Cash

For someone imperiously telling others to keep up, you didn't exhibit much comprehension of my post. I was going to spell out an explanation like you did above, but then I realized you probably wouldn't read it anyway, so I'll just call you a doody-head and move on with my life.

Last year, I got paid significantly less than several co-workers for doing the same job. I complained to management, and my salary was brought in line with the norm this year. But my vacation was reduced by a week, and now most of my co-workers have a week more than I do. Am I wrong to complain again? JW - I think I get your point, but then again I don't get your point. Are you expecting unbiased journalism from a team employee writing an article on the team's website? It might be a nice world if people or corporations were willing to acknowledge the flip side of the coin when advocating for themselves, but when does that actually happen? I don't expect a district attorney to talk about evidence for the defense in his opening statement. Maybe you're worried that the average reader sees "journalist" next to Chris Brown's name and thinks he's an actual journalist instead of a team employee? I can't vouch for anyone else, but I know that's not an issue in my case. I do think it would be remiss of an actual journalist such as yourself to write a schedule article without acknowledging both that the Bills did well in terms of early home games and that they got screwed in terms of playing rested opponents. The travel issue is interesting, but not really relevant. All of the home and road opponents are pre-determined before the schedule is made up. There's no way for the NFL schedule-makers to favor or screw over a team in that regard, short of fundamentally changing the way opponents are determined. All in all, I'm glad the Bills are complaining about this, because it is a competitive disadvantage. Maybe it's a small one, but you shouldn't take anything lying down. There are two possible reasons why the Bills got screwed: 1.) The NFL doesn't look at or care about playing rested teams when making the schedule, and it's just random that the Bills have gotten the short end of the stick a few times in a short span, or 2.) The NFL actively favors some teams (common candidates would be the Giants and Patriots) and gives them beneficial schedules as a result. This means that in order for the schedule to work, other teams will need to have extra-bad schedules. (Even in this scenario, I can't believe that the NFL has a specific axe to grind against the Bills or Falcons or anyone. I just don't buy it.) The nature of fandom lends itself to believing that (2) is the case, but it could easily be (1). Either way, if disadvantaged teams start (and keep) complaining about it, eyes will start to be on it, and things will likely change. If the NFL just hasn't cared to this point, but start caring going forward, problem solved. If the NFL is doing shady things with the schedule, there's a good chance they'd stop once people start to notice. Then again, the NFL is long on arrogance and stubbornness and short on common sense, so you never know.

Good read, thanks for posting!

The very last sentence of the piece: "A seven-win season in 2013 for the Bills would be their first in five years." Wow, that is depressing. Remember when Dick Jauron was a bum because he went 7-9 every year? It's been five years since we hit those lofty heights. (To clarify, Jauron really was a bum. Going 7-9 in 3 straight seasons is bad and should not be defended, plus he was a bad in-game coach and headed the most boring, lackluster, unexciting Bills teams I've ever seen.)

I also see what you're saying, and in most other threads, I would agree. But in the specific case of comparing the Cowboys' draft board/ratings to the Bills actual picks, one can't dismiss the Cowboys' opinions as worthless (implicitly validating the Bills' differing opinions) without considering that by that same logic, the Bills' draft opinions must be considered even worse. The Bills think Kiko Alonso was a 2nd-round prospect at worst. The Cowboys think he was a 4th-round prospect. How can we dismissively say that the Bills are right and the Cowboys are wrong without looking at their respective track records? Even if we just took the Bills out of it, the Cowboys have been a moderately successful team in recent history. Hardly infallible on draft day, but not hopeless or incompetent. If this was the draft board of a perennial doormat or famously poor drafting team, I'd gladly dismiss it out of hand as well. But unfortunately, most non-Bills fans would probably classify us as a perennial doormat or famously poor drafting team, so I don't think it's fair to so that our team's opinion is automatically better than anyone else's. For the record, I wasn't enthused to see that the Cowboys had such lower grades on most of our high picks (Alonso was probably the most concerning to me, but mostly because I was already skeptical of the pick), but it doesn't mean much to me. Different schemes, different needs, etc., not to mention that for all their hype, the Cowboys aren't near the top tier of the NFL. Now, if the Ravens' board got leaked with similar results, that would really worry me.

