HappyDays

Being investigated isn't a crime nor is it even evidence that one committed a crime. I thought as a society we had moved past that brief social endemic of guilty until proven innocent.

Bills 27 Falcons 23 I don't have a great feel for this one. Every year we enter an offensive slump that lasts at least 2 games and it feels like we're in the middle of that now. I think we can run on Atlanta though. They have a small DL. I'm not convinced this is the game our downfield passing offense is suddenly going to take off so we'll have to slowly and efficiently work our way down the field. Hopefully Penix throws at least one dumb INT to set us up with good field position. Penix has been awful throwing 10+ yards down the field this year. I don't trust our defense at all but McDermott's scheme has always worked better against one dimensional offenses. So I expect us to sell out to stop Bijan and that will probably be effective enough to keep them from out scoring us.

It's one thing that annoys me about Brady, he calls that exact play on critical downs way too frequently. It is just so predictable at this point and a simple zone defense beats it every time. Same thing happened on 4th down in the regular season KC game last year, Allen just put on the Superman cape. This time the Pats did a better job of contain so he couldn't run for it. The concept was DOA and his receivers didn't do a good job of uncovering in the scramble drill.

Hurts is the hardest QB in the league to evaluate. I was starting to buy in to the idea that he is a top 10 QB, but is it just as possible he's a bottom 10 QB? Whenever he's asked to just stand back and make normal reads it can look like a complete disaster. But also the two best games he's ever played both happened in the Super Bowl. He's a total enigma to me.

Yup: Although McConkey has had quite the sophomore slump. His YPG has almost been cut in half and his catch percentage has dropped 11.4%. I haven't paid enough attention to the Chargers to know exactly what's going on with him, but yeah his skill set fits in with the new archetype of high volume WRs. Coleman's skill set still has its place in an offense but it needs to be complemented by the opposite WR. The disappointing thing is that Coleman is the only major investment the Bills have made at the position since really the Diggs trade in 2020 which is just crazy. After they traded Diggs away they never even tried to add his skill set back into the offense. I guess Palmer was kind of an attempt?

That play was discussed at length in this thread: A couple posts to give you the alternative view to what you're saying: I'm not a fan of this concept on 3rd and 10. As I said in my post in that thread Brady needed to have the play design force Gonzalez to commit high or low. Shakir's mesh route doesn't get to his side until several seconds into the play so he's able to play the high and the low route simultaneously. Allen quickly moves on once he recognize's Gonzalez's leverage with the safety also sitting on it over the top. Sure Allen's best option with hindsight was to pick up the 4-5 yards and get to 4th down. Without hindsight though I always want Allen to try and create in those moments because we know he can. The two biggest failures on this play were Brady for the play design and the officials for failing to call an obvious DPI. Gonzalez full out slams into Shakir's back before the ball arrives. Crazy moment to keep the flags tucked away after all the other ticky tack penalties they were calling.

Week 9 would be even better but I get it if they don't want his first NFL action to be against KC. But man that group of WRs going against our slow CBs is the stuff of nightmares.

Don't read too much into the practice window not being opened yet. The most logical time was always going to be right after the bye week. I just posted this in the Hairston injury thread: That doesn't look like a player that "isn't going to be ready for weeks." Make it through Atlanta, activate his 21 day window after the bye week, and hopefully get him up to speed with the defense in time for the KC game. My concern with Hairston right now is less the injury and more the fact that he missed a lot of valuable development time and I don't know if McDermott is going to trust him enough to insert him into the defense. Hopefully White's play persuades him that a change simply has to be made ASAP.

I'm no expert on this stuff but to my amateur eyes it looks like he's moving quite well. Banged Up Bills' analysis:

Joe Marino brought up some good stats on today's Locked On Bills. The essence of it was that Penix is the worst QB in the NFL this year on throws 10+ yards downfield. Joe's point was that you have to make him prove he can beat you like that. This is not the week to play conservative and cede the run like we do so frequently. Stack the box, shut down Bijan as much as possible, and force them to beat you through the weakest aspect of their offense. If they can do that you tip your cap and move on. If they beat you with Bijan and quick short passes, your defensive gameplan was a failure.

I mean that's basically what Brady's offense asks him to do. They've tried to turn Allen into a game manager. Why couldn't he do that with a Shanahan disciple? The only difference is the reads would be more open more frequently because the play design would be better.

My concern with hiring a new to the job head coach is he has to learn on the fly all of the game management details that a lot of new head coaches fumble. So I would actually prefer a retread since the clock is ticking on Allen's career. If you want the new coach Klint Kubiak is my choice. Look at what he did with the Saints offense in that brief time before Carr suffered a career ending injury. Or what he's doing with Sam Darnold and the Seahawks this year. That's a rising star that could maybe be our Sean McVay. I'd accept early game management issues if the end result is an offense that can steamroll opponents, and you know he would steer the organization towards investing around Allen.

That was your takeaway from this article? That's not correct. The takeaway is that when defenses force us to throw the ball downfield we can't do it. Joe Buscalglia in his all-22 review each week grades all the players. This week he had Allen as his top graded player with a B+. PFF gave him a 77.5 grade which is kind of their version of a B+. That is not a "poor game." And I think that's a fair grade. Allen and Cook both played their B+ game and the offense looked totally dysfunctional at times. That's a big problem. Your best players can't be A+ every week. The rest of the team and the coaching staff need to be able to pick them up from time to time and they couldn't do it against an inferior opponent.

