BrooklynBills

There were plenty of guys to sign back in the summer when this problem was discussed ad naseum. These guys don't know what they are doing. Every year that Whaley has been at the helm, there is always a position that we seem to be scrambling to fill and find guys during the season. I can understand a rash of injuries one year, but this is a pattern at this point.

People that want a football czar just want a new decision maker making the calls in the Bills front office. Personally, I do not trust Whaley or Ryan to make sound decisions with regards to draft strategy, organizational makeup, and overall team philosophy. I would prefer the "football czar" to simply be our HC a la Pete Carroll in Seattle, with a smart personnel person paired with him. This is somewhat what the Bills have setup, but the two people who have the most say(Whaley and Rex) are not qualified to run an entire organization. And we have no one anywhere in the front office structure that has any extensive experience running a modern football program.

Everything happening now is a direct result of how the Bills (re: Pegula's) assessed and handled the end of the 2014 season. Doug Marrone asked for an extension and was denied, and the Bills incorrectly assumed that this was a team on the cusp of being a playoff team and needed to hire a veteran HC. They overvalued the talent on the team, especially defensively. They did not recognize the need to purge and rebuild a franchise from the top down as was needed, and as many here were calling for during the entire 2014 season. They were offered and encouraged to use consultant help from the NFL in the form of Casserly, Wolf, or Accorsi and said "no, thanks." The Bills now face the prospect of having a very expensive, very average team with a terrible QB making $15 mil per year for the next 2-3 years. It is not completely hopeless, but a complete re-tooling is necessary here. Not to mention the Bills are on the verge of losing a very key defensive piece in Gilmore in favor of keeping Taylor. Very bold decisions are needed here and I doubt our management team is up to the task as their MO has continually been to keep status quo.

There have been plenty of opportunities for Whaley to exert his philosophy of how to build a football team in his time there and he had failed miserably. There are plenty of good talent evaluators out there. There is a great one currently out of a job in Tom Gamble. This organization needs a top CEO type personality a la Pete Carroll, Bill Belichek, Ted Thompson, Andy Reid, or Elway. Whaley is not that person; if he was, the Steelers do not let him leave for a lateral position. Rex is not that person. Rex plus a strong GM = fine Whaley plus an alpha coach = fine Together, they will not work.

I'm right there with you BUT the blueprint for this team was supposed to be a stifling defense combined with a multiple and dominant running game with a QB who doesn't make mistakes. Obviously, this is not how most of us would want the team to be built, but in that paradigm the defense is the part that is vastly underperforming. This brings us back full circle to a talking point that has been beaten to death since Rex took over. His style of defense is outdated as a dominant way to play defense and we severely overvalue our defensive talent. We do not have dominant defensive playmakers a la Denver or Seattle or KC. The scheme itself does not make a dominant defense as can be seen by many other teams who are running a version of this 34 hybrid defense around the league without the best talent like Chicago, Indy, and Baltimore. Kansas City is the only team having success with this style of defense and they have better talent on defense.

Except they don't play defense

You Are Wrong It's funny to me that you think the Bills have any leverage here to tell him to skip the birth.

Anyone who gives Clay **** for this can go !@#$ off IMO.

Gilmore is good. The defense will not be as good without him FOR SURE. I think he is worth top 10 CB money, or at least what janoris jenkins got from the giants last off-season. The Bills still have the franchise tag available to them. I would think the smart play would be to franchise him and draft a CB in the first 2 rounds in the draft.

There are interesting vet options out there this off-season. I'd expect pryor, desean Jackson, Pierre garcon, kamar aiken, and Kendall Wright to all be available. Then you have uber vets line boldin or vincent Jackson. And possible cuts like Brandon Marshall(who the Bills had interest in), victor Cruz, or Stevie Johnson.

I agree with the sentiment of this post despite the source. We began the year with 2 quality NFL receivers, a perennially hurt and not that productive Goodwin, and a bunch of guys who probably shouldn't be in the NFL. Maybe they expected Dez Lewis to make the team. We got lucky getting Hunter off waivers considering Miami got him and was forced to waive him because of injuries to other positions. This has happened before with Whaley, specifically at G, where they got lucky taking a chance on Incognito otherwise they would nowhere at that position, and at TE, where they were forced to overpay Clay just to get a decent every down TE on the roster. Also this year with S. Going into the year knowing there was nothing behind Aaron Williams is terrible. Everyone knew he was one shot away from a season/career ending injury. None of this is hindsight. We were talking about it all off-season.

