Hapless Bills Fan

There should only be one response to this:

Yes, that he did, and to that point has neither been offered nor accepted any position on the D side of the ball since that stint. He's still coaching as an OL coach. For the Bears at present.

The stats Sal put up for those who care about it:

OK, even on a PC, I'm not convinced that table is showing what it asserts to be showing. For "total snaps", it shows the bills as 100% under center which...ain't right. I wish that guy would get a competent web designer, I think he's trying to sell his stats, but having the free side be so glitchy is not a good advertisement.

Yes, that is correct. Castillo was the OL coach of the Eagles for something like 12 years, from which one might reasonably conclude that they didn't think he sucked. He was DC of the Eagles for 1.5 yrs, and is the one who was fired as DC mid-season.

🙄 That's a real stretch of reading incomprehension. Let's look at what I actually said: "It is of course true that Reid promoted Juan Castillo, his OL coach, to DC, and the reasons why Reid made that decision are a puzzle for the ages. It took the Eagles from a 10-6 team who had been to the playoffs 3 years running, to an 8-8 then a 4-12 team and ultimately led to Reid's ouster from Philly." Now I think a reasonable person would conclude from that, I believe that HIRING JUAN CASTILLO, an OL coach who had no experience on the D side, had something to do with Reid's Philly demise. A reasonable person would not conclude that firing Sean McDermott meant that Reid had no alternative ut to hire Teflon Juan as DC, especially given that all this took place after the season, when coaches were available, not midseason as you incorrectly stated. Therefore a reasonable person would not conclude that I believe firing McDermott led to Reid's demise; it would be illogical to conclude that. This kind of straw man is exactly why so many here hold back from engaging with you. You genuinely know a lot about the Bills, and about football, and I respect that...but you sometimes appear far more interested in "poking the bear" or ***** stirring than in actually having the solid discussion of which you are capable. Thank you for that acknowledgement. Actually, one rumor was that far from being "utter disrespect" for McDermott's coaching, McDermott actually was asked on the way out who he would recommend as his successor at DC and made a persuasive and convincing argument for giving Castillo a chance. He certainly praised Castillo afterwards. I don't know about "jibber jabber from bitter folk" I don't find it's particularly useful to psychoanalyze other people's emotions (Heh. If I did...) But we agree about the futility of drawing conclusions about Belichick as a HC based on his record in Cleveland. People (including coaches) do learn and grow.

As always, Virgil, good writeup. Welcome back! Klein is a very solid player. Part of our defensive improvement as the season wore on was, I think, Frazier and McDermott eventually recognizing that the "NextManUp" idea blows wads when you have players with somewhat unique skill sets like Milano or Edmunds and redistributing responsibilities to craft an LB role for Klein that was suited to his strengths. And I believe that's what they did last Sunday. My point: the proper way to evaluate both Edmunds and Klein is "are they correctly doing what's asked of them". For Klein, that answer was a resounding "Yes" last Sunday, but recognize that part of the role that's normally filled by Edmunds may have been shifted to Milano and Johnson and vice versa (part of their normal role shifted to Klein). I do at times wonder if we would be better going to a 4-3 defense and playing Klein more. Taron Johnson's level of play has made that hard, but (for example) against Tennessee I felt our guys just wore down against Henry as the game went on, and I wondered if bringing fresh legs and a guy who can "thump" onto the field would have helped. I'll probably have the same question against the Colts. I think the guy who may have a seat out of this is Kumerow. Kumerow has been active every week for his 65% of the ST snaps. Yesterday Breida played 63% of the ST snaps. If the Bills built some confidence that Breida can play on teams, it's easier to keep Breida active even if he only takes 14% of the offensive snaps (similar number to what Kumerow has taken, but Breida undoubtedly made more out of his). The question for Breida to step up and answer is his blocking. He can physically block, I think, but that one Allen sack suggested to me that something was amiss in the protections/correct route for hot read. Some patience may be required there. Anyway, it might turn out long-term to be a Good Thing for Kumerow to have put himself on the Covid list last Tuesday and remove any table-banging Heath Farwell may have been doing about how much he needs Kumerow on ST therefore Breida must sit. After last season, Allen mentioned "interceptable balls" as a concern he wanted to address. I wonder if Allen had switched to seeing the field too conservatively and passing up throws he would unhesitatingly take, last season. Perhaps this game represents a needed step towards the middle. Sanders took 60% of the snaps yesterday, down from 99% vs Jax and overall 84% on the season. Gabe Davis took 52%, up from 28% vs Jax and overall 38% on the season. Sanders blocking was good at the start of the season. It's fallen off. I'll put it out there, I don't care how good care a guy takes of his body, 84% of the snaps is a hellacious load for a 34 year old WR. Add to it that Sanders was nursing a foot injury all through training camp and the first week of the season and couldn't practice, it's hard to think the nicks and dings aren't adding up. I think Sanders is a strong addition, but one where it stands to reason "less is more". If we cut his snaps and put Gabe Davis out there a bit more, we might like the result. Yesterday wasn't a huge change. I'm talking perhaps 5-8 fewer snaps for Sanders and 5-8 more for Davis. Similar argument for Beasley. I'd like to see a few more McKenzie snaps and a few less Beasley. I know the guy's a gamer and thinks he can play through any injury, but he can't. LOL, you could see it in his eyes that he had no clue where the DB came from on some of those plays. I wish him well, but "overconfidence is a B word", Man. He shouldn't have said that about believing he should have been the #1 pick in the 2018 draft. I've always said that when a large number of people with average knowledge feel strongly about something, it's always worth asking why. Sometimes they're missing something, but sometimes they're right, and the Bills needing to operate from Allen under center more often is an example. The success of the jet sweep and backfield motion is really an example of what shifting to under center can do. It's more difficult to run, and less successful in deception from the shotgun.