I love how many posters in this thread seem to be 100% certain that they know more about the attitudes of guys in the locker room than one of the players in that locker room. "He's just a punter, not really on the team." But isn't a fan even LESS on the team? I mean, a punter can still look at guys and overhear their conversations from his locker room stall, right? But no worries, I'll just take your word over his, because you're such a superfan that you can telepathically understand what every Bill is thinking at all times.

I don't buy it. The Cowboys come up with a dummy board that's different from their real board, allow it to be filmed/photographed on draft day, and hope a zealous Cowboys blog analyzes the footage/photos and posts the board online? What do they gain from this? "Exposure!" Jerry Jones doesn't need ridiculously circuitous plans to get his team media coverage. If this was a "leading up to the draft" special, there might be some incentive to have a dummy board photographed in the hopes that other teams might be fooled into thinking you don't like a prospect that you really do like. But what's the point of having a fake board set up in the real war room on draft day? Especially since their actual picks fit their ratings on the leaked board pretty well. So it's a fake board, except for all of the players that Dallas ended up drafting, who were slotted at their real positions? That doesn't make sense to me.

Of course not. But that's not how this got started. The post(s) you were responding to were not out-of-nowhere exclamations of Dallas' superiority to our team. They were responses to many other posters' initial reaction to the thread, which was roughly, "The fact that Dallas had our draftees rated lower than where we drafted them is either irrelevant or good, because Dallas/Jerry Jones is terrible at drafting." In other words, Dallas' opinion can be completely discounted because they are incompetent. It's completely reasonable to respond to that sentiment with a comparison of Dallas & Buffalo's recent track records of success, not to say that Dallas is perfect or immune to criticism, but just to point out the fallacy of that logic. If Jerry Jones is so incompetent that his draft board is worthless, that means that Russ Brandon/Buddy Nix's draft board must be worthless as well, because the Bills under Russ Brandon/Buddy Nix have been less successful than the Cowboys under Jerry Jones in that same timeframe. Frankly, the whole "Jerrah is stupid" reaction strikes me as an overreaction borne out of insecurity. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to doubt the Bills' 2013 draft class. (Also reasons to be hopeful about them, and one can even feel both ways, like I do.) The Cowboys' board doesn't add much to my doubt about the Bills' draft, but I don't think it should be dismissed either. There's no reason why Dallas' 2013 draft board has to be better (or worse) than Buffalo's, but it's certainly interesting to see how wildly the teams differed in player evaluations. We've long heard "insider" comments that teams have very different ratings on a given player, but I don't recall ever seeing proof before. The other interesting thing, which doesn't concern us a ton as Bills fans, is that with the Cowboys' board leaked the past 2 years, fans will be able to have an unprecedented ability to evaluate the Cowboys' scouting efficacy in a few years. Obviously huge allowances will have to be made for players who wouldn't have fit the Cowboys' scheme, but if they consistently have the stars of 2012/2013 rated low and busts rated high (or the reverse), that will tell us a lot more about their scouting abilities than just the success of the guys they picked.

Always thought Kamar Aiken looked great in preseason. Would've loved to see him get a shot in the regular season.

Rule is that in the last (2 minutes?) of the half or game, a fumble can only be advanced by the guy who fumbled it (or the other team, naturally). The reason it exists is to prevent exactly the type of play you embedded -- i.e., a guy is getting tackled, so just fumbles it on purpose, possibly forward. It is kind of arbitrary/no fun, because if you intentionally pitch the ball backwards, but it isn't caught & hits the turf, your teammate is still allowed to pick it up & advance it. The only decent argument for the rule is to prevent intentional forward fumbles being used as illegal forward passes. Overall, I think we'd be fine without the rule.

Right. I don't want to incentivize DBs to tackle WRs on bombs. When you have those jump ball deep passes that AJ Green specializes in, why wouldn't you just tackle him and take the 15 yards? Particularly if it's a late game situation and time is running out for the offense. Along with the other suggestion to make all holding a 5-yard spot foul, I kind of like this. I don't like the refs having to make a subjective call about the play's intent (what about holding on a toss sweep? that can easily get blown up for a 7-8 yard loss), and the NFL hates subjective judgments by officials too. But 5 yards from the spot of the foul kind of solves the OP's problem in an objective way. Currently, holding is a spot foul if it occurs beyond the line of scrimmage, but 10 yards from the line of scrimmage otherwise. If we make it 5 yard from the spot, it'll wind up pretty close to 10 yards from the LOS for most pass plays, and about 5 yards back for most runs. I support this. Easily solution: don't commit holding. If you don't have the automatic 1st down, then you highly encourage teams to hold on 3rd or 4th and longs. Be super-physical with the WRs, hope the refs consider it incidental or don't notice it, but even if you get nailed, they still have to deal with a 3rd and 20.

