jrober38

Jacksonville is loaded with talent. Their defense is arguably the best in the league, they have a decent line and they have several quality pass catchers. The only wildcard is Blake Bortles, who has been playing excellent football as of late. If they keep playing the way they have for the past month, they can beat anyone in the NFL. They're really good.

I'm not totally giving up on him, I just don't see much reason for optimism. He looks like just a guy out there. He's not big, he's not fast, he doesn't really separate. Where's the upside? His skill set doesn't suggest he'll be anything more than a #3 or #4 receiver. I don't see many starter traits.

Sure, but the difference is striking when you watch them play. Smith Schuster runs great routes, gets open, and is a beast after the catch. NONE of those things can be said about Jones. He looks slow, can't separate and does nothing with the ball in his hands.

Jones has been extremely disappointing. He doesn't generate enough separation and he has shown minimal ability to catch contested passes. JuJu Smith-Schuster is the same type of receiver. Too bad we didn't pick him instead. He looks like a real player.

I think they let Mills and maybe Henderson compete there. LB I guess I forgot about. Brown is a free agent, Milano showed some promise. Alexander and Humber aren't good enough. We have so many needs it's crazy. Our whole roster needs to be rebuilt. I guess I'd focus on QB and the trenches this offseason. We need better OL play and the defense can't function unless we can generate a pass rush by only rushing four guys. Then in 2019 you address the complimentary parts.

The Bills should have traded Glenn three months ago. Now we'll likely have to cut him. I can't imagine him coming back next year. He's no longer a durable LT.

Ranking the Bills' needs heading into the offseason: 1. QB - doesn't need to be explained. 2. DT - the Bills desperately need talent up front. You can make a case they need to draft two guys; one early and one late. They especially need someone with some size, preferably 320 lbs or bigger. 3. DE - our pass rush was non existent this year. We desperately need someone else with some giddy up off the edge. Lawson hasn't shown much of anything an is on IR again. 4. TE - Charles Clay is likely done after this year. He can't stay healthy and we need to get younger and more athletic at the TE spot. O'Leary and Thomas aren't good enough. 5. RG - This was the weakest link on the OL all season. If they don't like Miller, they need to upgrade Ducasse because he's not good enough. 6. WR - Next year we go into the season with Benjamin as the #1 and we have plenty of bodies behind them to compete. Hopefully Jones improves as the #2, and you have Thompson, Reilly and hopefully another mid to late round pick competing to fill out the depth chart.

Here's a great breakdown on how this is just a ploy to eventually force massive cuts to Medicare, Medicade and Social Security.

NFL players are bigger, stronger, and faster than ever. These factors lead to bigger, more traumatic hits, which in turn will lead to worse cases of CTE. A lot of people think CTE is only caused by hits to the head, which isn't true. You can hit a guy cleanly in the chest, but if the force of that hit is so severe that the player getting hit, or the person doing the hitting gets whiplash, the brain can still be damaged by its natural movement inside the skull. I'm not saying you haven't, but people really need to watch the movie Concussion. They do a really good job breaking down how blow, after blow, after blow where the brain gets "shaken" inside the skull is what leads to CTE. It's not just the brutal helmet to helmet hits that have become so scary to watch. 90% of football players' brains that have been studied have had CTE. You're talking about a subject to which you don't appear to have done any research on whatsoever.

What are you talking about? CTE is caused by repeated blows to the head, which is a direct result of playing football. The symptoms vary for people diagnosed with CTE. Some display no symptoms, and some have brains that don't properly function by the time they're 30 years old. It's not a one size fits all thing.

It makes you wonder about tons of young NFL players. Think of all the guys who cite depression as the reason they act out and fail drug tests due to smoking marijuana. Maybe it's not all their fault. Chris Henry the former Bengals WR had CTE. He had numerous off the field issues. Aaron Hernandez had one of the worst cases of CTE for someone his age. Everyone knows his story. Josh Gordon has been a mess off the field. What if he has it? Marcel Dareus? Considering the position he plays and his style, would anyone doubt him having it? When 90% of the people studied have CTE, it really makes you wonder how much it affects some of the NFLs players who have had constant off the field behavioural issues.

And it's only going to get worse for him. As he prophesizes, he probably won't know his own name when he's 50. These stories are going to become more and more common as players from the 90s and 2000s begin to die in their 40s and 50s. As more and more of these stories surface, football participation will inevitably decline.

