HardyBoy

I'm more talking about weekly during game plan prep and I would imagine sitting in the offensive meetings and sitting with the coordinators and potentially micro managing on the offensive side of things.

I'm genuinely loving the long posts and deep well thought out back and forth! That said, first I disagree that giving up no more than 24 points in playoff losses is a huge problem, let alone a problem (potentially). I don't have stats to look at, and I know the league was different 10 years ago, but I think teams play strategically a lot to get and keep a 10 point lead with a chance to be one play from a 17 point lead and that's what they're trying to do. Second, the problem isn't Josh Allen reading defenses wrong when he throws deep, but that he's falling into the trap of doing what the other team is baiting him into doing...it's their only chance of winning...they lose if he hits those deep balls and they lose if he spreads the ball around to the sure gains and moves the chains. You can combine those two points into a third point of how elevated scores aren't necessarily a function of bad defense, but a better team going for high reward low chance plays, missing a few times, the other team scores and now they're playing catchup and the team that's down starts playing to keep that 10 point lead and snag a shot to make it a the score game... that's basically what happened in the Bengals game. The bills seemed to play a good number of defenses that were really good at succeeding in low percentage situations... the bills defense has not been successful compared to the likelihood of success...these aren't one off plays like 13 seconds...third and long is consistently picked up going back years. McD talks about dictating to the offense (I'm so pumped for this defense!)...well Josh Allen allowed other defensive coordinators to dictate to him...not because they didn't think he could hit it, but because him missing was the only real chance they had to upset the Bills. Josh Allen was throwing haymakers to early and exposing the team to big body shots...that's not a knock on Allen, he'll learn...they used Allen's insane recall and processing against him. I do wonder if that's what Diggs got mad...they locked the routes but the receivers knew they had to not run deep to prevent Allen from taking the cheese and they lost a ton of say dynamically in the offense as a result.

I think he also realized he needs to step out of the offense, this lets him do that.

Isn't Sean Payton overrated though? Like I remember reading something where he's had way more bad seasons than you'd expect from an elite coach, even if accounting that they were in cap hell for a bit.

I think you're giving too much credit and blame to coaches though. Also, 13 seconds was Levi Wallace's fault, he should have been inside leverage on Kelce, I'm convinced they were baiting then into running that adjustment and Wallace brain farted at the worst possible moment.

To five toughest schedule in the league, honestly don't even know if missing the playoffs would be a regression. I think people severely underestimate the amount of randomness that comes with a 17 game schedule, football in general and a single game playoff format. You need to have a chance to get in every year and then you need to get lucky...way too many people confusing outcome with process here, and I'm not talking McDs definition of process. Don't give me the only outcomes matter, when those outcomes are so largely based on the bounce of a non-spherical ball. Before all the "well Josh Allen" crowd come at me with "well Josh Allen"...JP Losman in a lot of ways was very similar to Josh Allen physically and mentally. That coaching staff and front office completely broke JP Losman. Philip Rivers was another generational QB, how did firing Marty S work out for them? That was a gigantic reactionary error and happened because of focusing on small sample size outcomes.

Is that for real?! What if you dive to make a tackle? This sounds like it's a clarification of the existing rule of a targeting call or something... like targeting requires a launch and this is what a launch is now.

No, that's not how it works. I often have a backpack in my car with my work laptop in it, they can just pull me over for any arbitrary reason and then search my bag? A gun can be under a seat of a car too... so they can just search every car for a gun then?

He sounds like a mess and that's being kind (without understanding any context)... but how exactly did the police see there was an uzi in what I would imagine was a closed bag after a stop for a suspected vehicle code violation?

SLC Punk is such a good movie!

TJ Watt also tore his pec on basically the last snap of the game...my understanding is that is a fatigue injury as much as anything else.

Fair, but I think you need to take into account, mediocre at what? Situational football and all and certain players might be overall mediocre, but above mediocre at certain situations. That Ed Oliver comment on understanding situational football, in my mind is a huge compliment and not an incitement...what is josh allen working on?...exactly. Ed Oliver can play across situations, now the coaching staff is challenging him to know which physical skills to use in a given situation...but bringing it back to this point...coaching is the same way. You have players that in general maybe are mediocre, but in certain situations can contribute significant value. Also, you're keeping your stars fresh for the 4th quarter, but also for the full season. I think this is as much a philosophy as it is the application of sports science...in my mind this isn't some theory of McD, but something backed by scientific reasoning...irony is it might cost you a game to win a more important game and a single game might be the difference between the 1 seed and the 2 seed. This year though, with how wild hard the schedule is, screw trying to get the top seed, they need to focus only on winning the division and having the best season long output is more impetant than any individual game for that goal imo.

This team is so much better than last year!!

Being successful as a head coach isn't about scheme. I think people are misunderstanding that a lot. McDermott himself said on Pat McAfee that his role as a head coach is basically to let the coordinators coach and he is there to make sure he is coordinating things across the organization basically...a CEO sets expectations, sure, but they're not in implementation meetings talking about the tactical steps required to hit those expectations if that makes sense...McD said he is going to have to delegate a bunch of responsibilities in order to be able to take on the d coordinator position...he wasn't a quasi headcoach d coordinator, McD was solely a head coach. Frazier seems like a person who would actually be a better head coach than d coordinator in a lot of ways.

EJ Manuel & Josh Allen might both might a thought on the translating to wins, but overall good point.

Cam Newton & Andrew Luck...both broke down.

Not just attractive, but insanely talented...she's a very talented musician who plays instruments iirc Huh?

Not just Hawkeye, check her out in the Edge of Seventeen with Woody Harrelson, it's an incredible movie. This makes me happy for some reason (random people dating random people should not make me happy, but their personalities mesh really well I think!).

Tom, is that you?

It has come 10000x, but in what direction?

My first madden was madden 95 or 96 on pc... they had like an academy, where madden taught you different football fundamentals, like cover 3 vs cover 2. I used to play online a ton on madden 2007 for ps2... it's so sluggish now and the angles are all weird and defense is basically impossible, where in madden 07 you could shift your team, dictate a coverage and play defense with any player, and bait people into throwing to a hot route...they really just need to scrap the whole game and start from fresh code imo... like build an in home physics based engine and I'm hoping they've been working on that with a small team over the last few years...I want to get into madden again so bad, it just needs better online head to head play and offline franchise mode.

Seeing what's happened to Madden is so sad...I wasn't aware they've said they were legit going to try and fix the platform...going to do some digging there, but they've said that in the past too and then just added some feature that used to be in the game years ago back in. Like they need to unwind whatever crap happened when they switched to Xbox 360/ps3... it largely broke when they switched to that version of next gen, but then the damn ultimate team microtransaction bs started and the dev focus shifted on that and they couldn't spend enough time fixing the game...plus the decision to go to animation based game play instead of genuine physics based...

Do you know that's the case though? Also, do you know tre wasn't cleared for golf?

It really might be more sophisticated than that... I'm sure the pr/marketing/social media depts have metrics around engagement of social media posts (and I'm sure agents have that as well, as do media companies). Imagine Russ Brandon still running the team and there not being a wall between football ops and organizational ops... there's gotta be a better reason that players do that than to just publicly apply pressure, but I'm also a data analyst who people sometimes say has a utopian view of the way business should be run and this to me is perfect for trying to collect data to show the value of a player off the field as well and get places like espn to pick up the story because they see the engagement data of their audience with that social media scrubbing.

Right, then you watch the clips coming out of the practice and you realize he's being genuine.