Ronin

Like the NFL hasn't changed a bit since then. The only coaches in recent history that won SBs with non top shelf QBs were Gruden in Tampa with Brad Johnson and Billick with Dilfer and both QBs are better than what we have. Johnson was an average QB even. Still, that was then, this is now. The NFL has changed things so that the passing game now dominates the game.

I'm curious why not. Besides the secondary, and at least for now pending the free agency period, he'd have better defensive talent here than in NY and no worse a QB situation. He's never had great RBs or WRs or even a TE either, so with competent management, which I'm not sure we'll get going forward but which wouldn't be his fault, he should be able to make the most of what we have. His Jets have played the Pats more competitively than we have, usually with less talent than we've had. That's worth something. Pretty much anyone else we don't know what we're going to get, could be the next Jauron, Gailey, or Marrone and probably will be.

2004 was the first winning season in 5 years back then. You can see the results since then. We maxed out at 9 wins and it likely wouldn't have been a winning season if the final game had meant anything at all to the Pats. As the first respondent said, the coaching hire will determine the mood in here. Why do I see Kyle Shanahan being our next coach.

That's it right there. Not sure about 90% that seems a bit high, but you're right, some here will defend anything in a Bills uniform and then the second that they're off the team they're homos and losers. Marrone wasn't the best liked choice for coach, but it's interesting to see that quite a few people supported him, but now that he's gone, all of a sudden things that were rumored prior to us hiring him are becoming higher profile in the media, and all of a sudden the guy's a dirtbag. The same exact things could have come out if he were still the coach and those slamming him now would be defending him. There's way too much emotion in most opinions here.

It's an entirely different season now. That's beside the point, this is a record-setting season for rookie WRs period, by a long shot. So that makes no sense. Also, most, it not all of those WRs, were not the immediate #1s on their team. CJ wasn't. He was the 3rd. Bryant was the 3rd too after Witten and Austin. So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Also, the one that promised a massive increase in offensive performance was Whaley, not me. You guys misplace your anger and dissatisfaction with the team on fellow posters. We're not responsible, the FO is. And they've failed in a grand fashion. So take these things up with them, facts are facts. By the way, you're going to start seeing a whole lot more great rookie classes for WRs in the future, the rules in the NFL are accommodating the passing game like never before. Look at the QB yardage totals and TD totals. This is like aluminum bats in MLB.

Well, but you have to remember, he made a living on those "two yard pass plays" at Clemson. In fact, he caught some absurd number of passes behind the line there. The copy on him was that he just needed the ball, much as with Spiller, and then magic would happen. So we can say what you said, but that wasn't what they said about him coming out. It was supposed to be his freakish atheticism and after-the-catch stuff that was supposed to make him so dangerous, but that never materialized, obviously. If it were true, then you wouldn't be complaining about him not being used properly. When people say that it's usually, whether they realize it or not, indicative that a player simply wasn't as good as some people had expected, in this case most of the draft guru world. Some got it right, but most thought that Watkins was going to be a phenom. This would be different if the WRs that outplayed him played more, started more, and had better QBs, but that isn't true. Evans had crap for QBs, Newton had a terrible season, Hurns and Robinson in Jax had crap. People gripe about Orton but he exceeded his career per-game average here in Buffalo, it was his best season ever. Granted, not great, but still, his best ever. I'm not the one to ask there. I'm also not the one that traded two additional picks for him. I would have preferred Beckum, I also would have taken Hill in round two, it's on record somewhere. We can argue, but let's face it, this FO blows.

Shouldn't that befall Whaley? Where I'm at a loss is with how many posters seem to support Whaley, but we have no QB, largely due to him if not exclusively due to him, no RBs, nothing special at TE, questionable WRs at least to top levels, and opinions overall seem to be demonstrative that the talent on the OL is not good either. In short, he's got the offense in shambles and yet still has his job. Yeah, but that's clearly not going to happen. The time to have done that was last week. Pegula's missed the boat on this one. I hear lots of fans complaining about the Sabres, and I have no idea how there's any contrary argument there, but it seems as if he's pulling the same nonsense he played there.

This is the case with the front office too.

