Cash

If you had "3" in today's "number of posts to turn an unrelated thread into a Byrd-bashing thread" pool, you were right! You can claim your prize tomorrow at the downtown office!

Good post!

Had me going for a bit. Nice one!

I don't know if any Bills fans were clamoring for Alonso pre-draft. To the OP's point, there were definitely a ton of Bills fans on the Glenn bandwagon (including me), and a significant number wanted Woods in the 2nd round.

You don't like the feature where you've read a 5-page thread, which then gets merged with another 5-page thread, and now you sort through the whole thing to find where you left off? What a crybaby. Mods, this thread is discussing the Buffalo Bills, which are being discussed in several other threads on the board. Please merge or delete.

Awesome breakdowns! Keep up the great work!

Interesting. One would think that, going forward, the team could just fit the players for both helmets at the start of the season?

Disagree. Stevan Ridley was an absolute stud last year, and anyone paying attention knew it. The casual fan probably looked at Brady and NE's reputation as a passing team and figured they were more of the same last year. Us fantasy players, however, knew that NE's run game had taken a major step up from 2011.

Thanks! Best of luck to the Panthers the rest of the way, especially against the rest of the AFC East!

Giving up a 5-yard run is hardly something to brag about, unless it was 3rd and 10. Bottom line is that the Bills allowed 35 rushes for 158 yards (4.5 ypc, 7 rushing first downs). That's bad. Every team that's bad against the run whines about how they stopped the other team "except for one or two plays", but that's what being bad against the run is. No one gives up 4+ yards on 80% of the opposing rush attempts. For comparison, the Bills allowed 32 rushes by the Panthers for 125 yards (3.9 ypc, 9 rushing first downs). An improvement over week 1, but still bad. 3.9 ypc would be fine if the volume was much lower, but the volume was high because we couldn't consistently stop their run game. One thing I will readily concede is that the Bills' run D looks a LOT better this year than the past couple, especially via the eyeball test. Unfortunately, our historically-bad run defenses were so far down that it's possible to significantly improve, but only wind up like 25th in the league. Big Cat, we might not be far off here, since your whole original point was that the Bills' run D "was not that bad," which I guess means that you agree it was bad? We've seen a lot worse in recent years (and faced two pretty good rushing teams so far), and there's reason for hope, but I'm just not ready to anoint the run D as even mediocre until they prove it on the field.

Bingo. The more exposure this gets, hopefully the more restraint people show when harassing opposing fans just for the sake of it. Of course, some people don't really think much when they're drunk, but there's plenty of people at the margins who could be affected by this kind of news. Guys, it's okay. Drunken mobs of 60,000+ people just need more freedom. No sense in policing them at all.

Passer rating certainly has its problems, but it's at least based on objective data and it's easy to account for its biases. ESPN's metric is based on subjective judgments of biased people who have preconceived notions about the players they're judging. And since we don't know who those people are, what biases they have, or what sort of methodology they use, it's hard to know exactly what the problems are. As an example, ESPN's description talks about accounting for overthrows & underthrows. But how can they determine which throws are bad throws by the QB and which are bad routes run by the WR? Or, worse yet, just an example of the QB & WR reading the D differently. Without knowing the play call or the reads that each player is supposed to make, it's hard to make those subjective judgments. Of course, some stuff is obvious. If a pass hits the WR perfectly in stride, bounces off his hands, then intercepted, that shouldn't count against the QB the way most INTs do. But just because ESPN's metric is better than passer rating some of the time doesn't tell me that it's consistently better.

No fumbles, but 15/35 for 214 yards (6.1 YPA), 0 TDs, 3 INTs, 4 sacks, and a 27.6 passer rating. I'll go ahead and give eball the Prognosticator Award for this game. Well done, sir.

:lol:

I really think the problem was more "bad offense" than anything else. Obviously we were bad on 3rd downs, but a lot of those were 3rd and long, which came about because we were bad on 1st and 2nd down as well. Definitely agree with your last sentence... we pretty much need to be mistake-free to move the ball right now. If we want to be optimistic, we can think about how much different Seattle's O looked under Russell Wilson during the 1st and 2nd halves of last season. Actually, the evidence doesn't really say anything about fast vs. slow or huddle vs. no-huddle yet, because the Bills haven't huddled up or played slow. They might have been just as bad, but slower, if they'd huddled up last week. Then we would have seen about 25 minutes of possession instead of 22, but no extra yards.

+1. Also good luck to the OP on a potential Stevie/Gore trade. Highway robbery if it goes through.