2 years before. They actually missed the playoffs the next season, I believe. Then, this game happened with cutting Milloy and everyone said that the Patriots players hated Bill Belichek and that he had lost the team. They lost one more game all year.

Whaley, Brandon, and Overdorff are just over their heads in their positions. As was Buddy Nix. Now we presumably have an owner with no prior experience in the NFL, taking advice from these guys regarding management decisions. Not one is really equipped to run an NFL team. The committee approach does not work in the NFL. Their needs to be a driving voice and ultimate decider. We don't have one.

So did anyone read the article where it said his likely salary to his next team would be league minimum based on the offsets in his contract with The Jets?

Everything should be reviewable. Belichek has advocated for this every off-season when they propose rule changes. It would fix many of these problems. Also, a referee or league official should be overseeing the game and manning the playclock. If Blandino can tweet about the situation almost immediately, it is common sense that having someone there to provide oversight would have easily fixed this problem.

Glad we spent that 2nd round pick on Kouandijo, instead of including it in the Watkins deal instead of our 2015 1st round pick. I'm sorry, has this terrible Doug Whaley decision reached its statute of limitations and we aren't allowed to discuss it anymore?

What is the Bills plan for success? Play defense and run the ball well? Why are we firing OCs after 2 games? Why were relying on Greg Salas and Marquis Goodwin for sustained production at WR when we knew Watkins was already injured? Why do we have absolutely no talent behind the "one-hit-away" Aaron Williams at S? These aren't questions brought up in hindsight. They were there before training camp. To say Bills fans can't be patient is a joke. We are extremely patient. But no one is going to be patient when we are making bad decision after bad decision, just hoping things will work out.

The difference being that Theo had a clear plan that smart baseball people thought could work and then he went out and executed it. Every move he made was calculated and smart. Since Theo took over the Cubs, they have been arguably the most forward thinking organization in baseball. They have taken advantage of the system of team building in every possible way. They are a horrible analogy for the current state of the Bills in which every move they make is typically panned by the knowledgeable football media. Objectively, the Cubs winning the World Series was inevitable. They are well run, wealthy organization who made a series of smart and calculated moves to arrive where they are now. They are the Seahawks in the NFL. The Bills winning with their current organizational structure is more like the White Sox winning in 2005. Pure !@#$ing luck. And the Cleveland model for the Bills would if somehow Tom Brady found out that he was born and raised in Buffalo and his memory wiped by Belichek when he was in college.

Also, when you don't draft and develop QBs constantly, you put yourself in position to be where the Bills are now and for the last few years. Where you are forced to overdraft EJ Manuel in 2012 and now are being backed in to committing lots of cap space to Taylor.

The idea isn't to draft a round 1 QB every year. The idea is to draft a QB of every year of different talent levels so that you are always grooming someone for the position. Not to put your team building on hold until you hit on a first round QB. The other idea is to never feel like you are set at that position. And that is what the well run teams do. I will say this because apparently too many people here listen to the Bills spin machine: YOU DO NOT NEED TO DRAFT A QB IN THE FIRST ROUND TO BE SUCCESSFUL Good QBs are found in every round. It would also help to join the modern NFL and implement a more complex passing system.

Smith who?

All yesterday proved to me is that while I like the defensive design, we do need more talent long term at both LB and DL. Now maybe we already have that with Dareus, Ragland, and Lawson coming back full strength next year. Offensively, this team needs to figure out some semblance of short possession passing game that they can go to when the run game is not working. This is not college football in the 70s and 80s. Good defenses will stop your running game and the deep ball is only good for 6 points a game.

We won't find a number 2 for less than what he's making. And he is young enough to extend and lower the cap hits for the next few years. I could get behind this idea. He is not just a deep threat either. He is a good player. Better receivers have been traded for much less than even a 3rd rounder. I'm not trading anything rounds 1-3. And I'm only trading a 4 if we can work out a restructure/extension beforehand. Straight up, he's worth a 5th rounder.

I'll just set this down right here.... Trade for Jay Cutler. *and here...we...go... But seriously, he's cheaper than Taylor, better than Taylor, and I actually think he would do well in the Bills power run scheme.

I meant after 2018 season so I think we are talking about the same thing