PlayoffsPlease

Now we know why you are so grumpy.

Bills haven't been competitive for decades and yet here we all are.

Did you see the final regular season standings in 2018. Lots of teams a lot better than the Bills now. We need to pass them,

Put it a different way. I agree that the 2019 Bills ought to be better than the 2018 Bills. I am 100% certain the 2018 Bills will not be on the schedule. If we want to win a playoff game next year, then the 2019 Bills need to be better than at least one of these teams 2019 Patriots, Steelers, Ravens, Chiefs, Colts, Texans, Chargers, Browns. That is 8 teams as good as or better than the Bills now, who also all plan to get better next year.

Take this example. Do you think the Bills will have a more cost effective online than the colts next year ? The fact that the colts have good cost effective players now is not a handicap for them.

It wont matter if our top paid offensive players play below expectations, like they did last year.

Every team has the same amount of cap money. The Bills (nor anyone else) have a meaningful financial advantage. The teams that win are the one's that get "more bang for the buck", in other words players who produce more than they take up in cap space (Brady's below market contracts are a huge part of the Patriots advantage over the years). So far, the current Bills management has not shown a propensity to find players in either the draft nor free agency who outperform their cap hit.

Josh Allen. He actually did not play so that Nate Peterman could. Mind spins at the thought.

You seem slow

Some of the skeptics will complain that the team only averaged 23 points in his three super bowl wins, and that the Bills would have probably won 4 super bowls with Josh Rosen.

Very good analysis. But a big factor that can't really be known is what passes were not made. Tom Brady and Drew Brees trust their accuracy enough to through into very very tight windows. That may very well may be the most important skill a QB can have. If a QB holds back on 8 pass attempts a game that become "throw aways" or "runs" or checkdowns, that would be enough to the difference between winning and losing.

Are you really seeing that 6 out 50 is the same as 9 out of 10?

This is not true. If it was, I am sure you provide the statistical evidence for that.

Thanks for the correction on the standing. I think it might actually be ninth. This comment is idiotic.

Correlation and causation are two different things. It is simply a fact that top rated offenses win more championships than top rated defenses since the dawn of the 21st century. This truth is not disputable. Whether or not winning championships is caused by having a top rated offense can be argued, but when you have a statistical body of evidence to review over an extended period of time, it is reasonable to make conclusions such as "It is more likely the Super Bowl winner for the upcoming 2019 season will come from the top five statistical offenses, than from the top five statistical defenses" Having said that I struggle with using team defensive statistics to determine who the best defenses are. I think teams with very good or very poor offenses end up skewing their defensive results considerably. This results from a several reasons. 1) the pace of play, 2) starting field position 3) situational football (Look at NE's defense against the Chargers in the first half vs. the second half last week. Same exact defense, completely different football situation. very different statistical results) Lets look at the Bills specifically. In 2018 the had the #2 defense in total yards allowed: and 18th in points allowed: To my mind the "second best defense" would not give up the 18th most points. Why the disconnect? And is there a stat that can capture the disconnect? To me the best defensive stat (no single stat captures everything) is points allowed per drive. In 2018, the Bills were 19th in points allowed per drive. To me this is a better indication of where the Bills defense performed in 2018 https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/drivestatsdef2018 . That link shows the drive stat. If you are curious the Bills were 30th in points per drive last year. The top 3 teams in points per drive were KC , NO, LARams. The Patriots were 8th. The top rated Chiefs had 163 drives with an average of 3.25 points per drive. The Bills had quite a few more drives than the Chiefs, 191, but they only scored 1.4 points per drive, less than half as many. I suspect if you looked at the game by game analysis of the high powered offenses, you would see many examples conceptually similar to the NE-LA Chargers game last week. If this is true, it renders the total defensive statistics for those teams more or less meaningless.

Two of the top offenses made it to the Super Bowl. The four top defenses did not make it to the championship games last year.

Coach WAR. Sounds like the next new generation stat.

Damn, I don't know the meaning of decline.

I am applying a few simple rules. If my daughter can determine what offensive play call is called by the offense in a critical situation and it fails, and I scream. I count that against the coach. If I am screaming "call time out, call time out" and then a minute later saying "why the f did he call a time out now, i hold that against the coach" That is not very sophisticated. In serious I am not trying to play chess and make adjustments for both teams. Just in games the coach lost, were there sufficient clear opportunities for the coach to changethe outcome of the game. My original question was whether or not PFF has applied there concept. It would be a lot of subjectivity, but no more so than for a number of other evaluations they do. so your theory is that all talent levels in the NFL are equal. I am grading you out as an F for that.

NFL coaches get paid millions of dollars (while EMT's who save lives often make less than 40k) , so I never worry about if they are being treated "fairly" or "given a chance". Life is not fair, and they are on the very long side of life's teeter totter as it is. There are so many variables that it is truly difficult to evaluate the head coach. Has PFF or any of the other analytic sites applied there "every play" analysis to coaching? That might be interesting. Short of that, is it reasonable to evaluate each of 16 games and judge whether better coaching would have resulted in a win rather than a loss. For example in a game where you were forced to throw out Derek Anderson vs the Patriots, better Bills coaching was not changing the outcome. Whereas the Dolphins and Jets games seem to be the only ones that could have been won with better coaching decisions (at least to my eyeballs). This means the most games any coach could have won with this team was 8. So McDermott scores a 75. I don't know if this is good, bad or average. Of course this leaves out the important decisions on which players to keep, cut, make active on game day, and the important aspect of developing the players (crappy talent results in part from crappy coaching). The followup question is how many wins do the top coaches leave a fields because of coaching errors in a given year?

I am happy to invite both to camp and have them compete for jobs. I will be disappointed if Beane can't find a better RB1 and a better starting TE. Can't imagine paying McCoy that much to be an RB2. If the money is a cap hit and guaranteed, then i guess I keep McCoy.

Most Every NFL team is in the playoffs with some frequency. 35% of the teams make the playoffs every year. It is not that big of an accomplishment. Sometimes former super bowl winners like the Raven's Harbaugh are considered on the hot seat for not delivering recent results. Many Bengals fans would say that "continuity" just let to a decade of futility under Marvin Lewis. Bills fans are truly scarred. The think a playoff winning coach is such a rare commodity that you must keep that person for ever. There are three levels of coaching 1) gets more out of the team than the talent would suggest 2) gets the expected results out of the talent 3) gets below expected results based on talent. You can be in the first category without having a winning record. I don't know where to place McDermott. The talent on offense is awful. He can't catch the balls for the players. But Mcdermott thinks the position coaching is bad too (he fired several). The handling of QBs, the high number of penalties, weak offensive play calling, piss poor clock management and hiring the wrong positional coaches don't really indicate a strong head coach though.

The analogy applies to them as well.

My point is that for a long time, its a one year at a time analysis. If they win 10 in 2019, I definitely keep them. If they win 6, I take the issue under advisement. If they win 10 in 2019, but then win 6 in 2020, I am taking the issue under advisement. If they win 10 in 2019 and win a playoff game, and then win 10 in 2020 and win a playoff game, I am offering the whole staff thee to five year extensions at that point.

1 playoff and super bowl run. his best stat year was with Chip Kelly.