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The gap between the haves and have-nots is growing wider


notwoz

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What in the world is the point? Are there good teams and bad teams? Yes there are! Is it systemic? No it’s not. The sample size and length are not long enough to draw any conclusions other than teams with good coaching, ownership and quarterbacking tend to do better. NO KIDDING!

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The league has always been this way.  For all the talk about parity, the same teams (those with the best quarterbacks) always rise to the top of the standings.

 

The Patriots with Brady.  The Steelers with Roethlisberger.  Those teams have been at the top for 15+ years now.

The Colts and Broncos were good when Manning was around.  Not so much since then.

 

The teams with good/not-great quarterbacks see some year-to-year fluctuation in the middle of the pack.  Chargers, Ravens, Bengals, etc.

The teams with poor QB situations like the Browns, Jets, Jaguars or Bills get the occasional good season thanks to strong defense, but it doesn't last.  They eventually fall right back down to the bottom.

 

Usually when you see a new team suddenly become dominant (Chiefs, Rams), it's because they suddenly have a new hotshot QB.  Hopefully that's what we eventually get out of Josh Allen.

 

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3 hours ago, LittleJoeCartwright said:

 

Isn’t always true. Philip Rivers is one of the better QBs but the Chargers don’t make the playoffs every year.

 I think Stafford has been a good franchise QB but his lions rarely make the playoffs.  

 

Yeah - but i would say its been easier to be a coach/GM for rivers.  He's had andy reid in his division for like 7 years, and had peyton manning for a bit.

 

I also feel like the chargers are alywas injured.

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Honestly this article leads me to the conclusion that the Bills are going to be alright primarily due to the insane amount of old HOF quarterbacks (there's gotta be 6!) drafted frequently and consecutively playing at their top zenith level. I think externally more than incompetence internally (boy have we been incompetent) is a bigger reason for the drought and all them 8-8 seasons we've had in the Tom Brady era. We were simply a team not lucky enough to get a 10-6 season out of our *** like the Dolphins with Chad Pennington one random year to sporadically break a drought.

 

It feels so similar to the Kelly, Elway, Young, Marino, Favre, Aikman years where these teams traded SB appearances and long runs of success.. Free Agency or not; we were on the lucky end of that spectrum and didn't see teams living a football style just like we have the past 2 decades. Of course those guys retired early and I think we see teams like the early 2000s where the 2001 Ravens, 2003 Bucs, 2002 and 2004 Pats, and (with a nerfed Brady and godsend Viniateri) and 2006 Steelers (with a nerfed Big Ben going 15-1 in 2005) where defense and simply a complete team can beat most of the run of the mill quarterbacks playing. Ya'll realize the top quarterbacks those years were considered McNair, Vick, McNabb, Culpepper, Trent Green and Hasselback were among the best? That's about to happen when these ageless HOF guys go away and mediocre to great (not necessarily elite) quarterback play from Josh Allen is all we need with obvious offensive improvements for when the time comes to be back to any given sunday.. any given season when the stars align and we make deep playoff runs.. All provided we have a complete package like those early Pats teams (Brady was a more clutch Alex Smith than he was a Dan Marino).. Things are gonna be allllright :) 

Edited by PetermanThrew5Picks
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NFL “parity” is judged over the course of several seasons, not within any single one. The author is missing the point. There are always bad teams every season in the NFL. What makes the league different than, say, the NBA is the ability of most teams to improve (or fall) relatively quickly over the course of a few years. Except the Bills of course. That’s a Bills problem though, not an NFL problem.

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8 minutes ago, Soda Popinski said:

Give up?  Yes probably pretty soon.   Score?  I doubt it.   

I really don't blame the defense if they look like they give up sometimes. It's tough as a competitor knowing you don't have control over the other side of the ball scoring at least 10 no matter how well you play.

 

I just hope that doesn't stick to these young players as "that's just professional football, get paid and work just hard enough to get paid again.. losing doesn't hurt as much as it used to be" going forward and they can put these experiences in perspective knowing their whole career is defined by their effort in winning whenever given the opportunity. And of course, they must learn to hate the Pats. Because I want Tre White to carry that Gronk hit into pure hatred to destroy the Bradyless Pats with no mercy.. when he's age 35 still harboring hate against a terrible Pats team from an experience 13 years ago.

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Just now, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

I really don't blame the defense if they look like they give up sometimes. It's tough as a competitor knowing you don't have control over the other side of the ball scoring at least 10 no matter how well you play.

 

I just hope that doesn't stick to these young players as "that's just professional football, get paid and work just hard enough to get paid again.. losing doesn't hurt as much as it used to be" going forward and they can put these experiences in perspective knowing their whole career is defined by their effort in winning whenever given the opportunity. And of course, they must learn to hate the Pats. Because I want Tre White to carry that Gronk hit into pure hatred to destroy the Bradyless Pats with no mercy.. when he's age 35 still harboring hate against a terrible Pats team from an experience 13 years ago.

I think once they see a competent offense moving the ball downfield, the urgency to get the ball back and give it to them so they can score takes over.   I don't see any carryover of negativity once we start making moves in free agency and in the draft to improve the talent on the offense.   The defense will be fine. 

