hondo in seattle

There's a small group here who like to attack people with differing opinions. But there's a larger group of passionate, big-hearted Bills fans here. They're the ones who keep me coming back. Amen, brother! I wonder how much money posters here gave to the Darryl Talley fund? I'll guess it was in the thousands.

And so many of his yards were yards after contact. The line wasn't very good back then. Fred was a beast in his prime. But, sadly, that prime is long past.

I'll help us get to 136.

Admittedly, it's a difficult task to rank backup QBs. But this list is bad.

I'm guessing that after talking to Reid, McD decided that Maclin wasn't worth the price that Maclin's agent wanted even though there's still some interest.

Agreed.

Maclin still in Buffalo today according to a Baltimore Ravens website. "It is unknown where he will sign at this moment, but as of 12:10 pm ET [6/7], Maclin is still in Buffalo." http://www.baltimorebeatdown.com/2017/6/7/15750006/maclin-watch-2017-jeremy-maclin-extends-visit-into-wednesday-morning-baltimore-ravens-visit

I heard! I'll try it out the next time I'm there. I like a little adventure when I go out to eat - new flavors, new culinary ideas. But when I go to Buffalo I tend to focus on the things Buffalo does best: pizza, wings, beef on weck, Polish food... California, particularly SoCal, has awesome, authentic Mexican restaurants. Seattle's Mexican restaurants, for the most part, can't compete. This made me laugh - and got me thinking. I've had a lot 'okay' pizza here in Seattle but I can't think of a single pizza joint I'd recommend to a Buffalonian or anyone else that truly appreciates good pizza. Plus 'large' pizzas here tend to be the size of medium pizzas back in WNY. I've had a lot of tasty wings outside of Buffalo but I'm talking about Korean or Chinese or whatever wings, for example, not "Buffalo Wings." I still believe the best Buffalo Wings are, in fact, in Buffalo. For a while I used to order Buffalo Wings on Sundays to eat while watching the game. But after too many disappointments - if I eat wings at all - I make my own.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses. My complaint about Buffalo is the lack of diversity when it comes to food. In California, for example, you don't go to a 'Chinese' restaurant. You go to a Szechuan (spicy!), Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese or whatever restaurant. Same with Mexican - many restaurants have regional orientations - Oaxacan (mole!) or whatever - and are often quite authentic. In my experience, Latin and Asian food in Buffalo tends to be generic and Americanized. In bigger cities you can find virtually any cuisine. In the past couple years here in Seattle I've eaten Eritrean, Malaysian, Goan (very different than other Indian), Filipino, Peruvian, Tibetan, Russian, Guamese, and Colombian food at local restaurants - just to name a few. And these restaurants provide interesting menu choices: beetles that smell like flowers from Vietnam, brain tacos, spicy Szechuan chicken feet, marinated beef tendons, Cambodian boiled fertile duck egg, and so on. The menu diversity in major West Coast cities is immense. But I only visit Buffalo once every 3 or 4 years so I don't the city as well as I could. And I do grant that the pizza and wings in Buffalo are excellent. So - to tie this up - I hope Maclin likes pizza and wings.

I grew up in Buffalo but have lived a lot of places since then including prominently the three big S's: St. Louis, San Francisco and Seattle. My strong impression is that Buffalo is NOT a good place for foodies. "Peas and Carrots" strikes me as a good comparison because when I envision Buffalo food, I imagine something very unadventurous. What am I missing?

Thought this was a nicely written, AP style post. Then I discovered it was a NFL.com article written by Chris Wesseling. http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000813311/article/former-bills-rb-fred-jackson-not-ready-to-hang-em-up Last year's lack of interest in Fred should have - it seems to this outsider - convinced him that it's time to hang up the cleats. I do hope, though, he signs a one day contract with the Bills.

