HappyDays

Apparently Waddle is available:

I thought we were talking about offense. When Allen does well the offense does well. With Allen and this run game we're automatically a top 5ish offense. But some of us believe we need to be the #1 offense to win a championship. That caliber of offense isn't possible with this WR room, period. I want Allen to have the capability of performing at his absolute best because that's the only way we're going to win it all. We've had three games this year where we needed the passing offense to be at its absolute best on critical drives, and they delivered on one out of those three. That's not good enough. We can talk in circles all day about how Kincaid technically qualifies as a WR or whatever else, but at the end of the day this offense hasn't gotten it done when it needed to and that's directly tied to the receiving weapons.

These are one in the same.

She's sure hiding it well 😁

Relevant Bills notes:

I think it's the opposite. Chris Grier has no reason to trade away assets since it's his job on the line. With a yes man put in his place they can go into fire sale mode. We'll see.

Probably no chance they would trade within the division but maybe if we blow them out of the water we could get Waddle?

Didn't Al Michaels read the thread title??

If Miami just kicked FGs on all their 4th downs it would be 14-12. So many good looking drives utterly wasted.

The problem is it doesn't make up the bad call. Miami is about to be 1st and 10 from like the 11 yard line. Instead they ended up punting. Adding 10 yards to a kick return doesn't come close to making up for that.

Why does officiating seem even worse than usual this year?

YPA on its own is a not a good ranking metric. It doesn't factor in sacks, TDs, or INTs. ANY/A is the gold standard. Allen's ANY/A is ranked 9th at 7.27. Goff is 6th at 8.00. 9th is pretty good of course but top 10 should be the bare minimum standard with Allen at QB. Nobody has any confidence that in situations where we need to pass the ball to win we could do it. We're 1 for 3 in that scenario this year. If we get to face the ghost of Jaire Alexander then we have a shot. If not it's extremely dicey at best.

The Steelers to me are a lot like the Saints, just with a higher floor. For years they've needed to take an intentional step back to then take bigger steps forward, but they've been unwilling to take their medicine. Trading for Metcalf and signing old Aaron Rodgers for his last rodeo was more of the same. They should have already fired Tomlin and blown it all up.

You just know Mahomes is texting his wife "staying late at practice" and then he just sits in the parking lot for an hour before driving home.

QBR supposedly accounts for rushing too. ESPN doesn't make the formula public so it's hard to say for sure.

Unfortunately with this passing offense there are no good ideas, just new ideas. Allen has already taken as many sacks this year as he did through the entire season last year. So yeah I also don't know if trying to hang in the pocket is the solution. Every solution fans are trying to come up with is talking around the real problem which is the personnel. Since that problem isn't likely to be fixed we have to live through the run game and Allen playing like Mac Jones. I hate the architecture but it's all we can do.

I think that's fair. Rolling to his right has been almost an automatic big play for him throughout his career so it's a habit that's been positively reinforced and that makes it hard to break. This is the first year where those plays are hurting us more than they're helping us. Since a bunch of new WR talent isn't walking through the door Allen might need to adjust his approach.

With the caveat that QBR can be wonky, but this matches the eye test. When Allen gets out of the pocket he isn't finding anybody working open for him downfield, or the intended receiver isn't making a clean catch along the sideline. This alone might explain the difference between the passing game numbers last year versus this year. Most of our explosive pass plays last year were off schedule. This year those plays just aren't happening.

I'll be honest I'm still not super impressed with Kincaid this year. He's for sure been better than last year, I'll give him that. He might be our best pass catcher but that's more a statement about the WR room than it is about him. I'll use one of the videos from Jim Kubiak's article as an example: Kincaid is directly to the right of Spencer Brown before the snap. His route break is rounded and pulls him right into his defender. I see this a lot from Kincaid, his breaks aren't sharp and/or he drifts into coverage. He's a decent route runner but he hasn't developed a feel for leverage and positioning. Once this play becomes a scramble drill Kincaid confusingly decides to run up the sideline with his defender plastered on him, instead of coming back into the empty space where Allen could get him the ball. These are the sorts of plays Kelce has been automatic on. I can't remember the last time Allen was in scramble mode and Kincaid managed to work open for him. If we can get defenses into heavy sets Kincaid can be a situational personnel mismatch, but as far as running the offense through him I don't see it.

AJ Brown. Jordan Mailata a close 2nd.

I mean that's definitely being inflated by a 394 yard performance against Baltimore. In the other 6 games he's averaging 194 YPG. Last year before adding Cooper he averaged 193 YPG. After adding Cooper he averaged 257 YPG. On one hand I agree with Jim Kubiak. We should pound the rock with James Cook. That is by far the best thing our offense does. But his headline is wrong - the reason we should pound the rock so much is because we have a WR problem. When he says "no WR can blow by a soft cushion" if he's talking about our WR room he's 100% correct. If he's talking about the entire NFL that's just wrong. There's this weird myth I keep seeing that offenses can't complete deep passes against cover 2 shells/soft zones. There are in fact holes in deep zones against those coverages but you need a WR group that can attack them. So yeah keep feeding Cook. But we've seen a bunch of drives this year where that 1st down run only gets 1 yard and converting suddenly feels impossible. I remember when 3rd and 15 felt like easy money with Josh Allen. Now you have Joe Brady in this week's presser saying out loud that they need to stay out of 3rd and 7s because it's too big a hole to dig out of. With Allen's arm that's embarrassing. There's no reason our offense should have such a tiny margin for error. The historically mistake free offense we ran last year was never going to be sustainable.

I guess a WR trade isn't happening this week, so... Chiefs 27 Bills 21 Don't get me wrong, there are some intangibles that favor us in this one. KC on the road coming off a MNF game while we were resting our starters in the 4th quarter of our last game. Josh Allen as a home underdog. These are factors that sharp bettors would latch on to. Allen is going to bounce back from his slump eventually and this opponent might be the best one to wake him up. Unfortunately I just don't buy that our offense is talented enough to out score them. Especially with Palmer likely to miss the game. Spagnuolo has rounded his defense into form as you'd expect. They're not going to lay down and die like Carolina did. Cook will get his yards but without a legit downfield passing game the margins are too narrow. The defense I actually expect to perform reasonably well as they usually do in the regular season matchup, but this is the best KC offense we've seen in a few years so I think 24-30 points given up is a good predictive range. I have very little confidence that we can win this game. If Cook can really take off at a level better than I expect and Allen plays MVP/near-perfect caliber QB then we can edge out a close win... but that's a lot to ask and even then we wouldn't run away with it. Hopefully I'm way off in my thoughts here.