BillsFanSD

You don't actually know that there is a victim in this story. I mean, maybe there is. But you can't possibly know that.

I've terminated people for sexual misconduct, and I can tell you that this is not true. My organization (a public university, which is relevant here) does not dismiss people just because they were sued in civil court. We need something beyond that.

I don't think it matters morally, but in California the age of consent is 18 and they don't have a "Romeo & Juliet" exception. Technically a 21 year old who has sex with a 17 year old in the Golden State is guilty of statutory rape regardless. Again, not saying it matters, because this particular angle doesn't matter to me at all. In most states, something like this would be legal. CA law is just a little on the weird side.

For the record, I 100% do not care if a 21 year old has consensual sex with a 17 year old. It would not matter to me if the girl showed her ID and the guy knew with certainty that she was underage. There's nothing particularly wrong with a sexual relationship between two people of those ages, and this isn't the sort of thing that statutory rape laws were designed to prohibit. Prosecutors generally don't bring charges in cases like that, and if I were on a jury I would be a solid vote for jury nullification. The "rape" part is extremely important. The "statutory" part is not.

So what does this tell you about the information that the Bills have at their disposal? Araiza is a 6th round pick, and he plays (arguably) the least important position in the NFL. It's not as if the Bills are highly invested in the guy or anything. If Haack had "won" the punting job, a lot of us would have been disappointed but nobody would have seriously second-guessed that decision. There's really very little incentive for the team to retain a guy who they have serious doubts about, so the fact that they chose to retain him sends a signal that I should pay attention to. But this is all speculative, because I imagine we'll learn more about what happened over the next few days.

Another way to look at it is that the Bills did their due diligence and made a decision based on better information than what we have. I mean, maybe they screwed it up. It's certainly been known to happen. But there's literally no harm in reserving judgement for the time being.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff has friends there with her who can testify that she was in a room with her rapists for 90 minutes and that she reported being raped immediately before leaving the party. If they back up that story, that would be enough to put me in the "cut him" camp. If not, there's nothing here. I'm not seeing a reason to rush to judgement either way. We're going to find out in short order what the evidence shows.

I don't know about "we" -- I can only speak for myself. With the benefit of hindsight, the 50 year-old version of me realizes that the 20-something version of me didn't fully appreciate the Jim Kelly era when I was living through it. The Bills had a great QB with a great offense, and they were making deep playoff runs over and over. It'll always be like this, right? Well no, actually, it's not always like this. Not putting any special pressure on Josh. Just trying my best to sit back and soak it in while it lasts.

Maybe the Browns will regret moving on from Mayfield, but the bottom line is that if I were the Browns GM, his body of work didn't justify signing him to the kind of long-term contract that he was looking for. I think Mayfield probably has a long-run career in the NFL as a broke man's answer to Ryan Tannehill. If that's his ceiling, it's hard to fault the Browns for moving on even if it's very easy to fault them for moving on to Deshaun Watson specifically. In other words, I think the Browns are likely to regret giving up assets for Watson but unlikely to regret parting ways with Mayfield.

There is not a single GM anywhere in the league who has batted 1.000 on every personnel decision. Obviously Bean would like to have the Ford pick back, and obviously he'd like to have Teller back. Guy took a completely irrelevant franchise and turned it into the best top-to-bottom roster in the NFL and you guys are looking for nits to pick.

I literally just rewatched the week 17 game against the Jets yesterday afternoon. I wish Haack well, but I'm glad we drafted Araiza.

We have way more than one game worth of data on Keenum. He's not a rookie, and there's lots of game film out there.

I think we should make very firm snap decisions about Keenum after watching him play behind a patchwork OL while trying to throw to our backups for a half.

Who is going to trade anything -- literally anything -- for Matt Haack? No offense to the guy or anything, but he's a punter and there are football fans in rural Malaysia who know that we are going to release him.

I've had a fairly high opinion of Crowder -- the guy always seemed to make a play or two against us every time we saw the Jets. Big disappointment so far. I thought he would be a near lock for the starting slot position, and now I'm in the same boat as the OP wondering whether we really need a third slot guy. I mean, I'm sure he probably ends up making the roster, but still.

Andre Smith is nothing special. If it comes down to Smith vs. Spector, give me the draft pick who isn't getting himself suspended.

Why won't the NFL just take my money and let me watch their games on the device that I prefer?

Same. A whole bunch of people bought into a narrative about Allen before the draft, and it turned out they were mistaken. We saw that during his rookie season, of course, especially after he came back from injury. But it took media types a long time to update their views because social media causes people to dig in instead of just saying "Oops -- looks like I got this one wrong." There's nothing wrong with being wrong from time to time. People screw up prospect evaluations over and over again. Our FO does it too. The smart ones are the folks with the bravery to admit they blew it. (I give Arizona a ton of credit for kicking Wrong Josh to the curb rather than double down like other teams *coughMiamicough*).

I don't think Stevenson can really afford to miss "weeks" of camp/practice.

Cover 1 is great. I feel fortunate that we, as a fan base, have a team of content creators who put out good programming year-round. Especially once the season gets rolling, I enjoy the way their shows provide a certain structure to each week. And while the C1 guys are obviously fans, they aren't homers and don't just blow sunshine up everyone's ###. I know NFL teams are paranoid and I certainly don't doubt that McDermott in particular is tightly-wound, but not so sure that the Bills have a big issue with Cover 1. These guys have got be great for building fan engagement. The Bills are a money-making business, after all. C1 gives them a fountain of free, semi-professional marketing.

I'll bet you get so tired when you have to explain.

I don't care about access to actual live broadcasts. I live in the Midwest an have Sunday Ticket for that. Can't wait until this migrates away from DirecTV, but it's fine for the time being. I watch the 1:00/4:00 ET slots every week whether the Bills are on or not, so I feel like I get my money's worth out of it. During the drought, that was pretty much all the NFL I ever consumed. Since 2019 or so I've been watching more podcasts, replays of other games involving rival teams, and stuff like that. I thought about springing for Game Pass last year and never bothered, but I think I might open up my wallet for NFL Premium. I know already watch condensed replays during the season. I'm 100% sure I would watch the Bills' all-22 each week if I had access to it. I occasionally watch random replays on NFLN if I happen to stumble onto one that I don't remember watching at the time, and I'm sure I would do that with this service throughout the year, including the offseason. I know I can probably get this for free, but I'm also interested in having radio audio available. It probably doesn't synch up quite right with live television, does it? When I lived in central Indiana eons ago, stuck watching the Colts all the time whether I wanted to or not, I used to mute the television and listen to the radio call instead. Would love to do that again with random games. So much more personality than the network guys.

Having watched Davis play since his rookie year, I feel really confident in his ability to break out in a big way in 2022. The guy has just flat-out produced every time he's been asked to do so. Combine his previous results with an additional year of development, and I think I'm about as confident about Gabe Davis as I have been about anybody in a long time. This isn't just homerism. I'm not totally sold on Knox yet (hopeful, just not sold), not interested in resigning Motor, mildly pessimistic about Epenesa, etc. I'm just fairly confident that Davis is going to be really, really good this year.

Pretty sure all Bills fans are very familiar with this phenomenon.

Players always say nice things about the team they just signed with. That's normal. What's not normal is seeing a first-ballot HOFer bail on the team that he literally just won a SB with because he wants to play for your franchise specifically. When you see stuff like that happening, it's a clear sign that it's not just words and agent-driven PR spin. We actually have something special brewing here, and it wouldn't be happening without #17.