HappyDays

How would you feel about Rashid Shaheed? 1 year deal which makes a trade palatable, gives us the vertical element that we're missing. I don't think a true stud WR is in the cards so I'm trying to think about realistic options.

This is like the Lions from last year. Eventually you just don't have enough players to field a legit defense.

And now Kyle Hamilton is injured:

Right now I'd be more worried if Cook ($11.5M AAV) got injured than if Rousseau ($20M AAV) got injured. And I like Rousseau, I understand he has his role and does it well. But the whole conversation about how you never pay RBs got way out of control. For the way this team is built Cook is the 2nd most important player on offense. Maybe the 2nd most important player on the entire team this year. What would our offense be without him?

To me this is the hardest game to predict so far. I could see them beating us by a hair if everything goes right for them, but I could also see us winning by 20. The Pats are going to give us their best shot and I believe in Vrabel as a coach. But I also think we've had this game circled since before the season and they're going to get our best shot back. Our offense hasn't given any team their best shot since the 4th quarter of the Ravens game. We've been rolling out of bed and lazily moving the ball down the field, and only turning it on when absolutely necessary. We've called variations of like 5 different plays and kept the rest of the playbook under wraps. My hunch is that this week we empty the bag and I don't think the Pats have enough talent on defense to stop us at our best. So it comes down to can our defense finally fix its situational problems on 3rd downs and in the red zone? Pats have a poor run offense, we have a poor run defense. What happens when a highly movable object meets an easily stoppable force? That matchup of bad vs bad might decide the margin of victory in this game.

Bills 38 Patriots 30 Pats defense is better with Christian Gonzalez back out there but I think Brady is going to empty the bag in this one and Allen plays at his best in primetime. So I predict our best looking offensive performance of the season. I don't really trust out defense to stop anybody right now and Maye has looked pretty good. I worry that this will be the game they finally unleash Treyveon Henderson and with our poor tackling fundamentals I could see him ripping off a couple big runs. Another frustrating defensive performance made up for by the offense finally putting together its most complete game equals a Bills win by a TD.

No thanks to more defensive help. Enough is enough. We spent our first 4 draft picks and most of our FA money on that side of the ball. We still have Hoecht coming back plus Oliver returning from injury plus Hairston hopefully will be back at some point. Make it work with the group they have. An underrated problem in the past two games is our offense has stalled out a bit after successful early drives. They've had opportunities to blow the doors off our opponents and build an insurmountable lead but couldn't deliver. So I'd be very interested in a field stretching WR. The name I've thrown out a couple times is Rashid Shaheed who is on a 1 year deal. Maybe a RB2 would intrigue me if the team is ready to move on from Davis, Cook getting too many touches worries me a bit.

My least favorite Babich tendency is a blitz combined with soft coverage on the back end. Talk about giving the QB an easy answer. What is even the point of blitzing if you're going to make it easy for them to get the ball out quick? Babich frequently talks about how the pass rush and the coverage have to be married together. Take a look in the mirror man, that's your responsibility.

Okay you've presumably watched every defensive snap this year. Do you honestly feel like you have watched a championship defense? I sure haven't. I've watched what looks like a championship offense, not quite as explosive as I'd like but plenty of elements to succeed at a high level and able to turn it on whenever they really need to. The defense on the other hand looks regularly confused and out of position. They've been bad situationally on 3rd downs and in the red zone. If you're happy with what you've seen feel free to say so.

He had been itching to make that play for a while. A couple drives earlier he had a play where he very clearly pre-determined that he was going to run but got corralled for a sack instead. Did he learn from his mistake? Hell no, he said I dare you to take me down twice and proceeded to make them look like fools. That's my QB.

To be above average in red zone conversion rate and 3rd down conversion rate. Currently we rank 21st (63.64%) and 25th (42.00%) respectively in those metrics. Given the level of experience in the defensive coaching staff and the quantity of investments, I think it's reasonable to expect something like 50% and 35% respectively. Especially if our defense is designed to be bend don't break and intentionally allow rushing yards to defend against the big play. In a vacuum I'm fine with that philosophy but it needs to be complemented by strong situational defense. The timely turnovers are the one saving grace, I'll give them that.

They can't beat Texans or Rams with Lamar out on top of all the other injuries. I know their schedule gets easier but 1-5 is quite the hole to dig out of. They can only afford maybe 2 losses in their last 11 games and there's no guarantee some of these injured players will come back the same.

Yes I've been in favor of that idea. Score 35+ per game and just steamroll the competition. Make the defense practically irrelevant. The investments made over the past couple offseasons however tell you the team was expecting a different path to victory so I'd like to see those investments start to produce the desired result.

We've given up a TD on 63.64% of red zone trips which ranks 21st. We need to be top 10 at worst in that metric for that philosophy to work.

