Mickey

Yeah, and thats why our offense isn't producing, 'cuz he didn't chuck it on 4th and 11. Should he have? Yeah. Is that the reason we were that desperate in the first place? Hardly. The things wrong with this offense are not going to be solved by benching Trent.

The Buffalo Bills select, Gemma Ward, super model, Australia: http://ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/GemmaWard1.jpg I know, she can't play football worth a dam but neither can any of our other draft picks so why the F not? At least she has hair like Tom Brady if not his arm.

Your point is well taken however, I would respectfully quibble with the "skirt wearing" thing. The women I know are tough as nails in or out of skirts. If you have a wife and kids and was there in the delivery room, you'd know what I mean. I don't at all mean to imply that your are in any way, shape or form being sexist, just pointing out that maybe the time has past for using women or woman-like behaviour as a universal metaphor for weakness. Frankly, if Edwards was as tough as the skirt wearers I know, he'd still be starting. [ps: my ex-wife made me write this]

Off the mark though his post may have been, there was nothing personally directed at you anywhere in it. He was not rude, he was not disrespectful. Seems like it would have been easy enough to show just how off the wall his point was without making it personal. Plenty did just that. You were not among them.

...and you proved what? That you can personally attack a fellow Bills fan simply because he disagrees with you? That is just what we need more of around here, vitriol and bile. Thanks for helping us out. I have to say that I was hoping that Levi would be a good developmental kind of guy. I was surprised when they decided he wasn't even worth that much. If he stinks he stinks but given their faith in Edwards, I am not so sure I trust their conclusions wth regard to Levi Brown. I don't mind talking about the past, anything but that "game" on Sunday. Honestly, we just didn't even appear to belong in the same league as the Packers. I think we could play them 20 times and not beat them once, not even on a lucky day with all the breaks going our way. At least with JP, you could get excited once in awhile as he chucked it downfield. There was an exciting play every now and then. I almost forget what they look like.

Hmmm.....sounds like the same complaint we had with Bledsoe, and RJ, and Trent. So either we just had the bad luck of getting 4 QB's in a row who don't know when to get rid of the football or maybe, just maybe, that is what it looks like when you have a crappy offensive line. No OL means no run game which means 3rd and long, alot. No OL means you don't even get much time on 1st down passes. No OL means you often have to go max protect so that your WR's are outnumbered in the secondary. Maybe there is a common thread there? Just sayin'. I remember seeing a game in Pittsburgh, my brother had awesome, awesome tickets. We got killed. Their defense and pass rush was so good and our line so bad that we often sent just Lee Evans and one other WR out against nickel and dime coverage on 3rd and long and kept everyone else in for the ultimate in max pro. I remember one play in particular where all those blockers worked, JP had all day long. But they only blitzed one guy in, there was double and triple coverage everywhere. He held the ball and held the ball waiting for someone to get open. No one ever did. There was a LB shadowing him to stop him from keeping it himself. He finally got sacked after what seemed an eternity. He got up off the ground and spiked the ball in anger and I could here him cursing from our seats. Back home on Monday I checked in here and everyone was complaining about how JP doesn't know when to get rid of the ball and using that play as Exhibit A.

I think those deck chairs look much better over by those.....hey, where did all that ice come from!?

None of that would make any difference. The reality is that you can't retool an offense that has hardly any starting caliber players and change your defensive personnel to fit a whole new defense in a single offseason. It simply can't be done. This will take time. There are no great players hiding in the wings ready to be discovered. Yes Green stinks, yes Bell is awful but they are all we have right now. Wang missed too much practice time for a rookie. He will see the field whenever he is even close to being ready. They have used the shot gun, they have used the no-huddle and it hasn't worked. There is no defense out there that can be beat consistently enough in a game by a near talentless offense simply by clever gadgets and gimmicks. We just have to accept the reality that so many of us have talked about since day one. This team is rebuilding and given the size of the job, its going to take a heckuva lot more than one season and we will likely get worse before we get better. I think Gailey will get them playing better and better each week and they may even win a decent number of games before the season is done but they could just as easily lose 13 games. I am optimistic that eventually Gailey and Buddy will build a winner and patient enough to endure what is likely to be a really long season. Respectfully, I can only think that all the hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, all the talk about cutting this guy and that guy, originates from those who had unrealistic expectations for this team in the first place.

I don't think they are surprised at all. You only have so many draft picks. They couldn't predict Wang being injured and missing so much practice time. I didn't think Bell was very good at all but he was much worse than even I expected. There was one play, a delay to his side where he let his guy go and went to seal the edge from inside pursuit a step or two beyond the LOS. His guy almost got the hand off before the back did. I can't imagine that the play was designed to leave the man closest to the back at the snap unblocked. Either someone was supposed to pull or Bell thought it was a sweep of some kind where someone else was responsible for his guy and he had the job of sealing the edge so the back could get outside. It looke to me like on the sack he gave up, his guy went inside and Bell followed him where he eventually had pretty much no one to block. Meanwhile, the LB went in untouched. Stunting inside is not exactly unusual. I wouldn't expect any OT in the league to be fooled by that move. And not to leave out the other OT on the right who gave up a sack straight up to an outside speed rush where he simply couldn't get his butt back fast enough. And I saw Wood get bullrushed which is not something I expected to ever see. He and Levitre played well last year as rookies. They need to improve over that quite a bit before being considered solid, career long starters. I am hoping that what we saw was a young team with marginal talent at some key positions who don't yet have the hang of a new offense where mental mistakes are particularly costly. And as for Trent, well, when he had a little time he blew down the field. What bothered me though were those two near pick sixes he threw on out patterns. He was one lucky SOB on both of those. So yeah, as bad as it was, it could have been even worse.

