Sisyphean Bills

Why not? Many of the Bills better players were acquired then.

Thigpen is a UFA as well. And he was ahead of TJax on the depth chart all season. Maybe we should worry about losing him as well? Would it really be such a bad thing to blow up the QB position (replace Fitz and Smith too)? Are journeyman backup QBs who can wear a baseball hat that hard to find?

The irony is that Fitzpatrick was brought in after a poor season with the Bengals, a season in which he set a record for fewest yards per pass attempt, and it was widely accepted that it was because he would not seriously challenge a young, developing Trent Edwards.

He knows what a blitz is at least.

Why would Nix have to go above Gailey? Gailey worked for him. This paragraph is evidence that Gailey and Nix were not on the same page and that Gailey was not manipulating Nix like a puppet. Nix brought in two athletes who apparently bonded to Chan's offense like oil to water. (By the way, Thigpen was a pistol QB -- see Kaepernick -- and Smith was signed as a wildcat QB. So really, the only pocket QB that was capable of running the Brady-light offense was Fitzpatrick.)

It's amusing that so many credit Nix as The Big Kahuna Decision Maker in San Diego, particularly all the good decisions. If he made all the good decisions for AJ Smith (who was asleep at the wheel by this line of reasoning) then someone please explain why the !@#$ Buddy's top talent evaluator decision making skills, now that he is actually an NFL GM, are so below average.

You can do as you'd like, but I'm not giving Buddy kudos for figuring out that QB is an important position after 3 years on the job because he suggested that he's going after a QB in a weak QB draft class. Neither Seattle nor Washington sat on their hands waiting for the perfect QB to land in their laps. Both those teams have been much more aggressive in the last 3 years than Nix has been. And both organizations found a QB, a strong indication that being aggressive is better than passively waiting for perfection to find you. Ask Chan Gailey how it worked for him.

That is exactly the point. Neither is a superstar, but either could have gotten on a hot streak and won a few games. Not having the will-power to even attempt to get one of them ready to put on the field is a failure. I'm not sure anyone in this thread is really saying they think Buddy has handled the QB position well. It's very clear that he has not. He has sent a stream of cast-offs and ne'er-do-wells in Gailey's direction. Gailey did absolutely nothing with them. He didn't fix Trent Edwards; he couldn't do anything with Vince Young; he left Jackson in street clothes his entire time in Buffalo. You are absolutely correct that Nix should be of his own mind on players. Just because Chan Gailey had a woody for Fitzpatrick does not mean Nix can blow off his own objectivity as well. As the GM of football, he screwed up here on several levels: he bought the line Gailey fed him that Fitzpatrick was a starter in this league (at least publicly), he brought in Young and Jackson and to a lesser degree Smith and Thigpen and none of them were suited to run the offense Gailey was trying to build around his star Harvard QB, he didn't seem to care about Gailey's lack of a backup plan with the parts he had. It didn't happen, but if Fitzpatrick had gone down for any length of time, the Bills would not have been able to compete at all without reinventing the offense from the ground up. 16-32 would get both of them canned with many owners.

So, the take away is that every position is fine except for QB and positions where the starter could become a UFA. You realize that this team didn't beat anybody with a winning record, right? Two wins came against teams that combined for 4 wins on the season.

Wrong word. They are evangelical, not hypocrites.

To the bolded sentence, on average his backups were worse; but, I don't believe Tavaris Jackson is really any worse than Fitzpatrick. They are nearly the same guy -- streaky QBs that can look adequate one minute and then implode the next. Even though the GM went out and acquired Jackson, the coach had predetermined that Jackson was never going to see the light of day. Heck, the careers of both Jackson and Fitzpatrick are similar to the point that Buffalo was the 3rd team in their journeyman careers. The one key difference is that Gailey thought he could transform Fitzpatrick into a quality QB and thought that Jackson was a huge waste of his time. Gailey might have even saved himself if he had been able to milk enough good streaky play out of one or the other of these QBs to win himself games. But, he refused and bet the house on the arm of Fitzpatrick to his ultimate demise. Edit: On the other hand, Gailey also had to fall on his sword for his hiring of Wannstedt and unwillingness to take ownership of that half of the team. The defense was an unmitigated disaster and Wannstedt actually made it worse than it was under George Edwards.

For what it is worth, Bill Walsh predicted that LBs and DBs would evolve into a hybrid type of player in the back 7 at least 30 years ago.

Could throwing around the word "analytics" be a direct response to the last 3 years of Budley mantra of "I saw him do it before" (once, years ago)?

Statistically, he is a near clone of Fitzpatrick. Although Jackson actually has a better winning percentage. I think the case was more that Chan had made up his mind that Fitzpatrick was "his guy" and nothing was going to change that opinion. (Well, short of Fitz pulling a Trentative and running out of bounds with the ball rather than pulling the trigger as time expired.) Working hard to get Jackson ready was just anathema to Gailey, particularly that he was a miracle worker who could transform Fitzpatrick into a top flight NFL QB with just a few more reps and pats on the back. (The truth is that a lot of talking heads and fans bought right into the "Gailey is a miracle man and megamind" myth building.)

The problem with this is that Chan never got Tavaris ready. CG claimed that because TJ was brought in late, that he wouldn't get enough reps over the course of an entire season to ever wear pads to a football game -- and that is exactly what happened. The truth is that TJ was not the disaster QB for the Bills; Brad Smith was. TJ was the guy in street clothes on Sunday charting plays in a baseball hat and running the scout team for the defense the rest of the week. Now, he is gone.

Well said. I hope Marrone and friends are able to make quicker evaluations with that position and get them ready quicker than the last guy.

JP Losman was a 1st rounder.

The Bills had an unclear structure after Levy stepped down. Levy was reported to be more of a figurehead anyway, so when he parachuted out the back of the plane, Brandon had the GM of Football title appended to his name. I know Brandon was involved in the talent side of the organization. He was scouting players at the combine in Indianapolis, for example. Brandon, Modrak, and Jauron were all involved. For what it's worth: Jauron was the first to get fired and Photoshopped out of history, Brandon was right on his heels and soon to get stripped of his football duties by Ralph Wilson and promoted out of the way, and finally Modrak held on a bit longer but was sent packing by Nix. So, while I agree that draft class was one of the best of the Modrak era, everyone involved in the Aaron Maybin selection got burned to some degree.

The point is that $4M is a little much for a guy that can "play all the skill positions" and none of them very well. Heck, the NFL is even phasing out the kick return game, which is Smith's biggest "contribution". He was not one of Budley's better moves in re-architecting the Bills; he was a trinket to add to the bauble box under the "Wild Bison" tab of random, identity-lacking offensive plays.

No. It's time to build a team of winners.

Picture of the brother.

Teaching Buddy operations research between practices.

You really shouldn't let them hook a turbo-powered vacuum to your ear though. http://instantrimshot.com/

Sanchez is such a flusterduck at QB, it is hard to even conceive of ways to mess him up further. Lee: "We're going to up your blooper highlights from 5 a game to 20!"