hondo in seattle

Yep, I agree. It's "unreal" that McD is choosing a guy who knows the playbook because the Bills offense is like rocket science and takes years to figure out. You're absolutely correct if you're saying that take has very little to do with reality. I'm curious... Do you honestly believe that McD has an IQ of 70 and his football IQ is even lower?

I had forgotten about that. As you say, McD doesn't normally publicly call people out so he must have been particularly pissed. A tip of the iceberg moment.

We've noticed the friction since Daboll was here, especially with damn-with-faint-praise. Although they never publicly criticized each other, Daboll never gushed about McD or vice versa. For instance, more recently, Daboll had nice things to say about the Bills organization and mentioned the Pegulas and Beane by name but didn't mention McD. If something like that happened once, it could be a simple oversight. But there's a pattern of signs of mutual distaste that now includes a tepid handshake.

The biggest problem with this offense so far this season isn't the slot position. It's Dorsey. Harty is fine.

When you look at Dorsey's offensive stats, they're not terrible. But we've all seen games when Dorsey's lack of imagination in both play design and play calling was suboptimal. Sad to say, I don't have as much faith in Dorsey-Allen as I do in Reid-Mahomes. Reid, generally speaking, designs and calls plays that put Mahomes in a position to excel and keep defenses on their toes. You're right: McD needs to step in and help Dorsey find his shortcomings and fix them.

I'm not a Dorsey fan but if we fire him midseason, I'm afraid the alternative will be no better and possibly worse. I'm not opposed to McD checking out who's available after the season, though.

Our backs are fine. I'd rather work on the OL as you suggested. Give the backs a better line and they'll get the yards, and Josh will have more time to throw to receivers who have more time to get open. And Josh will stay healthier. Of course, I'd love to see the Bills have a Thurman-quality RB. But how many of those are available in the draft? With the RB position devalued, it seems the best athletes now play other positions. Back in OJ's day, for example, the best athletes wanted to be running backs. That's not true anymore.

So far, we're 4-0 when I wear my Kelly jersey and eat wings during the game. We're 0-1 when I wear my Allen jersey. We're 0-1 when I wear my Kyle Williams jersey - though in fairness to Kyle, I also skipped the wings because it was a morning game.

It was a dumb this to say but Saleh has built a nice defense. Maybe this was hubris talking but I think it was more him pumping up his team. Players like it when coaches brag on them. They just held the NFC champs to 14 points despite the Jets missing some defensive starters. He may have been a little exuberant. I wouldn't blame him.

Yes, a win is a win. There are no style points. But I'm worried about Dorsey and the offense. We won three games by 4 TDs. We also won a low-scoring game to the Giants while losing low-scoring games to the Jets and Jags. This offense has dissociative identity disorder, and I don't like some of its multiple personalities. We're not going to march through the playoffs, if we even reach the playoffs, if we don't become more consistent on offense. I think that's why this 'ugly' win has some of the mafia bothered.

McD's coaching gets the D to perform at a high level. It's a case of the sum being greater than its parts. But the parts do matter. Every team has jags. A defense rises above average largely due to the quantity and quality of its star defenders. Hyde and Poyer were among our stars but I'm beginning to worry Father Time is catching up to them. Von is a star when he's healthy. Tre was a star. Not sure if he had yet returned to stardom but maybe he would have if he hadn't torn his Achilles. And Milano was the brightest star on the D. Losing two stars (maybe 1.5) is huge. But we still have Von, some slightly faded stars, and maybe one or two up-and-comers. And McD has a talent for getting this D to play well together. It'll still be a solid D - top 5 or 10.

A 4-3 wouldn't be a bad idea versus the Giants. We went to a 4-2 because the NFL has become a passing league. But with TT under center, the Giants may run more than pass - and be more effective rushing than passing.

Milano excels in coverage and is also adept at finding his way through a crowd to a runner. Miller is very good at beating offensive linemen with his quickness, bend, and a variety of moves to get to a QB. Despite both being called 'linebackers' at some point in their careers, they have very different skill sets.