Of course he does. Last season he poured all of his resources into trying to correct incorrectable things about Manuel. I'm sure that he's shocked that he still has a job and can thank Mr. "Golly Gee, I'm the new owner of the Bills" for even still having a significant job. I'm guessing he'd trade the entire draft if he could to find a way to make EJ go. Hence our problem. His remaining in place is going to cost this organization for a long time and us as fans too.

Gee, I wonder which one will finish last. The ironic thing is that we could have had Hill with our 2nd rounder. I see no reason why we couldn't have traded down our 1st and gotten Bridgewater and Beckum or one of the other very good WRs too. Bridgewater, Hill, & one of the other top WRs from that class is a helluva lot > Watkins. That's what a good front office would have done for us. Instead they put their faith in Manuel and assumed that Spiller was going to arbitrarly do something he's never done and that Jackson was going to reverse the clock on the aging process. So here we are, sans a QB, sans a RB, and sans a 1st round pick instead. Yeah, wonderful. Great that Sammy's a finalist though.

A good front office would have traded down, ignored Manuel and never drafted him just oh by the way, in the trade down have aquired Carr or Bridgewater, another WR, possibly Beckum or Benjamin, and have taken Jeremy Hill in round two also. But we don't have a good front office and haven't. It takes vision to be able to do this, our FO has none. It shouldn't have been difficult to realize that a 33-year old RB isn't going to carry your team, that a marginal role player that puts up a big play every fourth or fifth game isn't a reliable RB, that Brown wasn't much more than that, and that Dixon was anything else but a short-tough yardage kinda RB. With faulty assumptions come faulty conclusions. Our FO specializes in faulty assumptions. Is this relevant? Thanks though.

Anyone that wants to know the truth instead of overreacting with emotionalism as well. Some people here will defend anything that wears a Bills uniform. That includes the front office. At some point, I was hoping that it would be the change of ownership, I guess no though, that's going to have to change if we're going to become a good team. Right now due to a glaring lack of vision this team's cupboards are bare in the QB & RB departments. You don't just build that up in one or even two offseasons, especially when you're missing two key picks from a dumb trade the year prior. Once again, our mavelous front office that doesn't appear to be changing at all.

Funny you say that, pretty much anytime anyone introduces and facts that run contrary to the agendas of others, the label "troll" makes an appearance. Instead of targets, let's talk catch % which is a whole lot more relevant. Obviously starting WRs get more targets than others. Jordan Matthews, Hurns, and Landry are the only other rookie WRs to have started all 16 games. None was the primary target all season like Watkins was. As far as catch % goes, Watkins ranks 9th for rookies with more than 500 yards receiving and behind Cooks, Landry, Beckum, Matthews, Robinson, Evans, Bryant, and Hurns. Sorry, but dems da facts.

OK, that's fine, let's apply that same standard to the rest of the rookies then. When you do you'll see how lackluster he was in comparison. Beckum started only75% of the games that Watkins started, Benjamin, with no better maybe a worse QB situation started one less game, both had 12 TDs and more yards. A number of other rookies outperformed Watkins on a per-game basis. Most had no better QB situations, again, some worse. About half were backups or 3rd WRs.

And he's the only player to play hurt? That seemed to have run its course. Then it was a hammy, then it was some other injury that I forget. Excuses! He didn't seem to have any trouble in the few big games that he put up sporadically. So what, we're to understand that his injuries magically disappeared for those games interwoven in between the ones that he played like a chump? The excuses that some make for some of our underachieving players is pathetic. As expressed above, he's a big boy and time for him to put his big boy pants on, not having to have excuses made for why he barely even played like a 1st-rounder much less like a great one and worse than a bunch of others drafted after him. As I've said, all we heard was, just like Spiller, wait for him to get the ball in his hands. Well he had it in his hands, 65 times, and his stunning plays and demonstrations of marvel were few and far between in that way. He wasn't outside of the ordinary for a starting WR. It really isn't a question of a straight up trade. If you think about it, a good GM may have been able to finagle getting Carr or Bridgewater, Benjamin or Beckum, and Jeremy Hill last year with a trade down to net the QB and WR instead of one trade up to net a WR that is no better than the other two. Watkins is here, he'll be fine, but he was not worth that idiotic trade. This, as usual, is a referendum on the front office, which just oh by the way hasn't changed a wink since Pegula took over. The worst, most prolific, and longest running issues of this team are still all but fully in place.