Soooooooooo beautiful! Allen is a magician (literally - he does slight-of-hand magic tricks). Given a defined task ("figure out how to fool their eyes on D") there's no doubt in my mind that he's got the mental and physical chops to figure out how to make this work. If the cameraman struggles to figure out where the ball is, no surprise that the defense is struggling. The other thing is...one of the problems our OL seems to have had, is with the second level: when should they stay in and block/transfer or at least chip vs. getting out to the second level immediately? When we ran more successfully in 2019, we ran (1,2) and (2,1) sets each about 10% of the time and Pat Dimarco got about 16% of the offensive snaps (which some would say was a few snaps too many, be that as it may). It was not uncommon to see him as a lead blocker on runs. I just hope this time McDermott maintains some oversight on the offensive play calling and run game design/use because I'm still not sure Daboll completely "buys in" to the need to make the opposing defense respect the run.

We've run (1,2) and (2,1) at the same rate this year, about 8% which represents an increase. I think that it's a bit deceiving because we now list Gilliam as a FB whereas last year he was listed as a TE. So if Gilliam is on the field with one of our halfbacks and Knox, it's a (2,1) set where last year it would have been called a (1,2) set. And some sites still list Gilliam as a TE. Confusion. Then, we not infrequently split our RB and TE out as a WR, and we also line Knox up as an H-back at times. The point is, it's not as easy with the Bills to look at the personnel grouping frequency and figure out what they're playing on offense, one has to look at the film. Anyway, agree with you that the sentence "I feel teams have a grasp of our 1,2 personnel spread looks" doesn't make sense because we don't run 1,2 that much, and while we do spread from it we don't always - it's more often been a goal line or run type of formation for us still. "grasp of our 1,1 personnel spread looks" would make more sense. Also agree with you that we've been trying to run from Shotgun and it hasn't worked, so if we can, a logical step is to shift to passing from under center to make running from under center more effective by making it less of a "tell" to a run play. (I may be one of the posters you agree with, heh).

C'mon Man. McDermott was fired after the season, on January 15th - after a disappointing 10-6 season in which the Eagles lost to the Packers in the WC game. He was hired as DC by the Panthers almost immediately. The facts paint a very different picture than your "***** canned mid season and replaced by Juan Castillo" imply to people who don't know better. You have valid points about the practice of denigrating Bill Belichick because of his long-ago coaching record prior to the Patriots or because he had the smarts to recognize what he might have in Brady, keep him on the roster, and develop him properly by not asking too much initially. So why undercut those points with dramatic sounding incorrect gouge? It is of course true that Reid promoted Juan Castillo, his OL coach, to DC, and the reasons why Reid made that decision are a puzzle for the ages. It took the Eagles from a 10-6 team who had been to the playoffs 3 years running, to an 8-8 then a 4-12 team and ultimately led to Reid's ouster from Philly.

