Hapless Bills Fan

I didn't add garlic, which I almost always would, but I think there was garlic in the sun-dried tomatoes in oil I used - probably not as much as I would have added. But leaving it out gave me more of the tomato flavor, so there's that.

So Joe B article in the Athletic thinks there are positive signs from the Jags game: https://theathletic.com/2946365/2021/11/10/did-buffalos-final-drives-offer-reasons-for-offensive-optimism-bills-all-22-review/?article_source=search&search_query=joe buscaglia Earlier, he looked at how the Jags were defending the Bills: https://theathletic.com/2941580/2021/11/07/unpacking-the-bills-offensive-problems-in-sundays-disaster-7-observations-from-the-loss-to-the-jaguars/ In this article, he noted some things that worked when the Bills were moving the ball effectively (which they did at times): The Pessimist says "Glass Half Empty" The Optimist says "Glass Half Full" The Engineer says "50% More Glass than Needed for Optimal Efficiency" We'll see I think what the BAL @ MIA game emphasized to me is how a handful of plays really can impact the outcome of a game.

Some truth to this, I think. Allen and Beasley and others have talked about how Daboll will take plays from anywhere - HS, college, guys dropping by his office. He does love his gadgets and plays. But he's cagey when asked about the team's offensive identity. There could be something to be said for the point that perhaps we need fewer gadget plays in our game plan, but a slightly wider variety of more routine plays like screens, then focus and execute them better. There's also no question Josh is looking for the big play almost all the time.

Happy Birthday!

Just curious: How many or what % of his plays did Daboll use pre-snap motion last season and how has that changed this season? The Bills ran (1,1) sets 71% of the time last season and 66% of the time this season, meaning an RB and a TE. How many of those sets feature an empty backfield? This year, we run other sets that feature at least 1 RB an additional 29% of the time this season, so 95% of our sets feature at least one RB. How many of that 95% feature an empty backfield? I don't know the source, but someone elsewhere posted that we run play-action 31% of the time. Assuming that's correct, what does "barely" mean to you, and how much play action would be involved in exceeding that barely? Football Outsiders claims they have studied this and it's not true https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2018/rushing-success-and-play-action-passing Read it and buy it or don't 🤷‍♂️

That wouldn't really make sense. He's playing about 5% of the offensive snaps per game and 20% of the ST snaps per game (~9 snaps per game), so he could get injured every game, in theory. I think that the coaches just have him lower on the depth chart than the guys who are playing ahead of him.

That's a fair point. I think what Urban might mean is that the Bills are a team that operates almost exclusively from the shotgun, with a huge reliance on the passing game or read option/RPO plays. I'm not sure that was true last season, but I think it's true now. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/buf/2021_splits.htm Shotgun: 340 of 474 plays (72%): 71% pass, 29% run Under center: 134 of 474 plays (28%): 25% pass, 75% run I couldn't find stats on how often Allen was the back on run plays from shotgun, but I'd guess his 57 rush attempts are a large fraction of the 91 run plays from shotgun.

Just tried this. 😍 Half the recipe, added a couple diced jalapeno peppers from our garden (mild on the spice scale), used both dried tomatoes and dried/oil preserved. Nice.

Just to be clear, I wasn't intending to comment on Allen's picks being a result of inaccurate short throws My point was to note that the calculation being used is "passer rating", which is influenced by both passing yards AND INTs thrown. So a single INT in an area of the field where the throws are already short, has a disproportionate influence on the number.

This is true, but to be fair - Allen did have some opportunities to make quick and short throws before his OL got dumped in his lap, of which he did not avail himself. (At other times of course, he got an immediate OL lapful) Plus, when you let yourself get into 3rd and long, those short throws won't necessarily help us

Errrrr.....I don't know how to interpret this. Have the RBs normally not been "taking it serious" and where do they normally look when the coach is talking to them? Why did we have to wait until a 9-6 loss for this to change, if so? Interesting. On the Bills depth chart, Dodson then Matakevich are listed as the backups to Edmunds. When Edmunds was out last season in MIA (week 2) pretty sure Dodson replaced him while Klein played for Milano.

So there's this, as of halfway through the season: https://nextgenstats.nfl.com/charts/player/season/josh-allen/ALL529264/2021/all/qb-grid Couple of notes: 1) I wish they would put completions/attempts in each area of the grid. If you scroll through the charts week by week, you'll see that we actually have very few attempts beyond 20 yds and not many from 10 to 20 yds. 2) Why all the red? a) It IS passer rating, so INTs matter. While Allen only has 5 picks, 4 of them are between the LOS and 10 yards (1 is just beyond). b) Short throws are still a "developing area" for Josh c) As several have commented elsewhere, "throwing short" and "throwing quick" are not synonyms. Even when Allen throws short, he doesn't necessarily throw quick. By play design/coaching or personal preference) he often reads the field long to short. Even if he seems to look at an open short throw, he may move on looking for a deep shot. By the time he comes back to it, an easy short throw has become a tight window throw.

Seems to be working for Tenn.

No you won't. Incognito is on the Raiders roster. On IR; hasn't practiced since the 3rd week of August.

Do you mean LT here? I think Dawkins problems go back earlier than the Covid infection. Don't you recall pictures of Dawkins at OTAs where we all were like "YIKES, if the Bills didn't ask him to gain all that weight, Uh-Oh!" After OTAs, he posted pics of himself biking and working out in a vest, which could either be a weighted vest or a cooling vest designed to accelerate weight loss. Bottom line, Dawkins got paid with Covid restrictions in place. I think with the lifting of Covid restrictions, he wanted to pahrrrr-tee. I think he was still training, it's just sometimes you think you're doing enough and you're not. I think Williams got paid and it took off his edge because last season he looked like locking down RT for a decade and this season - not so much. ? In 2019 and last season, Mongo was playing RG between Ford/Nsekhe and Morse, then between Williams and Morse. It's entirely possible that Jamil Douglas could get put in at RG and play better than Williams, Feliciano, or Ford or get put in at LG and play better than Feliciano or Boettger. My guess as to what will happen, though, is that if Brown is healthy, the Bills will put him back at RT and move Williams over leave Boettger at LG, and see how that flies for a game or two.