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6 hours ago, row_33 said:

They demand equality of outcome. That’s a losing strategy for every area of life.

 

equality of opportunity is all one can honestly hope for, which will not eliminate the reality fact that some people are just plain better than you in areas of life, and you will have to deal with that fact

 

the NFL provides the most equality of opportunity in that the worst teams automatically have first crack at the best talent from college

 

I've always thought it funny that with all the attempts to institute parity, there are still the have's and have-nots.  You give teams like Cleveland and Buffalo perennial top picks, as much salary cap space as the big market teams and they've largely wasted those resources. 

 

No matter how much equality the league wants to establish, there will always be the teams which win consistently. And you'll always have the teams which don't.  To me, that comes down to bad management.

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5 minutes ago, BillsVet said:

 

I've always thought it funny that with all the attempts to institute parity, there are still the have's and have-nots.  You give teams like Cleveland and Buffalo perennial top picks, as much salary cap space as the big market teams and they've largely wasted those resources. 

 

No matter how much equality the league wants to establish, there will always be the teams which win consistently. And you'll always have the teams which don't.  To me, that comes down to bad management.

Equality is not equal.  If you have bad front offices and bad general managers  it doesn't matter how many 1st round picks you have.   They will be consistently making bad decisions.   

 

It really comes down to the QB and nothing more.  If you have one, you are a have.  If you don't have one you're a have not.  Everything else is filler. 

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13 hours ago, Utah John said:

Success in the NFL can be self-sustaining.  Players want to win rings so up to a point they will sacrifice money to be on a great team. Players who know they're not on winning teams focus on money.  The exception that provides the rule is New England, where Brady could have raped the Patriots but chose only to make a fortune and not a king's ransom. This let the Pats put more quality players around him, and he gets to be regarded as the GOAT.  (The actual GOAT is either Montana or Peyton.)  

 

The Bills had this going a generation ago.  Their great front office brought in real talent and a deep coaching staff had them working together.  The Bills had fun, and other teams' players wanted to play with them.  Then Ralph, God bless him, lost it.  Fired Polian, fired Butler, brought in obscenely terrible front office people, let his Detroit-based beancounter determine whether the Bills could sign particular players, ruined the scouting staff, paid lazy guys tens of millions and let good players walk away.  Now they're fighting to get back on the winner side of the hill, and it's a lot easier getting to the loser side as they're finding out.

 

The draft is supposed to tend teams toward parity but that hardly ever works. When it does work, it's great.

Brady has more rings than Montana or Manning. How are they better?

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The league in its greed for expansion has watered itself down. There just aren’t enough elite QBs or HCs. 

I would like to see something similar to the EPL, with a first division and second division. It would stop the tanking. First division games would be much more competitive as would second division. Firsts trying to maintain status and seconds trying to level up.

1 hour ago, Chris66 said:

Nfl will never have parity. To many bad organizations that keep doing stupid things.

Fairly true for all leagues. 

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3 minutes ago, iinii said:

The league in its greed for expansion has watered itself down. There just aren’t enough elite QBs or HCs. 

 

IMHO The ‘problem’ is not that aren’t enough elite quarterbacks. The problem is that right there are a handful who simply won’t retire even while playing at an incredibly high level. We’ve really not seen this before. Those half dozen guys know more about the game and the play than the coaches on either sideline do. That generation can’t play forever...or can they?

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2 hours ago, Chris66 said:

Nfl will never have parity. To many bad organizations that keep doing stupid things.

 

one way of looking at it

 

the NFC has had so-called parity for a long time now, it has almost always had 4 or so very good teams to fight it out to get to the SB, the AFC a lot less so.

 

 

 

 

and again, the number of teams repeating a division win in a given year since they went to the 8x4 format is 3 a year, even with Brady and Peyton dominating for a long part of this...

 

 

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3 hours ago, Soda Popinski said:

I think once they see a competent offense moving the ball downfield, the urgency to get the ball back and give it to them so they can score takes over.   I don't see any carryover of negativity once we start making moves in free agency and in the draft to improve the talent on the offense.   The defense will be fine. 

I'm hoping on it man. That's all I can speak for cause I don't know what's going through their heads, but impressionable players getting paid on losing in blowouts ain't good. It's all about the coaching and intangibles these guys carried with them from college.

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1 minute ago, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

I'm hoping on it man. That's all I can speak for cause I don't know what's going through their heads, but impressionable players getting paid on losing in blowouts ain't good. It's all about the coaching and intangibles these guys carried with them from college.

That's the culture McDermott is trying to build.   Mental toughness to get through the times when we couldn't beat an egg.  

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I don't know how much this relates to this article in particular, but for a while now I have been thinking about the prospect of a separate "salary cap" or set of rules strictly for the QB position, to exist along side, but separate from, the regular team salary cap.

 

I think it would be interesting and fun to discuss the merits of such an idea.

 

The QB position is so important, and it eats up so much $$$ under the cap, I think it could be interesting to keep it separate from the rest of the team.  Might help both QBs and regular players.

 

 

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