I agree, its hard not to think we got a rock solid guy at GM, finally. It was an absolute disaster having a business guy trying to make the calls on football players. Nix will make mistakes, I'm sure. It is a really, really hard freaking job. Predicting which players will become stars is basically predicting the future and no one can do that perfectly. But I think we can be sure we have a guy who knows what he is doing.

The owners are going to charge what the market will bear. How much the players get isn't what drives up ticket prices. What drives them up is the increasing popularity of the product so that people are willing to pay the prices charged. I root for players because accountants don't take the field. If I am going to be robbed to buy a ticket and robbed again at the concession stand then I would rather see my booty going to the guys who play the game rather than the guys who are selling the game.

Why do you care so much about people caring about things you don't care about that you care to start a thread about it? Never mind, don't answer that. I don't care.

Not to offer any objectivity or anything but the press does have some advantages in assessing our chances over us. We are so focused, even obsessed, with our own team that we, perhaps, don't appreciate what is happening with other teams in the league and how we compare with them. Further, we love the Bills the way a parent loves a child so we are probably the least objective when it comes to them. On top of all that, we do this in our spare time, they do it for a living. Their every mistake is recorded, discussed, condemned and remembered. Crap we say gets lost in the flood within a day or two so our credibility is not on the line 24-7. Lastly, I don't get your point about going after people on the board who find it entertaining to discuss various articles. The question you ask, "Who Cares?" might just as well apply to your post. Why do you care that people care? What is the point of showing how foolish they are for caring? Frankly, "Who Cares?" could be asked about 99% of the subjects we discuss. Talk about the draft? Nothing we say matters, they are going to pick who they pick so Who Cares? Talk about our new 3-4 defense? Nothing we say is going to make it work or fail and none of us know what their real plans are so Who Cares? On an on. Who Cares? Lots of people do and enjoy doing so, why does it bother you? If you don't like those threads, don't read them. Those posters don't need you to save them from themselves.

If I had to choose, I'd rather be a good passing team than a good running team. I have watched so many Buffalo teams come and go, some that could run, some that could pass and the ones that could pass were the ones that were the best contenders. Running the ball can pile up yards and possession time but a game is played based on drives. Its not good enough to gain yards on average you have to gain yards on successive sets of downs to sustain a drive. Each down is a chance for something to go wrong. Most plays are not successful so the more plays you have to run to get to the EZ, the more likley it is that you are going to fail. Passing lets you gain yards in hunks so your drives consume fewer plays. I think that translates to more scoring drives. The chief benefit of running well, supposedly, is time of posession. However, I personally think that TOP is one of the most overrated stats ever. The game is played using a series of alternating posessions. Each team gets just about as many posessions as the other. Sometimes that edges a possession or two one way or the other based on who has the ball at the end of the half and of the game but at most, one team is going to have only one or, rarely, two posessions more than the other team. Long drives shorten the game in that each team has fewer posessions but that cuts both ways. The team driving the ball will also get fewer posessions. What TOP does do is make a difference in how rested your defense is. That can be important but hardly a goal worth sacrificing scoring TD's for. A long drive that scores a TD is great but mainly because of the 6 points, not because of the time it took to do it. Running clock when you have the lead or to score the go ahead pts while leaving your opponent no time to regain the lead are all worthy goals but you do that mainly by moving the chains. All told, I would like to do both well but if I had to pick one to be better at than the other, I'd go with passing. In the modern game with LB's running 4.5 40's, sustained drives on the ground are just too hard and too rare. WR's are so protected by the pass interference rule that the game has evolved in their favor while the game has gone the otherway for RB's.

Well, just once, but it was a long time ago, back when we were both in college. It was a crazy time, we were so young, so many people were trying to find themselves, experimenting with new lifestyles.....uhoh, wait.....you mean "hated" not "dated"!?....whoops

I remember that one like yesterday. But I didn't know until now how critical Reed was to that play. When Kelly is at the 5, there is a LB right there, only 2 yards deep in the EZ already charging to the goal line to stop Kelly. They should have met around the 2-3 yard line, well short of a TD. But Reed, after making his break to the inside sees Kelly running and spots that LB. He heads right for him and gets his body between him and Kelly. Kelly sees the block coming and dives in behind Reed. Wasn't the prettiest block I've seen but it did the job. Way to go Andre! Geez I miss that guy.