My take is that I'd feel better about the trade if we had gotten a good player with that 3rd rounder, and not DeWayne Carter who is very likely to be a total bust at this point. My other take is that I think both teams got the players they would have taken if they had stayed at their original pick. So mostly I just can't bring myself to care. Coleman makes our team better and Worthy makes their team better. They also each fit what their respective offenses want to do. I think Worthy has already pretty much hit his ceiling and Coleman still has room to grow, and I'm a sucker for high ceiling players so I'd still take Coleman right now if it were up to me. But there's not an ironclad argument for either player. It's week 5 of year 2 of their 10+ year NFL careers. Everyone needs to chill out and see where it goes.

Babich's problem isn't predictability. His problem is intent, or lack thereof. He seems to think that if you just call a wide variety of plays out of the same look, that is enough to get the opponent off balance. "Oh ho ho, last time we had six guys at the line we sent all six, but THIS time we're only sending four! Good luck Spenc- ah he just scrambled right through the vacated gap for 15 yards." You can't just call plays to call plays. Every play, especially on money downs, you need to anticipate what the opposing OC likes to call in those situations, what the opposing QB likes to do in those situations, and beat them to the punch. So when for example you face a backup caliber QB that likes to throw to his first read or use his legs, you account for it in your play call. You don't blitz while playing off coverage on his best WR as if to signal with a big neon sign "THROW THE BALL HERE." You don't drop both LBs out of the A gaps and leave a wide open lane up the middle for him to plod through. Multiplicity is great and I'm happy the Bills are throwing more pressure looks to make up for coverage issues popping up on the back end, but having a larger playbook doesn't automatically win you games. You still have to call the appropriate plays at appropriate times. The goal of calling the defense is to confuse the opponent and goad them into mistakes. Lately it's more common that we're confusing ourselves.

Coleman was good in this game to my eyes. Showed solid separation and strong hands. In fact he got his matchup CB Isaac Yiadom benched after beating him on a handful of plays in the 1st half. Coleman has become the primary WR in this offense and the snap counts prove it - he got 73% of snaps against the Saints, the next closest was Shakir at 53%. It's tough to tell how well he's performing at times because the Bills offense has to be dragged kicking and screaming into throwing the ball downfield outside the numbers. It's just not our identity right now. Palmer is a legit disappointment so far. Shockingly, Samuel and Moore each had a higher snap percentage than Palmer. He played effectively the same number of snaps as Shavers. Maybe it was game plan related but we signed him to be one of our 2 primary outside WRs and instead his role has been declining week over week.

There is also a part of me that wonders if blaming Babich for the defense is like blaming Klay Kubiak if the 49ers offense struggles. I get that McDermott is trying to play the role of pure head coach but it's his specialty and it's his philosophy driving that side of the ball so he has to take ultimate accountability.

Yeah week 1 I almost want to just flush because every single player other than Oliver put out a career-worst type of performance. But I said at the time it is on Babich to have his guys prepared and he didn't. I criticized some of Leslie Frazier's predictable scheme and play calling against playoff opponents, but he had his guys playing like synchronized swimmers. The all-22 on some of those regular season performances was beautiful to watch back. Watching this defense back you frequently see a couple defenders frantically waving their arms or pointing all over the place as the ball is being snapped. Entire gaps are abandoned. After pass completions you see coverage defenders looking around like they were expecting help that never came. We went from Swan Lake to the Truffle Shuffle. It's very frustrating and I don't have any confidence that Babich can fix it.

Yeah and more specifically it is built to play with a lead. An underrated problem the past two games is that the offense has stalled out after early success. When we have an opportunity to force the opponent into chase mode, we aren't delivering. I don't mean that as an excuse for the defense but our offense is too good to have a sequence where 4 out of 5 consecutive drives end with no points, especially against a bottom tier defense like New Orleans. And when you let an inferior opponent hang around for too long they can continue to use their whole playbook and eventually cracks will start to show in the defense.

It's no coincidence that our run defense looked great against NJ, then Milano got injured and we suddenly became a league-worst run defense. The DTs getting washed out of the play is responsible for some of the short yardage conversions, and I can live with that, but the chunk yardage runs are primarily happening because the 2nd and 3rd levels are out of position IMO. Given the level of experience at those position groups that's the more disappointing problem.

Couldn't agree more. Against the Saints Williams got 84% of snaps and Thompson got 16%... That needs to be flipped. I thought I saw Thompson getting more run later in the game though so hopefully that means the coaching staff is going to make the switch permanently.

I don't really pin this on the DTs. Dorian Williams is totally lost on this play. And having watched much of the defense back on all-22 he was lost for the entire game. So many big plays can be directly attributed to his errors. It's his 3rd year and the light hasn't come on, I think we can safely say he is never going to live up to his athletic upside.

Really sucks for the Ravens because this was supposed to be their all in year. In 2026 the following players become FAs: Mark Andrews, DeAndre Hopkins, Tyler Linderbaum, Kyle Van Noy, Patrick Ricard, Odafe Oweh, Travis Jones, Daniel Faalele, Isaiah Likely... I mean these are all starters. They have $53M in cap space but they're going to have some tough choices to make.

I don't know, they really could fall out of the playoffs entirely at this point. Especially if Lamar is banged up they could easily lose their next 2 games to Houston and LA Rams, and 1-5 just feels too far behind to catch up.