BarleyNY

Have to visit the FIL and his family. I’m dragging my sous vide set up and mini charcoal grill to make filets. Not sure what else is on the menu but I’ll at least have that. Also I’ll be drinking.

I will truly miss Captain Andrew Luck’s Twitter account

Outside of QB the only two offensive players on Houston that I take over ours are Hopkins and Tunsil. That’s it. The rest of their OL is poor. Their TEs are a joke and their RBs are pedestrian. I’d take Beasley over Fuller in the slot and Smoke over Stills. As for QB, Hopkins is a top 10 QB in this league. Allen is not close to that today. But I think he still might be okay on Saturday. Romeo Crennel likes to play a disciplined, but passive 3-4 with a lot of zone. That’s exactly what Allen thrives against so we might have a really favorable matchup in this game. I like our chances to get the W.

He was the OC the second half of the season and Baker and the Browns offense did very well for those 8 games. That’s what got him the job. But he was in way over his head as HC - especially also calling offensive plays.

This is fact. FWIW I hear that he realizes that he screwed up for pretty much exactly that reason. He thought it would be easier this year and it wasn’t. It also didn’t help that he got crushed by Kitchens’ incompetence. People wonder why the Browns did well in so many games on their first drive or two, then fell apart offensively. It was because the OC, Monken, scripted a couple series worth of plays every game. Then Kitchens took over. The good news for Baker and the Browns is that Mayfield has what it takes to be their FQB. He needs to dig in and properly prepare. I fully expect that to happen. The bad news is that the Browns also need to get their organization in order and get the right people in the right places. That is far, far less likely.

You might want to think twice about ripping on Depo. His job is to provide organizational structure for the Brown, though that’s been largely ignored up until now. The Haslams went against their management’s wishes when the Browns hired Hue Jackson and against Depo’s when they hired Kitchens. He preferred Stefanski. Also when the brass - including Depo and analytics driven GM Sashi Brown - voted unanimously for another candidate, but the Haslams ignored them to select Hue, do you want to guess who they all voted for? It was none other than Sean McDermott. Seems like the problem with the Browns is ownership, not competent people like Depodesta. Things with the Browns aren’t going to get better until they step aside.

You can’t hold that against Dorsey. It’s exactly what he did tell the Haslams, but they made him keep Hue for another season. Dorsey’s problem was that he went with Kitchens when he did get to chose. He also meddled with some coaching things and hid that from ownership, which did not go over well when discovered.

Already a thread on this

Yes, except for Green Bay. That’s public information, which the owners of the other 31 teams hate because their numbers are public. They are often used to to help estimate the finances for the other teams.

This really got ignored, but it’s the correct answer. Passing efficiency in meaningful situations is what matters. Take garbage time out of the mix, add in a QB’s rushing ability, account for drops, etc. and you see a much stronger relationship between wins and a QB’s performance rating. Metrics like QBR, DYAR and DVOA get ripped on a lot around here yet they do a much better job of rating QB performance than ones like passing yards and completion percentage. Take a look.

Correct. BB coached Cleveland’s last game but Baltimore didn’t want a Cleveland coach holdover.

No team has ever not rolled over their cap space. One could chose not to do so (or make an unintentional mistake and not do so), but that would not impact the minimum they are required to spend. The minimum spending limit is calculated as a percentage of the unadjusted league cap. Rollover cap dollars from each team are added to the unadjusted cap amount for that year to get each team’s adjusted cap.

It’s only if you kick the ball and it makes it past the LOS. If a FG is blocked and doesn’t cross the LOS the kicking team can recover and retain possession of the ball. Obviously If it’s 4th down and the kicking team doesn’t advance the block past the first down marker it’s a turnover on downs. If it’s 1st, 2nd or 3rd down then the kicking team retains possession if it recovers.

Again, I disagree. Looking simply at scoring averages the Bills have been giving up an average of 16.4 ppg. You’d expect more to better offenses and less to worse ones. NE is better than average and has been scoring 26.2 ppg. Average those two numbers and we get 21.3 points. That’s about what I’d expect NE to have scored if both sides played about average. They got 24. So NE got 2.7 points more than expected. NE was also playing at home so I’d expect them to do a little better which could account for at least some of, if not all, of that 2.7 point difference. In any event I don’t see “much worse” by our defense. Let’s keep this in mind too - there will be a lot of excellent offenses in the playoffs. The defense will probably give up more than 16 or 17 points to those offenses too. But it’s because they’re playing good offenses, not because they're playing poorly.