The only thing I like about the superconference movement is the idea that they'll soon form their own basketball tournament, which will rival/replace the NCAA tournament. The NCAA's revenue pretty much all comes from the TV rights to that tournament (which is most of the TV money for college basketball -- this is why schools only care about football), and they'd be hard-pressed to find an alternate revenue stream.

But a victory for Hart means that EA can't buy the "rights" to player images from the NCAA. The Ed O'Bannon lawsuit is a little more on the nose and likely to be wider in scope, but this one is interesting as well. Kill the NCAA and you kill most of the problems in college sports.

In Troup's defense, he didn't say anything along the lines of "I'm healthy" last year. In fact, he sounded really concerned about his back and regretful for having had the spinal fusion procedure. His comments were along the lines of "I'm trying to work through this and get healthy" I think. I still expect nothing out of him, but this isn't a Shawne Merriman situation, where every year we got to hear him say that he was finally healthy and in the best shape of his life. (Sorry to single out Shawne, because a lot of heavily-injured guys who hang on for a few years pull the same move, but I can't think of any others off the top of my head.) Right. Anything from Troup is an absolute bonus.

The thing is, I was never impressed by Troup even before he got hurt. Granted, he was a rookie, and rookie NTs don't always make much of an impact, but I didn't see anything on the field that made me think he was a guy with serious potential. I'm no scout, but I'm firmly putting Troup in the longshot/miracle category. I expect nothing, and if he produces something, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Not quite. I want Leodis to be both a CB and a PR. He is an absolute elite PR and a potential game-changer, and it's not worth taking a potential game-changing PR off the field to preserve his skills as a (hopefully) solid CB. Our next-best PR (Goodwin?) will probably be pretty good, but there's a big difference to me between good and elite. I don't see him as a good enough CB to justify that drop-off at PR. Besides, the risks of punt returning have historically been pretty low. Like I said originally, if Deion Sanders, Rod Woodson, & Tim Brown could return punts basically their whole careers, I think Leodis can as well. Another (minor) point I'd like to make is that unless McKelvin's CB play takes a major leap, it doesn't justify his contract. His CB play (at least last year) combined with his return ability does justify his contract.

2 problems with having him return kicks as well as punts. First is fatigue. It's tough enough to be a full-time CB (and even the nickel corner is essentially a full-time player these days), chasing around WRs on every play. Adding punts is arguably too much as it is. (I argue no, but it's a fair point.) Kicks on top of that is really pushing it. I'm hard-pressed to think of a full-time player who did all 3 and held up very long. Second issue is injuries. Kickoff returns are some of the most injury-prone plays in the game. And it's rare that the returner gets a chance to run out of bounds. Granted, this is less of an issue now that touchbacks are so much more common, but still an issue. The other factor that's specific to Leodis is that he's a good, maybe great KR, but an elite PR. Last year, he put up his 2nd-best KR average at 28.3 yards/KR (0 TDs), which is quite good. But Brad Smith put up 27.6 yards/KR (1 TD). The leader was Percy Harvin with 35.9 yards/KR (1 TD), followed by Jacoby Jones with 30.7 yards/KR (2 TDs). On the other hand, Leodis led the NFL in yards/PR with 18.7 (next best: 16.1) and tied for the league lead with 2 TDs. Plus Leodis was a better PR than KR in college.

If an O-lineman wins OROY, I'll eat my beard.

In Choice's defense, he may be slow, but he makes up for that by having no moves and no experience at returning kicks. I would like to see McLovin remain as the punt returner, but not be on the kickoff return team. I don't think he's good enough to justify his price tag as only a corner. Plus, he's not just a good KR/PR, he's a difference maker. I'm willing to live with the added fatigue/injury risk in order to get the benefit of his punt returning. With the ability to fair catch, the risk is minimized somewhat, whereas KO returners basically have to take a monster hit every time. If Tim Brown, Rod Woodson, and Deion Sanders could return punts their whole careers, so can Leodis.

If I thought my 2 realistic options were between 1.) getting $6.9 million to play a game, with no guarantee of anything else if I get hurt playing that game, or 2.) getting $9 million to play a game this year, with an additional $9 million guaranteed even if I get hurt playing that game, I wouldn't feel great about #1. Not saying Byrd is right to hold out, or even that he will hold out, but I don't blame him for at least attempting to get Dashon Goldson's contract before signing the franchise tender.

