Thurman#1

That you see a Meh roster overall is on you. Vegas has them as varying between the 6th to 8th favorites. That ain't meh. It ain't elite either, but it ain't meh.

Breaking news: Kick returners are sometimes judged on other bases than speed. This may shock many. One of those other factors is how well they guy runs back kicks. Codrington ran back two kickoffs this season for a total of 75 yards. 6th highest in the league among all who returned even one kick. And four of those other five guys only ran back one kick, perhaps (underline perhaps) being so good on one kick from luck. He ran back three punts, qualifying for the official list, which requires three or more returns. He was 2nd best in the league on that list of the 20 guys with 3 or more returns. https://www.footballdb.com/statistics/nfl/player-stats/punt-returns/2024/preseason?limit=100&sort=pravg Considering that this preseason is the only data we have to work with on the new kickoff method ... No, they really could probably not have found something better on the street, based on available evidence. They could have found someone faster. There is a difference. I get what you were doing. But adding in the last sentence made pointing out his actual results this preseason seem worthwhile to me.

She (Robillard) has 461K followers on Instagram. Cody has 81K. She's a bigger deal than he is among the sad group that follows this kind of story.

I could not. And an in-shape wrestler who practices consistently is going to kick the ass of a lot of the confident. A lot. 50 or not.

I do believe that's reasonable, but Pegula isn't the decision maker. You wouldn't want him to be. He has a voice, as he should. It's one of the best things about Pegula. He found a guy he trusts and he listens to him. Two guys he trusts at this point. It's interesting to think that they might possibly have picked Mahomes.

Yes, John. This nailed it. People want to ignore this about McDermott being stuck with Whaley, who had been in on the EJ Manuel pick. Ignoring that ain't reasonable.

I would disagree. There were physical questions involved. You can't narrow it down to mental / dedication yet, IMO. Here are the "Weaknesses" from Zierlein's evaluation: "Weaknesses "Below-average strength and could struggle against physicality. Unable to hold off challengers and save catch space when contested. Rolls into intermediate breaks with excessive gather steps. Ball-tracking inconsistencies will pop up at times. Focus drops are part of the package." And a fairly damning final bit: "Sources Tell Us “He’s not as explosive as (Jalin) Hyatt was coming out, but I look at him in a similar way with what he can do for your offense and what you won’t ask him to do. He’s a better route runner than Hyatt.” - NFC scouting director I don't really get a sense yet, but it does seem that fans and draftniks had him higher than the teams did. Hah!! Nice! Nicely put.

Nah. That's nonsense. Every chance that with a Trubisky or other upper level backup we go .500 or pretty close. Hell, teams Trubisky started games for have gone 31-26. "Scrub" is just not a word that should be used for the starters. Allen of course, but also Kincaid, Cook, Dawkins, Torrence (not so far this preseason but I think that's how it turns out) are all above average. One to three others who might also turn out that way assuming health and progression, though we don't know right now. I get it, it's more fun to get all ridiculously angry and yell and scream, but it only blurs the grip on reality. Yeah, if Josh goes down for more than a few games we're not winning a Super Bowl. But same with nearly all of the top QBs. Probably all of them to be honest, unless it happens late in the season and you somehow get a backup who plays the best streak of his life the way that Foles did and Ds don't have time to figure out how to defense him in that offense. It's wildly unlikely. Now, if Trubisky has regressed, should they bring someone else in? Yeah, sure. I'm not convinced that's the situation, but it's possible. The Bills know better than we do, but nobody is perfect at these decisions.

Yup. And the Bills are nowhere close to the stupidity side of the line. They're not perfect. They make mistakes. But not many. Mentioning stupidity in the same sentence as Beane and the brain trust just does not make sense.

DOH!!!! You're exactly right. Wow, that's twice within a few posts I've screwed up. Thank you, seriously, for correcting me there. I really do appreciate it!! Having said that, two games is not statistically significant in terms of these stats. Cincy DID win one of those games, the only one of the teams he suggested that did. Again, looked to me like Mahomes just had a bad game that day. Wanna say that some of that was caused by Cincy's D? Well, it's a reasonable conjecture. Looked to me more like Mahomes just not having it, but impossible to prove either way. In the other game, KC never trailed. Kept getting a lead, giving it up and going back into the lead. Cincy's offense just never made KC sweat, or that's what it looked like to me.

