Mickey

You are probably right about Jauron not likely to resist adding DB's. As for how well Walker will do, I tend to agree but this is the result of the personnel moves made by the front office so all we can do is play the cards we are dealt. It won't be the first time we have had a tackle who will need to be helped out by the TE or the RB to keep our QB out of a wheelchair. Just have to hope for the best and that the no-huddle and other moves can cover up the weaknesses on the line. As much as I liked having Peters on the roster, what's done is done so all we can do is hope to get through this year. I am over it but there are still quite a few around here who start each day with a search for anything negative about Peters. Apparently they need to constantly reassure themselves that it wasn't a mistake to let him go.

If you want to demonstrate your disdain for Peters, you might try apathy rather than watching him so closely he can't fart without your notice and comment. I am not the one sucking on his every move binky boy.

I am sure he will do the best he can out there but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that this is a good idea rather than the only option left after the personnel decisions that were made. It would seem rather futile for cursing at a snow plow for its not being a formula one race car. Walker seems like a class act to me and a good if not great RT who is helping the team out of the jam it got itself into by giving it a go at a position that is a poor match for his skills. I am not sure why that should engender personal insults from supposed fans. But I guess some just can't over the bitterness they feel over these uppity players getting paid more money than they do.

All the communication in the world isn't going to turn a RT into a LT. I have been saying all along that the OL moves are the product of necessity. They had to come up with something. It was clear that Dockery and the Fowler/Preston beast were failures and they couldn't get Peters on the dotted line. After what had to be a lot of head scratching, this is what they came up with. You don't have to be an expert to see that this a "celing wax and bailing wire" situation. It is not the first step in well thought out, long term plan. It is a reaction to the multiple debacles on the line. That having been said, I do think they have laid the groundwork for a solid interior line in the years to come. And sometimes you stumble on to a good idea when you are forced to cobble together something you never would have thought to do had it not been for unexpected adversity. Odds are however that we will be looking for a LT next year and if we find one, we will be wondering what to do with Butler and Walker. Maybe the long term plan is to move Wood to center once he has a year of experience behind him and then slide Butler back to G?

That was an assumption made by many, I don't think we could know that for sure. He still was not lining up against the other team's best DE. Blind side or not, I would put my best blocker where the most dangerous DE is lined up regardless of the QB's blindside. Their other QB's were right handed, what if they end up starting? Bottom line is that because of these issues, there was a risk to Williams that was not present with McKinnie and a number of other players on the board that year. And this isn't hind sight, I made this exact argument on this board prior to that draft and its not like I was the only one with those concerns. No one saw him becoming this big of a bust but plenty thought he was not our best option.

The book was also that Williams played RT in college, not left, so he didn't face the best rushers on the other side. I am not sure but he may be the highest picked RT in draft history.

Didn't screw up!??!?!!?!? They drafted him with the 4th pick in the draft. I think that qualifies as having screwed up. Maybe the biggest draft screw up this team has made since Walt Patulski.

Hmmm...I guess the NFL just gets a kick out of spending a ton of money on attorneys to obtain meaningless rulings and the union wanted to help out unemployed litigators. Yeah, that makes sense.

It is useless, the sour grapes here are so sour that there is no objectivity here about Peters and never will be. You can hardly have a converstation about without the rudest members of the board descending on you like a flock of flying monkeys. I think even Tim G. tried to point this out in a post a while back. The same logic that thinks it was brilliant/shrewd to: make an established vet who no coach has ever thought could play LT a starting LT; to move a good but not great Guard to RT; to make a career non-starter a starter at C and to start two rookies at G is not going to be able to get past their anger at Peters and acknowledge that you don't improve a team by losing one of its best players. All those moves might work out, I certainly hope they do and even if they don't, I'll find a way to enjoy watching these new guys learn the game and hopefully establish something later in the year. The end story on Peters is that he got out of his contract way before it was going to expire and his new contract is truly exceptional and on top of that he is now playing for a perennial contender in a much larger market. Despite his being "fat, lazy and stupid" and the proclamations by the same people you are arguing with that the team had Peters by the balls and that his agent was a moron, things worked out pretty well for Peters. As for the Bills, they wanted to keep him and offered him a large contract, a huge contract. But in the end, Philly offered more and given the no class move the Bills pulled by publicly calling him out last year at the start of camp, you have to wonder if Peters had decided that he needed to get out of Buffalo, period. Clearly, the team didn't want to lose him and had no long term plan for the OL that didn't include him. But lose them they did and what you see this year is necessity becoming the mother of invention. The new line with all the new faces and the shuffling, is, in part, the result of the team's scramble to cobble together a new line. Docjery and Fowler/Preston were going to be replaced anyway but moving Butler and Langston was not part of any plan, its is the best they could come up with in the face of the Peters disaster. The bottom line is that this is a free enterprise league and the market determined that Peters was worth more than the Bills were willing to pay, not a lot more, but more. So he moved on and so has the team but not, unfortunately, this board.

Langston is not exactly a mystery. He has been around long enough for us to know what we have: a good but not great right tackle who will be in over his head on the left side which will require us to change a lot of what we do to cover up that weakness. I don't expect him to embarass himself out there but I don't expect many highlights either. He is exactly the type of LT you would expect a 7-9 team to have.

