Thurman#1

Ah, we shouldn't talk about defensive injuries because it doesn't fit your narrative, right? Sorry, I forgot. But, um, just remind me, who took a whole post just to remind us of Cincy's OL injuries? That was, um, you, wasn't it? About two posts above? So we should avoid talking about injuries when it's the Bills and doesn't fit your narrative, but talking about opponent injuries is totally OK and should be encouraged? Have I got that right?

Somehow the people who always bring that up manage conveniently to forget that the Bills D-line was also ripped to shreds. Von was out. That was the year the D looked absolutely ferocious at the beginning of the year with a healthy Von, until his injury. DaQuan, out. Our two best DLs, by far. Out. This allowed them to double Oliver all game long. After Rousseau and Oliver the rest of the DL snaps looked like this: Tim Settle 53% Shaq Lawson 48% Epenesa 43% Eli Ankou 37% Boogie Basham 31% Jordan Phillips 25% Kingsley Jonathan 16% That's not murderer's row. So enough with how bad the Bengals OL had it. We had it just as bad. And again, when healthy at the beginning of the year, that DL was playing absolutely dominant. When a pressure was needed they seemed to get one.

First, John is a terrific poster, even when I disagree with him, which is pretty often. Your attack here is complete nonsense. And second, like it or not, that Bengals game was a Bills team that wasn't at the end of their rope, they'd gone beyond the end. Both sides of the ball played OK but not nearly up their normal standard. You look at the quotes after that game and you see multiple guy saying we just didn't have any juice and that the energy just wasn't there. Which made sense. That season was wildly bizarre. One of their players died on the field. Another (Knox), had a college age brother die. They had a situation happen to a team for the first time in NFL history, three away games in a row in a total of twelve days. A mass shooter in the city with a racial motive. Dozens of people killed by the weather in Buffalo. And there was plenty more. It wasn't a normal season. They had reached the end of their emotional reserves. And it showed. Having said that, the offense had far less reason to play badly than the defense. The D had been devastated by injuries, with plenty out and plenty playing through injuries that simply didn't allow them to play up to their own standards. The offense was pretty healthy. Neither played well, but again the defense had far better reason for not doing so.

There isn't a defense in the world that is better against good teams than bad teams. That's the way it works. That's why you want your team to be a good team, so that they can operate better against the units they face. DaQuan, when playing well, is a mountain in the middle and plays terrific against the run. In any case, the Bills D is consistently excellent. With one major problem. They can't rush the passer as well as they should. That's not a scheme thing. They don't have that one guy. Only about 5 - 10 teams do, but the Bills are not among them. And it's hard to get those guys when you're consistently drafting 25th or later.

Injuries were more than a factor, they were a huge reason. And the word is "could." "Might," maybe. Not "will." We don't need to "face" anything. We should probably understand that that's your opinion. It's an opinion with some evidence behind it, but that evidence is very far from conclusive.

I'd sign up for ANY Buffalo championship game. But yeah, the way it's going right now, I think the Bills would have a really good chance of winning.

This. And it's very very cool.

IMO He'll have to be involved in recruiting. His face and his presence are his biggest recruiting weapons. Wouldn't be surprised to see him demanding a helicopter and a pilot.

Nah. It's not "no way." They'd had a three and out a drive or two before. But the odds weren't great we'd do it again there. And they'd likely have tried three run plays there as well to keep the clock running and force us to burn those TOs.

Yeah, he could have changed the call. My guess is that he had tremendous confidence that he could get it done.

Wow, you dug deep for that old post. Nice job!!!! I'd barely noticed Anderson by that point. And you nailed the Bears on Bates again thing as well.

Don't worry about it. Someone else missing the point doesn't bother me. Not a bit, I kind of expect it. But if you're really worried about it, why don't you try not missing the point? He wondered why anyone would care specifically about Josh's TDs. Your went glib and replied that there tends to be a relationship between TDs and wins. Since Malazan was referring not to TDs generally but to Josh's TDs specifically, this was a pretty stupid reply. I pointed out that yeah there's a relationship between TDs and wins, but that who gets those TDs doesn't matter the slightest bit to wins. Which was Malazan's point as well. Now you're pretending to answer me by going straw man. You're lecturing me about whether and why Josh might or might not continue scoring TDs. Completely beside my point and nothing I said anything about. If you want to talk about something I don't care about, hey, it's a free country, go for it. But don't reply to me when you do so.

Oh, agreed that a couple of McD's rosters have been good enough. Though I'd argue that by the end of the season that was no longer true in one or two of those years due to injuries. If the coin falls on the other side in the overtime coin flip in the 13 seconds game, we're sporting a Lombardi right now at OBD, I believe.

He didn't win? Um, he won huge. Just didn't win a Super Bowl. He was a great coach, absolutely terrific, who didn't win a title.. Deny it or not, being in the right situation is a huge, gigantic part of winning. Ask Andy Reid. Ask Bill Belichick. Ask Matt Stafford. And there are hundreds more who could teach you the same thing.