Fair enough about AJ Brown and the Eagles. Good catch. Thanks for pointing out my mistake, I sincerely appreciate it. But even accounting for that, the Eagles are still not all that different from the Bills since 2017. And no, you absolutely do NOT have to compare the decisions teams made despite already having talent at WR. That evens out over long periods of time. They draft someone high, then they're not as likely to do so for a while. After they haven't, then they will tend to do that. That all evens out over time. Yeah, the Bills waited till they got rid of Diggs. But that came early and unexpected. When they still had him, they well should have felt more comfortable. But again, last year the Bills had Diggs, and they still picked Kincaid. Might they not have picked Keon if they still had Diggs? Yeah, maybe, who knows. The somewhat nutty idea I was replying to was that "They should have been drafting one in almost every draft in days 1 and 2." And no, that's nuts, nobody does that. All of your exceptions there, I believe, are accounted for since 2017. The need goes up and down for everybody.

Except for the Bills, those are all one game samples, except for SF which was two. Not large enough to be at all significant. More, all but one of those games were KC wins. If there's one thing we know about them it's that when they're behind, especially in the playoffs, they come on and tend to score a lot, and when ahead or not worried, they just aren't as sharp. The KC offense did what they had to do, in all those games except the loss to the Bengals The Bills offense when hitting on all cylinders has forced the Chiefs offense to rise to the challenge in a way that those other teams just haven't, again with the exception of the game the Bengals won, and honestly it just looked to me like the Bengals D played really well, but at the same time they benefitted with Mahomes just NOT playing well. YPP is to a very large extent just a factor of how much a team runs. It's also wildly variant depending on how many or few big plays they get; now over a season that'll even out, but over just one or two or three games if one DB falls down on one play, the YPP can jump up an amount that for YPP is a LOT. YPP just doesn't say much when looking such small samples. There's a real question whether it says much of anything, really, beyond whether a team is running more or throwing more. Again, the Bills D hasn't done well against the Chiefs in the playoffs, although last year they really weren't too bad. I'm not arguing they've been good against KC. But the whole "Bills D sucks in the playoffs" thing just isn't true. Except against KC the Bills D has been quite good. And not a lot of defenses HAVE done well against KC in the playoffs ... that's kind of a lot of the reason they've won so many Super Bowls recently.

It's a fact, but at the same time, it is spin, as in spinning like a dreidel. You used THREE, not one but three separate weasel words there attempting to unreasonably narrow consideration so as to gerrymander out times the Bills have done exactly this: 1) Yeah, if you say "WR draft pick" you can pretend that the Bills didn't trade for Diggs using a pick like that. 2) Yeah, if you say, "WR" you can pretend that the Bills didn't use a 1st rounder on Kincaid, who seems like he's going to be a terrific weapon. 3) Yeah, if you say "for Brandon Beane," you can ignore the #2 that this McDermott brain trust used to bring in Zay Jones Since 2017 we've been very much in line with those other teams the guy I was replying to mentioned. And it's absolute nonsense that they "have failed at trying to surround Josh with elite weapons," nonsense. Diggs was an elite weapon. Kincaid may well be one. And pretending that "Dotson" should be considered an "elite weapon," I mean, dude, please. Yeah, every team has not "stopped trying to acquire weapons." Well, yeah. Neither have we. If Dotson is going to be used as your example of bringing in a weapon, then the Bills have done an absolute ton of that over the years. Samuel, Cook, Shakir, Davis and Knox are all weapons if you're using Dotson as an example.

Yeah, this. When you've got Diggs on the team, spending a mid-rounder on Shakir to develop him seems like plenty. Then he's suddenly gone and you wish you'd known because you might have grabbed some earlier guys as well. Hole in his backside? I've got one of those myself. Anyway, yeah, agreed, but I think he could be a really good guy playing a lot inside. Guess I just wasn't watching there close enough.

Hunh, that Dotson trade is a bit perplexing. I thought they still liked him in D.C. They must not, or at least not so much. Hmm.

