hondo in seattle

The passing attack is certainly elite. While I'd love to pick up a great TE, it doesn't help the area that most needs improvement.

I don't dislike him for that. But it was impossible for me to ever like him again.

Flutie. Struck me as an arrogant, self-obsessed man. And I didn’t like watching him suck for three quarters while our defense played lights out then basking in glory when he did something spectacular in the 4th to ‘win the game.’

I get that Sanders and Bease aren't youngsters anymore. But QB and WR are - by far I think - the two most talented position groups on the team right now. If Moore is as good as you think he is, drafting him at #30 still makes sense. But the Bills have a number of needs. It would be interesting - to say the least - if Beane decided not to address one of them in the first round.

He might not ultimately fit in but I think he's more than the typical camp body. I think Beane gets guys who can legitimately compete - if not for a starting spot than at least a backup role. With a few exceptions, it used to be fairly easy to predict the final 53 before camp even began. It's harder now with Beane.

I'll say this about Beane: I think the Bills have the best backups we've had in decades.

I can’t see any Pats player calling BB with a prank or joke! (Except maybe Gronk a couple years ago).

You're right. I love the Bills as a pass-first team. They have the right people at the skill positions for it. But I don't like the Bills as a pass-only team. If you look at the offensive linemen Beane has brought in, most of them are better at pass pro than run blocking. That makes sense given the nature of our offense. But if we completely neglect the running game, defenses will be able to hyper-focus on our passing attack like KC did. Imagine if the Bills had Kent Hull and Billy Shaw on the offensive line. And Thurman in the backfield with Cookie as the fullback. What would KC do then? They couldn't sell out to stop the pass. I'm exaggerating to make a point of course but ideally you want your offense to be capable at running inside and outside and throwing both short and long so the defense is forced to defend everything.

Shaw, as I said, you may be right. I do, in fact, believe that the culture McD has created in Buffalo is one of the best in the league and probably accounts for a couple wins each season. One thing I'll mention about the Growth Mindset is that emphasizes process over result. It's no surprise that McD likes to say, "Trust the process." After a big win, an old school coach may want to celebrate the result. But a Growth Mindset coach like McD will celebrate the processes that led to the result. He might say something like, "We won because we trusted each other. We won because we worked hard. We won because we played together as a team..." The Growth Mindset coach will remind his players of the behaviors and attitudes that produced the right result - thus reinforcing them. It's great stuff. But I think back on the KC game and feel like we need more talent on the OL, more talent at RB, and maybe better running schemes (I love Daboll but he's no Greg Roman when it comes to designing a rushing attack). A Growth Mindset only gets you so far. X's and O's still matter. And athletes have genetic ceilings to their performance. Sometimes you just need more talented guys.

I really hope you're right, Shaw66, and maybe you are. But remember that when Carol Dweck coined the term "Growth Mindset," she wasn't inventing a new concept that only McD has since taken advantage of in the NFL. She was merely describing something that top performers were already doing. To say it another way, I don't think McD promoting a Growth Mindset gives us a huge competitive advantage because it exists on other teams as well. To gain a competitive advantage in the run game, we need better scheme, better play-calling, and better players.

I doubt if any team drafts purely according to BPA. My guess is that they all blend BPA with need.

To me what's interesting is watching teams trade up in the draft to nab a crappy signal caller. The hit rate on drafted QBs - even those drafted in the first round - isn't great. Talent evaluation remains an imperfect science. Moving up in the first round of the draft means you're increasing your percentage of getting a 'franchise' QB from 20% to 40%, or something like that. That extra 20% can be very expensive. But when you end up with a Josh Allen, it's draft capital well spent.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe KC ran a 4-1-6 much of the AFC championship game, blanketing our wideouts, daring us to run. And we couldn't. We need to do something different to energize the running game.

January 1991 found me in the middle of the Arabian Desert. We had no television reception where I was at. Even if we did, we had no tv sets. We had army FM radios but these were only good for talking with each other. A very few guys had short-wave radios but they found very little to listen to on them. Mostly stuff from Baghdad Betty telling us that our wives and girlfriends had already moved on and that giant moving sand dunes would bury us in our sleep, forgotten and alone. Well, even though I wasn't assigned a HUMVEE, I had one (long story). So in the weeks prior to the Super Bowl, as I went around my duties visiting other units, I asked everyone I came across if they had a radio that actually received anything American. Nothing Nada. Zip. Zilch. For the first time ever, the Bills were going to Super Bowl and I had no way to watch the game, no one way to listen. One of my own soldiers had a shortwave radio. It was my best hope. The day of the Super Bowl, I spent hours manipulating the nobs and antennae, trying to pick up something - to no avail. Frustrated, I sacked out in my sleeping bag (often called a "fartsack" by soldiers) on my cot. Later a soldier on "radio watch" woke me up and said, "Sir. Wake up! Wake up! The Bills just won the Super Bowl!" "What? Are you sure?" As a snake-bitten Bills fan, the news was very welcome but hard to believe. "Yeah. I'm sure." And then after a pause. "Well, I don't know. For just a minute or so I picked up the BBC World Service. The static was pretty bad. But I think they said the Bills won on a last second field goal." He wasn't a Bills fan but knew how maniacal and devoted I was. I spent the next few hours, while the rest of our cavalry troop slept, frantically playing with the dial of the shortwave radio searching, hoping and waiting for confirmation. I'm still waiting.

