TheBrownBear

Starting to think Burrow is the new Brady. At least he's not in the division.

I agree. Nice job building a team culture and getting the ship turned around, but I have serious doubts about our coordinators moving forward. I have very little excitement about 2023 with Dorsey and Frazier running the show. At least Dorsey is young, so maybe he digs through thousands of hours of film of successful, innovative offenses over the next few months and starts to incorporate that into his system and playcalling. What you see is what you get with Frazier at this point.

Yes, there was an unusual amount of adversity within the larger Buffalo community, but I think 99% of the non-injury stuff had little to no impact on what we saw on Sunday. I do, however, believe that the Damar thing was huge. That was a legitimate trauma inducing event. And isn't easy to bounce back from. I think back to the difficult birth of my youngest son and watching him have to be resuscitated in front of me over many minutes while my wife cried and begged to know why the baby wasn't crying and asked if he was dead. Happy ending as he's fine now, but he was in the ICU for almost two weeks and I would just randomly cry throughout the day for a couple of weeks and really didn't move past it (or stop revisiting it daily) until he had been home for a couple of months. I can see how the players might have been a little emotionally burned out from the whole thing and have it effect them despite their best intentions to move forward and win it for themselves and Damar. It's just human nature. Having said that, it doesn't excuse what we saw in terms of strategy or lack thereof, and the first quarter of the earlier game had already revealed that we had serious issues dealing with the Bengals personnel and approach. The better team won on Sunday. No doubt in my mind regarding that.

They sucked all year, and were easily worse than 2021, so I think you can put that thought to bed. They were horrible and had career worst seasons - no lemonade to be found. Not exactly sure who is to blame, but I think Dorsey probably put them in worse positions than Dabs did. I have to believe a ton of it falls on the offensive scheme.

Brown showed promise as a rookie and graded out as a physical freak, so I understand why they took the chance of rolling with him this year. I wonder how much of a factor his back injury was in his poor play this year. I know Beane discussed a lack of reps for him in the offseason and training camp, and for a young project like Brown, I can see how that could have led to his stifled development (or outright regression). At a minimum, I think we need to let Saffold walk, move Bates back to left guard where he looked more comfortable in 2021, and draft an OG (rounds 2/3), RT (late day 2, early day 3) and developmental C.

I like both players, but I think Singletary is more valuable for what we like to do. Singletary is a fine first and second down back and a surprisingly strong tackle breaker at his size. Hines' ceiling on offense is a gadget guy, since he's not a tackle breaker/pile mover when handed the ball. I think Hines could be a great weapon in a well schemed offense, but that isn't what we are now under Dorsey, so no point in eating up cap space with a return specialist. So, cut Hines, and then I think it comes down to trying to get Singletary to take a team friendly deal or replace him with a 3rd or 4th round rookie RB (or Duke Johnson type FA) to split carries with Cook.

I'm not going to argue that our defense is terrible overall. They're not. They were quite good to sometimes great during the regular season. But they were absolutely horrendous against the Bengals in the first half. They gave up 250 yards. The offense was horrible as well, no doubt, but the crap defense put them in a 14-0 hole and likely changed the game plan (as well as the mindset of a guy like Josh) and made them one dimensional highlighting our struggles in pass protection. Yes, the Bengals offense slowed down after that, but it felt an awful lot like they took their foot of the gas once they realized the Bills were no real threat to get back in the game. As soon as the Bills regained some sort of contact on the scoreboard, the Bengals easily went down the field to restore their 14 point lead.

I was going to say no, but, let's be real, that's just recency bias talking. Bills still have good depth and a top 5 quarterback. If they find a way to improve the oline and the defense can stay relatively healthy, they still look like the clear favorite to me. It won't be as easy as it has been, but I'm taking the Bills as a betting man.

I thought the same. Looked like we were on skates all day. I think it's entirely possible they messed up their choice of footwear. We heard leading up to the game that the snow wasn't supposed to stick on the field.

I'm sure he has friends at the Flying J who will comp him.

He won 2 playoff games in 2020 and one in each of '21 and '22, but you're otherwise correct. I think he can win, but he'll need a few breaks. He's not outcoaching anyone on gameday to get there. Given all the injuries this year, I'm okay with him running it back one last time with the hopes that we can improve the oline in the off-season and that our D stays healthier next year. After that, it's open season on McDermott as far as I'm concerned. But I really would like to see a different OC brought in this offseason.

Yeah. Next year.

Listening now. No changes coming. Get ready to run it back next year

I've defended Oliver and I think he may have been playing hurt on Sunday, but his production just hasn't paid off the investment of where we drafted him. He was supposed to develop into a real disruptor and we just haven't seen that from him over the years, at least not consistently. I think that's the biggest weakness right there. Most of these great pass rush teams have guys in the middle who can really disrupt and wreck things. We are sorely lacking that. Outside of Minnesota, all of the teams who gave us trouble this season had dudes who were really capable of collapsing the middle of the pocket.

We are all grasping at straws at the moment and the OP's thesis is no worse than the others. I think it's pretty clear things would have gone differently if Hyde and Von hadn't been injured. They were both great performers as well as probably the two biggest leaders of our defense. We all pretty much knew we had to be carried by our offense once Von went down, especially considering the hobbled states of guys like Poyer and Tre White.

