Ronin

I'm guessing that they liked Alonso for his INTs. Under Pettine the D, at all other costs apparently, was weighted heavily towards stopping the pass.

Once the kids are no longer playing college ball and declare for the Draft, the rules for accepting stuff like that, getting advances, etc., are all non-applicable.

Not sure I get the same take from the piece as the optimism is here. From the article: Wilson's estate is in the process of hiring an investment banking firm that would oversee the sale of the team, which is expected to go to the highest bidder. Apart from completely busting the notion that Wilson did all that he could to keep the team in Buffalo, this pretty much leaves the fate of the sale of the team in the hands of the highest bidder, not necessarily one that would keep the team in WNY. The other owners really are going to have the final say. If they want the team in Buffalo, it'll be there, if not, then it likely won't since they have to approve the owners. I don't even rule out some collective buyout of the team's lease if those owners want the team elsewhere badly enough. In other words, if the team can generate umpteen more million dollars of revenue elsewhere, with what would likely be a much much higher revenue producing ceiling, the league may see that it makes more financial sense to pay some renegotiated portion of the cost, or pay it entirely, to do just that. $400M is really not that much in NFL terms. Divide that by 31 other teams, even on a sliding scale, as well as another state or municipality, and it shouldn't be difficult to see that that is really not the transfer barrier that everyone seems to think it is in calling it a showstopper for the most part. Perhaps I'm just skeptical in this way given the times over the years that Buffalo seems to have been a sticking point for many of the other owners in one way or another but always revolving around finances. Remember, the rest of the league wants the stadium named after a corporate interests for purposes of additional revenue generation despite how relatively little that would be for each owner/team. WNY doesn't seem to have the magnitude of businesses that would typically pay for that. I don't see anything in the piece that claims that the front-runners are a bidder that would keep the team in WNY. I see lots of interest, and at least rumors of one group, implicitly more groups, that want to do that. But bidding always involves what a state, county, a/o city is willing to put up in cash that they take from the taxpayers, in order to finance a new stadium. No matter how we slice it, it's hardly a slam dunk that NYS is that entity. Surely Erie County has little, it's not as if they are in a position to add much, it'll be all state. As it is, the county ranks below average in median income. Secondly, the team has to stay here, but it also has to then clean house and put in a front office that has a clue. They can give Whaley another season or two, but if it remains on the path of what it's been since he's been here since 2010 as AGM, then time to go and clean house. Would that happen? Because if it doesn't, I don't see why anything would change in terms of this team ever becoming competitive. As I've said since the news originally broke that the team may not sell for several years, I fully expect that a deal will get done within the next 15 months. We obviously won't know until it plays out, but it's going to be a long-term decision, not a short-term one. The State isn't going to build a stadium and re-do a lease for some short-term or indefinite period of time. I'm curious where other ownership interests might be interested in moving the team. We really haven't heard much besides the perpetually rumored L.A., but there are a number of other cities that would be more suitable than Buffalo, bigger cities with greater ability to do what the modern NFL wants, namely sell out corporate luxury suites and PSLs. I suspect that they might be quietly biding their time until the post-Wilson-passing fallout subsides.

What do you mean "not asking too much from Manuel, much like in Seattle?" Wilson's done a ton there. This is QB in the NFL, much is expected. The job ain't for weenies. Leaders are what leaders do. Be eratic and inconsistent, with gross inaccuracy issues, poor decision making, and the inability to string 4, or at least 3, quarters of good solid football together, and good luck being a leader, at least an effective leader.

LMAO What is this, comedy hour.

LOL And Michael Jasper, remember that hype, about the "workout video." Imagine we had competent personnel guys and good coaching.