This, especially when it started with @PatsFanNH saying "Every one of the Patriots wins was against an above .500 team..... That’s simple facts" when the "simple facts" show that the Patriots in fact have 3 of their 6 wins against bad teams, plus as you say, beat up on the Browns without their star RB Nick Chubb and with an injured (then out) Mayfield. There are other metrics for how difficult a win is to achieve for a given team in a given week than the opponent's W-L record. In the meantime, You Are what Your Record Says You Are. Kudos to Belichick and the Patriots for putting together a 6-4 season with a rookie QB. Good for them! In the meantime, I guess if it makes a Pats fan feel better to come on a Bills message board and spout nonsense about how "every one of the Patriots wins was against an above 0.500 team" being a fact, whatever. The Bills are on to Indianapolis, which is IMO a far bigger challenge than their 5-5 record would suggest, and a "test" for the Bills defense which was unable to stop the combination of a strong rushing attack and a sufficient passing game against the Titans. The Pats get to play the Atlanta Falcons, who IMO are a far weaker opponent than their 4-5 record would suggest, but any given Sunday.... This. The same "look at his record when he was with...." argument could be used to discredit our coaches as well. Bill Belichick is a great coach, which is why it's somewhat puzzling that he resorts to some of the shady things he has done - but he's still a great coach. The fact that he gets the Star treatment from the refs and that previously, he has owned Sean McDermott's soul, just makes him more dangerous.

I think Josh is more comfortable passing from shotgun because he can more quickly scan the secondary for post-snap changes in coverage. I also think he has trouble, not with the footwork per se but with Mitch Morse stepping on his feet. Mitch seems to have a relatively narrow stance for a 6'6" dude and Josh, as a 6'5" dude, needs a wide stance to get low enough for an under center snap. I forget what the show was but last year at some point, Peyton Manning pointed out that Josh's stance leaves his feet in position for his C or G to step on them if they need a quick balance step back and Josh doesn't get his feet out of the way fast enough. Josh commented on "4th and Forever" with Mark Sanchez that he's "always getting his feet stepped on" and "it doesn't feel too good" when it's cold out. (He said it's his fault for not getting his feet out of the way fast enough, to which Sanchez said "it almost has to be, right?") While it was working better, there was probably low motivation to polish this, but the Bills need to run effectively, and if they can't run effectively from Shotgun, they need to put Josh under center to pass more often. We'll see if the Bills remain committed to this.

Where in the Sharp Football Stats page is this? I was looking. Thanks. Oh ha ha I can tell you this. Pro-football-reference also gives splits in the free part of the site. They aren't updated yet for Sunday (think they update Weds or Thurs). They show the bills as 355 of 528 plays from Shotgun, or 67%. So just that one game, Sunday, looks to have lowered the Shotgun % by 8%. That's a *****-ton of "under center" for one game. The problem with the shotgun/center split wasn't so much the % of plays in each - it was the combination of % in each with the % we run vs pass from each. Under center was overwhelmingly run (71%). Shotgun was overwhelmingly pass (also 71%). My guess is combined with personnel groupings by down and distance and other tendency stats, an opposing DC could probably figure out when the Bills were gonna run and when the Bills were gonna pass with something like 90% accuracy. Combine that with not having a realistic "long run" threat, and what's what allows Bills opponents impunity to run those overload stunts and twists where they smash through one side of the line while leaving "no one home" on the other - even if the Bills run and they give up 8 yds, "So what?" on a 3rd and 12?

When you look at the snap counts, the guy who actually had the biggest change in his snap counts was Reggie Gilliam, followed by Tommy Sweeney. Gilliam was on the field 38% of the snaps, Sweeney 34% - and Knox 84%, so that wasn't a load sharing strategy with Knox. Bates saw 19%, which is 12% more than his snaps replacing an OL starter at the end of the game. The Bills evidently decided that if we can't run with 5 OLmen, we'll bring in extra blockers. We're shocked that the Jets didn't run that Cover 2 Shell against us, but the fact that we had extra blockers in so much and were able to run the ball may have been cause-and-effect there.