We shouldn't get rid of a perfectly good barrel just because we can't hire a coach. Seriously though, the above is a valid point. From all appearances, the Bills simply couldn't attract a legitimate NFL head coaching candidate, and had to opt for a fired offensive coordinator who'd been unemployed the previous year, but who did have head coaching (and playoff!) experience. However, the flip side of this argument is that part of the reason the big names turned us down is because they wanted more control over personnel decisions. Shanahan essentially hired his GM in Washington -- it was very explicitly reported that hiring Bruce Allen was a condition of Shanahan's. Cowher & Gruden have cushy TV gigs and probably won't come back unless they have total control over football operations AND a QB already in place, or the chance to draft one right away. With Nix already hired as GM, the Bills couldn't offer the kind of control/power that the big names are capable of demanding. Had Nix not been hired (and the GM job been vacant), maybe Shanahan goes to the Bills instead of the Redskins? Overall, the 2010 Bills coaching job was very unappealing, and that's a big reason why we got stuck with Gailey. But doesn't Nix deserve part of the blame for that? For a prospective HC job, the 3 biggest factors have got to be owner, GM, & QB, right? If Buddy (a first-time GM at the age of 70) was an inspiring figure, he might have been able to scrounge up more interest in the job. After all, there's only 32 NFL head coaching jobs -- it's the pinnacle of the profession, and highly sought-after. Good post. As I said a ways upthread, Buddy's legacy can be greatly helped (repaired?) if he nailed this last coaching hire/draft. And really, it all comes down to Manuel. If he becomes a top 5 QB, we're in the playoffs basically every year he's healthy, Marrone has a great W/L record, and Buddy looks good. If Manuel's a total bust, Marrone is probably fired after 2-3 years, and only the craziest of crazies will defend Buddy. If Manuel is good-not-great, Marrone is probably fired after 4-5 years and maybe 1 playoff appearance, and Buddy still looks pretty bad. If the plan was to get back to mediocrity in 4-5 years and become a real contender in 5-7 years, Buddy shouldn't have said "we're not that far away" in his opening presser, or went into his backwoods "show me the baby" bit. So I have to think that Buddy was in over his head his first year or two on the job (understandable, since he'd never been a GM before), and may have also been hamstrung by some factors beyond his control, namely Ralph/Littman/Overdorf. Nonetheless, people have short memories, and if he went out by selecting a winning QB/coach combo, his tenure will mostly be regarded as a success. Except by the people who think Whaley was pulling the strings the last few months.

The Bills are big fans of telling us how they do things differently than everyone else, or disagree with the consensus opinion. The implication is that they're smarter than everyone else. And yet, they keep losing.

So we can safely expect an announcement within 16 days.

SJBF puts it best when he says that just about everything comes down to the HC and QB acquisitions. It's hard for me to demonstrably say the non-QB talent on the team is significantly better or worse than when Buddy was hired as GM. I'd say that the lines are better, even with the loss of Levitre, but the defensive backfield (including LBs) is probably worse, as is the WR corps unless 2 of the rookies break out. Some (not all) of the Nix defenders seem to want to give him credit for Jauron-era additions like Stevie Johnson, or credit their development to Gailey, while simultaneously blaming all of his failures on Gailey. But the bottom line is that Nix is directly responsible for Gailey's record, and it sucks. And Nix inherited a roster with Trent Edwards, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Brian Brohm as the QBs, and didn't bring in a credible challenger for the job for 3 years. These are monumental failures. I think some of the people defending Nix sound like opposing coaches after a RB kills their team. "Take away those 4 long runs and we held him to 30 yards." Yeah, but unfortunately the 4 long runs still count. Take away Buddy's HC hire, QB acquisitions/lack thereof, and W/L record, and his tenure as GM looks fine. Unfortunately, the things being discounted are by far the most important aspects of a GM's job. Now having said all that, Buddy's tenure will basically be redeemed if Manuel is awesome. It's unfortunate that it took him 3 full years to bring in a QB, but if he got the right one (and the right coach to develop him), the team will be in fine shape going forward. Let's hope so. Go Bills!

The only real surprise is that both Buddy and Russ Brandon went nuts talking about how Buddy was in for the long haul post-draft... if they knew this was coming, why go overboard saying it isn't? And if they didn't know, then what changed?