BillsFanSD

The fact is that Allen has turned the ball over too many times recently. Many of those turnovers weren't his fault. Some of them were. When a QB is turning the ball over, the talking heads are going to talk about it. This entire fanbase needs to grow thicker skin. Good teams and good players get criticized all the time, because they find themselves in big games that attract lots of media attention and folks need to find narratives that drive clicks. That's all it is. If Allen leads us to a championship he'll be a generational QB again.

Who cares who the analysts are picking? Seriously. Betting markets have actual, demonstrated predictive power. Analyst picks mean nothing.

The Bengals are a very good team and they are perfectly capable of coming in here and beating us in our own stadium. They and the Chiefs are the only two teams I put in the category of "As Good as Buffalo." No NFC teams are as good as we are, but two of our AFC rivals are and we're playing one of them this weekend. So no, of course Burrow doesn't feel like his team should be underdogs. They're about as good as we are, and honestly I'm surprised the line is as large as it is.

If Miami is going to emerge as our main rival within the division, I'm at least glad they have a cartoon-like, easy-to-hate head coach. You need a little color like this to stoke a really good rivalry. It's like how Miami-Buffalo would have been a good rivalry back in the 1990s anyway, but it took Bryan Cox to elevate it to the next level.

A lot of people on this forum would be better fans if they just watched non-Bills football from time to time. Okay, sure, our win over the Dolphins was kind of ugly. But we won and we were clearly the better team from start to finish. If you watched the next game and actually paid attention to what was happening on the field instead of just nursing your stupid little grudge about the fringe WR who got away, you would have noticed the #3 seed getting upset in their home stadium. Say what you will about the quality of their wins, but that's a 13-win team getting beaten convincingly by a team that nobody had sniffing the playoffs back in week 1. If you kept watching, you saw the Big Bad Unstoppable Bengals get taken to the wire by a Ravens team missing its best player. They needed a bizarre, stupid, one-in-20-years 14-point play to secure the win against a wildly inferior opponent. But sure next week is hopeless. This team is doomed, I tell you.

I thought Allen played extremely well yesterday. His receivers let him down with huge drops, neither pick was his fault, and while he should have just eaten that sack it would also be nice if linemen blocked a bit better. His one legitimate mistake was trying to do too much on a play that we've seen him manufacture brilliance on before. That's acceptable. The deep shots during "that" part of the game were annoying, but they were there for the taking. I don't know whether that was Dorsey pushing, Allen pushing, or just everybody taking what the defense was giving us, but it's not like they were forcing the ball into double coverage or anything. Those were favorable matchups.

That's the sort of play I associate with the post-Kelly playoff Bills. Always some backbreaking play.

omfg

Sure, that's possible. That certainly isn't the vibe that we're getting from Ravens-land though. I don't recall any Bills players calling out Von Miller for dogging it, after all. That should tell you something. Another way to frame this is "Even Sammy Watkins questions Lamar's toughness."

I'm inclined to agree with Watkins. He might not be the right guy to point this out, but everybody expected Jackson to be back out there weeks ago. Reading between the lines, I suspect Harbaugh agrees with him too but is smart enough not to say so out loud. Edit: Also, does anybody think that Watkins is just speaking for himself here? If one guys says it to a reporter, you know there's another dozen guys who quietly agree.

I like Lamar and he's a fun to guy to watch. Any team who gives him Allen/Mahomes money is making a franchise-altering mistake.

This. I'm totally fine with Miami wasting a season if that's what they want to do.

In the unlikely event that an edge rusher slides to us and is clearly the BPA at the time of our pick, fine, take him. The big picture is that we need studs on rookie contracts, and we can fill in the gaps through FA if needed. But no obviously we should not be targeting the D-line. If an edge rusher and a comparable guard are both sitting there, we should break the tie in favor of the guard.

The Dolphins played us really tough this year. Our two games were decided by a grand total of five points. It doesn't get much more evenly-balanced than that. But the Dolphins team taking the field on Sunday is a shadowy reflection of the team that we played earlier. I would fully expect the Bills to pound the bejeezus out of any team starting its 3rd string QB against us, and that doesn't even get into all the other injuries they're dealing with. Not worried about this game at all. I don't care if some stranger on the internet thinks that's not a good look. We're 13-point favorites for a reason, and if we lose at least we'll know that we probably weren't going to get past the Bengals or Chiefs either. I expect an easy game because this one is a mismatch.

I'm happy with any announcer who brings color and personality to the broadcast. Lofton (for example) sucks because he doesn't do that. He's just another voice who sounds exactly like every other generic announcer out there. Romo is great. I could do without the ball-washing, but he obviously understands what's happening on the field and can explain it to the audience in real time. Not every color guy can do that. He also has a little bit of a "Madden" vibe where you can tell that he's really enjoying his time in the booth and isn't just collecting a paycheck (Al Michaels). I know I'm in the minority here, but I especially like color commentators who are willing to be critical of players and coaches. This is where I really appreciate Chris Collinsworth. Sure, he's annoying when he does Bills games, but I like listening to his other broadcasts as a neutral. My all-time favorite commentator was Dan Dierdorf, who managed to be both blistering and funny as hell simultaneously. That sort of thing rubs people the wrong way, but that's fine -- you can watch Friends, but I'm watching Seinfeld.

No matter how bad Thompson is, he'll never be any worse that the second-most hated Skylar.

It's up to 13 at most places. https://www.vegasinsider.com/nfl/odds/las-vegas/

Sorry, but I can't take a Tua-less Miami team seriously. We should thump any team that rolls in here with their 3rd-string QB. If the Bills somehow lose this game, I'll be able to sleep like a baby knowing that there's no way were getting past the Bengals or Chiefs so there's no need to play "what if?" in the back of my mind.

Speak for yourself! The second half is a lot more fun when the Bills are up by 3+ scores.

You've never seen a 7-point favorite get upset before?

Our beat reporters aren't very good at their jobs. Buscaglia refused to provide any context for this statement either. You're a reporter -- providing context is kind of your job.

I remember people absolutely pooping their pants over Steve Young playing football toward the end of his career. I don't recall exactly how many concussions he had, but the way people talked about it was if each snap could be his last. I have a very low opinion of Mike McDaniel because of how he handled Tua's concussion against us back in week 3. I have very little doubt that he would have filed a protest with the league if Hamlin's injury had happened against his team, and I don't doubt that he'll push Tua out there this week if he can. He's sort of coaching for his job. The combination of the owner's impatience and the coaches' lack of professional ethics is setting up some really ugly optics for this weekend.

Also, Beane's record in the 2nd round is kind of cringey. Drafting is hard, and there's a huge amount of randomness here. We consider it a good class if you get one high-quality starter and a couple of contributors in any particular year. Any GM is going to miss more than he hits. It's fair to acknowledge that Beane has a lot of not-quite-hits in the first round and outright misses in the 2nd round. Then again, the guy does seem like a wizard when it comes to the cap and free agency.

I've never been a critic of Edmunds, and I'm glad he's playing well. At the price point we're talking about, I'd rather draft another MLB. We're going to have to let some good players walk at some point, and unfortunately Edmunds just happens to be on the upper end of that range.

It would be interesting to evaluate Beane against his peers around the league if you could remove the QB selection in 2018 from his resume. Obviously that was by far his biggest call as a GM and he knocked that one way out of the part -- any GM would get an A grade just for that one pick alone considering how it altered this franchise's trajectory. Intuitively it feels like Beane has done an above-average job of managing the salary cap, bringing in appropriately-priced FAs, and working the draft. It's just hard to judge since I don't pay much attention to the day-to-day workings of other GMs.