IMO, nah, not 85%. 60 - 70%? Yeah, probably. And yeah, he took a Mac Jones-led team to the playoffs, when he was 69, not 73 as he would be next year. That's a serious difference at that time of life. They won 10 games that year, against only three teams with winning records, one of which was us in the snow game. The Titans win was a pretty solid one, though Tannehill had a pretty crappy game. 9-8 Chargers 12-5 Titans Bills snow game

Ok, and tell it to the other great coaches who didn't make the Super Bowl when those guys did. And Schotty was great. You look at his rosters and you see players not good enough to have had the success that Marty brought them to. He was terrific, got teams to overachieve pretty much every single year. He had rosters good enough to win a Super Bowl maybe once or twice in his career. Maybe.

Gotta disagree there. He's 72. Ten to fifteen years ago, yeah, 100%. But I don't think he is what he was, and maybe not even very close.

Probably not, as many of those coaches were involved to some degree in choosing that QB, and a great deal in developing him. And a great deal in developing a team around him that puts him in a position to have great success. This is fair. It helps. Still not easy by any means, though.

Yeah, very possible. Also possible that they all realize that in football, the Bills OC, is not the guy most think of first when the name Brady is mentioned. I personally have made that mistake when reading a bunch of times.

Ruben Brown was terrific. He's way underestimated. Yah, he used to drive me crazy with false starts but the man was an absolute road grader. Certainly popularity contest is part of it. But year after year after year if you lined up the Pro Bowl lineup, they'd have been an absolutely ferocious scary lineup. Does Hamlin deserve it, though? Nope. Playing pretty good this year, he's taken a real leap upwards, but not at a Pro Bowl level. Still a terrific lineup there, though.

Yup. TDs. Not TDs by a QB versus TDs by an RB particularly, though. Pick sixes, punt runback TDs and TDs off blocked kicks work just as well too. Same amount of points for all of 'em. Also TDs you prevent the opponent from scoring.

Haven't changed at all. I have tremendous respect for him. I think he's likely to get us to the promised land if not this year then soon.

Yeah, this is it. The way they play, teams are going to be able to run a bit on them. If your RB can turn those openings into chunk plays, we have to play different, and that makes passing on us easier. Knowing how prolific our offense is, the coaches feel opponents are going to have to want to score quickly and that - generally - requires passing. It does seem that Daquan isn't playing this year the way he has in the past. Is it age? Injuries? Hard to say, but he's not having a great year, and Oliver has been up and down as well. If they return to form, things would improve. McDermott loves to have a big run-stopping block-eater in the middle, and DaQuan hasn't lived up to his own standards this year.

It's just not true that the D was bad against the Colts. You can say that they had some problems through much of it. They also put it away in the end. The Bills offense punted in their last drive and the The Colts got the ball back at the end of the 4th quarter with 2:30 left at their own 14. The Bills D just choked them out. They ran 13 plays and gained 39 yards. Ran out of time at the Bills 47 yard line. Allowed 24 points. To a team that averaged 28.2 PPG. Far from great, but not a bad game. The last two years the defense has been just devastated with guys out, and important guys too. They still played decent, particularly against the Chiefs last year, but they just weren't healthy enough to play well. People can say, "next guy up," and all that, but it's just a fact that teams with a ton of injuries to key guys don't generally do that well. That's just the way it goes. The D has been good in the playoffs except for against the Chiefs, really. You can throw in the Bengals game if you want, but that was clearly a team just having a terrible day, with nobody playing well. And for good reason the way that year went, what with Knox's brother dying, and Hamlin and the blizzards and the mass shootings and all the rest. They haven't been able to stop the Chiefs from scoring well enough. Not many teams have the last few years ... that's why all those Lombardis are where they are. They've got to get past the Chiefs. Whose offense doesn't seem to be as good this year, and here's hoping that continues. Nicely put.

Hap, they weren't the best team on the field last weekend, even at the end. Vegas scored more points than KC in the final quarter and if they hadn't done a Raiders thing at the end they'd have had more. They were moving easily on that last drive. And what KC player was it who stepped up and forced that bad snap? IMO you're letting confirmation bias and the great team they were the past few years cloud your vision on what we're seeing now. Vegas isn't a good team and they were going to win if they hadn't made a bad team type of mistake. Are the Chiefs dangerous? Absolutely. Are they also getting very lucky? Yeah, they are. Nobody should look forward to playing them because they have good weeks and they really do have a belief they can do it at the end. But they're beatable this year, and this kind of a streak of getting lucky at the end can't forever. Having said that, they're a team that got a lot better near the end of the season last year. They could do that again, and I hope they don't. But unless they do that, my guess is they don't make the AFC championship this year.