I don't think you're wrong at all. Doyle did NOT look ready for Primetime in the preseason. Joe B had this to say: I don't take Buscaglia as gospel, but at RT that seemed to match what we saw. 'Course, Hart is now starting at LT for the AFC-leading Tennessee Titans so there's that 😈 Seems to me if the Bills coaching staff felt Doyle was at all plausible as a starting RT at this point, they would have preferred to play him at RT and keep the rest of the OL constant, instead of first shifting around 3 positions (Williams RG->RT, Feliciano LG->RG, Boettger bench -> LG and then Ford Bench->RG when Mongo was injured). Don't you think?

It's looking more possible that's a fair assessment of Feliciano at this point. He spent 4 years on the bench in Oakland, starting 8 games spread across those 4 seasons. On the one hand, it was a cool story that in FA he finally earned his chance to start here in Buffalo. It does happen, guys do improve. And he showed major grit coming back from the torn pec and probably played hindered all last season. But he seems to have regressed - a lot - this season. In hindsight, maybe he looked like a solid starter for us in 2019 because he was an improvement on John Miller, or because any G would look improved playing next to Mitch Morse vs Russ Bodine.

Then take them from the coaching staff. They've had Douglas on the practice squad for 7 games, and only elevated him to sit on the bench as a backup when they put Feliciano on reserve. That's their opinion. If they don't start Brown at RT and return Williams to RG duty, they may in fact start him ahead of Ford, but unfortunately that's looking like a very low bar for improvement at this point - unless you take your opinions from PFF too.

I'm going to try to break this into a separate thread because I think it's worth discussing. I raised this issue in the Urban Meyer Interview thread last week. His comments were that the Bills were a "spread offense", and that Miami essentially solved us by playing Cover 0, "when you do that, there's no more spread offense then it's just a matter of if you can hang in there" Several knowledgeable posters agreed with Meyer that we are in fact a spread offense now. @BringMetheHeadofLeonLett had this gem of a comment on the Bills, buried in the TNF thread: If there's one offense Urban Meyer ought to know how to shut down, that would be a spread offense. So I thought it was worth revisiting. Daboll, when asked about our offensive identity, habitually deflects and says that we're going to do whatever it takes to be successful against our opponent each week, whether it's run 50 times or pass 50 times. At this point in this season, I feel it's pretty fair to say that's baloney from Daboll. The Bills predominantly use a (1,1) set. This is down from last season (66% vs 71%), as is our use of 4 WR sets (12% this season, down from 15%). But while I don't have stats on this, to my eyes, even when we're in a (1,1) set this season (1 RB, 1 TE), we often split the back and the TE out wide. We also aren't using (1,3) sets at all whereas last year they were a small but important part of our short-yardage and red-zone vocabulary. I think it would be fair to say that we aren't getting those 10-15 yd pass plays that were our bread-and-butter last season, because teams are clamping down hard on that area of the field. We also aren't gonna consistently get those deep balls, because they're not Allen's strength, Sanders often takes them, and he and Allen just don't seem on the same page most of the time. Thoughts?

Is this what you're talking about as the "cocktail napkin"? He pointed to things that Miami was doing (cover 0, or "6 sub no deep") that had elements of what Pittsburgh did as well. So there's a couple of components there: 1) "then it's just a matter of whether you can hang in there" - a lot of teams can't. 2) but it's also a matter of can we adjust and do something else, when teams can? I'm gonna link this in to the Urban Meyer interview thread because I think it's a topic worth discussing. Fundamentally the question is: are we now a spread offense? Is that our offensive identity? Because it wasn't last year - we did adjust what we tried offensively to our opponents, and I'm not sure I would have called us a spread offense. But I think it might be accurate this season. I've noticed that when we are in a (1,1) set, a lot of the time we're still effectively 4 or 5 wide because we have the back and the TE (or at least one) lined up as a WR. If it is correct, Urban Meyer (and other recent college crossover coaches) have an advantage against us in that if there's one offense he would know how to shut down, it would be a spread offense.

If the Bills had "the same opinion about Teller" (a 2018 draftee who played half a season at LG on a very bad line and was traded at the last minute before the 2019 season) as I express about a literal, 7 year vet with 11 starts scattered across those years - that would be silly of them.

With 11 starts and a handful of other games where he took >50% of the snaps over 7 seasons, I think Douglas has already shown he can play in the NFL. The question is "how well?" since neither of the teams he started for considered him more than a capable fill-in. He is the very definition of "journeyman"

Nah, any more than Beasley or Davis did. If you take away the 7 points from the Sammy fumble the Fins still win; Lamar Jackson had a fumble it was just luck and heads up play by his OLman they recovered; he threw a pick from the MIA 7 to seal the deal. One play changes, the rest of the game changes But the Ravens offense most certainly laid a wet fart and Sammy was the little solid piece in the center of the skid mark. And WHAT a coincidence that just when the Dolphins finally scored a TD off a Ravens miscue, the refs were shocked, SHOCKED to discover 3 successive penalties for 35 yards to help the Ravens down the field. The first was legit IMO, even Aikman had trouble figuring out what was going on with the 2nd and 3rd.

Too simplistic IMO

Yes