In another thread this is how I ranked my options: 1) Kevin Stefanski (if the Browns fire him) 2) Brian Flores 3) Robert Saleh 4) Klint Kubiak 5) Kliff Kingsbury/Vance Joseph I favor picking a retread coach because the clock is ticking on Allen's career and I'd rather not have someone learning on the job if I could help it. Flores and Saleh would have to come with the right OC but Allen is going to be successful regardless of who the OC is and I'm sure they'd have their pick of the litter given the career opportunity of getting to coach Josh Allen's offense. Kingsbury and Joseph I kind of just threw in there as the other retreads floating around the league who have since had successful stints as coordinators, but I'm not sure either of them have the right temperament to be a head coach. At a certain point though I'd be willing to try even them over McDermott because I just can't imagine a significantly lower floor. Kubiak is the easy choice if you're trying to pick the young offensive coach. Like I said I'd rather not waste too much time on a newbie learning on the job but his coaching resume is legit and he could probably build an almost unstoppable offense in Allen's remaining prime years. I could be convinced he deserves to be higher on this list. The head coach picks the GM these days so this question is irrelevant.

If the year ends in similar disappointment as every other year, the fanbase will be restless. Having a brand new coaching staff in place as the new stadium opens would be extremely marketable. "Come watch the next stage of Josh Allen's career." The excitement in WNY would be palpable. Like you couldn't draw it up any better than that. By the way I don't think Pegula is actually going to fire McDermott after this season no matter what happens. But it won't be because he's thinking about dollar signs. It will be because he genuinely likes McDermott as a person and I don't think he has it in him to put his head on the chopping block unless the bottom completely falls out. As long as we're going to the playoffs he'll convince himself good enough is good enough.

Philly goes into this weird funk every year, it's unexplainable. I guess the difference there is that I know the skill position talent is a lot better than the production they've gotten out of it, so I have more faith that they can turn it around as they did last year in the playoffs. I don't think the Bills have the personnel to suddenly become a dominant offense that can steamroll opponents.

It was not just the one game though. The offense fell into a rut against the Saints and Dolphins too. Against the Saints we had 4 consecutive drives in the 1st half that ended with no points. We were struggling to move the ball for like 50 minutes of the Baltimore game. Everything came to a head against the Pats but those issues did not mysteriously appear out of nowhere. They are fundamental issues and unlike the defense there aren't any reinforcements coming to potentially fix them. We're still going to win a lot of games but the goal is to win a championship and it's questionable if we can achieve that goal with the issues that have been showing up on both sides of the ball.

Presented without comment:

Yeah you definitely need some defense. The discrepancy in investments though is shocking over the past two offseasons. Out of 6 picks in the top 100 the Bills have taken an offensive player with just 1 of them. This past offseason their only meaningful offensive addition was Joshua Palmer. On defense they handed out meaningful contracts to Bosa, Hoecht, Ogunjobi, and White, and spent their first 5 draft picks on that side of the ball. All of those investments and the defense is pretty much identical to last year's. Unless Hoecht and Ogunjobi are going to singlehandedly raise this defense to a top 10 level, it feels like a lot of those resources would have been much better spent on a legit weapon for Allen.

The Colts and the Lions look like the two best teams in the NFL right now and it's not with dominant defense, it's with offenses that are steamrolling their opponents and running up the score. They've made their defenses practically irrelevant. I think it is still possible to build a dominant defense, just look at the Browns, it's just a lot harder in the modern NFL. And this regime has never been close to having a dominant defense. Even in the Leslie Frazier years when we ranked top 5 in a lot of the relevant statistics we laid down and died in the playoffs on an annual basis. So I just never had any faith that this regime was going to invest their way into a dominant defense. They chose to lean into the one thing that they've never gotten right, instead of the one thing that they nailed.

Yes this is exactly correct and it's what I was worried about all offseason. The common refrain from the fanbase was that the offense was already elite so all the investments needed to go to the defense. And McDermott and Beane clearly agreed because that's the script they followed. My concern was that all the investments in the world wouldn't make a difference on the defensive side, and that we should instead go all in on investing around Allen because he represents our best shot at a championship. Unfortunately all of my fears have come to fruition. In a vacuum I understand blaming the offense more for this loss. But we have a defensive head coach with his hand picked DC, and we've spent the vast majority of our draft and FA resources on the defense over the past two offseasons. What is the point of all that if we can't even win one ugly defensive battle? If we're doomed to lose every single game against a decent opponent where Allen and the offense aren't at their best?

Copy pasting myself from another thread: "I'm stealing this information from Joe Marino's all-22 analysis. Leading up to the game Joe said the Pats have weak coverage LBs, and that one of our priorities should have been to get them into their base personnel and throw the ball into it. In his all-22 analysis he revealed that we got them into base personnel on 14 plays. But we only passed on 2 of those plays. Both passes were 20 yard completions to Kincaid. The 12 runs averaged 2.8 YPC... That represents a massive missed opportunity. We got the looks we wanted but didn't take advantage on nearly enough of them because our identity is that we run out of heavy personnel and that's that. Stubbornness hurt the offense on Sunday night." I'm starting to worry that Brady game plans for his players' strengths but he doesn't game plan for the opponent's weaknesses.

Thanks for posting this Dave. I'm going to copy and paste a few short snippets, and none of this should be a shocking revelation: As Joe points out later in the article, it was a known issue in the offseason that we had no vertical threat on the roster. Even more shockingly, we had the same problem on the roster last year which forced Beane to trade for Cooper. So he doubled down on his previous mistake and his answer to the problem was to yell at Jeremy White on live radio. Real nice. This regime has neutered a lot of what makes Josh Allen special and that more than anything should spell the end of them if they don't make a drastic change soon.

Yeah I'm kind of at a point now where the experience matters more than the specialty. Anyways Allen can be successful with pretty much any offensive coach as we've seen so if anything a defensive guru that can form them into a legit top 5 defense might be better for his last few prime years. The offense has always done its job against KC no matter the coach, if the defense can just show up we're racking up Super Bowl appearances.