You have it backwards. (Now retired) Bills LB Zo Alexander laid it out in 2019, players have to think about it and be mentally prepared for stuff to happen and don't get mentally hijacked when it does. Doesn't mean they spend significant time on it, just be aware that stuff will happen, equipment wise, ref wise, etc. and don't let it get to you, move on. Your team is called the Cheatriots for a reason. Doesn't mean they're not a good football team and Bill Belicheck a great coach, just means they earned that moniker Fair and Square.

I think if he had an OL that was good at blocking the runs they call and determined to stick to the run, we'd discover that he is a more capable back than most here believe.

According to Spotrac, the guy earned $22M in his 8 year NFL career. WTF, Man? It's one thing to have your car smell like weed. As @FireChans commented, in some parts of Florida >50% of the population could have that said of them. It's another to drive around with 3.5 lbs of weed in your trunk and a pistol in a satchel full of baggies.

So this may interest some of you. Offensive snaps are up. Click to embiggen. McK has been averaging 15% of the offensive snaps. So his usage actually only went up about 7%, or 4-5 snaps. Davis has been averaging 38% of the offensive snaps. So his usage went up about 14%, or 8-9 snaps. Breida actually got only 8 snaps!!!!! It sure seemed like more. Gilliam, like McK, has been averaging 15% of the offensive snaps. So his usage went up 23%, or about 13-14 snaps. Sweeney, for a game where he wasn't replacing an injury, also saw a big increase from ~18% to 34% or 16% Gilliam was actually the biggest percentage increase with Sweeney a runner up. All of you who had that on your bingo cards, stand up now. Yeah, get out of here, none of you saw that coming, myself included.

If he's being coached to steer clear of contact, Vic Fangio is apparently unaware: https://www.nfl.com/news/vic-fangio-on-bridgewater-darius-slay-sequence-i-would-like-to-see-teddy-at-leas

I'll let Mark Sanchez explain

Agreed. Beane wagered that Ford and Mongo would improve this season, and they've gone in the other direction.

I don't think it's fair to tag Gabriel Davis as a "dud". We're playing less 4WR and 3WR sets, and Emmanuel Sanders and Knox between them said to him "All Your Snaps Now Belong To Us". And when he is out there, he's often out there blocking (and he's very good at it). I personally think we should take some snaps from Sanders and give them to Davis. Sanders is a good player, but at 34 I think that would help him hold up through a long season, and Davis brings fresh legs and better blocking. Unexpected Studs: 1. Spencer Brown. We signed Williams to lock down the RT position, and I felt Brown was this year's swing tackle and next year's RT. He has to be leading the "unexpected Studs" race 2. Rousseau. He didn't play last season. The Beane-meister was obviously trying to temper expectations talking about guys who might not contribute this season but would in the long term. He's come on fast. 3. Taron Johnson. He's been a good player all along, but last season many were looking at him and thinking he was the "weakest link". He leveled up. Unexpected Duds: 1. Ford - no argument there. 2. Tie between Dawkins and Williams - we thought we had a "Sweet Lock" on the OT position, but they are not playing up to expectation. Williams lost his job, and Dawkins is not playing up to the level we expect of him 3. Star. He's actually played quite well, but after opting out due to Covid, to go through training camp unvaccinated and wind up on the Covid list in late August as a close contact - C'Mon, Man!

So you're not a Bills fan. Got it. Well, I hope we will. There's always the Zebra factor, and the still-lingering belief that when you play in Foxborough, Stuff Just Happens

I'm trying to figure this out. Record of opponent at the time of Patriots wins: Jets (0-1) Texans (1-3) Jets (1-4) Chargers (4-2) Panthers (4-4) Browns (5-4) So basically, your argument amounts to, the Patriots beat the Chargers (who are now 5-4) and the Browns (who are now 5-5), so that makes them better than the Bills, who beat KC (who are now 5-4)? I think those words "simple facts" may not mean what you think it means. I mean, if we're exploring that the Land of Might Have Been, why stop there? 10-0 Baby!

No quarrel with that, and to be clear, I'm not saying that Allen's desire to inflict physical punishment upon a defender who pilfers his pass is a GOOD thing. But where Allen is concerned, considering some of the licks he's laid down, I'm pretty sure it's a thing. In addition to being worse...Drew Lock was placed on the Covid-19 list 6 days ago due to testing positive, and is still unavailable AFAIK