HappyDays

👀 Hopefully Chicago embarrasses them in the 2nd half and they move into fire sale mode.

I don't see Denver as a legit threat in the conference. Bo Nix and that offense haven't been good enough. Sure they could steal a win against KC though, just like LA did. Right now it's KC and Indy as the only legit threats IMO. The NFC has a lot more legit contenders.

I wouldn't read too much into this game against a laughably untalented opponent, but it is starting to seem like they have no real challengers in the AFC. I'm interested to see what Indy looks like against them in a few weeks. KC's defense is not elite this year and Jonathan Taylor has been playing like an MVP candidate. Lou Anarumo is their DC and he has confounded Mahomes in the past. So there are some favorable elements there that at least in theory make them a worthy challenger. Is Daniel Jones up to the task though? That's the biggest question.

The defense isn't any number of players away... They are a coach away. This idea that they just need to get the right players in the room is the fundamental error that caused this regime to make all the wrong decisions in the offseason. They could have added Myles Garrett and it wouldn't have mattered. No amount of investment we make on that side of the ball is ever going to matter under current management. Either get a new coach in the building or do whatever it takes to make the offense so good that the defense becomes irrelevant.

Yeah I do blame him... It's an unforgivable error. Missing on a draft pick, that's forgivable. Failing to make a no brainer addition is not. Right now we are wasting an entire season of our elite QB while he's in his prime. That's a fireable offense. This season we could have been watching Allen throw rockets to Metcalf downfield which would have been fun to watch if nothing else. It would have opened up everything underneath too. Nothing about the offense the last two weeks has been fun to watch. Beane rested on last year's laurels and used that as an excuse to run it back. I genuinely think he believed that last year's results meant we didn't need a #1 WR and he doesn't have a head coach that tried to convince him otherwise. If he really believed we needed one he would have closed the deal. They (and much of this board) had the completely wrong philosophy about how to build this team to a championship level.

Jakobi Meyers is inactive. This game so far has nothing to do with calls. In fact Las Vegas just got out of a 3rd and 12 because McDuffie committed illegal contact. They just have no offensive talent. It's like watching an expansion team.

Looks like Tennessee is getting the interim head coach bump.

Raiders offense today without Bowers and Meyers is in the conversation for least talented of all time. They have zero hope.

Yeah I hate to boil it down to one move but that is the glaring mistake. There is no combination of defensive players that we're paying that I wouldn't give up for Metcalf's contract right now. Rousseau and Bernard in particular stick out. Their combined AAV alone just about pays for Metcalf's $33M.

It's just really hard to buy this given the total lack of any attempt to add one. He's made exactly 1 WR pick in the top 100 of the draft since 2021. In fact Shakir is the only WR other than Coleman that was a top 150 pick during that period. It's almost impossible to invest such a small amount into any position over 5 years, let alone a premium position. There have been several WR trades and signings made over the years that he has failed to make. It's pretty clear to me that he just doesn't value the position nearly to the level that he should. Beane spent all of the 2024 offseason resetting the team's salary cap to prepare for the 2nd window of Allen's career. He then used the vast majority of that freed up cap space to re-sign good but not great defensive players instead of using it on a legit offensive weapon. 3 of his top 4 free agent signings were defensive linemen. His first 5 picks were defensive players. If Beane "would love to have" a legit #1 WR he sure hasn't acted like it. You can't excuse the quality of the WR room away as just bad luck or bad timing. Repeatedly and intentionally he has valued every single position higher than WR. His words and his actions make it impossible to deny that.

Oh for sure. The worst part is I saw all of this coming. I knew that investing a bunch in the defense wouldn't make a difference, although even I didn't think it would look this bad. I knew that failing to add a legit WR would haunt us. I knew that Beane's WGR rant would end up making him look foolish. Once the season started I kept an open mind and hoped they knew better, but unfortunately it has turned out even worse than I predicted. This whole year since March has been like watching a train crash in slow motion.