He's been the Asst. GM for four seasons prior to now and supposedly brought on for his personnel prowess next to a braindead and numbskull GM that everyone from the media on down was applauding just a few years ago when he came on. Where's been this big splash so far? What, Mario a few seasons ago for stupid money? This offseason in free agency's been a wash at best. It's good to hope, but as usual, many fans are overrating Whaley and downplaying his supposed role for four prior seasons here for reasons of polemical expedience. We'll see what the draft holds, but last year's draft was one of the best in years simply for Alonso and Woods, and in theory at least, Nix was in charge. But if we want to give Whaley credit, then he should also get "credit" for the three prior drafts too. I'll believe that Whaley's as good as many seem to think when he puts us in the playoffs. I don't see that on the radar now though. I've love to see it, but I just don't right now. The drafting of Manuel will in hindsight be the move that sent Marrone to the showers and the team's continued insistence on sticking with him will see to that.

The entire approach to building a team, which Polian understands but which no one in our FO of any influence does, is what changed the balance in the AFCE. Even the great and wonderful cheating Belicheat has notable chinks in his armor there. He's not a great GM. He's lucky he's had Brady and that Bledsoe got hurt that year, or he'd be doing what we've been doing with QBs like Bledsoe and a litany of who knows which others. Brady's a once-in-a-coaching-career find. Even back then though, the Bills' secondary really wasn't all that. It was very average but just "played well" because of the front-7. We had killer depth in the F7 too back then.

The division was a lot different back then. There was no modern day Pats or anything equivalent. It was a division full of mediocre slop. Like most people that aren't Pats fans, I detest Belicheat and his brand of "morality" and ethics, but as long as he's coaching that team with Brady at the helm they'll overachieve regularly and win the division. Ryan's a very good coach too. If you don't think that the coaching in the AFCE is good now, it was worse back then.

You touched on something relevant. Good teams that are missing one or two or even just a few key players can afford to "trade up" for that highly ranked/touted player, but teams like the Bills should be trading down trying to fill as many spots with true starting caliber players as possible. We have a good 10 spots, at least, where we are forced to start depth caliber players. And for us it always seems to be a one-step-forward, one-step-backward approach. We sign a guy like Spikes, forgetting that he's entirely one-dimensional, for a truly ballhawking FS that's among the best in the league. We'll see how that plays out, but in a passing league I easily view that as being a net loss. Then in free-agency of course the team talks big and becomes the league's biggest investor in turd polish. This team is in absolutely no position to assume the ever-growing list of risks associated with Clowney. That could very well be another McKelvin type mistake. This team's front office has such a glaring lack of understanding as to how to build a team, a statement for which there is absolutely no defense at this point.

To me the cheerleaders add nothing to a pro game. The entire point of it, going back, was primarily that, to lead cheers. Well the cheerleaders have all been replaced, and then some, with all of the electronic gadgetry at stadiums including the huge scoreboards that can say whatever they want along with the ribbon scoreboards and those immense sound systems. The cheerleaders anymore are nothing but a distraction for commercials and the league knows it. But I'm not even sure that they need that anymore with cell phones and PDAs and the like. I would argue differently for college football b/c it's more student oriented.

Not sure what your point was/is. Spikes is a one-dimensional MLB as we will see this season. He's an asset vs. the run but he's equally a liability vs. the pass. In a league whereby more plays, by about then again 50% or so, plays are passing plays, we'll see how that works out for us. Chandler and Corey Graham are so-so starters, everyone else is a depth caliber player on that short list. Again, not sure what your point was. Mine was very simply that the team broke the bank and poured all but the sum total of its resources last season into the pass rush, which was highly successful, but the net result was the same, which the more astute NFL fans, observors, media, and analysts knew already, and the rest of the team suffered as a result, as in regressed for the most part. Not to mention that at the end of the day the team allowed more scores despite that bolstered pass rush. Meanwhile, fans and media look at isolated stats, aka "sacks," et. al., and for some unbeknownst and similar reasons as per above, come to the erroneous conclusions that players like A. Williams, McKelvin (who's sucked as a CB for years), Hughes, Searcy, and Lawson, and to a lesser extent Mario, are better than they actually are. Buffalonians are so starving for a good team that they overlook that stuff perennially and utterly fail to be able to assess the new team going forward. McKelvin is a classic example, if he were worth the proverbial ****, he'd have proven that prior to last season. He's failed miserably as anything but a nickel back at best, even there he's hardly among the better 3rd CBs in the league.

