Thurman#1

Oh, man, yeah. That's wonderful to hear. I'm sure it will do her good. Best of luck and health to Kim.

This makes no sense, John. They wouldn't have known. He either plays and they find out, or he doesn't play and they don't find out. He's right, if he hadn't played, he'd have gotten a ton of guff about how he didn't even try. Um, no, it was precisely hindsight, and your own post points it out. The reason they knew that in Week 17 was that they had played him each game earlier and seen what happened.

That's not the way it worked. He and the team knew he wasn't ready each day. But both thought that with the work, he might get better and be ready to be a difference maker before the end of the season. That's not the way it turned out. But it could have. That's what they were hoping, and it wasn't unreasonable to think it might.

Wait, you mean hindsight is 20/20? Who'da thunk it? This. He thought he was doing the best thing for him and the team. Turned out not to work that way. If only he'd known the future, he might have acted differently.

Astro is the single source I look forward to the most at TC. His stuff is observant and really fun. Damn shame.

The defense was playing third and even fourth stringers, and injured firsts gutting it out (Poyer and DaQuan most particularly). And yet they kept the Bills in the game the whole way, and were very effective late. But yeah, you're quite right, blaming it on only Diggs is flat-out ridiculous. An absolute joke. Allen himself, while he played a good game, had two chances to bust things open and didn't quite manage it either time. You can say it may have had something to do with his injuries forcing a change in throwing form. Maybe. But he still missed on two fantastic chances. The Chiefs were all over Diggs defensively. He should've caught that pass, but as you said, it was a tough play and a better Allen throw would have greatly increased chances for success. Ty Johnson played very solid, as did Shakir. Seven catches on nine targets and a TD, that's good play from Khalil. Same with Kincaid, who had 5 catches on 5 targets. It's not really possible to make catches on balls not thrown to you. The guy who thinks that? That's you. Confusing your own unsupported opinion with fact is poor thinking.

I don't mind them trying to use the rules and regs creatively. The business guys do. Why shouldn't the football players? But nearly 80% of pro athletes go broke within three years of retirement. And it ain't because of the state taxes they did or didn't pay. It's because of the squandering spendthrift tax, the believe-the-sycophants tax, the unsophisticated tax, the bad financial advice tax, the don't-worry-about-the-future tax, the wanna-live-like-a-star tax, the splurging spendthrift tax, the start-a-business-without-studying-how tax, the trust-Uncle-Roger-to-be-your-financial-advisor tax ... These are the things they need to worry about, not so much state taxes. But again, if they want to try to be creative, why not? Everyone else tries.

Thank you. Worth noting.

Dude, if I were to mail you a gyroscope, a GPS app and the best map available, could you find the point then? Or are you simply unwilling to try? Yeah, Mahomes had relatively bad passing stats. AND THEY WON A LOMBARDI TROPHY!!! Which is more important? I genuinely believe that you do not know the answer to that question. So I'll tell you. Winning the championship is the goal. Not gettiong your QB good passing stats. Talk to Mahomes, Allen, Reid, McDermott, anyone on any of these teams, and they will tell you the same thing. If you can win a championship by building up your defense and other areas at the temporary expense of your WR room .... YOU DO IT!!!! And the Chiefs have proved you indeed can. You're right they traded Tyreek, my bad, but the point on Tyreek is that THEY COULD HAVE KEPT TYREEK. AND THEY DIDN'T. And they won not one but two championships in a row while he played in Miami. Because they were very fully aware that the important thing is NOT having the best WR room, it is having the best team. They traded him like we traded Diggs. They got more for him. But the point again is that they could have kept him. And if having a good WR room was the most important thing, that's what they'd have done. Um, no. That's dumb. Let me correct it for you. Rice MIGHT be #1 WR on this team in target share. Certainly possible, particularly if he doesn't get a suspension or jailtime. He might even be the favorite, but that there is a guess. As is the ENTIRE remainder of your post. The Bills will have a bunch of guys who have never played in this system or with this QB. Same with KC. It's not clear how things will go for either team.

Yes, that is the argument. An unassailable argument. But again you state this poorly. They weren't terrible. They just weren't very good. They won a Super Bowl with a fairly weak WR group, making up for a ton of it by having a terrific QB and a terrific TE. Both of which we appear to have. As for arguing that our weapons in 2024 will be better than theirs, yeah, nobody's saying that. Not many are saying the converse for sure either. Too many unknowns on both sides. That's why nobody is saying it. What we know is that the year KC most recently won the Super Bowl, their WR room was pretty weak. It will likely be stronger this year. But will they win the Super Bowl? Nobody knows yet. That's why people talk more about last year than this. We know what happened This coming year we don't. My guess is 65/35 the Chiefs WR room will be stronger than the Bills, and that the Chiefs don't win the SB again. But that's all guesswork. Again, last year the team with the relatively weak WR group DID win the Super Bowl. Because they had a really excellent team.

