Sisyphean Bills

That's what I meant when I used the term bridge. Nor is the labor issue a "right vs. wrong" situation. The players deserve to be paid, but there is more to the NFL than just having guys run around in pads on a lawn with a ball. (The idea that the players could just walk off and start a new league is laughable.) Part of what makes the NFL a success is the competitive balance, which was something Rozelle was always preaching to the owners, and which is tied closely to equality of revenue streams for all partners. There are a lot of different factors and tactics in place to try to maintain that competitive balance obviously. Some owners, such as Jerry Jones, seem to only pay lip service to competitive balance and are only for it if his team happens to be on top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGMEoJ-Kbec

Pyrite Gal! The points I've stated on Luck and the labor dispute can be summarized succinctly as Andrew Luck is the best college QB in my opinion Not everyone makes life decisions based strictly on financial benefit The CBA that Tagliabue pushed on the owners at the 11th hour (they didn't even have time to review it in detail) was clearly one that the NFL owners now regret because they voted out of it last year. How it can be suggested that the owners really think it was fair/good/acceptable given the course of events is incomprehensible. I do recall, Pyrite Gal always took labor's side on such issues and regardless of the economic realities. In part of your rant, you mention that the NFL doesn't develop younger players in minor leagues, yet fail to connect the dots that part of the reason that isn't possible is that the NFLPA takes its lion's share of the gross revenue and distributes it to a fixed pool of roughly 2000 individuals. Your argument that the owners cannot have a lockout because of fixed costs is factually incorrect; the owners will be paid by the networks regardless of whether there are games or not, which will easily enable them to bridge a work stoppage. It's not quite as simple as "Down Owners! Bad boys!"

Ray Lewis. http://thepurplechaos.com/2010/09/24/the-greatness-of-ray-lewis-and-his-coaching-tree-legacy/ Edit: digression into leadership vs. toughness... But, it often has to come from the QB position. Peyton Manning. Drew Brees. Tom Brady. Actually, the Patriots had some true leaders on defense as well. The Steelers are an organization that tends to collect leaders. Great players lead and elevate everyone around them. It was always curious to me that Dick Levy started by getting rid of all the Bills veteran leadership.

Well put.

As far as I know, the owners haven't been meeting all the spending requirements of the old CBA, so the cap growth was actually accelerated as a sort of "penalty". (For example, Washington in recent years has continued to throw huge contracts out there and one never hears that the Redskins are in any way hampered by the cap.) The corporate and civic welfare for NFL teams wasn't going to increase forever and certainly not with the economic bubble imploding. Ralph was correct; the CBA that Tagliabue ramrodded through at the last minute wasn't a good balance and has widened the gap between the high-capital teams and the rest.

That's the real problem. Why come here at all if there is no information? The endless crying that every news piece, whether it is opinion or reporting, is somehow flawed or insufficient is absurd. Reporters don't make the Buffalo Bills suck. The Bills make the Bills suck. Buy some perspective.

I really like Andrew Luck, personally. That kid has an NFL pedigree (his dad was an NFL QB), is athletic, has an excellent arm, is highly intelligent, driven, has the right attitude, and seems to be a leader and winner (unlike our last Stanford QB). He's only a sophomore and my guess is he'll stay in school. http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=18619 (Yes, I remember Bert Jones -- he was one hell of a QB stuck on some horrible teams.) Big Tex has a freakish arm. He seems to have a sort of arrogance about him, which along with the arm is reminiscent of Leaf. I don't know if Mallett is the pampered, immature punk (read: jackass) that Leaf was. Leaf failed in the NFL because he didn't have anything other than his arm, so when things started turning to **** for him, his true character came out in temper tantrums. He had spent all of his time partying and playing bimbo bop, and never learned all the other aspects of the game to be successful against the best of the best.

Sacks? That's something my groceries come in, right?

You have to take chances to be good. There is no doubt that the Bills desperately need a franchise QB that will lead the franchise from the field. On the other hand and looking at recent drafts and decisions made, it wouldn't be all that surprising if the Bills got a wild hair of goofiness and took some athlete like, oh say, Terrelle Pryor #1 overall and bypass the next Peyton Manning (if there is one). Edit: And the Panthers suck real bad too. The Bills may be eclipsed in their race to the bottom by the Panthers, which had the same sort of brain storm this year apparently. People aren't going to be happy to pick #2 and get the Ryan Leaf while the Panthers get the Peyton.

He's not a cornerstone and elite player. I don't even think he's the sort of heavy downhill player that's more suited to the ILB of a 3-4 defense, as I've seen him get absolutely destroyed at the point. (It's pure nonsense that it's all the d-line's fault because they aren't walling up all the blockers, btw.) On the other hand, maybe they are going back to the Tampa-2 now. He's not terrible at jetting back into the center field zone. Not irreplaceable either.