And we've also seen from the same reviews of the All-22 footage that Colin Brown was universally rated as atrocious, in both the run and pass. Do you really think that 1/5 of your O-line playing terribly makes no difference to offensive success? "But there were no sacks." There were also only 10 throws intended for WRs. Maybe the Bills would've like to throw downfield a little more, but either couldn't call certain plays or didn't have time to throw certain routes because Colin Brown was getting blown up? Maybe with a better LG, Marrone has more confidence in his short-yardage formation and goes for that 4th-and-1 at midfield and/or converts a few of those failed 3rd-and-shorts on the ground? One more scoring drive may have been enough to win the game for the Bills. Sometimes all it takes is one more 3rd-down conversion to make the difference between a punt and a score. How can you possibly say with certainty that Colin Brown's crappy play didn't cost us a single first down? Yes, every move a right one! 286 yards of total offense is an unqualified success. The Bills continue to make the right move again and again! /sarcasm Seriously though, I obviously can't convince you of anything, and I don't even specifically believe that replacing Colin Brown with an average or better LG would have swung the outcome in the Bills' favor. But your religious insistence that there's no way there was any impact is puzzling. How hard is it to admit that having a really bad player play every snap on offense is bad for your offense? And that, in a game where your offense was really bad overall (granted, with rare flashes of brilliance), that replacing the bad player with an average (or good!) player would help? And that, even if it's only a small help, because it's not a very important position, it could have been the difference in an extremely close game? The bottom line is that the Bills' offense was terrible in this game. You can't say that they succeeded in spite of a terrible player. So instead you come up with this insane logic that because Spiller had a bad day, the run blocking couldn't have been a problem. And because Manuel wasn't sacked, the pass blocking couldn't have been a problem either. That is bananas.

Love it, thanks for posting!!

That's a pretty tough statement to back up after a 2-point loss where the offense put up 286 total yards and went 4-13 on third down. Even a small marginal improvement on offense might have been enough to tip the scales in the Bills' favor. Can you really say with conviction that better LG play wouldn't have led to a couple more first downs? Maybe an extra FG at some point? It's impossible to say that better LG play would have definitely won the game for the Bills, but given how close the loss was, I think it's very hard to say that any improvement on offense wouldn't have swung the outcome.

Good post. Lost in all the "uptempo or no?" debate is (IMO) the more important point: the offense was really bad. Don't criticize it for being uptempo, criticize it for stinking up the joint. 286 total yards and 150 passing yards are pathetic totals. And the true believers can talk about penalties and drops and fumbles all they want, but penalties and drops and fumbles are all part of the game. You shouldn't need to play a 100% mistake-free game in order to be good, and it's unrealistic to expect a mistake-free game more than once a year at most. And in fact, we probably should expect a lot of mistakes. The Bills had huge penalty issues all preseason; why should they magically go away now? If our offense can't overcome several penalties a game, it will not succeed with this current crew. Stevie has had drops in the past, Graham has horrible hands, and Woods had tons of drops in training camp, per practice reports. If our offense can't overcome a couple drops a game, it needs to get new receivers before it can be any good. Now, the whole uptempo debate might have some merit IF the Bills' offensive problems are due in part to the fast pace -- e.g., maybe the linemen are getting winded and forced to hold more often or something. Way too early for me to say that the tempo is part of the problem, but I don't think we should blindly accept that the coaching staff is correct in their assumption that uptempo offense is inherently more efficient than downtempo offense.

It definitely seemed that way watching it live. I think moreso than any penalty, the play that killed me the most was Chandler's drop of a 30+ yard completion. We'd have been approaching midfield with at least a chance to pin them back against their own goal line, if not score. Instead, it's punt from our own endzone time.

As would the penalties. Problem is, we seem to need everything to go perfectly just to be above average. It would be nice to have an offense that was capable of overcoming the occasional mistake. (It would also be nice if the offense made fewer mistakes in the first place.) Three if you count Terrelle Pryor, but yeah, pretty low-impact week for running backs. Only 1 guy (Vereen) had 2 or more runs of 20+ yards, only 1 guy (McCoy) got above 101 yards, no one got above 2 TDs...

Provided you have the right personnel, yes. If the D doesn't commit enough defenders to either side, you hit them with a quick screen. If they commit only little guys to one side or another, you can be reasonably confident that your tackle will put a guy on his butt and maybe find someone else to block. Should be at least a decent gain. If the D does commit enough defenders to both sides, like Washington did last night, then you've got the middle of the field wide open for your electric RB to make guys miss. If you don't have an RB who can make guys miss (like McCoy or Spiller or Jamaal Charles), then the formation is probably a dud. If you don't have at least 2 WRs who are reasonable threats on the bubble screen, whether through moves or speed or both, then the formation isn't as good. But the key to it is that the ridiculous spacing forces the D to show its hand, but gives the O at least 3 options depending on what the D commits to. There's no way to send a corner blitz from the outside against that formation. Although the other key is that your QB needs to have a quick enough release to get the screen pass off without getting nailed if the D decides to just load up in the middle.

Awesome!

The singer or the cartoon?