Sisyphean Bills

Royal did just keep drifting downfield rather than attack the ball. He even looked surprised that a defender undercut his lame route. Mellon heads, the lot of them.

It's sort of like saying, if Plaxico hadn't shot himself in the leg, it would have been a good shot.

Not even close. Ever heard of a guy named Cade McNown?

Yep. Same with Marv. You tick either of those guys off with loafing and not giving your all, your stuff was in a box on the curb before you finished your shower.

A certain Buffalo Bills front office person once said, "Building a line is no big deal. You just get 5 fat guys and get them to play together." Does that sound like a front office that has good strategic planning and has its sh-- wired down real tight? BTW, overpaying for average or below talent (Dockery, Walker, Teague, Kelsay), signing guys that don't fit the system or just can't play (Fowler, Reyes, Tripplett), drafting big-time busts (McCargo, Williams) are all systems of a common disease: the Bills as an organization just aren't very good at evaluating line play. You need a higher hit rate than Jason Peters and Aaron Schobel in 8-9 years.

It really was a bad play call. Rolling out and moving the pocket for a short pass may be a safe play against a vanilla defense, but the Jets were in an all-out blitz to stop the run and get bodies flying around in the backfield. Rolling out necessarily means the ball is in the backfield longer than normal: any QB has to take the snap, take a drop, and run towards the sideline. That takes time. Against a jail break blitz, where the defense is sending more guys than you can block, the one thing the QB doesn't have is time to dance around in the backfield. The design of the play was even more fugtarded when you realize that the play action bite was only half-baked. The running backs do not sell the run by crashing the line, but rather angle across the formation to chip block and get out for the pass in the flat. The defense doesn't even bite one iota on the play action. They just cave the whole thing in. You are correct that an aggressive play call against that defense would have been a 3 step drop and get the ball out and over the wave of the Jets defense or a deeper drop with a hard-core play action and you probably hit someone that is either uncovered or man covered and if he makes the play, it's a home run throw.

The relevance was as to whether Losman had anywhere to go with the ball. He has to run outside of the tackle box in order to "just get rid of it" without taking a penalty. By the time he gets there, he's hit. Only Losman can say why he just didn't cover up and go down; however, this is a guy that has learned some terrible "Doug Flutie ball" QBing habits. He tries to do way too much, tries to make plays happen when they aren't there. His athleticism at Tulane let him get away with it, but in the NFL it just blows up in his face. Why he doesn't get that, who knows? I think it is a fact that a guy that has only started 33 NFL games as a QB is not very experienced. That is barely 2 seasons of starts under 3 different OCs for a lousy team. Yes, he has been in the NFL for 5 years and you would hope that the guy would be much more developed than he is; I'm not disputing that at all. Indeed, it is shocking how little progress he has made, which suggests to me that either he is uncoachable or the coaching he has gotten has been putrid. FWIW, he doesn't have to be a genius to play the position -- Dan Marino was an all-time great but he's clearly no genius -- he just has to be drilled on the basics so that he'll stop trying to think and make plays that aren't there. He wouldn't be the first QB that has struggled in this regard. Brett Favre had bad mechanics, bad habits, did too much, didn't play within the system, made lousy decisions -- until Mike Holmgren started screaming in his face day after day. Holmgren did the same thing with Hasselbeck; he just absolutely demanded that he play the position exactly as he told him to play it and to not try and do "little extras". Can anyone honestly see Dick Jauron grabbing his QB by the facemask and screaming at him at the top of his lungs? So, while Losman is not very experienced and is still fairly young for an NFL QB (they used to say an NFL QB didn't start to hit his stride until he was 30), I don't want the haters to misconstrue any of the above. Losman is very, very close to simply closing out his NFL career as a bust. Whether it is that he is uncoachable or he has been piss poorly coached doesn't really matter at this point, because no coach/GM is going to tie his own job to Losman as a starter and savior for his team. He will probably get a chance as a backup somewhere, but if the change of scenery doesn't light a huge bonfire under him to get with it and correct his poor game, stick a fork in him.

Gordo, your reading comprehension sucks as bad as Losman.

The deeper route was Evans who was double covered. There was no throwing lane to Evans at any rate. There was no dump off opportunity as both Lynch and the McIntyre were getting bounced around heavily in the jailbreak pressure. Throwing there was an interception waiting to happen. Losman is hit less than 4 seconds into the rollout because Peters completely whiffs on his block. It's possible Losman felt the pressure and was trying to throw it away (inexperience there, not recognizing the situation; just fall to the ground and take the sack and tell Dick he's a moron after the victory) at the point of impact ... or maybe he's just a klutz. Fine went to the outside but may have been nothing but a blocker on the play. It appears that he wasn't covered, but he probably wasn't looking and there wasn't time or a throwing lane anyway. Bottom line: this was a horribly conceived play, called against the exact wrong defense at the worst possible time in the game with a young, backup QB and executed terribly in nearly every aspect. There is just no justification for it.

http://www.firejauron.com

It's not from logic. It's from English law.

The guys liking Dick Jauron will come in handy if Jauron runs for elected office someday.

You do know that Dick Jauron was the HC when Rex Grossman was drafted, right? And a few Bears fans might disagree that Grossman is a huge upgrade over Jim Miller.

JP is a goner Donahoe bust picker Who do you blame next?

Abram "Buffalo Hunter" Elam.

Jauron doesn't even measure up to Ron Meyer.

How do we want to rank him? He's clearly among the worst of all time for the number of seasons he's been a HC. Marion Campbell, Dan Henning, Sam Wyche are in the running... http://www.pro-football-reference.com/coaches/ On the bright side, he makes Wayne Fontes look very capable.

Collinsworth also said the Bills playing a game in Toronto was the dumbest thing ever in sports history. Why wouldn't everyone take what he says as The Truth Revealed?

1976. There were 5 teams in the AFC East and the Bills lost every single game, 0-8.

I'd go back further. The "turning point" in the season was this past off-season when the brain trust barely lifted a finger to help a woefully bad offense. The default choice of Stanford grad Turk, expecting Trent to just suddenly emerge from a phone booth, and drafting Hardy were just not enough to improve a struggling, flagging unit.

Dick could outcoach Belichick. It's possible.

Again.

But I thought JP was the only QB capable of fumbling when getting drilled from behind.

Jauron said he made the call.

It's just a train wreck. Bad scheme, bad play calling, bad players, bad breakdowns ... we have it all.