They keep you young, but at the same time they take years off you. It goes both ways. Still the best decision I ever made, though. Only wish I had more. Giving a friend advice, I once said that anytime they ask you to pick them up, do it if it makes sense. You don't want to spoil them. But those are just the best moments. And they ask less and less as time passes.

Um, first, duh. And second you missed the point. Two or three of them, actually. First, of course it wasn't their plan. Nobody said it was, so I don't know who you are trying to contradict there. You're not managing to contradict anyone, certainly not me. Of course it wasn't the Chiefs plan. Nor was it ours. Nor anyone's. But they were willing to cut Tyreek knowing that by far the most likely impact on the WR room was a major drop in overall quality. Nobody was surprised that cutting Tyreek ended up leaving a poorer WR group. But a stronger team. Again, what you want is a strong team, not a strong WR group. Second, they weren't "***** on offense," your (dumb) words. They had a pretty bad WR group and yet they finished 7th in the league in passing and 9th in total offense. So your statement there has a sense quotient of zero. They were a pretty good offense. And, you know, Lombardi trophy winners. Due to being a very good team despite a not very strong WR group. It's never anybody's plan to be ***** in any area of their team. Duh. And yet nearly every team has a position group that's not that good somewhere. It's a result of circumstances and limited resources and the fact that you can't address everything you'd like to. Your point that they didn't plan to be bad ... well, it's true but again, zero relevance or impact on the argument. What they showed, though, is that you can be below average at WR and particularly if you have a very good TE and a very good QB you can still be very good on offense ... and win the Super Bowl. Again, you need a good team. You do NOT need a good group of wide receivers. This idea that below average WRs mean a bad offense, it's wildly popular here among a certain group of people. Unfortunately, it's dumb.

Best of luck to you. Had my first well into my 50s. Exhausting, but having a great wife helps a ton. Still the best thing that's ever happened to me, that kid.

Not at all. Not a bit. Wins and losses. That's what will be bad or good. That's what matters. How good we are at throwing and catching the ball is only a part of the puzzle. You win by having a great team. Not by having the best WR group. Not by having top two or three WR production. By having a great team. I believe the Chiefs weren't in the top ten in WR production last year. No 1000 yard receivers. And yet somehow I don't think they'd trade away the Lombardi for the better retroactive production from their WRs.

IMO you're significantly under-ranking and under-arguing on both Kelso and Wright. Wright had a ton of tackles, he was played very well against the pass and quite well against the run as well. He's under-rated. Having said that, I agree with you that Washington should be there. He was an absolute monster. My guess is that Marino doesn't think of Washington so much as a Bill, since he spent 2/3rds of his career elsewhere. But I think your argument is legit when you see that Washington spent six years here and Wright only 7. But Wright is 100% a Bill. That Bills D was built to beat the pass, as it had to be with Marino in our division. We were a terrific defense, good against the run but never great. We wanted to score a ton and make teams pass. I agree if we'd had a guy like Ted Washington there in the middle we'd have won one or two of those SBs. If we had made them. We might also have lost some games against the Fins and other teams with great QBs that we won having Wright being more disruptive. I'd rather have had Washington but that didn't mean Wright wasn't a good player. Kelso was a center fielder, but he was a good tackler and always in the right place. Kind of the same kind of player as Poyer and Hyde, smart as hell, always doing the right thing, not letting a lack of elite athleticism prevent him from being a very good player. Poyer and Hyde were better, but Kelso was quite good, always could be counted on. You can't hold being a center fielder type against him. That was the system he was in. He was good. Plenty of center fielder safety types didn't have his INT numbers or his success. Top four among Bills safeties is fair, I think, though Logic's top four safeties is also fair.

This is just dumb. Plenty of terrific, extremely effective WRs are not all that fast. The idea that you have to be fast to be worth trying to stop them from separating is just pure dumb. Diggs is a good example. While not an absolute flier, he is a terrific WR, and there are plenty more like that, including Andre Reed, but also tons of others with Ceedee Lamb, Puka Nacua, Davante Adams and Cooper Kupp as wildly obvious off the top of my head. And the WRs - the ones with significant numbers of targets so the numbers are significant with the worst hands in the league have drop rates well below 10%. The idea that you'd let a receiver go because he drops, as an example, 8 - 12% of his throws again is purely without sense. And again, part of the reason Bills receivers drop a lot is that Josh throws a very powerful ball and is harder to catch than most. About the Bills, would teams let Sherfield run free last year because he had one drop out of 12 catchable passes of 22 targets? Shakir with zero drops on 39 catchables of 45 tar https://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/advanced-stats-wr.php Or Diggs because he had 8 drops out of 115 catchables and 163 targets? Or Harty on one drop out of 16 catchables out of 21 targets? Or Davis with 3 drops out of 48 catchables from 81 targets? Shakir with 39 catchables of 45 targets? Doesn't stand up to any test of simple sense.

