BADOLBILZ

True but I think this part gets overplayed a bit. If you look at the top 80 or so QB recruits in the 2024 class 10 of them were listed at UNDER 6 feet tall. And a bunch hovering at just 6' or 6'1". These are all 3 star and up types. Not being 6'5" played a part but I think it was way more the lack of exposure and competition. Clearly he had athleticism and a strong arm from the tape we see from time to time.

Fried is an ace so it's a big "baseball" signing. I had the displeasure of watching him dismantle the Yanks in person back on June 23rd in the Bronx. And when I think of him in the playoffs I just remember him putting away the Astros to win the WS in 2021. It was, on some levels, a historically dominant performance. Fried may just seem like a random good player to the casual baseball fan but this is also another strategic move in the Yankees/Mets battle for hearts and $$$ in NYC baseball. Just in time for the holidays!

Yeah if they go 3-1 against that schedule you gotta' tip your hat. They would have earned the 2 seed.

Yeah exposure is obviously a big part of it. Spencer Brown was also a zero-star and then athletically tested like a HOF'er at the combine. In he and Allen's cases they played in small, rural communities without much exposure or a lot of high level competition.

I guess we will see. NIL extends to HS in a lot of states now and will be all states soon enough. I think you might underestimate how much of the shrink in HS sports is about kids pursuing opportunities to earn money. That's the biggest problem in a lot of areas. Everyone's hiring and kid's want money. It's not just apathy.

Well the Eagles pulled the plug on Reid after 14 seasons. Those 14 years were full of home playoff losses and frustration. That SB he lost to Belichick was like a fever dream nightmare. THEN he blew a 28 point lead in the playoffs to the Colts and lost a playoff game at home to Mike Mularkey. 😂 Even with Mahomes he blew another huge halftime lead at home to the Bengals in the AFCCG in 2022. With Belichick washing out and then being fired the bar has gotten so much lower. He was in a class by himself for a very, very long time. There aren't any Joe Gibbs versus Bill Parcells matchups. Let alone a Bill Walsh. It's the oft-failed Reid and clever schemers with sketchy, inconsistent records like McVay and Shanahan or consistent culture guys like Tomlin, the Harbaugh bros.........and McD. I'm sure there is someone out there who would be better than McD but I am even more sure there are a lot more who would be worse.

Not necessarily disagreeing with your premise but 25 four-star players would give you the #1 ranked class. Expectations would be thru the roof even without some fives. There aren't usually close to 400 of them fours so it's hard to get a full class of nothing but them. There's only 30-35 five-stars typically and we know a lot of those will be busts and Beane will pick some of them up in UDFA one day. So it's the 300-325 four stars and probably more importantly the 2,000 or so three-stars that do most of the work.

If Patrick Mahomes doesn't come along.........Andy Reid's legacy is probably as the all-time leader in games blown by bad clock management. He has been brutal throughout his career. I know we think that McD has Allen so he should be winning SB's too...........but Reid had about a 20 year head start of making mistakes and learning from them before he got his truly elite QB. The Bills are a traditionally inept organization. And let's not kid ourselves, at this point, they are 2 moves away(losing Allen and then firing McDermott) from returning there(see Sabres, Buffalo). And they certainly weren't going to get an established, high quality HC and have him acclimate for another 5-6 seasons and THEN give him that GOAT level QB like KC was able to pull off. No f#cking chance Reid was coming to work for Ralph or Terry Pegula back then. For Buffalo, this had to happen all at once with a 3rd choice level rookie HC or it wasn't happening at all. So now they have a first time HC who has outperformed his pedigree for 7+ seasons and also still have had back to back inexperienced OC's and now a young DC etc.. No rookie OC has won a SB since Mike Holmgren with SF in the 1980's and that shouldn't even count since it was on cruise control from Bill Walsh. Experience matters more often than not and the Bills often haven't had that in their coaches. So it's been a relatively sloppy process watching McD and Allen evolve simultaneously and knowing they are at a disadvantage against a seasoned combo like Reid and Spags. If the right HC who will work with Beane is out there that will almost certainly upgrade what McBeane has been.........then bring it on. But I think with each passing season that becomes less likely to find. And don't make assumptions that they will be better at game management if they are new just because they were a clever play caller. See how y'alls boy Daboll has done as a HC. Trash. Most of the OTHER best regarded HC's in the NFL would merely be lateral moves at best to an 8+ year seasoned McD. If McVay wants to move to Buffalo I'd be interested. Not happening, and you'd always have to be wondering when he'd quit for the booth if it somehow did. Shanahan is like 0-forever/whenever against Reid so pass. Sirianni? GTFOH. 😂 Who we getting that we know won't make game management mistakes but can beat Reid sometimes? Ben Johnson? We have no idea if he can handle play calling and being HC and you only want him if he's play calling. The reality is that as much of a bummer as it is to watch McD grow into the job, the AFC west would be lined up to hire McDermott because he's 5-1 against Reid in the regular season and played him close in the playoffs twice.