Did Josh Allen retire?

Yep. It was almost as if the Chiefs game was the Bills' Super Bowl. All of the good vibes, confidence, energy were building towards that moment, and then with Josh leading that late comeback and Von and our secondary sealing the win and confirming we had made all the right moves to get us over the top of the Chiefs' mountain, we were absolutely on cloud 9 as a team and fanbase, getting tons of love and respect from the national media. We'd get our one week break and then it would be a simple 14 game cakewalk towards our coronation as SB champs. But then our focus began to wane, sloppiness creeped in, injuries piled up and what was supposed to be a joyous 14 game gallop towards a Lombardi became a joyless slog of just getting to the finish line of the regular season, by which point we had numerous glaring issues in our coaching, execution and personnel availability.

I think the coaches and us fans were able to delude ourselves in 2020 and 2021 by saying "the Chiefs are just better with generational talents at QB, TE and WR, but even so, we are closing the gap and were 13 seconds away from possibly marching to the Super Bowl." That was the entire narrative heading into this season, one in which we were nearly unanimous Super Bowl favorites among the press and Vegas. There were concerns/issues raised by the KC losses, but we had seemed to make a real effort to address them with the signing of Von and the drafting of Elam and Cook. I think most of us were content with where we were heading into this season (outside of minor quibbles about Frazier, Dorsey's inexperience and the lack of a No. 2 WR) and didn't have too many doubts about the current state or future trajectory of the team under Beane and McDermott. I know that was the case for me. But Sunday changed all that as far as I'm concerned. The Bengals might be the better team, but they aren't 17 points better than us from a talent perspective, especially not on our home turf. Outside of our competent special teams units, we failed to show up at every other level. Our game plans were crap, our execution was crap, our adjustments were crap and our attitude was crap. We were undeniably underprepared to play on Sunday and that all falls on McDermott. I think he, more than any of the players, lost his edge as a result of the Hamlin incident.

This post is sending my satire/sarcasm meter into overdrive.

I honestly believed he had made great strides in this direction until the last two weeks, where he seemed to push all the wrong buttons. I think his seat should deservedly get a little warmer, but I'm not ready to fire the guy. I haven't forgotten the long cold winter that was 2000-2017. If and when we move on from McDermott, Beane/Pegula better be certain they're bringing in someone as good or better. Otherwise, we are just setting ourselves up for the next cycle of prolonged misery.

I was like "typical TBD overreaction" and to the "winner go the spoils", but then I actually took a look at his Twitter and he seems to be a Grade A D*ckhead. Need to put a little hurt into this punk next year.

Agree with you guys. The whole thing seemed odd - probably because you could barely see him through the snow, and we were getting our azzes kicked at the time.

Ummm, you lost me here. Wanting "fiery" dudes who have some "nastiness" on the field doesn't mean we want actual "bad guys." I don't want anything to do with any of the guys you've listed above (outside of Hopkins whose biggest issue was getting popped for PEDs while rehabbing an injury). You can be a tough, mean, mofo dawg on the field, without being an actual criminal.

I agree with this 100%. The identity of the team was supposed to be that we were some offensive juggernaut. By midseason it became apparent that was no longer the case and we were scratching out wins with Josh hero ball and the occasional decent showing from the running game against subpar opponents. We looked for scapegoats in McKenzie, Motor/Cook, Gabe Davis, Knox and even Josh to some extent, but the guy behind all that inefficiency we've seen is an in over his head Ken Dorsey. We barely run any motion. Can you remember anything even remotely imaginative? Shovel passes (no, not that improvised one that Josh threw off Ike's facemask in KC)? Traditional screen passes? Hell, even a simple old naked bootleg? If these things actually happened, it wasn't after week 5 or so.

I trust McDermott as a CEO type and he's improved (the last two weeks notwithstanding) in his aggressiveness and gameday decision-making from year-to-year. I don't want to see us cut bait and end up with a clear downgrade, which, let's be real, is the most likely scenario should McDermott get the axe (he won't so this conversation is moot anyway). I'm kind of torn on Frazier. It's easy to B word and moan about the 3rd and longs we've given up at times this season, but most of those had decent coverage and our corners just made lousy plays on the ball. Yesterday was different in that he had guys running free all over the field, but we were playing with our hands tied behind our backs due to the injuries up front and in the secondary. Trust me, I won't cry if he's let go, but I'm pretty confident that just replacing him with anyone isn't a good idea. It needs to be a clear upgrade - an innovative and aggressive defensive playcaller. I want Dorsey gone. Other than serving as Josh's QB coach, he didn't have a resume worthy of being handed the reins to a SB contending offense. Our offense under Dorsey may have generally been a continuation of Daboll's Erhardt/Perkins scheme, but at least Daboll would come up with some imaginative wrinkles to get guys in space for some easy yardage when we were really struggling. We saw nothing of that from Dorsey. Just drop Josh back and have him hold the ball forever and wait for guys to run open. Not a recipe for success behind a struggling offensive line in December/January weather. Either roll the dice on a young imaginative guy with real upside or hire a veteran OC that can rein in Josh's worse tendencies. Continuity and "process" failed us here.