I think ultimately a 2nd would get it done. If we have to give up a 1st so be it, hopefully we get like a 3rd back as well in that scenario. Metcalf went for a 2nd and he's a better WR than Olave IMO. Maybe we give them Keon Coleman too if it comes to that. Anything within reason should be on the table. I wouldn't extend him this year. No need to rush it given his injury history. As for what we would do with him after this season I don't even think about it to be honest. To me this is the all in year. I'm willing to make pretty much any move to help the offense regardless of how it impacts 2026 and beyond. I know that's a cop out answer but that's how I want Beane to be thinking about the team right now. Make decisions as if he's fired if we don't reach the Super Bowl.

Relevant notes for the WR conversation: So the most realistic names right now are Calvin Ridley and Jakobi Meyers. Not exactly the most inspiring options but both would represent upgrades. The question is, is New Orleans serious about extending Olave? Or are they just putting this out there to try and drive up offers? We might have to wait right up until the trade deadline to acquire him. I don't know if we can afford to wait that long. No way we can beat KC with this WR room if Palmer is out. Carolina won't be a layup either. If Beane is serious about winning this year he needs to make a trade offer that blows someone out of the water. Make an offer New Orleans can't refuse. We don't have the luxury of staying patient to try and "win" the value of the trade. If the trade makes the offense better in 2025 it's an automatic win. Next year's draft be damned.

Certain Bills podcasters have already started running with the narrative that "WR isn't the problem." It's not inconceivable to me that Beane will convince himself of the same. Hey all we need is for the QB and the OC to be perfect in every single game. No big deal. I find myself thinking about this more and more. Allen's legacy is going to be determined by the whims of a billionaire. I don't get the sense that there is any pressure on McDermott and Beane at all. The WGR rant which should have been an absolute embarrassment to the organization was instead featured as a triumph in official Bills social media posts. The coaching and roster management in this 2nd window of Allen's career has been so horrifically bad that I'm now firmly in the camp of there is a 0.0% chance we will win a Super Bowl under this regime. I think Allen is still in his prime of course but he is past the absolute peak of his prime when he could shake any tackle and stiff arm LBs. We are now on the downslope of his career and while I don't expect it to be a steep slope it is clear to me that the clock is ticking. But I don't think Pegula thinks about this stuff nearly as much as some of the people on here. To him what McDermott and Beane have done is a rousing success. They sell season tickets, they sell merchandise, they fill the stadium deep into January. The only graph he cares about is on a perpetual incline. To the fans that have grown hopeless about this regime there is zero risk of a change. To Pegula there is a very real risk and very little upside - how much more money could a change really earn him? So short of Allen personally walking into his office or sales dropping off a cliff he has no incentive to make a change. We're stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

I think the correct explanation is that this is the time of year when teams are adjusting what they do and are finding holes to attack on their opponents' film. Our coaching staff apparently does neither of those things which would explain why we always lose a couple games at the same time of year. You can copy and paste that explanation for our annual playoff failures too. As recently as last year my take on McDermott was that he was a good coach but not great enough to elevate the team to a championship. I'm starting to question that. I'm starting to wonder if he's flat out a bad coach in all respects other than establishing team chemistry.

And I can even live with banking on a young safety to take a step, I get that you can't be strong everywhere on the roster. But banking on the sophomore WR with a lot to work on to be our X receiver was just a moronic plan. That isn't a position you can paper over. Look at what KC did - they drafted Josh Simmons but they also signed Jaylon Moore to at least give them a baseline LT option if Simmons didn't develop right away. You can't give yourself no backup options at the most important positions on the team. It's week 7 of what's supposed to be our Super Bowl year and we don't have a freaking X receiver. It's horrible and entirely predictable roster mismanagement.

I am extremely patient with young players. One thing I will always push back on is people calling rookies or even 2nd year players busts. But there has to be some sort of arc of progress to keep the hope alive and there just isn't anything there right now. I'm at a point where I'd make him a big slot the rest of the season because without the refined technique that's the only spot where his natural athletic abilities are going to work. Of course we don't have anybody that can reasonably take the X role from him so that complicates things. But him being forced into that role is the #1 problem with the passing offense right now IMO.