Right, it's all everyone's fault around him. Naturally the WRs that did better had perfectly thrown balls all season. Do you ever look at stats and data? Watkins ranked 21st (according to ESPN) in targets, same as Calvin Johnson. All we heard about when we drafted him was about the damage he was going to do after catching the ball. He had a few big plays after the catch but most of the time he was no better than the average NFL WR. And what, Benjamin, Evans, Landry, and Matthews all had great QBs throwing them the ball perfectly on target all the time? Maybe we should be asking fans how they feel now lighter by 1st and 4th round picks heading into the draft. Poor poor Watkins, did everything perfectly, nothing his fault. Come on ...

He doesn't. It just takes some people longer than others to figure this out. Unfortunately, some of those others are in key roles on the team, including Whaley, who's in a fox guarding the henhouse position right now in an enormous conflict of interests. I was hoping for a change in the organization resulting in competence. I didn't realize that we would go from a 3-ring circus to a 5-ring circus in a "new and improved" circus. Honestly, you can't make half the **** that's happening to this organization up.

That person should be fired then. This is a fiasco. The cart's before the horse, there are all kinds of organizational issues, and I mean standard ones that shouldn't exist in any organization much less a people oriented one. I see no reason to think that this isn't all at face value. Hammering that notion home is the fact that things have been around this dysfunctional for years, should we really have believed that novice owners would have a smooth plan in place? If so, wouldn't the time to evaulate have been from the time that the Pegula's were approved as owners 'til the end of the season?

You got that right.

LOL I distinctly remember when he came here how many fans were on board with his hiring. I'm sure a lot of the same ones that support what's going on now. And yet, the people still here made the decision to hire him, again, with many here applauding the move. This org is so dysfunctional it reeks.

Maybe Marrone (or whomever) wanted Bridgewater or Carr, both of whom had excellent seasons on **** teams. Teams worse than ours. Bridgewater's last 9 games were very good. Think about it, we could have finagled a trade down that would have netted us Bridgewater or Carr and Benjamin or Beckum given what we did. The problem with this place is that everyone gets angry emotionally and blames the people that have left instead of the people that remain. The shittiest part of this team, its biggest problems, are still firmly in place.

If that's true then it sounds like the single person most needing firing is Whaley. This makes particular sense given the disagreements between Whaley and Marrone. It also makes more sense than anything we've heard to date for a variety of reasons the least of which is hardly the FO's propensity to want to retain as much power as possible. Pegula should have been looking into these things quietly during the season. The fact that they're/he are wasting time now having to sort thru all this bull **** might very well mean that he too is in over his head right now.

Well, I think that it's safe to say that he's not in NYC, Chicago, LA, or in his original stomping grounds in Florida. Odds are.

Absolutely all of the candidates mentioned thus far besides Ryan and Shanahan would be purely a roll of the dice. None have significant experience and are far more likely to become Peter Principle candidates than they are good head coaches. I like Ryan because with a team like the Jets, very similar to the Bills in many ways, he has managed to beat New England. It would be refreshing just to have hopes of beating them every season again. Shanahan's had his ups and downs but all in all has been largely successful. We can't fault him for the situation in Washington, which unfortunately has similarities to the one here. Both he and Ryan may shy from our situation due to the similarities in their FOs at those two places that hampered their successes there, QB and FO/personnel issues. Either way, of the choices, those are the ones I'd go with. Reich is a nice emotional story, but the odds of him or any of the rest being better head coaches than terrible ones are not good, here or anywhere, that's just the odds in the NFL. We really don't need another roll of the dice at this point, we need proven competence. Easy to say with Peyton at the helm. I'm sure you'd have seen something similar here if he had been our QB, even with Marrone & Hacker in charge.

The fact that Whaley's in charge of this is not a good sign. He's going to hire a yes-man for himself. Done properly they should have replaced him first, he's made far too many high-level critical errors that have damaged the intermediatre future of this franchise. They should hire the right coach however long it takes to find him. Whaley's got far too big a personal conflict of interests in this.