What you aren't mentioning is that there isn't just one portal period. The players who can command starting guarantees can transfer in January or the spring and get away with it but most players really need the offseason to get a fair shake at playing time. And that begins with getting transferred in so they can start school in January and get in the training program and go thru spring games prepared to compete. It's not fair(or logical) to the players or the teams they are leaving to not open the portal in early December to thin out the mass of talent in the portal. I very much agree with the idea of more eligibility though. Years from now we may look back and realize that a lot of rank and file type players(and some QB's) are more useful to the NFL if they come into the league at 23-24. The stars are still leaving after 3 years but more eligibility is a good thing for the rest.

Your mind is totally in the wrong place on this. At the HS level, football is a sport that's in danger. Money needed to flow down to the college players to entice more participation at the HS level. Having the carrot 7 years away was too far. Greedy pocket stuffer football factories like Alabama didn't want to share their wealth because they make exponentially more than others. So it ended up becoming an NIL game. The system is many iterations away from the profit sharing of the NFL but NIL is doing for NCAAF something similar to what free agency did for the NFL.

I mean, he made some bad decisions and throws in the second half too. It's hard for almost any other QB to play much better than he did. But.......not for him. The last time he played the Rams in LA he was absolutely surgical. But not as memorable.

Well, yeah........but it wasn't like he pitched a perfect game against a great defense and lost. He had 2 games worth of TD's but a game and half worth of bad decisions and throws too.

Well sure he wants to get his kid a path to success........but it absolutely makes sense to have a successor in place for 73 year old HC. Obviously. As for the NIL bidding wars........they've served to level the field some. As has the portal. If not for them it would still be Georgia or Bama in perpetuity. It's not the NFL system of parity but it's better than what it was. If only for the fact that the criminal organization known as the NCAA now actually has to allow players to be paid.

That's one of the things he wants if he agrees to take the UNC job. He wants Stephen to be named HC in waiting. Which makes sense for recruiting because every other HC is going to be recruiting against BB's age. Ideally you want to know who is going to be the man in 4 years. Makes zero sense to demand that at the NFL level. I think you are conflating the two.

Oh it will be looking like the worst contract in baseball history at some point. I doubt his body will hold up to his very unnatural style of hitting. He was already trending toward DH status. But the Yankees have a billion in revenue annually. I don't care if $500M of that ends up being wasted money over 15 years. Their revenue might be $2B annually in 10 years. Doesn't matter for Yankees or Dodgers because their revenue dwarves all others. This is a big setback for the Yankees in the Judge/Cole window and Soto rakes at Citi field so should be a fun few years for Mets fans at the least and then Steve Cohen or his heirs can eat the loss personally, no problem. Scary day for small market baseball teams because a player proved how lucrative it can be NOT to take the early money. Soto can't run or play a lick of defense and he got $53M per. What would Bobby Witt have been worth if he waited instead of taking that horrible deal with KC? Gunnar Henderson gonna' have to think twice about taking less than $1B to sign early. 😂

Puka is a HOF talent. But he plays with such abandon that he will end up washing out due to injury. But when he is on he is maybe the most unstoppable WR in the NFL. Bills ran into a Rams offense that was mostly healthy, which almost never happens. McVay and Shanahan beat the hell out of their players and we saw both ends of that spectrum the past 2 weeks.

