HalftimeAdjustment

No White on returns please. If we get to that point, find somebody to just kneel it down, or perhaps even fall forward.

I had to know what he was worth. Apparently... the difference between a 2023 6th and a 2023 7th. Is that more or less than a 2023 7th?? Does the draft pick value guide go down this far? https://www.packersnews.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/2021/08/31/packers-punt-jk-scott-acquire-corey-bojorquez-trade-rams/5671482001/

Sorry, I really meant an audit to ensure that legislators' friends got a sufficient percentage.

Well, if the taxpayers contribute any money then there should ideally be a mandatory public audit of the costs involved to ensure that money is well spent. Having said that, costs of doing business in WNY are clearly higher than those in Indiana, Georgia, or Texas. Both political and weather factors impact the cost. I don't see why that is not obvious. MetLife is probably a better comparison point.

The long snapper will be available all game.

I think the NFLPA just says "no" and the proposal goes nowhere. Even if 90% of players are vaccinated that does not at all imply that a majority of players support forcing the other 10% to get vaccinated. Support for a mandate among players is likely very, very low. There was already basically a "vax or be inconvenienced" approach in place, the NFL should leave it at that.

This, exactly. The situation changed so the rules have to change. Very frequent testing for all provides the highest safety margin. The vaccinated are less likely to transmit it, but not so much less likely that it is worth not testing them more often than 1/week. The testing is uncomfortable but let's face it these guys can deal with a lot of uncomfortable things for their job.

Some of the 16 could be in the vaccination process though.

I hope he is able to make a full recovery.

Let me start with my opinion that a 100% taxpayer-paid stadium is not reasonable. Looking at this more deeply there are at least 4 basic ways to have public subsidies: - Direct public funding (state/county pays, gets nothing in return, taxpayers eat the cost). - Public financing (state/county floats bonds which are secured by future stadium revenue / team payments) - Indirect investments (state/county provide free land, roads, or other services) - Tax rebates (business gets future tax reductions). For purposes of this discussion I think we should ignore this option or treat it the same as the direct funding. The team, meanwhile, has 3 major sources of money: - Sales to fans (tickets, merchandise, suites, and possibly PSLs) - Television / shared revenue - Owner's personal wealth The public financing option should not be ignored in this mix. If the stadium will cost $1.1B, a split between direct public subsidy, public financing, and team money (upfront) is likely to be involved. I am not optimistic about a near term resolution. Asking the team to stay and take $0 in public money of any kind is worse that the status quo (state/county already kick in millons/yr under current agreement). It may seem attractive on principle, but it is barely more realistic than a 100% public paid option.

100% (plus money for the Sabres) is obviously unrealistic. It's hard to look at that as a good position even to open negotiations. Would you list a regular house, valued at $200K, at $700K just to see how high of an offer you would get? Having said that, I suspect that the sources for the article were government sources who wanted to immediately make the Pegulas look bad, as part of their own negotiating tactic. The more they can fire up opposition the less leverage the Bills will have. The team will have a hard time going about $300M of public contributions in this climate and that would need a really long commitment period.

Isn't this his 2nd replacement?

"Bills Hall of Famer weighs in on Cole Beasley controversy".

We can call it "Bickering Bills II"

They should deal with it, as much as possible, by focusing on football and avoiding getting drawn in. Beasley's social media behavior is 100% on him. At some point you just have to say, hey his views are not those of the Bills organization and should not be attributed to anyone (player, coach, etc) other than himself and move on. It is obvious at this point that he's not going to change his behavior and so the best approach is to give it less attention. This "show some leadership" idea ignores the fact that he's an adult who holds his own opinions and can speak about them. Now, the team could decide his social media behavior is so bad/detrimental that it warrants cutting him (but they should not, IMO). I am sure that many people would lose their jobs if they become a national-scale irritant on social media. However, at this point it's just not in the Bills' best interest to do so; the line of bad behavior has not been crossed. There is a line at some point, however. I won't indulge in hypotheticals, but there is always a point where the negatives for the team outweigh the positives. If Beasley were a bubble player, he'd probably already have crossed it.

