Sisyphean Bills

On the near block, the guy that came in was completely unblocked. It's actually to Powell's credit that he got the ball away on that one.

It looked like they were trying to punt to one sideline or the other but the kicks were often drifting back out in the middle of the field. Or going 25 yards and straight out of bounds. It wasn't much of a clinic on directional punting for sure.

Ugly looking. At least he is walking...

Getting the Trent Edwards treatment...

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I think you mean Phlippa Byrd,

If you think I am trying to absolve the FO somehow, you're dead wrong. But, in a larger sense, yes. If the OC convincingly argues that he can polish a turd and make it great, then the GM might actually be swayed into believing him. During Gailey's stint, he was the HC and OC, so there was no checks and balances there. OTOH, if the OC is demanding in every meeting that he can't win with the QB he has, then that should have an influence in a well-run organization that pays attention to the people trying to do their jobs well. BTW, I admit that I am not certain it really was all Gailey. Gailey may have accepted the job under the condition that salvaging the QBs from Jauron's roster was his priority. Indeed, if that was what the inner circle wanted it would go a long way to explaining why the job was considered (and turned out to be) purely toxic to most of the available coaches at the time.

I get where you are coming from here. To make an analogy of my previous post. Say you are a carpenter building houses and have plenty of competition in your market. You run out of nails. You could drive across town and buy some to continue working on the project. Or you could start whittling some pegs and drilling holes because, well, your name is Chan and you're battery is dead in your nail gun anyway. While whittling pegs might be working to an extent, the dummies with the nail guns already have their houses on the market for sale. Who's the greater mind?

And, even there it is debatable (and why this topic keeps coming back). Does it make sense to classify someone that insists on beating his brains out against a brick wall "great"? Gailey had some success with QBs like Kordell Stewart, Reggie Ball, Tyler Thigpen, and Ryan Fitzpatrick. He was able to wring production out of QBs that weren't the most talented and had severe flaws to their games. He could get the chains moving when he had little more than a bag of spare parts to work with. But, he was a masochist of sorts. Greatness takes care of itself if a coach realizes that in this business what is most important is beating the opposition and not really trying to work miracles while losing respectably.

Interesting that Manuel is not even mentioned in that piece.

They're the only team further under the cap than the Bills.

On the other hand, is Manuel, coming off a bum knee, really a big running threat in a zone read game? He has 13 carries to 75 by Spiller and Jackson. That's nearly a 6 to 1 ratio and any NFL DC out there (other than Wannstedt) is going to know what to do -- can you say "tendency"? While Manuel may be misreading things, the concept may not be so great if Manuel isn't really going to run the ball for whatever reason.

Is that your response to my post? My post was a response to K-9's demand for someone to do his homework for him. I freely admit the numbers aren't "facts", but that's sort of the game with answering an ambiguous question. PS: I don't have a dog in this fight. For instance, has it been shown ToP differential is directly correlated to how "tired a defense" happens to be as measured by some (well defined) standard and while controlling all other variables? I doubt it.

OK, I'm bored. Buffalo is 28th in the NFL with a 3rd down conversion rate of 31.1%. The average number of possessions is 10-14. Let's just say an average NFL play takes 5 seconds. Let's guess the Bills take 10 seconds off the 40 second play clock. If both teams go as slow as possible, then there is 80 plays per game. If both teams go at the bogo-jack-rabbit pace, there are 240. Now, nearly all NFL teams are more likely to get 1st downs based on 3rd down conversion rates than the Bills. Say the average is about 38%. That would mean that 7% more of the time, the average team is going to get a first down on 3rd down, whereas the Bills wouldn't. If we further pretend both teams play at a pretend Hackett-rabbit pace and wave our hands, we get that the opponent runs say 128.4 plays for 32:06 of possession. But, if the other team runs in slo-mo, then they might have a ToP of 48:15. Of course, we could've just looked at the gamebooks and had real, true facts to deal with. The Bills are more than 10 minutes behind on average in ToP. Time of Possession 24:47 35:12 http://www.nfl.com/teams/buffalobills/statistics?team=BUF

Isn't that an offense's job? Tired or not? "In other news, NFL offenses will try to score points this weekend!"

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[This is an automated response] 3 threads all on the same topic and bunched together.

You forgot Leonhard. You look at some of those photos and its easy to tell that the line is getting caved in on some of those plays. No LB is going to be able to "fill a gap" that is more than 10 yards wide. At least not consistently.

Oh, go float in Lake Ontario, will ya?

Bad reads would be on Manuel. Hesitating would be on Spiller. Getting blown up at the point of attack, in those 5 plays, would be 4 of the Bills 5 lineman.

Well, they did hit the daily double on Legursky and Kolb. PS: And, the Browns were trying to pass them in cap space... you can't have everything after all.

Wait, why is this even an issue? Isn't finding a decent LG as easy as finding a bucket of water in the middle of the ocean?

"You can never have too much veteran depth at fullback," said no coach.

I think you missed the point. Obviously most teams that fire their coaching staffs and hire new ones, which is the only way a rookie head coach gets a job, weren't exactly winning the Super Bowl the previous year. The point is that several teams with rookie head coaches were more than average active in free agency, which means that they were necessarily bringing in veterans in that coach's first year as only veterans are eligible for free agency. It's not good to try draw generalities and norms from the operation of the Bills and Browns.