finn

Some of the calls here I don't necessarily disagree with, like the roughing the passer penalties against Mahomes. Also, with a full season to work with, you could persuasively cherry pick evidence of bias helping or hurting any team; unconscious bias is inevitable. Finally, anomalies do happen; getting pocket aced three times in a row doesn't necessarily mean the dealer is cheating. But I don't see why all this can be true AND that it's also true the refs are deliberately influencing some Chiefs game. In fact, it might be naïve to think otherwise, given the truly enormous amount of money at stake and how easy it would be to pull off. Bottom line (to me): With normal levels of ref bias, the Chiefs would have won maybe 12 games last year, would not have hosted the AFCC, and would not have gone to the Super Bowl. I'm not claiming there's a league-wide conspiracy, but I'm pretty sure someone has been putting a finger on the scale these past few years to make sure the Chiefs succeed. Why they would want a petulant, mincing whiner like Mahomes to be the poster child for the league is another question.

I like how the writer paraphrases Beane as saying, "Nothing is earned." That made me laugh.

But what makes you think he still can run a 4.46 after blowing out his ACL and Achilles? (He's also turned 30 in January.) He might be running a 4.56 for all we know.

That's a thought. Rather than bulk up a safety like Matt Milano or Lewis Cine, why not switch a DE with speed to LB, especially if his chief purpose is to rush the passer and defend the run? Not saying there isn't a reason (I don't know), but if you're thin at LB and rich at DE, the question comes up. Would be nice to see some beef at LB when Henry is running downhill on us.

Otherwise a slam-dunk signing, though, eh?

I didn't take offense myself, but the title is pretty clearly meant to be insulting to the team, or at least to emphasize not that they accomplished no other team ever has in getting to four straight SB but rather that they lost four in a row. Kinda dumb, in that the chief audience is presumably Bills fans, who don't want to see a narrative of how their beloved team was a pack of tragic losers, as the title implies. Not sure I follow you on that one, brother.

They might have chosen a more cheery title. Why not just "Four-Time Losers"?

Well, as with life in general, the hair-pulling and regrets do have the benefit of helping avoid similar mistakes in the future, at least supposedly. Maybe evolution selected for such a high-degree of guilt, bitterness and regret in our species because it takes that much to penetrate our thick skull to not make the same mistake twice. I assume Beane has an outcomes-assessment review in place where his staff considers why they made the mistakes they did, going back years. I'm sure it's more efficient than hundreds of pages of posts declaring how idiotic certain picks were. But, given the thick-skulls theory, maybe reading through the thorough roasting here is what it would take to persuade him not to draft players like Boogie Basham and Cody Ford. In any even, go Keon! I really, really do not want to spend the next ten years despairing how we could have had Ladd or Xavier.

I noticed the tackles. The interior seemed competent to me, but not stellar.

Yeah, but what message is he sending that's worth missing all these early but still important practices? "I'm really serious, guys! I really am mad now!" It's just so juvenile. If anything, Beane is less likely to sign him if he holds out, and I see why. He loses nothing by coming to mini-camp and gains a lot, including Beane's good will. Some of these athletes have the minds of 14-year olds.

Makes me smile to think we have the polar opposite of this at QB now. The only way Josh Allen goes out of bounds short of the marker on fourth down with the game on the line is in the air as he throws it on target thirty yards down the field across his body.

I wish we could have found a way to keep him. But he wasn't going to start, and he's too good to be a backup. One of the few real weaknesses on the team right now is backup linebacker. Williams is great, but Baylon Spector is either bad or injured.

What makes you think McGovern is top 5? Not challenging you, just genuinely curious. I had him as a slightly above-average player.

I wasn't diehard until the Kelly era, but I remember OJ smashing a snow ball into the TV camera lens on Thanksgiving day when I was a teenager.

Before the rule change, the success rate of online kicks was like 15% AND teams didn't need to declare them. That gave the option real excitement. But at 6%, everyone knowing it's coming? No, that's pointless. They need to think out of the box, something equivalent to pulling the goalie in hockey. High risk high reward. Maybe an 75-yard field goal attempt.