Poor speed can be overcome. But it takes a high level of nuance and attention to detail. Coleman in that respect has not progressed at all since last year to my eyes. I really think he could be capable of it even with his 40 time if he developed his technique. He is still a very good athlete and plenty of WRs use their strength and technique and understanding of leverage to get open more than their speed. But whatever training he's done and whatever coaching he's received is not showing up on the field.

Trust me he worked very hard this offseason. Did a lot of private WR coaching, had 1 on 1 sessions with Allen before camp, etc. Unfortunately he just doesn't seem to have it. I'll always bet on athletic traits combined with a strong work ethic but some players never apply the training to the field. After all that work he hasn't progressed at all, he's making the same mistakes he was making last year. With his skill set he needs to have the nuances of the position down pat, and he just doesn't look even close right now. So I'm pretty close to giving up on him at this point. He can maybe salvage his career if he switches to big slot, I'd at least be interested to see what that looks like.

Cole Beasley said it too: That is the subtle benefit of having a legit #1 WR that nobody ever brings up. It creates a snowball effect on the rest of the offense. Everybody below the #1 on the depth chart now gets better matchups which allows their skill sets to shine.

It's been long enough that I can put this out there now - There was a period right before the draft where the Bills gave Cook and his agent permission to seek a trade. It wasn't a coincidence he put his house up for sale in April, he thought he was gone. No trade partner ever came through and that's the only reason he's still on the team. The Bills were ready to let him go and I can't even imagine how awful our offense would look if that had happened. For whatever reason Beane just doesn't believe skill players are important. He rested his laurels on last year's offensive efficiency and seemed to think that as long as he has Allen the offense will be elite. Well, we're learning the hard way that that isn't automatically true.

I won't lie part of me was happy New England beat the Saints. That franchise is perennially looking for any reason to stay the course and never take an intentional step back. If they got a two game winning streak I think the Olave/Shaheed option would be off the table. I am a huge Bears fan this weekend. We need hopelessness to settle in there so they start looking to the future.

Yeah I'd like to know why we have a couple games a year where exotic blitzes confound our offensive line and the whole offense falls into a rut, while our blitzes are seemingly always easily picked up and any decent offense has its way with us. Our one and only "wrinkle" is we put 6-7 guys on the line, but ooh we don't always send them all. Yeah that will fool 'em. Meanwhile every Atlanta blitz looked completely different from the rest. And it's not like Atlanta's defense is uber talented. Don't get me wrong they have some good players. But for example their #2 CB is Mike Hughes who famously got his lunch taken by Gabe Davis in the 13 seconds game. They don't have any superstars on the DL. You know what they have? Jeff Ullbrich, the same DC that confounded our offense when he was with the Jets and had a top performing defense every year with them. Even top offenses can be forced into bad games by great defensive minds. Why can't we ever, even once, make a top offense look like that? I mean we can't even make Atlanta's mediocre offense look like that so I guess I should lower my ask, but man it's frustrating.

The telling quote in this BN article is at one point he is talking about the failed flip pass to Ty Johnson. He writes "Allen had no choice but to run to his left to avoid the unaccounted for defender." A couple sentences later he writes "This was another Allen mistake... He could have easily turned and thrown Johnson the football." What a luxury it is to say that after your QB gets out of an automatic sack because of an unaccounted defender and no quick read, that the result of the play is because of his own mistake.

Do you think Allen led Shakir out of bounds on that 3rd down throw? I have two legit criticisms for Allen from this game: 1) There were at least two hot routes he missed, one where he held the ball and one where he didn't read a telegraphed blitz. 2) He needs to stop forcing throws to Coleman. This criticism extends to last week too. I don't care if he's 1v1, it just isn't working and he seemingly hasn't progressed at all. We need a legit X receiver and that falls on Beane. Until then stop trying to make X receiver Keon Coleman a thing. Any other option in the progression is better. No I don't think Allen played like crap. The MNF loss to the Zach Wilson Jets, that game he played like crap. This game he played below his MVP standard and made a few uncharacteristic errors.