Well, if they draft the next Peyton Manning, then Buddy Nix will get his ass crowned. If they draft another bust, it'll be another 7 or more year run of bad football and another failed regime or three before they recover from it (as it was for the Losman Disaster).

Not in Buffalo. In Buffalo, you take a nap first. Second, you spend a season evaluating which part of the house to tear down. Then, you tell everyone to suffer pain and be patient because there is a plan. Some day on the stealth schedule, you'll be in the position to actually show up at the work site. Or the schedule is abruptly terminated and the estate sale happens and those frittering away the hours that make up a dog day are sent out to pasture... Edit: But, who are you trying to kid anyway? It's a football team. It wasn't working; if it were Jauron would still be here. That's obvious to anyone that has a few functional brain cells. There were obvious problems with the team that anyone earning a paycheck as a professional scout could have told you about. It's a myth that the only path to building a team is to tear down a team by voiding all the talent in a long, slow deliberate flushing motion and then and only then roll up the sleeves and figure out what to do with an 0-16 or 1-15 sort of flaming crater in the ground. It is proven and quite possible to get rid of bad players AND bring in better players. If you have a plan.

Even if they weren't following the Bills every move, one would hope that the Bills would've hired some leaders that were enough on the ball to get up to speed very rapidly. You don't get ahead in this business by catching more naps than the other guys. It doesn't take a genius to know that the Bills were bad and the last coach was shown the door; you admit that. So, this amounts to saying these guys leapt in before realizing where it was they were jumping. Furthermore, by their own ignorance of the situation, they were forced to play a 20 game pre-season slate to figure out what sort of talent was in the cupboard. Yikes.

No. They've been turning over that roster non-stop. Yes, the Buffalo Bills can't (or won't) do what is necessary to make a first class organization that top coaches and assistants and players around the NFL view as doing what it takes to win. Not that there is any pride in that.

He asked why some fans were upset with the way things are going under Buddy Gailey. I answered his question. Now, if his question had been, "Why do some fans have a woody for the re-build Chan Nix have done?" then the answer would have to stress all the masterful moves that the braintrust has made to date. Like signing Chris Kelsay.

That and the lack of activity when it mattered. You have to actually swing a hammer to be building something, not taking a nap and puffing about a plan. They lost their only pass rusher. They lost their top receiver. They didn't replace either of them. They lost their RT to retirement and paid well for a piece of jetsam to replace him. They said they'd be sleeping during free agency -- kudos to outworking the competition there. They cut their opening day QB, who most predicted would flop but were willing to let Gailey try to rehabilitate (in what turned into the shortest rehab ever). They traded their top rusher for less than they could have and after preaching about the need for 3 backs all summer. They are now dumping the 3-4 defense plan because they realize they never had the players for it, and the defense quite frankly has played like a steaming pile. The improvements? Ryan Fitzpantsdown is posting some nice stats in losing efforts. CJ Spiller is electric, if he's not being tackled for a loss.

Take a look at what Seattle and Washington are doing and have done in the first year of their re-builds. Continued erosion isn't re-building.

The big wrinkle is the prospect of the lockout. Think Ralph is going to pay 2 ex-coaches if there is a lockout? Of course, that doesn't mean that once the labor situation is resolved, Ralph doesn't pull the trigger on Buddy Chan for a 0 or 1 win season. (Although his interview with Wawrow sounded like surrender to me -- like he was going to give these guys 3 years to show if their so-called plan, which has looked like little more than reactionary spastic flailing so far, can work.)

Oh, they are already there. Some comments on Modrak...

One could argue that the 2 drafts Marv presided over in 06 and 07 are actually better than the draft classes of Donahoe's last 4 years. The 06 and 07 drafts both yielded 1 Pro Bowl player, whereas there were none from 02-05. The 07 draft class is looking worse now as the new regime jettisons players from the draft obviously. A strong argument could also be made that our best draft of the millenium was the one before Tom Modrak was brought in, namely the class of 2001. Coincidence? Given the abundance of data from 2002 onwards, probably not. Building through the draft on the advice of this guy, given the track record, could easily be another 10 years of wandering in the wilderness.

Was it that there were only 2 good ones, or that there were so many big dudes out there that there was no pressure to actually take one because they could grab a starter at any time? The Bills seem to have a certain chutzpah that they can take any big dude and turn him into another Jason Peters success story of late.

Shouldn't the term "rebuilding" imply that something was originally built and that there is some building actually taking place? Not to hijack the thread but "rebuild" really isn't a synonym for erosion, disintegration, decay, and wearing away. The current team is scraping the bottom of the barrel and arguably has the least amount of talent of any team in the post-Butler slide. Even as bad as the 3-13 Bills of '01 were, they did have some decent players although they had garbage at the QB position.

All things being equal, an 0-16 or 1-15 year for virtually any other organization would be a ticket out of town for Gailey (and probably Nix as well). But, things are not equal. There is the spectre of a lockout and this is the Bills. Ralph's list of people he knows is a blank, empty page.

Garbage In = Garbage Out.