HappyDays

Since losing Hoecht and Oliver it actually has been close to the bottom of the league: Without Bosa we don't have a prayer of getting consistent pass rush, unfortunately. Might be without Epenesa too which puts Shaq Lawson or Morgan Fox in line to play a significant role. Bad week for this to happen. We'll have to beat Cincy by sustaining drives on offense and blitzing a lot while maintaining coverage on the back end. Tough needle to thread but their defense is so bad I think our offense can out pace them. Cook should have 30 touches in this game.

Wow I really did not expect Ingram to get claimed. I guess Kamari Lassiter is injured so they need the depth? Oh well. Ingram is a marginal NFL player, I'm not losing sleep over it.

We actually don't. If we win out we just need New England to lose to Miami or NY. I'll be rooting for them against the Ravens in fact. We want Baltimore out of the playoffs.

Ingram was definitely going to make it through waivers and back onto our PS. So yeah I'm guessing we'll just re-sign him to the active roster. No harm no foul.

Why are people thinking Ingram will be claimed? He's a PS caliber CB that we keep around because he's been in our system for a few years. Whenever he actually gets on the field he looks lost.

Another mystery injury that pops up out of nowhere and likely keeps an important player out of an important game.

I must be the only Bills fan that doesn't care if it's New England who wins it. If it isn't us, makes no difference to me. I don't think New England is talented enough to win it all but if they do so be it. If nothing else it would shine a light on some of the issues that have gone on in our organization and maybe increase the pressure.

Maybe, but his injuries the past couple years have been non-contact. I don't think that's a size issue. The knee injury that popped up on the report yesterday must have happened in practice where there isn't any real contact. There have been constant soft tissue injuries popping up with this team all year long, and really for the past few years. I don't want to automatically blame the training staff, it could just be bad luck, but the problem has been so persistent and happening to so many different players that it makes you wonder if some part of our conditioning process is broken. Things like Josh Palmer randomly popping up as a DNP out of nowhere and McDermott saying "it doesn't look good" in his last presser, that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen to other teams, certainly not with the frequency it happens here. I'm at a loss.

This is the one. It's not as crazy as it sounds either. If we cut Samuel and Knox, and restructure Allen and Brown, that alone gives us about $50M in cap space to work with next year and that's just doing the bare minimum cap manipulation. You would definitely want to make Pittsburgh keep some of the salary as part of the trade if at all possible but either way we can fit him or any other available WR of our choosing into the cap next year.

Bills 34 Bengals 27 I've been absolutely terrible predicting our games this year. Even when I get the result right I've been way off on the score. I've given up on trying to guess what version of the Bills will show up each week. For this game I think the Bengals defense really is just that bad, worse even than the Bucs defense that we dominated. I expect Cook to have a field day and the passing offense to suddenly look functional for the first time in weeks. On defense I don't know what to expect but Burrow looks a bit rusty and we don't have to worry about their run game too much so I think we can stop the bleeding at least. Ultimately I expect our offense to sustain drives better than the Bengals can in our house in cold weather.

I'm getting a different result with the NYT playoff simulator through the Athletic. If we beat Browns and Jets and lose the other 3 games, they have us 75% to make the playoffs. Add any other win and it shows >99%. So to guarantee ourselves a spot we need to handle our business against the two clearly inferior opponents left on our schedule, and beat 1 of Bengals, Pats, or Eagles. Ideally we'll beat 2 of them and then can rest starters against the Jets.

Yeah that's pretty much what it comes down to. The NFL is too big for Ingram. Slay may be way past his prime but he's an improvement. Nothing to complain about with this move. He costs $350K against our cap and upgrades the depth, even if only slightly.

I saw a video of Chris Simms breaking down our run offense in this game. He briefly touched on this INT saying that Davis screwed Allen over by not crossing the CB's face. I'm not saying that Simms is automatically correct, or that Kurt Warner is, or least of all that I am. I inherently trust @HoofHearted more than anybody on this board with these questions. I'm just saying that's what it looked like Allen's thought process was. Gabe throttles down a bit and only accelerates back into his route once he realizes where the ball is headed. That brief slow down affected the outcome. I could be convinced Allen shouldn't have thrown this ball in any case because Echols' leverage muddies the read, but I do believe the ball was thrown where Davis would have been if he had continued the pace of his route and that a pass breakup would have been the worst case scenario.

Do you think Davis needed to cross the face of the slot there or did Josh misplace the throw? My thought watching it live was Josh expected Davis to continue running and the end result is we probably end up in 4th and 2.

No I'm fine with the horizontal passes to Shakir. They haven't been successful the past couple games but I wouldn't give up on them. I mean literally forward passes. Drops, INTs, fumbles, inability to get both feet in - those have been the outcome of way too many targets in Shakir's direction this year. We have to give up on the idea that he is a legit slot WR. He's a gadget player who's playing hurt so his overall role just needs to be reduced. I'd give TEs and RBs the majority of our targets from now on. Palmer if he can ever get healthy should get the most targets outside and even those targets should be limited, and maybe Cooks can give us something when he's been fully implemented. Anything else in our passing offense should be reduced as much as possible.