Sisyphean Bills

I was wondering that too. Would've been a better thread if all these wankers had been tied together as love children of the master bottle washer himself, though.

But it is meaningless if you are content to win 1 out of every 3 games.

There was chirping this past season that The Plan was to bottom out ... so maybe they just stick with The Plan and draft Andrew Luck next year.

Levy/Jauron would take Prince Amakumara or Peterson with the first pick and then trade back up into the first round to take Stefen Wisniewski.

Well, Tom Modrak rated him as highly as Haloti Ngata.

Hey Hope. Still, most regime changes do happen when a team is bad. (Franchises that are winning every year aren't too motivated to blow it up.) Most regime changes clear out the management side of the business and start afresh with someone that is intimately connected with an NFL franchise that is on the winning side of the equation and has been making noise. Those people tend very strongly to bring in other coaches, players, and systems that are successful in the NFL at present and inject a new passion, shall we call it?, into the organization and fan base (a large part of the formula really is to get everyone enthusiastic about the team). Then they are drafting early in each round (often franchise QB early) and jettisoning anybody that smells like a bad apple. I don't think it is a coincidence that most such changes improve the situation right out of the gate. In fact, that lends itself much better to giving some credibility and inspiring some confidence in the new regime right from the start. Just getting everyone to pull on the oars in the same direction goes a long way to making the ship sail straighter and stop circling the drain.

James Harris.

It should show who really wears the pants.

Is he more interested in golf than playing QB?

They made up for that mistake by getting the best CB in the next draft. Of course, the real question is whether it would've been better to select one of the top 3 players at a position versus a player that is a platoon player (and now off the team) at his position. The answer is self-evident, of course.

Not really buying that idea, Thone. Merriman's problems are all in his legs AFAIK, and moving him inside to be a thumper and play downhill against the interior of the OL on gimpy legs tied together with rubber bands doesn't seem like a recipe for success. I don't really want him "sprinting" around trying to cover the deep middle 3rd of the field either, do you?

The problem isn't in the replacement of incompetent people promoted out of their skills sets and who can't get the job done. The problem is in hiring them in the first place. It becomes a systemic problem when your process repeatedly leads you to hire the wrong people over and over again. P.T. Barnum comes to mind when some get all fired up, defensive, and trot out the same ragged excuses each time the record skips and the same chorus of the same song is played. I hope Nix is different and hope he finds a clue; but, he hasn't earned blind faith by taking the team backwards any more than Ralph has earned blind faith in the way he's run this franchise the past decade plus. It is what it is at this point. Mere hope and wishful thinking. Nix and Gailey both said it themselves. Talk is cheap. Show me the baby.

Add that the Bills could've had Revis, but chose Marshawn Lynch 2 picks earlier.

I've seen him plenty too. In fact, I wasn't sold on all the hype slung his way last year. Your comparison is apt. He's going to need some time to develop into an NFL QB, if he ever does. And with Losman, the urgency Donahoe felt to ramrod him into the lineup was an unmitigated disaster.

How much of the anti-Locker crowd are sour grapes that he stayed in school rather than grabbing the cash last year? Locker had some really putrid receiver play last year. He's definitely a project and not a sure-fire can't-miss ready-to-go QB. He's such a talented athlete and the Huskies were so awful, that his development as a NFL-ready QB was really quite limited. Running for your life every snap does that.

"Lights Out", hunh? Guess he's talking about his football career.

McShay's absentee take is directly contradicted by Maybin's coach who said point blank it is not a question of doing the work. Maybin just doesn't have the talent and was a terrible draft pick. In short, McShay was completely and totally wrong about him with his glowing "first step" praises. He apparently didn't know the players in the NFL can move better than the players at Coastal Carolina. It's a revolutionary concept... for the Bills.

Well, there is that but it's like praising them for figuring out Trent Edwards sucked after he had started 2 games.

Why the trust in Edwards? George started out 2-gapping last year until it was way beyond obvious that he didn't have the horses for it and then he went to the 1-gap hybridized scheme to try and get things shored up a bit. Frankly he's never done anything to earn anyone's blind faith. The Bills did have lousy LB play last year. Some of that was that the parts didn't fit, though. If you want to have smaller penetrating DL, then having them backed up by LBs that can't get off blocks and can't get to their gap responsibilities is going to give you a really bad run defense. The coaching was also terrible. So they went out and hired a 4-3 expert.

Elementary, Watson. What is generally true is not true in every circumstance.

Jevan Snead couldn't even make a roster in the Arena League. But your promotion of bad former Longhorn QBs is duly noted.

There is another way one could look at it if Peter King meant his comment in a more general sense than simply that Buddy didn't return his call. In order to have a total information blackout, the team must not be talking to anyone, not just Peter King. Not talking to anyone means there can be no leaks. Still, the framework for trades in the draft are established during the combine and up to the draft, where management types discuss what they are shopping for and what they might be willing to offer, etc. In short, the only way deals get done is by talking to others. After all, who are they really kidding anyway? Other NFL teams have the tapes and can evaluate the Bills just as well if not better than the Bills themselves. They know the Bills weaknesses and the areas they need help. Nobody would be surprised to learn the Bills need help, for example, with their terrible pass rush. Of course, King may have just meant that he couldn't get anything himself out of 1BD.

Well, I think there are a lot of different reasons since we are of course talking about a lot of different situations. As to the Bills specific, sure, they were changing systems on defense and it was a lot of trying to force square pegs through round holes. On the other hand, that tells you something. Still, the Bills are hardly the only team that's ever switched defenses. Other regimes have had major roster turnover and managed to walk the high wire to improvement. Look no further than the Seahawks last year. They had the most roster turnover of any team in the NFL by far. Another element in their faulty switch is that their owner is in a bit of a, shall we say, thrift mode (the lockout and his age having obvious implications there). Cheaper, younger, and not quite passable are the watchwords.

I'm not sure if what I posted didn't make sense or what. I'm not talking about those two specific cases that BillsVet posted. In general (read: league-wide and over the past 20 years if I remember correctly), a regime change more often than not improves the W-L record immediately in the first year. Now, obviously, one can trot out any number of hypotheses as to why that is, argue that it doesn't matter for the Bills, and suggest why the Bills of 2010 went the counter-trending direction. That's all well and good. Still, the fact is that it is more common for a regime change to take over a team and make it better from the word "go".

It's probably just an embarrassment of riches sort of thing. After all, we've had so many Hall-of-Fame and near Hall-of-Fame QBs running the Bills offense, especially in recent years.