Two of the posts I responded to were just short lists and the other only talked about why other QBs weren’t on his list. Not exactly exhaustive arguments. They got an equivalent response. I’ll leave it at this: There are a lot of good, young (or at least not old) QBs in this league who have outperformed Allen. An unbiased look at the QB options would yield a much longer list than between 0 and 3 names. I hope Allen keeps getting better, but there’s no guarantee that he will and he’s not the only QB who can do that. If we’re looking at performance to date then there are a lot of better options.

Well, then they need to because they aren’t carrying their weight. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. The defense wasn’t stellar, but they weren’t bad either. Good teams are going to score in the NFL today. And if we’re going to criticize let’s do so based on performance, not just expectation. The offense was a notably worse than the defense yesterday and they’ve been that way all season.

I guess I see what you’re saying, but this is a good team we played. Playoff caliber teams are going to score points on almost any defense. You might get away with a win here or there against those teams on your defense dominating, but that isn’t a winning formula anymore. It was rare before the rule changes and now it’s even more so. Besides our defense doesn’t have the dominating pass rush that’s necessary to neuter top QBs. That was Denver’s formula when they last won it all. I know this isn’t the Bills year. Their window opens (or should open) in 2020. We all have a good idea of what needs fixed. I just don’t think it’s fair to blame the side of the ball that’s playing the best for losses like this.

I read it just fine. It’s a ridiculous, logic defying argument. Sure, our identity has been that our defense has had to carry the team to its wins because it’s been excellent and the offense has been below average. Who in their right mind blames the part of the team that’s doing better than the other for losing? It’s like blaming the fasted leg of a relay team for not being even faster because, well, we all know the other guys are slow.

This is ridiculous. The offense did its job? 17 points is doing their job? Wow. This is the NFL in 2019. Good teams - playoff teams - are going to score. An offense has to be able to put up points and ours hasn’t been able to do enough of that. Simply pretending that the problem is that our defense didn’t live up to the very high bar you set for them and that the offense cleared the very low bar you set for them is absurd. Instead consider that the part of the team that has been underperforming all season might just need to step it up. The reason the Bills best win is against an 8-7 team not that of its top 3 defense.

That’s insane That’s even more insane And yet more insane. The homers are really out in this thread.

Wow. I was really hoping he was going to get asked about it in his interview. Next time Oliver needs to fall right on him.

This is correct. I noticed that Pittsburgh tried to bait the Bills with a similar play. On one punt they brought the player covering the gunner in the same way the Cheatriots did. But right before the snap another player who was positioned off of the LOS and inside a bit bailed to cover the gunner. The Bills didn’t take the bait and got the punt away. I thought it was a good try by Pittsburgh.

Not surprising. Gotta protect the shield. Flutie can’t expect to keep getting a check from networks for doing NFL games and analysis if he’s going to blemish the league.

We might’ve seen different games. In the one I watched the Bills were losing 10-7 in the 4th quarter before winning 17-10 and finished with 261 yards of total offense. Kinda seemed to me like the game was in question for quite some time and that the Steelers defense did pretty darn well. The Steelers finished with 229 yards of total offense with the Duck at QB holding them back. I don’t see how you can rave about the Bills D going up against a team with a 3rd string QB but not give the Steelers D their due. They had a tougher job and did very well.

The Bills aren’t in a big market and they don’t have much in the way of national star power. It’s tough to leverage a CB for much of that - even one as stellar as White. Their QB is from a FCS school and was considered very raw/flawed prospect coming out and in the NFL he doesn’t put up big passing numbers. Their other offensive players at skill positions aren’t big names. They are not a sexy team at this point, but the team is winning and that is changing the national perspective. Expect a lot more hype for this team leading up to 2020. They’ll be a popular team for pundits to pump up - especially with the likely departure of Brady and decline of the Cheatriots. While I do expect a lot more love from the national media to be forthcoming, I think there is some hyperbole in this thread. It wasn’t like they expected the Bills to be trash, they just didn’t expect them to be this good. A lot of that has to do with Allen and his improvement.