BillsFanSD

As I've gotten older, I've swung around strongly to the view that age discrimination should be perfectly legal. The idea that people don't slow down as they age is just nuts.

Cool. I certainly won't complain about an up-and-coming rival scoring an own goal.

I think that was still a pretty reasonable believe in training camp. Consider: Davis was productive during his rookie year with a few catches in the playoffs. He blew up in the 2021 playoffs. It was reasonable to expect him to continue to build on that production in Year 3. He didn't. We thought we had two halfway decent options in the slot, three if you count Shakir. Turns out we were wrong. Three times. We thought we had added an extra dimension to our offense by adding Cook. Then he fumbled and got sent to the doghouse for the rest of the season. We thought that a DL featuring almost nothing but first- and second-round picks would come into form. Whoops. We added to our LB depth by investing a third round pick in that guy who was inactive every game. We drafted a corner in the first round to play opposite Tre, but our coaches wouldn't play that guy. Also, Tre took much longer to come back that anybody was predicting. How many safeties did we burn through this year? That's a lot of whiffs mixed in with some places where we actually were pretty deep but our depth was severely tested (the secondary).

A billion people have said this already, but add me to the "we haven't drafted particularly well" camp.

I don't know anything about this person, but he spells his first name correctly so that's a very good first step. Works for me.

I was getting irritated with the offense toward the end of the season, but I was one of those people who was hoping that maybe we were just holding back some wrinkles for use in the playoffs. Nope, I was wrong. There were no wrinkles. My opinion of Dorsey dropped quite a bit between the Miami and Cincinnati games. I don't feel bad for giving him the benefit of the doubt (what was I supposed to do? -- it's not like he's under my control or anything) but I can certainly update my priors accordingly.

I'm strongly in favor of not firing McDermott, but let's be honest. He's a COY candidate because one of his players was severely injured on the field. He's not being nominated because of his team's success, and the way our season ended pretty much eliminated any real chance he might have had of winning a sympathy award.

McDermott is arguably the best HC the Bills have ever had. Levy was great of course, but he didn't have to deal with the salary cap and got to coach a loaded roster every year. Without getting hung up on whether McDermott is better than Levy, let's just posit that he's really good. That said, nobody's perfect. He's been here long enough now that we have a pretty good idea of his strengths and weaknesses as a HC, and his weaknesses are going to get called out a little when our season unexpectedly comes to an early end. To the degree that he has a voice in the draft, our drafts have been mediocre. He refuses to play rookies as if this is still the Bill Parcels era where rookies are seen but never heard from. There seems to be communication issues between him and his coordinators. But more importantly, he's built a team that's both physically and mentally soft, much like the Dungy-era Colts. We're that team that wins 12+ games every year but you don't mind seeing us in the playoffs. That's absolutely on the HC. Do I want McDermott fired? LOL no. I remember the drought thank you very much, and I'm enjoying our continued run of high-quality relevance. But I do think it's fair to question whether this coach is optimized for a championship.

I actually don't mind this part. The team had lots of first-hand experience with Dorsey. They knew the guy way, way better than any of us did. They knew his background, they knew (or should have known) how he thought about offense, his relationship with Josh and the other offensive players, etc. If the people with years of experience working with him day in, day out thought that he was the right guy to replace Daboll, cool. I'll trust their judgement. Of course, the corollary here is that if you get that decision wrong, you need to admit as much and make a course correction. I don't feel strongly about it, but I'm skeptical of the idea that we should allow Dorsey to grow into his role. That would be okay if we were rebuilding, but you just can't waste time developing an OC when you have Josh Allen. In other words, I would be happy if the team decided to throw a bunch of money at Frank Reich and make him the highest-paid OC in the league. Surely this is an attractive job for a top OC.

The coaching staff and FO absolutely should have their feet held to the first on this topic. Toss Elam in there while we're at it. And why did we even draft Terrel Bernard? Why are we drafting players and then not playing the players we drafted?

I expect to win the AFC East next season, but it won't be a cakewalk. Miami is legitimately good, and they will be a threat if they get their QB situation straightened out. The Jets will also be a threat if they get a QB. (Not worried about New England at this point). Sitting here in January of 2023, I guess I give the Bills something like a 70% chance to win the division, and maybe an 85-90% chance to make the playoffs. This assumes that Josh Allen stays healthy all season. This team is not a playoff team without Allen, and it doesn't really matter who the backup is. (The quality of our backup QB matters if we're talking about a game or two -- if Allen misses any significant amount of time, we're screwed.) That said, this team is clearly on a downward trajectory in the sense that we no longer have the luxury of having an all-world QB on a bargain bin salary. We'll have to make some tough personnel choices, and from here on out we'll be challenged by up-and-comers with star players on rookie contracts. The days of us having a built-in cap advantage are officially over. We should still be competitive of course.

