Cash

Graham tracked a ball and Manuel put it on the money!!!!!!

Boo. Let's see how the offense responds. A nice sustained drive here would be very nice.

Right on cue, gets toasted. Let's see if we can get the goal line stop!

Boy, McLovin got beat bad on that play. No pass rush either. Would be nice to see the Bills play two good halves in the same game for once...

Wow, great punt. Take a knee here, no need to do anything stupid.

Think this catch gets overturned.

Huge game for the Birdman!!

Love the quick-hitter FB give on the goal line with the RB swinging out for a pitch. Doesn't work every time, but a solid play, and allows for the FB fake, RB toss play that was unstoppable in Tecmo Super Bowl.

FUMBLE! Way to go KW & Lawson! And a goal-line carry for Spiller.

1. TOUCHDOWN!!!!! 2. One of the ugliest long TD passes ever, but I'll take it! 3. TJ Graham made a play!! 4. TOUCHDOWN!!!!!!!!

Sneak! Looks to me like we got it, but we'll see about the spot... YES!!!!!!!!

I'd like to see a sneak or a naked bootleg here.

EJ looks SO much better today than he did last week. That quick checkdown/swing pass deal to Jackson was actually a really nice decision and a good throw. So far, he looks like a guy who plays terrible on the road and decent at home.

Worse, I think. IIRC, he's picked us to win twice -- last week against Pittsburgh, and also against Cleveland? Not sure of the earlier one, but I'm fairly confident that he's picked us to win twice, and we've lost both of those games. If I'm right, he's actually 5-5 picking us to win or lose outright. Update: couldn't find his pick for Week 8 vs. the Saints, but no one thinks he picked the Bills, right? I checked all the rest, and I was correct -- he's predicted Bills wins against PIT & CLE, and been wrong both times. 5-5 overall, 5-3 when predicting the Bills to lose. I think the Bills have a shot in this game, but it depends on what team shows up. Our two worst performances of the year, both as a team overall and EJ specifically, were the first Jets game and Pittsburgh -- both on the road. I'm hoping that the first game was more of a home/road split thing than a "Rex Ryan owns us" thing. Fingers crossed. See above -- Rodak (so far) would have been better served just going against us every week. I'm hoping that turns around, though. The Bills just need to revert back to playing the way they played against NE, Carolina, Baltimore (defense only), Cincy, Miami (again, defense only), NO, & KC. That level of play is enough to beat most of the teams in the back half of our schedule -- including Pittsburgh, but we instead played our worst game of the year and got destroyed.

The qualifier on the list the Bills put out is a minimum of 150 attempts, which seems silly and arbitrary. However, dropping the minimum attempts would also add Matt Ryan & Joe Flacco to the list, and both would slot in below EJ: http://espn.go.com/blog/afceast/post/_/id/67012/bills-brass-comes-to-manuels-defense Honestly, I think it's pretty meaningless no matter what. There can't be much of a correlation between a guy's first 5 games and his whole career. Any five game stretch is way too small a sample to mean anything.

The post you quoted was 223 words long. (Thanks, MS Word!) If that's approaching War and Peace length for you, maybe it's time to make the switch from reading a message board to listening to talk radio? Or you could get your Bills discussion from twitter -- 140 character limit puts everything squarely in Ivanhoe territory. Yes, this has been discussed extensively in other threads (MODS PLEASE MERGE INTO 200 PAGE SUPER-THREAD), and the Cowboys are the only team that has spend consecutive first-round picks on QBs, although I still think Walsh being a supplemental pick makes it a lot different. I think we'll eventually see a team spend back-to-back #1 picks on QBs in the regular draft, but I don't know if it'll be soon. I think if this past draft had been a better one for QBs, you could have seen Cleveland make that move. Drafting a 29-year-old QB in the 20s is the kind of #1 QB pick that lends itself to drafting a QB in the top 10 the following year. Drafting a 23-year-old "raw prospect" QB at #16 is less conducive to going back to the well the following year. Now, if EJ doesn't show any progress in the final 7 games, I'd be all for drafting another QB in the first, but I still don't think it would happen. Wow, that was a very interesting an depressing article; thanks for sharing. So we're at 13 years, almost certainly 14 after this year. (Even if we won out, we'd probably get bumped by a 10-6 team.) The all-time record is 25 years without a playoff appearance, jointly held by the Arizona Cardinals and Washington Dixies. Still a ways to go before we threaten that record. Even if Marrone is a bust, we're looking at an additional 3-4 coaches to take us there.

Geno Smith's starting WRs when he lit us up in week 3 were Stephen Hill, Jeremy Kerley, and a gimpy Santonio Holmes. I don't need EJ to light it up, but he needs to play better than he did last week. No excuses.

Bingo.

That's very good to hear! Tuel is one thing, but there's no excuse for EJ to underthrow guys on a deep route. Overthrowing is generally pretty safe, and if the guy is fast enough to catch up to the throw, it can be the difference between a TD and a guy being caught while he's making the catch.

That's what I figured. Thanks!

Mine was for $17.55. Was it prorated based on how many you bought? I only buy a Madden game every 3 years or so.

Conversely, there are times when the rainbow is better served, most typically on deep bombs. EJ's long ball accuracy has not been up to snuff thus far, and one of the main reasons IMO is because he's been throwing too flat of a ball. Makes it harder for receivers to adjust. Good for him that he can throw a laser-type pass 40-50 yards, but those are less likely to connect. Tuel's weak arm requires him to step up and huck it at about a 45-degree angle to throw a bomb, which worked out in the case of the Goodwin throw. (And failed miserably on the incompletion to Graham a couple plays earlier -- that throw was probably 10 full yards underthrown and fluttered badly.) Lewis has shown a pretty good touch on deep balls so far, which I love. Overall, I'll take the strong-armed QB and try to improve his technique on the deep throws over a guy with marginal physical tools.

Very interesting point -- hadn't thought of that, or even considered if the 2 injuries were to the same knee or not.

And if TJ turns it around and starts playing well, we'll flip on him too. Gleefully! There's no vendetta, it's just that this is a mid-to-late round talent drafted (through no fault of his own) in the 3rd round ahead of Russell Wilson and T.Y. Hilton, who has now been sold to us as a playmaker/key contributor by two different coaching staffs, and who continues to disappoint over and over again.

Pretty spot on. Kiko has glamour stats that put him way above the competition, regardless of actual quality of play. The #1 glamour stat for QBs is wins, and Geno has his team 5-4. They finish 7-9 or worse, he probably has no chance. They make the playoffs, he's a mortal lock.