From NFL.com... The sudden release of Jeremy Maclin took most of the football world by surprise, including his own quarterback. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith said Saturday that Maclin's cut caught him off guard. "Shocked," Smith told Blair Kerkoff of The Kansas City Star of his reaction to the Friday news dump. "Jeremy is a really good friend, an amazing teammate, so still kind of just processing that he's not going to be in there with us, a guy that's done a lot for us the last two years, a guy I've grown really close to." "Obviously Jeremy was a leader and a veteran presence in that [wide receiver] room," Smith said. "With that gone a lot of the young guys will have to mature fast, learn from that example and will be able to step up." http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000813038/article/alex-smith-shocked-over-jeremy-maclins-release

Yep. Some of the analytic guys put on a number on each player and then add those numbers up to put a value on a team. But a team is more than the sum of it's parts. Plus players will perform better or worse in different schemes under different coaches. Analytic guys also say that unit performance (offense, defense) remains fairly constant from year to year. That isn't true, though, when there's a change in QBs or coaches. There's no analytic model out there that I know of that can account for how the Bills will perform with a new coaching staff, a new offensive scheme and a new defensive scheme. If the football analytics guys want to be taken seriously, they need to develop more sophisticated models that account for more variables.

As thin as we are at WR, we'd trade away our best - though oft-injured - receiver?

Great food?

We're a 0-0 team until proven otherwise.

I don't believe the odds of the Bills making the playoffs are good. But I also don't believe that ESPN has created a good predictive model. Not when it completely ignore coaching changes. That would be like climatologists creating a rough-and-ready weather model that completely ignores ocean currents yet purports to accurately predict the weather. If you want to be accurate, you have to account for all the meaningful variables.

Hmmm... the trend is that we do well when someone with the initials T.T. is in the offensive backfield. In fact, we've make the playoffs 10 of the 14 seasons we had a starter in the backfield with the initials T.T. About 71% of the time. Ipso facto, we're looking at a 71% chance of making the playoffs this upcoming season with a T.T. under center. Statistics are wonderful. I'm going to sleep better tonight.

I'm so jealous! I lived in San Ramon for many years and loved the Bay Area. Seattle's cool... but I'd move back to the Bay Area if I could. The combination of natural beauty, culture and weather can't be beat. And, as a bit of a foodie, I miss the tremendous international restaurant scene. If I ever move back, I'll come to the picnic!

I don't hate football players. Why would I? As for Gronk, I know he's talented on the field and fun-loving off the field. Neither of those traits inspire any emotion in me at all. Exactly.

This highlights the limitations of football stats. It's true Tyrod didn't pass for a lot of yards per game because he wasn't asked to. But that begs the question, why didn't the coaches ask for more from Tyrod? Tyrod has a decent QBR and passer rating because per attempt, he's efficient. But he doesn't put up a lot of yards per game because (a) the coach's philosophical preference for the run, and/or (b) his coaches don't believe in him enough to call a lot of pass plays. If last year's answer was (a), we can't blame Tyrod for his comparatively low production. But if was (b), we can.

Well, we all need entertainment. Though it's questionable how entertaining it is to be a Bills fan watching our team lose year after year. I used to be a sports fan in general. I'm not anymore. Pretty much the only sports I watch any more is Buffalo Bills football. I try to spend my life more productively and meaningfully than just planting myself in front of a TV. But when the Bills lose an important game, I'm usually pretty useless the rest of the day.

Yes, sir. We're in agreement. Scientists have spent millions of dollars building climatological models to predict the weather. These models have a fair degree of accuracy when looking ahead a couple days. Beyond that, they're highly fallible. There are just too many variables in a complex, dynamic system. ESPN has spent maybe a couple grand trying to model another complex system with an incredible number of variables. It's not going to be any more accurate than the long-range weather forecast.

In his prime, he was exceptional. It sucks when a WR's career is limited by bad quarterbacking.

Pseudo-science. It looks great all dressed up in high level math. But how does an analytics guy accurately include new coaches and new schemes into his equations? He either doesn't (which is a huge limitation of the approach) or he does (and wanders deeply into the woods of subjectivity). "Millions of data points dating back to 2006 are used to learn from the past to predict the future. This rigorous process requires a thorough exploration of the available information and the testing of many hypotheses... the process is extremely objective and data-driven.... For advanced statistically minded folks, I'd like to reassure them how rigorous the model is under the hood. It was built with cross-validated data sets and fully respects the uncertainties and covariance among the inputs." This is intellectual sports nonsense. http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/13539941/how-espn-nfl-football-power-index-was-developed-implemented