Not really. Approximately 90% of all football players test positive for CTE. What's scary, is that Larry Johnson is only 38 years old and this is a degenerative disease that will get worse over time.

Things will change over time. At some point kids and parents will say, I'm not going to play the sport that will give me lasting brain damage and shorten my life. I'll try something else.

I don't see Cordy Glenn as a part of this team next year.

There are 4 stages of CTE. People with stage 1 show no symptoms.

I agree. Aside from the Bills games I can't watch the NFL anymore. Too many penalties, too many pauses, too many commercials, too much time commitment, not enough quality from the product. My NFL viewership has steadily declined over the past 7 years and will likely continue to do so. I have family season tickets and I usually go to 4-5 games a year. This year I went to 2. My interest just isn't where it used to be.

Nope. I'm Canadian, and I told my wife (who is American) that Trump was going to win for weeks leading up to the election because I thought Hilary was such a horrible candidate. Hilary was probably the worst presidential candidate I've seen in my lifetime. She never had a chance of beating anyone last November because she had so many glaring flaws voters would never overlook.

It's a generation thing. I imagine a good chunk of parents will hold their kids out now, which will water down the sport in 15-20 years. These are probably parents who have kids under the age of 10. Once a kid gets to the age of 10+, you can probably tell who the elite athletes are and the dream of making it to the NFL becomes a fantasy a lot of parents want to see their kids try and live. The parallels between tobacco and football are very real. You have an industry that did nothing but deny, deny, deny for years, and when the science became impossible to ignore, the industry experienced a steady decline. Tobacco went through this for the past 50 years, and the NFL just began their decline about 5 years ago. If NFL participation drops by 50%, as you have a generation of players from the 90s and 2000s dying in their 40s and 50s, at some point parents are going to stand up in mass and say enough is enough, let's play basketball, let's play soccer, let's play baseball. Let's play anything where my decision to let my son participate doesn't directly lead to them having severe brain trauma.

I think it'll take about 50 years. I figure a lot of people who are just starting to have kids now will be the first generation to really hold their kids back from playing football. That decision will be felt in 20 or so years. Then that generation does the same thing, I think the league will be on really unstable ground. When you think about how much was learned about head injuries over the past 10 years, it'll be crazy to imagine anyone playing in 50 years once you imagine how much more they'll know about the effects of playing football. Think about tobacco. A lot of the science behind the effects of smoking came out in the 60s. In the 60s, about 42% of Americans smoked. Now, only about 16% smoke which is a decrease of about 60%. If that happens to NFL participation over a 50 year span, the NFL is finished.

Trump can't stop catering to his base. He does all of the things you mention because his base loves it, and he loves hearing positive things about himself from Breitbart or Fox News. The problem is that he's completely alienated the rest of the country. As I explained earlier, his disapproval rating has skyrocketed since he entered office, and as you pointed out that's in an environment where pretty much everything else is going really well for the country. Trump lost the popular vote, and he's likely lost millions of supporters over the past year. He's not going to change who he is at this point in his life, and he's going to spend the next three years doing the same stuff, digging himself into a bigger hole among moderate Americans. By the time the 2020 election rolls around, you might have a situation where 60% of voters will vote for anyone but Trump and he'll lose in a landslide.

Most former NFL players have CTE. Humans aren't meant to play football.

Ya, there's no way they don't take Mayfield with their first pick.

I agree with the premise of what they need to do, but I think you underestimate how many people truly dislike Donald Trump right now. Most of the 2016 polls had Clinton with a 2 to 4 point advantage heading into election night. Trump's current approval rating shows there's a 20 point difference in those who approve vs disapprove. That's a MASSIVE advantage.

Of course we're years away. But we're talking about if an election were held today. Or at least I thought that's what I wrote. Based of current polling numbers he'd get obliterated by pretty much any other candidate. If 57% of the electorate flat out disapproves of the job you're doing, those people are probably going to the polls to enact change, and I'm pretty sure you can't win a presidential election if that portion of the electorate votes against you. Hilary Clinton was a horrible candidate. She'd have lost to pretty much any of the Republic options in the primaries because she had so many glaring flaws as a Presidential Candidate. The Dems had no one but themselves to blame for forcing her down everyone's throat. And assuming the Dems will use the same campaign strategy as they used last year is equally as dumb as me assuming the current approval polls will play a part in three years (I was talking about right now).