If that ain't the truth. You have my vote. But then that reduces part of the NFL's marketing campaign and therefore their money, ... can't have that now.

That's Redskin cheerleaders. They're hardly cream of the crop as well, but they're head and shoulders above the Jills. Let's face it, the Jills among other teams' cheerleaders are about as competitive as the team has been this century.

You got that right about Trump! He's an oxygen grabber. Bleacher Report did this, or one of their stiff writers? McKelvin? Seriously?

Depth isn't the issue, starting talent is. Half of their starting talent is of depth caliber.

Just like most powerful and influential enormous corporations, rules can and will be bent and changed for them in the courts. Not to mention that they can tie up opponents in court costing them millions if necessary, which is chump change for the NFL. I anticipate that this whole notion that the Bills can't leave Buffalo until 2020 will play out quite differently for exactly that reason. Despite the fact that we all want the team to remain here, the fact is that the region simply is no longer capable of sustaining an NFL team, by the NFL's corporate-driven standards along with PSL licensing, whether we are honest enough to admit that to ourselves or not being irrelevant. Buffalo is a blue collar "lunch pail" kinda town, not one that fits the current NFL model for teams. I personally can't stand where the NFL has taken itself, but unfortunately that doesn't matter either. It wasn't that long ago that the Bills were competitive, only 20 years or so ago, and during the Kelly/Bruce/Thurman/Reed era, it was still very much a blue-collar kinda gig. For us Buffalonians it still is, but for the NFL it is not. I see this pushing north of the border and much more quickly than we all assume. $400M is really not all that much, and all it's going to take is a new owner telling the county, behind closed doors of course, that he/she/they will simply let the team "rot" in Buffalo for its last few years, or they can take the grease money and feign something like that the county gets nothing if the team simply leaves and that "this way" the county would at least get a buyout at a fraction of that $400M, which of course they'll sell to the public as a good deal. Entirely lost will be the irony that having and NFL team is supposed to have a net positive impact on the economy, including getting all those taxpayer dollars back, a false notion, but one that will be stood on its head nonetheless if/when that happens, likely without anyone challenging it like that. This entire thing, including where the NFL has taken itself, could not be a whole lot more tragic, particularly for WNY-ers. And frankly, if we cannot have a "blue collar" team/stadium etc., then I'm not sure that I'm all that interested. I've seen what this does, as many of us have, to football in other cities, like D.C. for example.

OTOH, I'd say that it's quite likely that after a season or two one of the top WRs in this Draft would be an upgrade over Stevie. Stevie is a low end starting WR. He's more of a slot WR than he is a big-play WR. He'll never post much more than the 1,000 yards than he's barely eclipsed in three of the last four seasons. Last season he was outperformed by a rookie WR. His 12.7 ypr is tremendously mediocre as well. For every great play he seems to make two stupid mistakes or some on-field lapse in reason that costs his team just as much going the other way.