I am sure Chan would love to run but I don't think he is the type to just pound it for the sake of pounding it. The Bengals were crowding the LOS last night and we struggled to try an run the first series. Gailey didn't keep trying to run the next series, he went to the air. And gee, what a difference it is to have an OC who reads the defense and figures out what will work on the very next series. Jauron would have stuck to the same stuff right to half time. I don't know how good Gailey is but compared to Jauron, he's Knute-freaking-Rockne.

I would like to know more about that "runs over 4 yards stat before I can have faith in it as demonstrating that we were a good running team. For example, if we have 4 runs and two of them gain 4 yards and the other two lose 4 yards, would that stat read that 50% of our runs were over 4 yards? If so, then it is a pretty meaningless stat.

He is just not all that talented or special that it is worth waiting through one rehab after another. Remember this guys' career next time you start to think how overpaid these guys are. He always gave it his all but his carrer could never get past his bad luck with injuries.

I also think they shoulda cured cancer too. And baldness. They had one whole offseason to do it. It's time for them to go. Clearly they are failures and the team needs to go in another direction. 7 months and not one word from them on how they are doing with that flying car thing. F'ing losers.

Hmmm....why do you think a woman experiencing menses is a good metaphor for a weak person needlessly fretting to the point of tears? I don't know about the women in your life but the women I know would kick me in the nads If I came up with that one. I am sure it was unintended so don't take my pointing it out personally. I do think the time has past though for using statements like "acting like a girl" as an insult meant to characterize a man as being weak.

Maybe not top guys but Buffalo has been a very generous place if you are an overpriced mediocrity. We are pretty good at attracting those guys. I would rather pay a guy who can play 20% more than he is worth than to a pay a guy who can't play half as much. In the end, you have to have personnel people with a knack for finding talent and a little luck. We have had neither for a long, long time.

I don't think this is all that different than what Jauron ran. They did plenty of short, quick passes because the line couldn't block. I don't think there has been an offense in the league over the last 10 years that doesn't have that trick in their playbook. It doesn't work if you can't get the ball downfield enough to back the secondary off. The closer you are to the los, the less space you have. If the defense is packed in, you have no space. And throwing a short, quick pass means even if you complete it, if its 3rd and 8, your are still punting. I think Gailey is going to run a spread, or one of its umpteen variations. Its a good offense for suspect lineman and questionable QB's. CJ is an ideal back for the spread. Gailey has had success with it in the past in trying to revive an offense that can't get out of its own way. But as always, running the most brilliant offensive system ever conceived won't get it done if the players can't execute it. Their is no offense that doesn't require good blocking to succeed. We can make it a bit easier on them in certain situations but you have to be able to block.

I have a pet theory on Flutie. I think he made his decision before the snap on who he was going to go to based on what he saw. Sometimes he was right, sometimes not but he stuck with his decision figuring that you have a better chance of completing a pass, even to a covered guy, if you knew where you were going and therefore could get the pass off that much faster and cleaner. That doesn't mean that he didn't pull back if after the snap it became clear that his first choice was impossible and then scramble and buy time. He did plenty of that and was damn good at scanning the field quickly and finding the open guy. But I think his meat and potato was decisiveness and part of that was to ditch the mandated progressions from primary, if covered, secondary, if covered, TE, etc. that so many passing games are built on. How many times have you heard Trent in the Jauron era talk about "going through my progressions"? I really don't think Flutie gave a damn about that. I think he knew who was running what route, took a good look at the defense and made his best guess pre-snap as to who should be the best option. It may not sound like a big difference but when you only have 2 seconds to make a good decision and then launch an accurate pass under fire, saving a little time by giving up all the reading the saftey crap to try and get to the most open receiver in exchange for decisiveness and time can make a big difference. No, I can't prove this but I watched every game he played for the Bills and so many times I saw him drop back and let it fly to a "covered" receiver without so much as a glance anywhere else, that I think he often had his WR picked out pre-snap and didn't give a damn if he was covered or not. And when they were, more often than not he completed it anyway because the pass was so on the money or the WR made a play. Sure beats watching a guy hold the ball while he searches and searches and searches for the open man, going through is progressions one at a time. God forbid a QB should just rely on his years of playing football to complete a pass. Better to make him pull out a slide rule and T-square and figure out scientifically who the optimum target is on every play. Hamlet said, "There is nothing in this world either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I would paraphrase that "There is no WR either covered or uncovered, but thinking makes it so."

Depends on the type of pass. I actually think that a short screen pass can be among the hardest of all to hit properly. The lineman are chipping the DL and then pulling so the QB is going to have guys in his face, that is the whole point, lure them out of position. The QB is usually backpedaling like mad buying just enough time for the fat lineman to pull and the RB to get free of traffic. Then he has to find way to throw the ball just a few yards but get it past huge rushers with outstretched hands at the same time. How do you get it over their heads without overshooting the RB? How do you hit the RB, often with suspect hands, on the spot so he doesn't drop it and can start running right away? JP's worst pass, bar none, was the screen. It requires accuracy, touch, judgment, even some improvisation to find a way to get it done. You are right of course that some passes are so easy you shouldn't have to be 100% accurate but even some short passes require that the QB be spot on. The windows in NFL secondarys are pretty damn small.