I started the season by wearing my Josh Allen jersey on game day. We lost. I switched to my Kelly jersey, and we blew our next three opponents out. Feeling overconfident, I switched to my Kyle Williams jersey for London and we lost. To make matters worse, since it was 6:30 a.m. game here on the West Coast, I didn't have Buffalo Wings during the game as I traditionally do. My wife even suggested that I run to the grocery store at halftime since we didn't have any but I declined. This week I promise I'll wear my Kelly jersey and have some piping hot Buffalo Wings ready to go.

From Cookie Gilchrist on, we've been blessed with good RBs over the history of the franchise: OJ, Cribbs, Greg Bell, Thurman, Henry, McGahee, BeastMode, Freddy, Shady... But over that same time we've had maybe two good QBs: Kelly and Allen. Arguably you include Ferguson when he blossomed into the guy who did more than just hand off to OJ. And Bledsoe started out good for a half-season. Kemp wasn't an accurate passer but when you throw in his toughness, leadership, and running skills, maybe you include him? But, personally, I only count the two: Kelly and Josh.

I'm glad he's doing well but I was never enamored with him when he was here. I have to say, though, he was hard to evaluate. On the one hand, our run-blocking sucked. Holes were rare when runs were expected. Then again, runs weren't often expected as we were a pass-first-and-second team. The fact that defenses were focused on Josh and Diggs helped explain Motor's and Moss's good YPC. I did like Moss's effort, though. He usually didn't go down easily. But he was slow and with running lanes closing quickly in Buffalo (if they ever opened at all), that was a problem.

If you don't want to read the whole thesis, Urschel provided a short summary: "This thesis considers four independent topics within linear algebra: determinantal point processes, extremal problems in spectral graph theory, force-directed layouts, and eigenvalue algorithms. For determinantal point processes (DPPs), we consider the classes of symmetric and signed DPPs, respectively, and in both cases connect the problem of learning the parameters of a DPP to a related matrix recovery problem. Next, we consider two conjectures in spectral graph theory regarding the spread of a graph, and resolve both. For force-directed layouts of graphs, we connect the layout of the boundary of a Tutte spring embedding to trace theorems from the theory of elliptic PDEs, and we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the popular Kamada-Kawai objective, proving hardness of approximation and structural results regarding optimal layouts, and providing a polynomial time randomized approximation scheme for low diameter graphs. Finally, we consider the Lanczos method for computing extremal eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and produce new error estimates for this algorithm." Typical locker room jock talk.

Urschel grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Canisius, became a Baltimore Raven, and just got a job as a math professor at MIT. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on "Graphs, Principal Minors, and Eigenvalue Problems" and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers. All by the age of 32. Makes me feel like I haven't tried hard enough.

As a Purdue alum, I was rooting for Orton throughout his NFL career. Then the slide happened.

We finished 13-3 last year. We didn't lay many eggs. Also, we often relied on Josh's heroics to win games. It was almost as if Beane said, "We don't need no friggin' offensive line or running attack. We have a freak for a QB!" This year, so far (disregarding the Jets game), Josh has been protected well and the running attack has been good. It's starting to look like an offense that can sustain its success. Josh just needs to be good, and he's very good. He doesn't need to be superhuman.

I think they'll have a decibel meter at the new stadium that's built to retain the sound better. I can't remember who has the record now - KC or Seattle - but we'll break it.

Bills leading the league in EPA (expected points average) when looking at the combo of offense and defense... rbsdm.com/stats/stats/

Agreed. I'll just add that Allen's cold streaks weren't because he suddenly lost his arm talent. His cold streaks come when he was under duress and running for his life in games, often low-scoring, close contests, where he pressed too hard to make a play. If this OL protects him better, and if he can stay patient when things aren't going our way, the cold streaks should be minimized if not eliminated.

I was really happy with Beane this offseason. I thought he might have successfully upgraded our OL from bad to average. And I was excited about that. I never imagined seeing something like this.

Whatever it turns out to be, with $50 million guaranteed, the opportunity cost was substantial. We could have signed a Pro Bowl offensive lineman, for example.