One way or the other regarding the new owners, IMO $1B is somewhere around max, if that, if the team is to stay in Buffalo or the surrounding region. If the price is significantly higher, expect a deal to have been struck to be able to move the team within 2-3 years of buying it if not sooner. A huge chunk of the viability of a team's location is the corporate dollars in the community, and let's face it, amidst NYS politics/taxation, we all know that such a base no longer exists in WNY or even CNY anymore. It once did, but every non-service corporation worth a ****, for the most part, has moved its HQ out of the region as a direct result of strangling taxes. Toronto compares to Boston or Charlotte in terms of being a financial center. So figure that regardless of the asking price, if a Canadian interest purchases the team, it will be to move it across the border. Only a fool would not given the options. The question would then be would such a move, say to Hamilton, not geographically distant from Buffalo or Niagara Falls, although more so from Rochester and other population centers in WNY, be enough to retain the majority of the current base of Bills fans. I don't think it would although to each his own. I would drop my interest in the team at that point to merely a passing interest. I doubt that I would ever make the trip to Canada for a game, even if I still lived there. Everyone that's expecting that the team cannot possibly be moved however should be cautioned. A deal can be struck with a buyout for the county, to move that team much sooner than the 2020 of which everyone speaks. None of that stuff is written such that it cannot be altered, and it could very well come down to the other 31 teams pitching in to buyout that clause, at what, just over $10M per team, to have it moved and expand the NFL's market to Canada, aka internationally, which it's wanted to do for years now. Could even be less per team. I mean what would the county execs do if the NFL told them that the team would not be there anyway past 2019 (or whatever season), and offered the country $100 to $200M to settle that? Naturally I'd also expect some money to have changed hands behind closed doors that we'll never see or hear about prior to it being too late, maybe never. Now that (IMO) enough time has passed, if Wilson really wanted to keep the team in Buffalo and really "did all that he could do to see to that," he'd have sold it to an interest that promised and wanted to keep it in Buffalo while he was still alive. IMO he did not do so for selfishly motivated reasons. I realize that that sentiment is going to be about as popular as a turd in a swimming pool on a hot summer day, but that's a fact, that if he wanted to do the most that he could to keep the team in WNY he'd have sold it to an owner that would do so while he could have. There is far too much uncertainty now, and while we're all excited about the possibility of Trump buying the team, there too, other people have more money than Trump for one, and secondly, he could very well just be doing it for publicity, and lastly, Trump's the one that challenged the NFL head-on w/ the USFL, which might end up being a showstopper for him in terms of ownership.

Regarding this question; Is Buffalo big enough to support an NFL franchise? The focus of that question is on the wrong thing. Clearly the region has enough fans, but today's NFL isn't predicated upon selling individual tix at $70 apiece, it's built around PSLs and selling luxury suites. So really, the question needs to be whether or not Buffalo (and/or WNY) are economically viable enough to allow owners to do that. Clearly that's hardly the case. This article is probably the best I've read on the subject; http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2014/03/05/absence-of-toronto-game-wont-slow.html?page=all Excerpts; Brandon spoke to Business First last week before the Bills announced their decision, and would only say at the time it was still being evaluated. But he did discuss the Bills strategy for long-term financial viability in a small market — a viability that could be tested in the coming years as an expensive new stadium or retrofit at the Ralph is analyzed, and, eventually, as a new ownership group considers how much money it can make in Buffalo. That last part will be the determining factor, which will include which city builds a new stadium for the team. The major disparities in revenue between teams come from gameday revenue, sponsorships, local media deals and other forms of corporate support. Buffalo simply cannot produce the support for filling luxury suites and it's not a PSL town at the individual level. Unfortunately, but hey, that's what NYS taxes have done. A look at the total personal income, or TPI, of Buffalo and Rochester offers an example of the combined wealth of the two cities. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2012, Buffalo ranked 56th among U.S. metropolitan areas at $48.5 billion while Rochester was 58th at $47.4 billion. Combined, the two markets would rank 33rd and, coincidentally, just ahead of fellow NFL markets Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City and Indianapolis. This was two years ago and clearly hasn't improved since then. Also, it takes both Rochester and Buffalo markets to compete. Also, ... The Bills released a joint statement between Brandon and Keith Pelley, president of Rogers Media, announcing a “robust sponsorship agreement for the 2014 season that will bring Canadian NFL fans visibility and access to the Bills.” That agreement includes ticketing, merchandise, media outreach and a newly created Canada House near the Ralph for Canadian tailgaters. “The NFL remains very popular in Canada and we are dedicated to enriching the experience for the fans,” the statement said. If true, namely that the NFL is very popular in Canada, then I suspect it would be a lot more popular if Canada/Ontario had its own team. It stands to reason.