That's how he's always seemed. Very in control of his image. On his TV show he seemed great, but when not focusing on it, like a jerk. No big Gruden fan, but I've always thought it was the Skins, who were even bigger jerks.

The majority have us finishing 2nd or 3rd in the division, you say? Man, I am not seeing that. Are a few saying that? Yeah, absolutely The majority? Nah. Vegas has us as the division faves overwhelmingly. I've seen one site with us getting the same odds as the Jets, none with any division rival better than us. The division looks tighter than it has for a long time, but the smart money is still on the Bills to win the division. And please, every team's fanbase is optimistic about their team, that's how this all works. But the consensus here on TBD is NOT that "we are guaranteed to win the division." It just isn't.

I noticed that too. Had me on Google saying, "Has Dion changed the spelling? Even at the time that '17 team looked like a fairly untalented roster, at the beginning of a rebuild where they'd kept a few guys around to stop it being a complete It was a hell of a coaching job getting them in, with some real luck thrown in in terms of a 9-7 team squeezing in. But they weren't a roster that looked capable of going 9-7. It's an interesting comparison because the two teams don't have a lot of natural areas for comparison. That's what makes it thought-provoking. Different areas in terms of the team life-span, though both teams are dealing with being forced to cut cap to improve the future financial situation. The '24 team definitely looks better, but that's not saying a whole lot, honestly. I always think of that year as the Kyle Williams playoff year, a really nice way to send off an all-time great Bill with an overachieving year with a playoff appearance that otherwise didn't mean much. That team had zero chance to go beyond the divisional round even if they'd managed to get past that awful Jags team in the Wild Card round. It's a fun POV to assume for a minute, though.

Whereas this is exhibit Dumb.

I am living rent-free in your head, aren't I? This is the second time in the last two weeks you've mentioned me in a post when I hadn't addressed you or even thought about you. I feel sorry for you, man, I really do. It must be wearing away at you to be so wrong so very very often. The sad thing is that apparently when it happens you think of me regardless of whether I'm involved or not. Dude, yeah, I do often show you where you're wrong. And you do generally then move the goal posts rather than admit the obvious. Still, so many other better uses of your time than fixating over it. Not least of which would be to better prepare your argument before writing. Even better would be doing things like exercising, spending time with friends and family, maybe reading a book. Seriously, you clearly need stop obsessing about me. Hope that works out for you.

Too early to "expect" anything. Best guess for me so very very very early would be "other."

If they keep running that Philly style QB push thing, over. I worry about injuries but he's not likely to get impact hits that way and he's tough.

No, Spotrac has us as $17M below the cap right now, but there will be moves made over the next few months, so that's a sort of preliminary idea based on little change happening. But as they say, change happens. ColoradoBills is on target above.

He's not on the short list of areas we need to improve. Very lucky to have him. But a few mistakes at bad times hurt in the Chiefs game last year. In last year's playoff game against the Chiefs, the D was absolutely devastated by injuries, while the offense was healthy and Josh had a decent game but not a great one. Nearly everyone on the field was on that short list last year, but at least most of the defenders were 2nd or even 3rd stringers in as injury replacements. It may not have been a short list, but the offense simply wasn't very effective, and there were two plays by Josh that cost us dearly: that end zone shot when a bit of easy pocket movement leaves Josh an easy throw for seven points and If he'd just stepped to the side to buy some room on that play with around 1:55 left in the 4th where he was lightly bumped on the throw to the end zone, we very likely score an extra seven. Tons of room everywhere else and he didn't step away from Jones pushing Dawkins into him just enough to affect the throw. If he'd just thrown shorter on the play before the missed field goal instead of holding it. Nobody was wide open but Diggs had space and someone else was open short over the middle in position to get close to a 1st. Remember he fumbled it at around 5:30 in the 4th, and we got very lucky with Kincaid recovering it? Just before that he missed Diggs and almost gifted McDuffie a pick six. He sure didn't play badly. Pretty well, overall. But not at the level you expect of Josh in the playoffs. I'm still pissed at the Diggs drop on the long ball, though. Frustrating. Three offensive possessions in the 4th quarter and only a missed FG out of it.