Sorry, I'd only half-constructed the post. Take another look.

Um, what? No, that's nonsense. You know, but apparently most everyone else is dumb enough to think so? Please. Everyone knows this. 40 time is a much smaller factor in separation than the ability to cut and be explosive. And it ain't only a few who know it.

Yup.

Alpha, no. Separation isn't mostly a 40 thing. It's much more an explosion, athleticism and ability to cut hard and run routes thing. Route-running, college play design, and smaller guys tend to separate better ... there's a ton to it. And a ton of the concern about separation is a Bills-specific thing, because this group has brought in guys the last few years based greatly on separation. We learned to expect them to do so, and to judge guys based on that. The Bills have plainly decided on a change of direction, probably greatly affected by the way the Chiefs in the playoffs just assumed correctly there wouldn't be flags thrown and just grabbed the hell out of our separators. In college Keon got good separation on some routes and not others. He's really good at separating on stop routes for instance.

Again, our defense has been damn good in the playoffs when not playing the Chiefs. And who in this period has been good against the Chiefs offense? Or the Bills offense for that matter? Unfortunately, the Chiefs comparatively healthy D last year finally did a pretty good job against our offense at the same time that our deeply and comprehensively injured D finally did a pretty good job against the Chiefs, but not good enough. Our OL was better than the Chiefs last year, and not by a little. They had tackle issues most of the year. If healthy they could take a major jump up again, but we'll have to see. The whole "quietly got better" at WR thing for us this year? No, you're dead right on that. It's wishful thinking. They could well be a solid group though, particularly when you throw in Kincaid and give the young guys time to develop early in the season, but they're building. It's what happens when changing situations make jettisoning a guy like Diggs your best option. Yeah, the Chiefs will be competing for a threepeat this year. So will we. They have a better shot than us, no question, but we're still in there competing with a legit chance. They did it last year by working hard on their D in a year when their O had problems.

Nah. Not so. You said, "They should have been drafting one in almost every draft in days 1 and 2," and actually nobody does that. The Bills have used a first (Diggs) and traded another 1st back to a very early second (Keon) and a 2nd for Zay Jones in 2017. The Chiefs used a 1st in 2019 for Mecole, a 1st for Worthy this year and a 2nd for Skyy Moore in 2022, and that also goes all the way back to 2017. Pretending those are more than very slightly different is flat-out ridiculous. The Bengals used a 2024 3rd for Jermaine Burton, a 2021 1st for Chase, a 2020 2nd for Higgins and a 2017 1st for John Ross. That's a difference, basically, of one 3rd rounder more, in eight years of drafting. The difference is that they sucked and so had a 5 pick to use on Chase. #5s are more likely to be dominant than the late rounders. The Eagles? A 1st in 2021 (DeVonta) and 2020 (Raegor), a 3rd in 2019 (Arcega-Whiteside). That's it since 2017. Again, extremely comparable to the Bills. 9ers? A 2024 1st in Pearsall, a 2023 3rd (Danny Gray), a 2020 1st in Aiyuk and a 2019 2nd in Deebo and 3rd in Jalen Hurd. And a 2018 2nd in Dante Pettis. That's more than the Bills. The Bills thought they had Diggs again this year. When they didn't, guess what, they targeted an early WR. This is how teams work, they look at what they need, and they hope for needs to meet what's available when they pick, and sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't. When you only look at two or three years you're deeply bending what you're looking at, because of a low sample size.

Top 15 pick? Jeez. Possible, but very unlikely IMO. Again, Vegas has us as 6th and 7th favorites depending on the outlets. 9-8 is a bit more likely but still significantly against the odds, says me. And, as I mentioned, Vegas. 20% chance, maybe? 30%? Could happen, especially with many more injuries and especially if Allen is one of them. But that's significantly pessimistic, I think, Ja.

Yup, precisely, Augie.

Yup. It's arguably the historically most common way to win a title, very very good defense, and an elite/near-elite QB making an offensive unit better than the pre-season roster looks like it can. Been said a million times so far, and that's only in this thread, but that right there is the story of the 2023 Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs. Brady also needs to be very good, I think you're dead right here.

That's interesting. I hadn't really noticed that. Good thoughts.