If selling the team becomes hindered because of this anchor to keep the team in Buffalo, watch how fast they work something out to buy out that clause for relatively cheap. Not to mention, grease a couple of key politicians to feign crying in their soup over what may be the inevitable anyway, and see how fast all this changes.

Have you actually watched Corey Graham play? I've seen most Ravens games and I'm telling you, in addition to how he ranks all over the web, Graham is not that good, he's massively inconsistent. I'm not even going to argue that. If you'd seen him you'd know. As to "issues," the team's the one with the issues, not me. LOL Not sure what most of your statements even have to do with the topic at hand. Sounds more just like a personal perspective kumbaya piece. I'm not here to mock anyone, and if you perceive that I do I promise you that it's in response to a first volley and on like terms. Otherwise, I'll tell you what doesn't matter here, it's what any or all of us collectively think. It matters not a hill of beans. But there are facts. Do you really think that Mario's worth the most money of any defensive player in the league? Yeah, I didn't think so. I cannot believe that you're implicitly defending the personnel moves of the most futile team in NFL history and then challenging my opinions which explain why. You talk about me in a negative way, but your types come and go every season, and instead of being steady and rationale opiners, your types always talk about how things are improving, how dunces that we hire were actually good hires and "are starting to turn things around," etc., but then come November your types go psychotic leaning 100% in the other direction getting ready to drop nukes on OBD. Now, remind me again of my positions. I have to laugh, this just in, but the team sucks and has sucked for well over a decade. Talk isn't going to change it. Novice coaching that hasn't even proven that they belong in the league likely aren't going to change it. Now, the topic of the thread was how the team is run as it relates to how bad we are, generally speaking. You want intelligent debate? I've got all you can handle starting with a whole bunch of questions that you won't answer honestly if you're really intertested. But let's face it, you just want to BILL-ieve the fluff that they throw at you, and feel free. Just don't expect everyone else to buy the same nonsense. Some of us are more astute than that. Otherwise, this thread has seen numerous posts stating false premises regarding the sale of the team. Maybe start your criticism there? The bottom line is that until proven otherwise, there is not someone in charge that proves that they know how to build a team. For the last bunch of years Wilson resigned himself to allowing numerous people make key decisions, if not spanning far further back that that even. That does not appear to be on the cusp of changing anytime soon now. I suppose the singular hope is Whaley, but if we're going to be honest we've not seen anything particular from him thus far either. The best I'm willing to concede on Whaley is that he's largely unknown and this will be his second Draft/offseason. Having said that thus far his moves have been neutral at best on a poor team. What is ridiculous is to give him credit for every positive move and none of the responsibility for the negative ones while blaming those all on Nix over the last four years. The bottom line is that until this team posts 9 wins, nothing's really changing, is it. Dogness, here, I've done your homework for you. My statements regarding Graham have been based on my own observations, so here's a piece with a little more objectivity on Graham. http://articles.balt...webb-and-graham If after reading that anyone thinks that Byrd will not be missed I just don't know what to say. That's if Graham even takes his spot at all. If not he'll just be depth or a nickel CB at best, and even then only because we're short decent CBs.

Well, he just screwed up then.

We'll see, but there is nothing historically to indicate that things will change. Brandon's been a part of the process either way. As has been mentioned here repeatedly by a number of people, it's the entire front office and coaching staff. I still say that Marrone's going to tank, perhaps at least partially as a result of his friendship and choice of Hackett who's clealry an anchor that's dragging the ship under and a coach that hasn't earned the right to coach in the NFL. And while Schwartz may correct some things, my early analysis tells me that he's going to lapse in some things as well likely resulting in a net-zero type of change. As to Whaley, everyone gives him credit for all the positives involving the FO but none of the responsibility for the many failures since he's been here as the Asst. GM with everyone insisting that Nix was nothing but a figurehead in hindsight. Can't anyone see the lack of logic there? We'll see, but to me this whole thing is simply the next installment and upgrade of the rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.