Sisyphean Bills

He got 2 sacks closer to Bruce Smith's record last year. So, if Kelsay can play for 70 years or so, he might be able to get close to Bruce...

Apparently not. But, I'm laughing. "Done right" ...

Do team building trips to the movies or a round of put-put count as a practice?

Slavery is not a holocaust, nor was slavery unique to the United States. It would utterly defeat the point of slavery if all the labor was dead. Your point would've been better served if you'd used America's dislocation, destruction, and extermination of its native cultures, a highly successful campaign of genocide fueled by racial superiority that actually served as a model for Hilter to apply in eastern Europe.

So Kelsay decided to pick on a guy half his size, eh? Of course, being the team captain and having your ass handed to you by a rookie might not look so hot.

More likely he texted them and they went to Baskin Robbins after practice, his treat.

That I agree with entirely. The Bills in their glory years were a couple of run-defenders up front away from winning a Super Bowl. Not a hard sell on me, bro.

I sort of think the question about goals and his answer about trying to be the best LT in the game, get to the Super Bowl, and continue to be draw accolades by his peers and go to the Pro Bowl spoke more about his work ethic than some contorted and convoluted extrapolation from a perceived slight of the Bills. The Bills collapsed as a team. Jason Peters doesn't have to take sole ownership of that crash and burn to show his "work ethic" doesn't suck.

Since NFL coaches call the plays and packages on every down, it hardly seems a great stretch to connect the dots and see that to be a consistent winner a team needs coaches that are better than almost tactically competent. It's just one of the many facets of modern coaching. It's more than being able to recall data like "951 catches and 139 touchdowns is a lot of production." Pinning the faults of Jauron coached teams on lack of talent is just too simplistic. It is true that he has never coached a team that has Hall-of-Fame caliber players 5 or 6 deep at every position. No coach does. But the converse is not true either: his rosters do have some talent. In fact, we've all seen quick turnarounds in the NFL where a new staff can come in, shake things up a little, and a team can suddenly go from worst to first. We saw this in Miami last year, and let's not pretend that they went from having "no talent" to having "great talent" with a snap of Parcells' magical fingers. Really, quick turnarounds cannot be explained by a formula that has player talent as the only variable and dismisses coaching as an entirely level playing field. Indeed, Lovie Smith was able to take a roster that consisted in majority of the same players Jauron had to the Super Bowl. No, the multifaceted job of coaching is critical to success in the NFL, it has become increasingly important from the old days as the game has evolved and with increased player movement, and it is certainly not a level playing field. Indeed, with free agency and the salary cap, the talent distribution across the NFL isn't totally out of whack like in other sports. Every team has holes and good players: the good teams just get more out of their good players and hide their weaknesses better. Once again, I don't think Jauron is the worst coach of all-time; he seems like a great person. But, he has proven his deficiencies over time and he stands among some of the losingest coaches in NFL history for his comparable longevity.

Sounds like the expectations may be higher too. Count me amongst the flabbergasted.

Of course. I'm chuckling at the memory of 2 years ago when people were saying the Bills went 7-9 in the "toughest division in the NFL" because the Patriots went 16-0. The Jets and Dolphins were 2 of the 3 worst teams in the entire league and the Bills were paper tigers, which of course helped the Patriots to that 16-0 with 6 walk over wins. Indeed, the NFC East pounded the crap out of the AFC East that year -- other than the Patriots and ignoring the Super Bowl.

Well, you just want to keep it close and hopefully have a chance to win it with a kick at the end. You'd like to do that every week, but sometimes it's an interesting day weather-wise.

On the other hand, Russ Brandon did make comments to the effect that "7-9 wasn't good enough, we know that. We need to get better. We owe our loyal fans that much. We have to get better. We brought Terrell in to make us better.", etc. It was good sound bite marketing stuff. Pretty much exactly what one would expect, honestly.