I said it in another thread but he had put in 6 months of prep for his walk year right before he signed that contract. Hay was in the barn so the results followed. Not sure if he got around to making any hay this past offseason. Looks like naw. Well he didn't look good yesterday and I could have sworn I saw him go off the field favoring his arm like he had re-injured that wrist.

What makes it worse is that perhaps the Rams most vulnerable spot on the entire team is their interior OL pass blocking. Avlia and Limmer are among the very worst interior pass blockers in the entire NFL. Shameful performance from the DT's.

Agree on both. The blitzes were utterly ineffective. As for Oliver.......I suspect he had a bump last year because he had approached the 2023 season like it was going to be a walk year. We tend to forget because he signed during summer but he'd spent 6 months prepping to earn a big pay day on the field. Nothing like a walk year to get players in the best condition and mindset of their lives and most of that hay was in the barn by August. It's hard to use the excuse of not having good 1 tech production this season because Jones missed most of last season and Oliver played well despite that.

And there were probably a dozen decisions and/or throws he'd want back. It wasn't a master class in efficiency at QB because the Rams DL won the LOS.......but they couldn't bring Allen down and once the ball got past the Rams DL it was one big play after the next against their horsesh!t back 7.

They are talented enough on D everywhere except DT. The current DT's undermine the entire scheme on days like this. They can't be trusted to hold their ground and force the run outside or collapse or penetrate the pocket consistently. So the ends and back 7 can't just go out and play their games. It's the #1 need going into the offseason, whenever that begins.

Nothing will quell anyone who thinks a 3 loss team deserves a chance to play for the national championship. All that really matters are teams that actually have a legit great chance to win the tournament. That will always be forgotten by some no matter how large they make the field. Nothing will make me believe that Alabama or Miami had a legit chance to win 4 games in that tournament. The fact that half the field that did make only has a snowball's chance doesn't really change that, IMO. They made it so broad that nobody really should have a legit gripe.

I honestly believe that the Bills turnaround really started with the Bills mafia stuff. I initially hated the goofy "mafia" moniker but having watched(in person many times) how the north side of Chicago kept the pathetic Cubs franchise alive by turning games into nothing more than a social event.....and thriving...... I always felt it was imperative for Bills fans to also somehow identify as a separate entity from the team. It changed the dynamic of how the team and players viewed the fans. Then the team wanted to profit from that fan solidarity and the players wanted to perform for it. There is a dynamic in place where the Sabres suck continues to mount and the fans feel increasingly victimized and then their voiced frustration only adds to the toxicity. We saw it last year when the players were refusing to acknowledge the fans after games because they were bitter about booing. With so many games I know that it's harder for hockey fans to separate themselves from the results while still supporting the franchise. But that's the approach that's needed, IMO. The organization is a joke........so don't take it seriously. Unite around something different than the performance and results. Easier said than done but it's been proven to work.

I wasn't really aware that @NewEra was calling Kincaid an asceding superstar TE. Yeah he has pretty much blown so far this year. I haven't seen a mea culpa on that until now either so maybe he has owned it or maybe @FireChans just called him out and you are presuming he owned it prior. I don't know. My issue is questioning his @BullBuchanan fandom and the vitriol used. I bust people's balls all the time but it's not personal and hateful like that. I mean a long distance, online participant only fan like New Era calling on another Bills fan's cred? GTFOH that's hilarious. 😂

Tom Landry doesn't count the first two years of his streak NFL teams only had to play 14 games. Soft! ........Please with the counting stats that include era's with less games, people. Like the BS about Saquon deserving to be MVP because he is probably going to break the single season rushing yardage record. He isn't even on pace for more yards per game than Jamal Lewis(this season vs Lewis 2,000 yard season.......or even ypg career) let alone the distant ypg stats of Dickerson or OJ in their record seasons. But in response to the question.........I appreciate what McDermott brings to the table and I think he CAN win a SB.......but maybe a lot more coaches than you think can go 11-6 with Josh Allen five straight times and get on that list. The stat, IMO, is more a testament to an elite QB staying healthy than anything. But yes, if you cherry pick the right stat you can put McDermott in a category with 4 HC's who combined to win 12(?) Super Bowls.