The guy's an #######. Big deal. Lots of people in lots of lines of work are #######s. If you get bent out of shape every time you encounter one, you're never going to get anything accomplished.

One guy on a team of 53 guys says something mean and you people freak out over it. Embarrassing.

I voted to fire the OC and DC. I don't actually feel strongly about firing either of these guys -- Frazier has been reliable and Dorsey has room to grow -- but on par I would be open to parting ways with either or both. Wait, what? Josh Allen is a product of pass blockers who can't pass block? He's the product of deep threats who can't haul in on-target deep balls? He's the product of jet-sweep gadget guys being pressed into service as full-time slot receivers?

How do you know this anything to do with Josh? I wasn't seeing a whole lot of plays designed to set up the short game, especially involving Cook. I know they were sprinkled in a little bit, but the QB can't execute plays that aren't being called.

This is just stupid. Come on, man.

This isn't an elephant in the room -- we all know that the difficulty level gets dialed up now that Allens' contract kicks in and we have to make tough decisions about our own free agents. Going forward, the Bills are going to need to prioritize what they want to be good at and live with being weak someplace. But they need to be genuinely good at whatever they choose to emphasize. In other words, we can't pour half a dozen draft picks and massive FA contracts into the DL and then have the DL be so-so. They need to succeed at whatever they set out to succeed at. Personally, I would feature the OL, and after that the WRs. You have an all-world QB. Build around him. If that means that the defense becomes kind of average, that's okay.

This is a slightly-unconnected observation, but I'll put it here anyway because it's close enough: Other teams play their rookies. This team is absolutely allergic to letting their rookies see the field. This has been a consistent theme of McDermott's tenure -- remember Frank Gore trying to fall forward for positive yards late in games while Singletary was standing on the sidelines? Our general attitude toward the draft should be that anybody good enough to be drafted in the first 2-3 rounds should be good enough to start and we failed as a coaching staff if they can't see the field. It was infuriating to see players like Elam, Cook, and Shakir have their rookie seasons go to waste like this.

Sure, but Mahomes isn't any better than Allen. These guys have different play styles, but they're interchangeable in terms of talent. Mahomes has a better supporting cast and better coaching. If we had Mahomes and KC had Allen, they would be prepping for the AFC championship and we would be lamenting our loss to the Bengals.

Seriously, regardless of what you think of Allen, the pass protection today was disgraceful. Worst game of the season by far on this metric, and this line hasn't been good all year.

Same. Sadly, this game was never really in doubt, which makes it a lot easier to swallow.

There really wasn't much Allen could have done today, at least from that one viewing of the game. He took care of the ball until the garbage time int. Had some he'd like to have back. Had some drops. Had some nice ones. He wasn't winning this game.

Couldn't agree more. Very nice write-up. My only caveat would be that this seemed to be "one of those days" in terms of it being a total team breakdown. And the Bengals are a very good team. Let's hold off drawing sweeping conclusions from this one game in particular. But man, we've had issues with both lines all season . . .

Anybody who feels disrespected over this particular practice -- which is a longstanding one in professional sports -- is stupid. We should quit worrying about what stupid people think about things. We can carry on with our business while they sit their furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation.

Maybe. The best way to shut these people up is to bring home a Lombardi. If we lose to the Bengals this week, we're probably going to get ripped as having taken a step backwards relative to last year. Obviously the specific criticism we receive will depend on how the game goes and exactly how we lose, but this team is not the plucky underdog that went to Houston any more. Everyone's expectations are higher now, including the media's. That comes with success. If we win this week and lose to the Chiefs in the AFCCG, the narrative is going to be that we're 0-3 against KC and the Bills will never get over that hump and Allen is worse than Mahomes and McDermott is worse than Reid etc. These stories write themselves. If you don't think that a bunch of sportswriters already have rough drafts of this article sitting on their hard drive, you're mistaken. But who cares? I'm not going to be completely satisfied with this team unless/until they win a championship. If the media want to give them a hard time in the meantime, that's okay with me. Ultimately, winning fixes everything, and I'm not going to be really happy until we win anyway.