The problem with the "Jauron has never had any talent" wall-to-wall carpet excuse making gesture is that it attempts to cover an entire career of coaching multiple teams with a long list of players without identifying a single one of them or in any way defining terms. "He never had any talent to work with" universally dismisses every player that's played under him as garbage. The implication is that guys like Brian Urlacher, who is a possible Hall-of-Fame player, have no talent. I posted in the past a list of roughly 30 players that played for Dick Jauron in Chicago and also played for Lovie Smith in the Super Bowl in rebuttal to this vague argument. Either way, that says something. Either the Bears roster was chuck full of total crap players but Lovie Smith was able to lead much of that same group to the Super Bowl or Dick Jauron actually did not (as his apologists would like to have it) have a team that "had no talent whatsoever." And, if we're just going to wave our arms around and make vague generalizations, then we can definitely say that Coach Fisher has not always been given the pick of the litter in terms of talent throughout his career. Early in his career his team had no good WRs. He's had a broken McNair (RIP), Volek, Young and the well-traveled Collins as starting QBs. He's had and lost great players like Freak and Haynesworth. He's lost coaches to other teams. He's had to retool the entire team over time, in fact. Yet, overall, they just keep winning. That's not emotional reaction dude. I've given you plenty of facts that can be readily checked. Finally, as to your last paragraph, I have to agree. It isn't good.

But the brain-lock-trust were telegraphing that they needed to address the pass rush before the draft and before they dumped Jason Peters.

I like it. Starters Vapor and Paper with depth of Tissue and Missyou.

This isn't intended as an attack, bro. But, the irony of someone with a screen name of "keepthefaith" posting this is off the charts. Thanks for the laugh attack.

What? Getting blown out in a playoff game wouldn't make you giddy?

You're just being panglossian again. What if DJ doesn't get fired?

Cough. Well, actually ... check out some of these quotes. http://www.stadiumwall.com/index.php?s=&am...t&p=1503549 "The guys played hard today. We wish we could win every game. It's tough to win in the NFL. We just have to go back to work."

"We looked at our draft board and didn't see anybody on there with 951 catches in the NFL."

Absolutely shocking.

I guess he was listening to Russ Brandon sound bites.

Discussing football on a football board. Whodathunkit? I also can't lay it all at the feet of Modrak. I think he's a good talent evaluator/scout and he found some good players when he was working with Donahoe, some of them are still the leaders of this team in fact, and found some good talent for the Eagles before that, and the Steelers as well. If what Ralph said is true, then he also lobbied to draft Cutler and was ignored. Where would this team and this board be now if the Bills had a young franchise QB coming off a Pro Bowl season, had stocked both their lines to control the line of scrimmage, and were just only now thinking of restocking the back half of its defense? Modrak's role within the organization has been as a guy that puts in his required hours, punches the clock, and goes home since the day Donahoe brought him in. That worked better with Donahoe around since Donahoe was clearly and unabashedly the supreme leader and decision maker and Modrak could kick back and be another pair of eyeballs and sounding board. It hasn't appeared to work as well when the decision makers are the "inner circle" jockeys and Modrak just reports to the water cooler. Really, the "new attitude" that Marv supposedly brought in to the organization has been a mirage in many ways. While no one walks on eggshells around Donahoe anymore, there hasn't been any steady improvement either. Meathead Mularkey was a 7-9 coach on average in Buffalo and Dick Jauron has been a 7-9 coach on average in Buffalo. The franchise is treading water. Marv was a figurehead as the GM who hired a coach he knew and liked and gave that coach unprecedented control within the organization. I may be mistaken but I don't recall Marv himself even having total control over the coaching staff, basically a trump over Wilson himself, written into his contract. Wade certainly didn't have it and no coach under Donahoe had it either. And where did Jauron and the "inner circle" start? They ignored Modrak and passed on Cutler, they drafted a small SS and a bust DT, and tried to address bad lines with FAs like Tuten Reyes and Larry Tripplett. At this point, the head coach's philosophy and doctrine should be well-established, the team should have been demonstrating steady progress, and most of the puzzle pieces should really be in place. But, if one looks at the Bills objectively: they ended season 3 in total disarray and a spectacular free fall; there are still obvious questions about their QB; they're installing a new offense and a new offensive philosophy; they've completely gutted the offensive line; they still have holes in the defensive front 7; and they're still tinkering with the secondary. No need to be concerned at all though, since that would make one a "hater idiot".

OK. But how many great coaches are of the "mamby pamby" variety? It's one thing to come to realize as a manager that your team is loaded with self-starters and guys that love to kick some ass every day. You manage that situation differently than say a group of slugs that would rather take 4 hour lunches every day and text their friends the other 4 hours. On the other hand, that's not the same thing as just assuming that your team is going to emerge as a bunch of highly motivated self-starters if you just wait long enough and give them as much slack as they want because you've built relationships with each and every one of them (i.e., they text you on their 4 hour lunch).