Yeah, this is something I think about. I'm believe maybe things went down like this in 2020... The lack of preseason/offseason preparation hurt NFL defenses more than offenses. But not all defenses were hurt equally. The NFL became somewhat like sandlot football. The team with the best athletes - not the best playbook or the best discipline - won. in 2017 and 2018, the things that made our defense exceptional were teamwork and execution. Without a full training camp, both of those took a big hit. The Bills D was hurt more by the training camp restrictions than other Ds. If this theory is right, our 2021 defense should more resemble the 2017 and 2018 editions as you say. With a better offseason, McD and Frasier should hopefully get teamwork and execution up to their prior levels. I'm not entirely pessimistic. "Conflicted" would be the right word. I see reasons for hope as well as reasons for concern.

QB is the big differentiator right now. Our D isn't elite. Our running attack is far from elite. But Allen is much, much better than any other QB in the AFCE. Fitz says Tua "is going to do great things." I'm doubtful but maybe he's right. Or maybe the Fins get Watson and he stays out of jail. And maybe the Pats find a QB. They're suddenly competitive if they do.

You're probably making the best counter-arguments here. I guess I come from that mindset: if you're not getting better you're getting worse.

I'm not just ready to discount the Pats. At 7-9 last season, they were average-ish, not awful. They were hurt not just by Brady's departure but by all the Covid opt outs - most in the league. They get most of those guys back. Their coach is considered by many to be the GOAT. And now they spend $200+ million plus in free agency. Say what you want about their acquisitions, I'm not convinced that Belichick doesn't know what he's doing. With all that, there's still the QB issue. Cam was bad last year. But he's only 31 and the former NFL MVP. While I can't see him returning to MVP form, he might be capable of playing better than what we saw in 2020. We're still better than the Pats. But they narrowed the gap.

I love winning and enjoyed last season immensely. I just want to enjoy this season even more. I want to win the AFCE and see Josh throw the Lombardi to Diggs from yacht to yacht. But I'm not confident we have the roster to make that happen.

This makes complete sense to me, actually. I'm sure Beane did have all his spending meticulously planned out years ahead. But Covid did happen and we're hamstrung more than some other teams. Look, while I do think Beane could have done some things better, overall I'm happy with the guy. But this is less about pointing fingers and more about observing that we need to get better this offseason and we're not. Building a serviceable OL mostly out of affordable journeymen, signing Beasley, signing Diggs... Bean's done a lot in previous free agency periods. Not so much this year when more work needs to be done.

Your belief is wrong. I'm seriously concerned. When he first got here, Beane started jettisoning players to solve the coming cap problems and help build the culture. He began with addition by subtraction. Since that first year, though, he's made the roster stronger each off-season. Till now. Don't get me wrong, this is a good team. But for us to create a dynasty, dominate the AFCE, and compete for Lombardis, we need a better roster than the one we have right now. Yet, thanks partly to Covid, we find ourselves in a situation where we can barely hang on to last year's players, let alone acquire the FAs that would help get us to the SB.

When we hired Daboll, I remember reading an observation from a fellow coach that Daboll was better with passing concepts than run concepts. Daboll is certainly no Greg Roman when it comes to running the ball, but I don't think it's all on him. I think Moss and Singletary are backups. And I think most of our offensive linemen are better at pass protection than road grading. That's not altogether a bad thing. Without spending a boatload of money, Beane had to find Allen some decent bodyguards and he did.

Thanks for the encouragement. And I agree that Beane has done great work this offseason just avoiding an exodus. McD deserves some of the credit too because he's created a culture that players like. Looking at some of the contracts, I think we may have received a few hometown discounts. And, yeah, Covid and a decreasing cap present challenges. But the contracts that pushed us up against the cap are Beane contracts. This off-season he was solving problems that were mostly of his own creation. But given the situation we were in (a product of Beane's past decisions and a modest 2021 cap number), Bean has done amazing work keeping as many players as he has and adding a few more interesting pieces. Like you, I think this off-season has worked out better than I initially expected. But not as well as I hoped. Because - dammit - I'm greedy and I want all our roster gaps filled before the draft.

IMHO, we're not stacked. Our D was ranked 14th in yards allowed, 16th in points allowed. Hopefully Star's return helps. But based on last years performance, I wouldn't say our D is stacked. All our RBs put together produced a mere 1301 yards. Our RB room is not stacked. Our offensive line often gets TE and RB help - far more than the NFL average - to protect Josh. This is despite the fact most of our linemen are better at pass pro than run blocking. Our OL is not stacked. Knox is our best TE and he often drops balls and often whiffs on blocks. Our TE room is not stacked. Our QB and WR rooms, on the other hand, are undeniably stacked. As Happy Days suggested, maybe I should have said we're not ready yet to compete with the Chiefs. Until our opponents find QBs, we're still the best team in the AFCE - though it'll be tougher this year.

C Yeah, there's the McDermott factor. Give this guy lemons and he makes lemonade. He does seem to have a knack of getting the most out of guys.