Sisyphean Bills

Actually, one comment I distinctly recall was qualified exactly as I wrote in my original post. "He's the best coach I've had in the NFL." The qualifier could be taken as an exception that proves the rule: in other words, he wasn't the best football coach they ever played for, but he was the best and only coach they'd played for in the NFL. You're conflating being a good person with being good at one's profession. Dick Jauron is a great person and he never says a bad word about anyone. Unfortunately, his record shows that he was lousy as an NFL head coach. There is no contradiction; both are true. And contrastingly, Nick Saban may be an !@#$, but he builds football teams (on the collegiate level anyway) and wins.

Present: First place Future: Maybin not

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/bl...rn=ncaab,255935

I suspect he cares. (If he didn't care, he wouldn't have fired Dick Jauron mid-season. Photoshopping him out of the team photo was classic.) He just doesn't know what to do.

Statements like, "He's the best coach I've ever had in the NFL" were laughable coming from young players that had never spent a millisecond under any other coach nor had any success. And some fans lapped it up like a hot dog.

Bordering CFL

Snake bit

Same as it ever was. When Ralph first started up the franchise, he brought in a buddy from his insurance business to help him run the team. He's a hands-on owner and the Bills are his toy and he wants to play it his way. Nothing wrong with that, but it hasn't translated into building a self-perpetuating machine of success and winning. Flash forward 50 years and he still falls back into the pattern of promoting from within and staying with those he knows and trusts. The Tom Donahoe experiment, where Mr. Wilson let go of the reigns to let an expert run his team, ended in total disaster on many levels and Ralph simply doesn't have the luxury of time at this point.

Ralph flushed big money down the toilet on contracts to guys like Derrick Dockery and Terrell Owens in very recent times. Neither of those guys made a substantial impact. As far as paying good players, the Bills problem is they can't identify good players, not paying them.

Is there a strong correlation between spending huge money on free agents and winning championships? Washington and Dallas come to mind. If you can put together a playoff team without blowing big money on free agents, why would you blow big money on free agents after you've established you could do the former? Seems, ah, just plain dumb.

The optimist says "Domination by the Lake Erie towns."

Sounds like he was using Ralph's speech writer here.

The painful truth was that he never learned from his mistakes. He just kept doggedly repeating the same blunders.

Front office failure. Why did they want to reward players that hadn't proven themselves yet on the theory the player would "grow into his big payday contract"? Lunatic fringe. At least they fired John Guy.

I'm not going to hold my breath though. You need the line to function as a unit, and there are just too many question marks. Hopefully the line can stay healthy and show some signs of progress over the season.

To be fair though, there is the very real possibility here of "garbage in, garbage out". Whoever is making the decisions is relying on getting good advice from his staff. If his staff is crap, he is either going to make some big mistakes, have to re-do everything (in this case the scouting) himself, or float through a minefield with little more than a rabbit's foot as his guide. Marv Levy confirmed himself that he was a figurehead within the organization. He said that he had always wanted, liked, and had had significant push in the war room on draft day as the head coach. So, as GM he wanted to do whatever the HC thought was best.

You're missing the main point. They're going to line up in a 3-4, so they must be better. (Just kidding. Anybody that thinks the Bills front 7 on defense is set in stone is hopefully following their talent and working for Psychic Friends Network.)

The bolded part is an issue for me. Insidiously, it may even be Jauron's true belief of his team, a team that he had a large hand in putting together. At some point though, you have to take the training wheels off in order to let the kid compete with the others riding their bikes at the X Games. If they never actually attempt the tricks they will never be able to do them. It's like a kid that really wants to learn to play the piano, so he is given a sheet of paper with the keyboard stenciled on it to practice on and told not to touch the piano in the living room because mom thinks he's going to suck at the piano; everyone is just wasting time. If a big component of why this was the strategy is that their coach has no confidence that they can do it, then what does that say? A coach's job is to coach and make his players the best they can be. If he truly thinks those he is coaching are talentless, he is wasting everyone's time. All the moreso at the professional level, where fans pay their hard earned money to watch elite athletes in the sport. And after 4 years of overturning the roster to suit his schemes? Isn't the coach implicitly condemning the job done by his talent evaluators to bring him talent? Isn't he condemning the job of his assistants that they suck as coaches and can't get the most out of their players? (Aside: Tom Brady didn't enter the NFL as a polished, finished perfect QB. He fell to the 6th round precisely because he wasn't developed. After hard work on his part, and great coaching, he became the superstar he is today. How different would his life be now, as well as Patriots fans, if Belichick had looked at him and said to himself, "this skinny kid doesn't have the talent and will never be any good.") I tend to think Jauron overthought the statistical side of the game. He can recite all the stats down to the thousandth of a percent, no doubt. But, sometimes you have to take risks and allow your team to succeed or fail on a chance. The Saints took a chance in the Super Bowl with an unexpected onside kickoff. Can you even imagine Dick Jauron considering a move like that? I can't.

Like any other complex enterprise, the blame for failures can and should be distributed. As far as the comment about players vs. coaching, part of the reason the players were able to come in and play immediately for Jauron was that his approach was one of simplicity. For the 4 seasons which were started with Jauron, the Bills roster consisted of a lot of young players and depth, which played a role every season, got young very quickly. Strategically, his approach was to take the air out of the ball and try to play games close. "It's tough to win in the NFL," was a mantra and an approach. Being in a position where it was possible to steal a game in the 4th quarter with a field goal was the strategy. (Some would even argue that it implies the Bills were a solid team, though dogged by misfortune.)

I know you know this: the Bills ran the Tampa-2 for 4 years. But, yeah, the defenses were polar opposites.

You must be a pessimist not to mention Doug Flutie.

Perhaps not. The Steelers new OL coach was the Bills OL coach last year. Scott and Kugler just caught the same flight out of Buffalo.

Max Starks said that Adams told him he really wants to play LT. The Steelers need a RT. Connect the dots.

And Jason Peters. CJ Spiller is part of that equation. If he doesn't want to stay for whatever reason, the Bills wanting to re-sign him may fall on deaf ears.

Some athletes are, well, just more athletic. They may lack the neurons or the drive to be successful, but one can see moments when they display great athleticism. On the other hand, there are guys that have worked hard and do a good job, but there are moments when they just look lumbering and artless. Upside vs. lunch-pail. The best players combine both: overwhelming freakish athleticism and a work ethic coupled to an relentless drive to excel.