Well, it is time the NFL increased the frequency of testing for vaccinated players. Getting tested isn't a ton of fun but is probably no biggie for 95% of these guys.

It's totally confusing to me what the league will do with a team that has an outbreak, can't reschedule, and is (let's say) 90% vaccinated players. You might have 5 unvaccinated players and 48 vaccinated players on a team. Now let's say they test them all because of a couple of cases and they find 12 people are positive, most or all asymptomatic... and yet this happens on Saturday. What do you do with that game? The whole "if we can't reschedule it, you'll have to forfeit" seems like a huge loophole. Last year they went through hoops to reschedule games and bent over backwards. In fact, the only way I can see them not rescheduling it is if it's a week 18 game. Otherwise... they are going to go to extreme lengths to reschedule, vaccinated or unvaccinated. No one gets paid when they don't play games.

For a minute there I thought you just locked it to save a step!

Quick, someone update the thread title so no one else creates a duplicate thread!

Not really "news", but it is a statement from Bruce Smith regarding the Bills. Many less meaningful utterances from Bills players have caused threads to open.

Well, I am not going to copy that whole thing in a quote, but given that the protocols are currently for preseason only, I suspect they will be slightly relaxed. There is no argument that could convince me that unvaccinated players should not be tested daily for the forseeable future, and that is hardly forcing them to get vaccinated. Similarly the quarantine rules for unvaccinated players who have a probable exposure are unlikely to change. I suspect most of the focus will be on the travel/hotel restrictions and other appearance opportunities etc. Having said that, when you ask how I can say that I am fine with the NFL/NFLPA deciding to make life easier for vaccinated players and encourage (not force) vaccinations, I say that because that is my opinion. Beyond that, I think the conversation gets into off topic areas.

Quite simply I can't agree that the current risk is the same as last fall because community prevalence and transmission rates are lower, which of course could change. That argument could be used to extend the same 2020 protocols to 2025 or beyond as long as there is a single case. Which is not, of course, what the rest of society is doing as far as maintaining rules - not in practice anyhow. I am not saying the protocols are different because I have not seen a side by side comparison but I do not believe that a rigorous scientific analysis is the only driver. Encouragement to get vaccinated is part of the motive and I am completely fine with that.

Hopefully this lets any other players who have felt the need to hide, be more comfortable in disclosing (if they choose). But I also respect players' right to privacy, and honestly care very little about their personal lives. Ideally he will be accepted the same as before but unfortunately there are going to be some haters... there always are.

I feel they designed the vast protocol difference intentionally to nudge the undecideds/uninformed. Once they get down to the hardcore anti- group, nudging is useless so they may provide more "out"s. It is hard for me to describe some players as vaccine-hesitant. That describes people who waited a few months for lots of people to get it, then decided to get it. They literally hesitated. That would describe someone who is still open to maybe getting it. Someone who is firmly against it is really not vaccine-hesitant, they are vaccine-opposed. As noted in the prior article, they will likely not be affected by carrots or sticks unless taken to an extreme. So I think "infection parties" are more likely among the "opposed" than the "hesitant". But it is probably in the NFL's interest to delay providing alternative options.

I think the protocols for the unvaccinated s could take into account 2 additional factors: 1) Player's prior history of COVID. Despite a general recommendation that post-COVID infection you should still get vaccinated, there are actually reasonable disagreements on when that should occur. It is also not really in dispute that there is a short term level of resistance conveyed by infection. So, it might be reasonable to allow someone to be treated the same as vaccinated players for X months, such as 3-6. But this would require some data to back it up... such as frequency of reinfection of non immunocompromised individuals in that time horizon. I don't have enough data to judge this either way but it is worth considering. 2) Probably an even larger factor is the prevalence of infection in the community. Is there a threshold below which severe restrictions on player interactions no longer make sense? If the "positivity rate" were 0.01% and there were 100 infections/day nationwide, would that be sufficiently low to relax protocols? I don't have the answer of course, but "disappear completely" seems like an unreasonable standard. I don't believe Ebola has disappeared completely but players are not required to follow precautions against it because their risk is effectively zero.