I'm now almost certain that he really was playing for the tie. When asked about the possibility of a tie, he talked about how 2 different teams he's been on have had ties, and both were beneficial to making the playoffs. When asked about a tie's impact to playoff scenarios, he made it sound like he's an all-seeing psychic who considers every potential butterfly effect before making a decision. This is apparently why he needed a timeout - I guess you can't consider 10,000+ possibilities in just 40 seconds, but 1 minute 40 seconds works just fine? However, he later said that he doesn't/won't look at specific playoff scenarios unless we're still in it with 1 game to go, so I think the first take was just coach bluster. Bottom line (just my opinion, but I think it's right): McDermott was hoping to get lucky and get the win somehow, but mostly was focused on not losing. Viewed through that lens, punting makes sense, and so does setting that timeout on fire.

Don't confuse process with results.

Listening to his response to "were you aware of the playoff implications of a tie" and yikes - this guy thinks he's the smartest man who's ever lived.

I was late to the game, so I missed the first drive and maybe the second as well. Just about every pass I saw was what I'd call bad but catchable. I.e., poorly placed, but close enough that the receiver could still get his hands on it to make a medium-to-hard catch. In normal conditions, I'd fault the receiver at that point. In those conditions, no fault on either end.

Well you obviously weren't at the same bar I was. Pagano is terrible - if you're willing to pass the ball multiple times on that last drive (stopping the clock), then you have to commit to going for it every 4th down. Even if you want to play for the tie, you should be running the ball. We never would've had a chance if Pagano didn't make the exact worst possible combo of decisions.

I don't believe we'll make the playoffs. But I won't give up hope until we're mathematically eliminated.

If Taylor's not healthy, Peterman. If Taylor is healthy, then he should start as long as we're mathematically alive for the playoffs.

I disagree with this. Any NFL OC should be able to excel with "good ingredients". But due to the salary cap, it's nearly impossible to consistently have a high talent level year after year. If you're saying that Rico isn't so amazingly terrible that he should be fired immediately, I guess I agree. But I'd still like to see an upgrade in the offseason. Hitting the bare minimum of NFL coaching ability isn't good enough. And I feel like it's easier to find and retain good coaches than it is good players.

Obviously if the players execute at a very high level, they'll have some success regardless of the coach/scheme. I don't think Dennison is so bad that he can singlehandedly torpedo our offense, but I also don't think (so far) that he's doing anything to help it. Seems like we need high-end talent across the board to have a good offense in this scheme. Whereas Roman's scheme (and Lynn's on-the-fly adaptation of it) had a genuinely positive impact on the run game, especially in terms of using Taylor's mobility to free up space for the RBs. One other point: Part of a coach's job is to scheme, gameplan, call plays, etc. But an equally large (larger?) part of it is coaching players. I.e., getting the players to play well in the scheme. There's a lot to that - teaching, motivation, understanding players' strengths and weaknesses, plus plain old management like in a regular business. When one player isn't executing, that usually means there's something wrong with him (injury, off-field issue, lack of talent) and he needs to go. When all the players aren't executing, that's indicative of a coaching issue. I would be very into that.

Finally, a front office that wants to build a winning organization! Why didn't any of the previous regimes think of that? If it works out, great. But literally every coaching staff in the history of the NFL has tried to build a winning organization and culture. I think the "how" is a pretty important factor. And the only thing McBeane have offered into how it's done - i.e., what "the process" actually is - is that they want to collect guys who fit into a winning culture. Cool. But that's basically just saying, "I want to bring in my guys." Which, again, is what most new coaches/GMs do. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I'll believe it's working out when it actually happens.

I'm in the 8.3% of people (so far) who said bad move. We'll see - hopefully I'm wrong. For the record, I'm only considering this season/this year's team. It's possible that Peterman is the worst QB since Jeff Tuel and we lose out, but that leads to some franchise savior QB in the draft or whatever. But I choose to hold McDermott accountable to his stated rationale, which is to improve the team now, and I don't think it will. Again, I'll be happy if I'm wrong on this one. Tyrod's play against the Saints was indefensible, and I won't try to defend it. He was terrible. However, I thought he was one of the very few Bills who actually played well against the Jets, and I don't really understand why 2 straight total team collapses seem to be 100% the fault of the QB? Is Peterman going to fix the lack of a pass rush, the inability to stop the run, or the inability of the O-line to run block? Could any QB fix those? Jerry Hughes, Shaq Lawson, Kyle Williams, and Adolphus Washington have been invisible for weeks. If McDermott thinks this team is so much better than 5 wins, where's the accountability for them?

Very good article by Sal. Rico still has the opportunity to prove himself somewhat, but I've generally not liked what I've seen so far. Every week, @yardsperpass tweets gifs of plays from that week's game. Typically he includes at least 1-2 outside zone runs (the staple of Rico's run game) that fail miserably because the weak side of the O-line can't block it effectively. We stink at those, and we have all season and preseason. And it's always for the same reason - the weakside misses their cut blocks and fails to get their defenders on the ground. And yet, we keep going back to them over and over. Cover1.net recently had an article showing how much more predictable the offense has gotten this year compared to the last 2 (we almost always pass out of the shotgun and run under center), which also went into how vanilla the pass game has been. Maybe the lack of NFL-level complexity in our pass plays is a Tyrod Taylor problem, or maybe it's a Dennison problem. But the predictability is 100% on Rico, and it's troubling. That quote regarding the Tolbert low-speed option is particularly damning. It suggests that Rico basically has no idea what's going on. He seems like the type who will keep making the same terrible decisions over and over and be forever stunned that they don't work out. Confidence is great, but at some point it needs to correspond to reality.

Keep in mind that at home, we beat the Jets by 9 in a game that was relatively close most of the time. It's not like the Bills were up 20 most of the game and the Jets just scored a bunch in garbage time - that game wasn't over until pretty late. And teams generally play better at home and worse on the road. If we're 9 points better than the Jets at home, we're probably only 3 points better than them on the road. And that's a very slim margin to count on a win. Having said that, I'm still basically waiting for the other shoe to drop on this season, and losing tonight would be a very classic Bills way to kick that off. This is the first of 3 winnable but not easy games (@NYJ, Saints, @Chargers), followed by 2 "if we win it's a big upset" games (@KC, Patriots). If we don't win at least 2 of the first 3, we'll need to seriously overperform in the harder games to have a shot at the playoffs. But upsets do happen.

Oh no. That's the kiss of death. I am seriously very worried about this game now.