This one was on the defense folks

[Pokebball]

2 minutes ago, BarleyNY said:

Well, then they need to because they aren’t carrying their weight.

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization.  The defense wasn’t stellar, but they weren’t bad either.  Good teams are going to score in the NFL today.  And if we’re going to criticize let’s do so based on performance, not just expectation.  The offense was a notably worse than the defense yesterday and they’ve been that way all season. 

I wasn't the one that used that characterization, and it does fit.  The defense performed much worse than they have all season.

Edited December 23, 2019 by Pokebball

[BarleyNY]

35 minutes ago, Pokebball said:

I wasn't the one that used that characterization, and it does fit.  The defense performed much worse than they have all season.

Again, I disagree.  Looking simply at scoring averages the Bills have been giving up an average of 16.4 ppg.  You’d expect more to better offenses and less to worse ones.  NE is better than average and has been scoring 26.2 ppg.  Average those two numbers and we get 21.3 points.  That’s about what I’d expect NE to have scored if both sides played about average.  They got 24.  So NE got 2.7 points more than expected.  NE was also playing at home so I’d expect them to do a little better which could account for at least some of, if not all, of that 2.7 point difference.  In any event I don’t see “much worse” by our defense.  
 

Let’s keep this in mind too - there will be a lot of excellent offenses in the playoffs.  The defense will probably give up more than 16 or 17 points to those offenses too.  But it’s because they’re playing good offenses, not because they're playing poorly. 

[Hapless Bills Fan]

On 12/22/2019 at 10:18 AM, Lieutenant Aldo Raine said:

I will disagree all I want.  I have never given a crap about senior officer opinions because you’re wrong most of the time, like you are here.

 

In perfect character I see, Lt

 

I would be interested in the substance under your disagreement with the pundits who assert offenses with running QB have trouble with screens - if the Ravens are successful where we aren't, can you point out what they are doing that we aren't, or other factors that make them successful?

 

I mean "you're wrong" "no, you're wrong" in theme and variations has limited value as convo

[Hapless Bills Fan]

On 12/22/2019 at 6:42 PM, BarleyNY said:

Again, I disagree.  Looking simply at scoring averages the Bills have been giving up an average of 16.4 ppg.  You’d expect more to better offenses and less to worse ones.  NE is better than average and has been scoring 26.2 ppg.  Average those two numbers and we get 21.3 points.  That’s about what I’d expect NE to have scored if both sides played about average.  They got 24.  So NE got 2.7 points more than expected.  NE was also playing at home so I’d expect them to do a little better which could account for at least some of, if not all, of that 2.7 point difference.  In any event I don’t see “much worse” by our defense.  
 

Let’s keep this in mind too - there will be a lot of excellent offenses in the playoffs.  The defense will probably give up more than 16 or 17 points to those offenses too.  But it’s because they’re playing good offenses, not because they're playing poorly. 

 

I think this may be an example of sometimes needing to look a bit deeper at numbers to think what they mean, and also sometimes needing to just go by what you see.
 

As far as what we see, the Bills D was completely susceptible to power runs and screens.  It was no "fluke" or one missed play like the Hurst TD  vs the Ravens.  It was systematic exploitation of a defensive weakness uncovered by an adaptive offensive coach, and not able to be countered successfully in-game by our defensive coach or HC.

 

As far as numbers, since a picture is worth 1000 words, here we go.  Pats offensive points vs. week.  Wins are green, losses are red.

So first of all, we see the Pats are "bimodal"; when they're facing a bad team, they never take their foot off the gas, so they run up big scores.

 

 

We can see that a lot of the Pats gaudy offensive numbers came in the first half of the season in Butt-whuppins of bad teams.  In the latter half of the season since Week 10, the Pats have had a lower average PPG - 21 ppg on offense, and that's with the Cinncinnati slaughter.  If we do your same analysis of averages on the last 6 weeks of Bills games, our defensive average is 16 ppg.  So per your calculation, expect 18.5 points, gave up 24; 5.5 points worse than expected.

 

In my mind, though, the key parameter showing the defense's poor performance is TOP.  The Patriots had the ball for 38:52; our offense had it for 21:08 - the lowest TOP of the season by 3 minutes and 5 1/2 minutes lower than any of our wins. 

It's no secret that our Defense is better than our Offense.  It got the lion's share of the attention McD's first years and the attention the O got was far more mixed in outcome (Zay Jones, Kelvin Benjamin and Corey Coleman at WR, for example).  If you have a young and struggling offense and a top defense, absent turnovers there should NOT by that TOP disparity.  The defense's job is to get the opponent offense off the field and give our offense repeated chances to get its ***** together.  Instead, we gave up 3 long drives of 11, 17 and 11 plays, including one after our offense took the lead, to cut the lead to 1 point. 

 

That's a pretty poor defensive performance, in my mind.  Our D was gassed at the end, no question, but they had a lot to do with that outcome.