Just positions every NFL coach who has seen them play has determined to be positions they shouldn't be playing. These moves may work but they are not the product of shrewd thinking or long range planning, they are the product of necessity. We simply have no choice. If it works, great for us, we are overdue for some accidental brilliance. And if it doesn't? Well, I hardly think any of us will be terribly surprised.

Well, we have the mediocre part down pat, now we just need to work on the "shock the league" part.

Lets see, Did Peters get out of his contract years ahead of schedule despite claims by Brandonosexuals like yourself that the Bills had the poor idiot by the balls? Yes, yes he did. Did he get more money than the Bills were willing to pay? Why yes, yes he did. Did he become the highest paid OT in the league? Why yes, I do believe he did. Did he get to a larger market with a team that is not about to get sold to Canadians? By George, I think he did! Did he get to a team that is a perennial contender with a respected, successful coach and away from a team that hasn't been able to get out of its own way for 9 years? Somehow that fat, lazy, stupid moron who the Bills had by the balls managed that trick too. Hard to believe that Peters can't see what a huge mistake he made.

I don't think there is anything specific you do in the offseason to avoid this particular outcome. You try to improve your team so you can win as many games as possible. I don't think you come up with a plan to win games 7 through 10 or something like that. Overall, we did have some injuries but so did other teams. We had an average defense and a less than average offense which in, the language of numbers, translates to 7-9. I think some coaches can elevate their team's play with excellent week to week game planning, clever schemes and unpredictable play calling. Other coaches can bring their team's play down a notch or two with poor game plans, etc. If actual wins and losses matter more than post game coach-player love fests, it is pretty clear what kind of head coach we have.

ummm....they are the same guy, and I think you meant "sleep walk" into the pro bowl. What do you think is the more rational conclusion, that a guy who worked as hard and as long as Peters did to get as good as he was in 2007 was really just lazy and stupid, a fact finally revealed in 2008 or that Peters held out as a business move (eventually resulting in a new, huge, contract years before his old deal was to expire) which cost him nothing but did effect his ability for one, repeat, one, year? Do you really think he held out because he is lazy and stupid or do you think maybe lazy had nothing do with what was strictly a business move? A very succesfull one as it turned out, for Peters anyway.

This line does not, to me, look like the result of some brilliant long term plan. It smells to me more like, "what the hell do we do now?" in the wake of disasters like losing Peters and the Dockery mistake. What do we do? Oh, oh, oh, I know, lets move this guy over here, and that guy over there, then draft this guy and that guy. Sure it might work but it will be a brilliant accident if it does.

Yes, if we win a lot of games against good teams we will be a good team. Truly insightful.

Similar claims were made about every offensive lineman that has been in and out of that locker room for the last 9 years. Unfortunately, saying it is so does not make it so. All we really have with regard to this line is hope. In fact, the objective realities are, at least for this year, pretty depressing to contemplate. We have a RT who no one has ever thought shuould play LT now playing LT. We have a RG who was a decent if not great RG moving to RT. We have a career non-starter starting at C and a couple of rookies at both Guard spots. Could all 5 of those gambles work? I suppose but I guess I just don't have faith that this coaching staff is so good that they are going to go 5 for 5 on O-line personnel moves. 6 games in to the season, we will have some real evidence one way or the other. I am hoping we got lucky, we are overdue for some.

Well done. I would only add that calling Peters out in public when camp opened last year was inexplicably stupid. The only people who mattered in the negotiations were Peters, his agent and the front office. So why do something to alienate the player? It got the fans all riled up but they don't have a seat at the table so why tick off someone who does?

bravo Sir, bravo

Wow, he must have been even more talented than I thought. Imagine that, being able to go from an undrafted FA to the pro bowl and having a lousy work ethic and attitude to boot. Makes total sense so I see, you don't really hate him. You just think he is stupid, lazy, selfish and lacks integrity. But other than that, you just love the big guy.

Couldn't agree more. I don't recall any of those who now swear that Peters sucks calling for him to be benched in '07 or '08. Even the Bills recognized his value, eventually offering big bucks and to drop his existing contract. Turned out that he got even more from the Eagles so the Bills were a year late and quite a few dollars short in the end. Rudely and unprofessionally calling Peters out in public as Brandon did the day before camp opened probably didn't help but none of that matters anymore. There is no question the Bills themselves thought very highly of him and there is no question that around the league, Peters commands respect for what he can do on the field. Really, the only doubts anywhere about his talent come from the people hereabouts ranting and blathering with page after page of tedious analysis supposedly proving that Peters sucks. Apparently what they know sitting behind their computers working for the Dunder Mifflins of the world outweighs, in their minds, what actual NFL coaches and front office people know. Tim got it right when he called it sour grapes. The fact that the grapes are this sour is proof that despite all their ranting, even his detractors know how good he is. People don't get upset when a second rate talent leaves.

...and yet, even if we were to concede all of that, he is still the best QB we have had since Kelly left and was the last to get this hard luck franchise to the playoffs.

Please explain why we have a "very, very good shot" at beating the patriots??? They have owned us home and away and Brady is back. With logic like that, it is hard to take anything you say seriously. And why are the Dolphins a lock when they beat us twice last year? Yeah, we are home but we lost at home 4 times last year so its not as if we are unbeatable there.

"Deadwood" is quite possibly America's greatest contribution to western culture. I am not ashamed to admit that I openly wept the day it was canceled.