The Ringer: How Did the Buffalo Bills Go From the Top of the AFC to the Fringe of the Playoff Picture?

[finn]

I still think that one line from the article warrants more discussion: "The Bills rank 27th in success rate on zone runs; they lead the league in success rate on man-blocking runs." I can't find the stats online to back up the author's claim, but it would seem that the solution to the Bills' offensive imbalance is to call more man-blocking plays. Am I missing anything? 

[DrDawkinstein]

6 minutes ago, Sheneneh Jenkins said:

Well I mean of course the team was pumped and eager to get a piece of KC with the Championship game loss on their mind. I'm talking about Beane in general as other poster said. A GM would be doing a bad job if focusing the entire off season making decisions/roster moves etc basing it off one team.

 

Pretty sure there is record of Beane talking about the draft and wanting to improve the pass rush with the main reason being they saw how Tampa beat KC in the SB and said "That's what we need to do".

 

Now, sure, pass rush is an important foundational piece of the game. But the tunnel-visioned focus on it, at the expense of the run game and shoring up other areas of need, seems like it was mainly influenced by KC.

 

Hence why I said it was a mistake (or in your words, a bad job). I dont think it's necessarily a fireable offense, but it is a mistake.

[Patrick Duffy]

7 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

 

Pretty sure there is record of Beane talking about the draft and wanting to improve the pass rush with the main reason being they saw how Tampa beat KC in the SB and said "That's what we need to do".

 

Now, sure, pass rush is an important foundational piece of the game. But the tunnel-visioned focus on it, at the expense of the run game and shoring up other areas of need, seems like it was mainly influenced by KC.

 

Hence why I said it was a mistake (or in your words, a bad job). I dont think it's necessarily a fireable offense, but it is a mistake.

Well they needed to improve the pass rush anyways because they had none last season. So that was going to be addressed anyway since it was obviously a need and that decision was done focusing to get pressure for every opponents QB and not just KC...

Edited November 23, 2021 by Sheneneh Jenkins

[Big Turk]

Umm...the article also says the Bills are not good at zone blocking(27th in the NFL) but best in the league at man blocking on runs...

 

Why not simply switch to more man blocking run plays?

 

I know it's an oversimplification, and other things would need to change but when the disparity is this great, it's simply common sense.

[DCOrange]

7 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

 

Pretty sure there is record of Beane talking about the draft and wanting to improve the pass rush with the main reason being they saw how Tampa beat KC in the SB and said "That's what we need to do".

 

Now, sure, pass rush is an important foundational piece of the game. But the tunnel-visioned focus on it, at the expense of the run game and shoring up other areas of need, seems like it was mainly influenced by KC.

 

Hence why I said it was a mistake (or in your words, a bad job). I dont think it's necessarily a fireable offense, but it is a mistake.

I think that's mostly just fodder for the press. Beane wanted to improve the pass rush because everyone wants a good pass rush and ours was not good.

[BarleyNY]

57 minutes ago, Nextmanup said:

Just goes to show how up and down the NFL can be from just 1 year to the next.

 

And yet football fans constantly make the mistake of judging "now" based on what happened "last year."

 

The league is very even to begin with, and then every team is a moving work in progress, every year.

It's all a very fluid situation and making assessments based on absolutes determined 6 months ago is foolish.

 

A lot of Bills fans here, right now, are having trouble realizing that New England is a huge threat to us this season.

 

I think they watched NE play their first few games on TV this year, and concluded they weren't that good based on those performances.  So they get slotted away in their mind as "not good" when in fact, they are playing much better than us lately and probably have a better defense....with much better coaching to boot.

 

 

Yeah, it’s always easy to think that the trend is always up for your team.  But in reality it only works that way about half the time.  Parity in the NFL makes it so close that random events can have a big impact.  The wrong injuries can have outsized impacts, for example.  With teams so close, having a flaw get exploited is a big issue.  The Bills are dealing with that on both sides of the ball now.  They’ve got to adjust or they’re done.  It’s certainly possible.  I just hope they can pull it off and get back into the hunt. 

[Boatdrinks]

They lost one terrible game to a team they should have beaten easily and were flat in the season opener. That’s really about it. Doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but in this years AFC it is. Their other losses are very similar to last year’s at this point. The loss in the closing seconds @TEN is last seasons loss in Arizona. The Indy blowout is last years debacle vs the Titans. The Bills sit at 6-4 when they were 7-3 last year. The Jags game is probably the one that flipped the script for this years edition. It doesn’t take much. After the gut wrenching loss to the Cardinals in 2020, the Bills never looked back and didn’t find themselves in the L column again until the AFC title game. They’ll have to go on a similar run starting Turkey day in the big easy. Do they have what it takes to complete their mission in 2021? 

[Albwan]

Bills been chasing a pure passing game, ignoring everything else while the rest of the teams

were building teams to run, play defense and stop the pass with medium level qb's.