HappyDays

Day 1 of practices just concluded. So far the biggest winners I've seen brought up a lot are WR Ricky Pearsall, DE Marshall Kneeland, and C Jackson Powers-Johnson.

Oh man imagine if they pivot and hire Aaron Glenn...

I'm going to guess the "sources" are in Washington's front office. Perhaps the damage control mindset survived Dan Snyder's exit.

Nice. McDermott can be an actual head coach this year, and if he fails again we have Ben Johnson lined up for next year. This is the most hopeful I've been about the future in a while.

Huge news for next offseason. I wonder if he decided he wants to wait for an opportunity with an established QB?

I will say I definitely want the Bills targeting WRs with elite physical traits as long as we're in the Josh Allen era. His whole career he's been playing with smurfs with a low catch radius. An elite physical QB throwing to an elite physical WR just fits better. As much as I normally hate the idea of contested catch specialists, if the Bills think Allen can launch the ball downfield to Coleman in 1v1 coverage and he'll come down with it more often than not, I'm good with that. Coleman is also a bully with the ball in his hands and that is not a skill set we've ever had in the Allen era. It might be a case where his skill set is too limited for 90% of offenses, but for ours it's perfect. At least that's how I'll talk myself into liking the pick if we draft him. The funny thing about this whole discussion over which of the WRs we should draft is that it might not even matter. Any WR we take gets the benefit of immediately being in an offense with Josh Allen. Unless they're a total bust, it's almost impossible for them to fail. Kincaid was the first pass catcher we've drafted on day one or two in the Allen era and he immediately broke a couple franchise records... It's not complicated. Just make an actual effort to put great pass catching talent on the field with Josh Allen, and prosper.

Which brings us back to my point... Mahomes and the Chiefs offense are not literally unstoppable. You know this, right? Is this one of those things where you don't actually have a point, you just like trolling another team's board? There's 2 other Chiefs fans on here with the same shtick. You should start your own little club.

Couldn't agree more. What is your point? If you want to hop on the Fire McDermott train with me, there are plenty of seats available.

No offensive player "runs circles" around an opposing defense while getting shut out for an entire half. If you want to say they ran circles around the Ravens D for 2 quarters, go for it. Football is played in 4 quarters. Your point is wrong. You're trying to argue Mahomes and the Chiefs offense are simply unstoppable and there is nothing the Bills defense could have done to slow them down. You're trying to argue the defensive injuries didn't matter. This is obviously on the face of it incorrect. Gee, what happened to the Chiefs offense after those other playoff games you cited (while ignoring that Tyreek Hill was on the field but we'll let that slide)? They must have run circles around their following opponents, right?

Let's break it down line by line. This is the one thing you said that has merit. The DL was healthy and underperformed relative to expectations. Why does this matter? Hyde and Poyer have both been well below their standards this year. I doubt either will be on the roster next year. When we say the defense stunk, we're including the safety play within that. Sure, Douglas limping around the field definitely means our defense was close to full strength. Nice try. Christian Benford being replaced by Dane Jackson, who had the 2nd worst performance on the defense, isn't worth bringing up according to you. Get outta here with this crap. Oh yeah, they "took advantage" of Klein alright. I appreciate your attempt to minimize this by lumping it in with the rest. Klein had one of the worst individual defensive performances I've ever seen in a playoff game. It harkened back to a Mike Hughes performance in a game you might have watched two years ago. I recall a mediocre WR racking up Randy Moss like stats as a result. Yes one absolutely terrible no-business-being-on-the-field defensive player can single handedly ruin the game for everybody else. That was Klein in this one, with an honorable mention going to Dane Jackson. Get outta here with that crap.

"Ran circles" around the Ravens D. Chiefs had 8 consecutive drives of: Turnover on downs Punt FG Punt Punt Punt Punt Punt Ran circles. Get outta here with that crap.

This is the most uneducated collection of statements I've ever seen on this board. Suffice it to say, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Good executives are self-aware and Beane is a good executive. He wouldn't dare pull a stunt like that. I am 90% certain we will take a WR with the first pick. Beane says the last game of the season shows you your weakpoints and, well...

We have to come out of this draft with 1 WR from day one and 1 WR from day two. It might be a long time before the position is this deep in a single draft, which means good value in every round. We have to take advantage of it. This draft could and should be the foundation of the offense for the next stage of Allen's career if we play it right.

None of them are must haves. I would bring back DQ just because he knows the system and we need bodies at the position. But I would set a hard ceiling of $5 million. If some other team wants to give him more, let them. He's 32 coming off a major injury. Dane Jackson would be next on my list because I expect us to cut White and Jackson has filled in well in spots. Again, we will need a body at the position if nothing else. But he was one of the worst players on the field against the Chiefs so I won't lose sleep if he walks. Truth is we will need to fill the bottom of our 53 man roster with rookies, UDFAs included. We don't have enough cap space to waste money on underperforming free agents like we have every year since Beane got here. Guys like Dodson, Jackson, Lewis, they're good values on rookie contracts. Anything more and they're overpaid.

If you're going to remove coaching from the equation, it is really the rest of the rosters where the Chiefs have us cleanly beat. Even if you want to say Mahomes is better than Allen, the difference between them isn't that great. To me it's much more a matter of who has more stars. In past playoff matchups they had Mahomes/Kelce/Hill/Jones to our Allen/Diggs/Milano. Advantage KC. This year they had Mahomes/Kelce/Jones/Sneed/Thuney/Humphrey to our Allen. Massive advantage KC. Game changing players win playoff games. We only had one in our latest matchup. Hopefully Kincaid becomes one next year, maybe Shakir although I have my doubts that he can ever be more than a really dependable role player. Hopefully Diggs' drop off was in fact injury related and not a sign of what the rest of his career will look like. Hopefully the WR we draft in R1 hits the ground running and looks like a star by the end of his rookie season. So much has to go right for us to make up the sizeable talent gap between us and the Chiefs, especially if the coaching gap is also as wide as I believe it is.

I may be way off the board here but if they choose to double dip at WR how would you feel about Brenden Rice? Size, strength, great hands, ability to high point the ball. He has elite NFL bloodlines if that matters (Jerry Rice's son). He played with Caleb Williams so he has a lot experience in the scramble drill and making himself available to his QB. I see most mocks have him in the 3rd-4th round though.

Other than age and one year of production, two things that I've seen in scouting reports: 1) Inability to win off the line against press coverage 2) Inability to separate at the top of his route against man coverage In general he seems to lack nuance in his release package and route running. More just a pure straight line guy. Those guys tend to fail at the NFL level unless they are total alphas like DK Metcalf. So I think NFL scouts see a raw physical package but already 23 years old and only one year of college production... Which raises the question, does he still have upside to develop into a true WR1/WR2, or will he permanently be stuck in a very specific rotational role? Your own scouting of him may differ, but those are the concerns I've seen. I think Dane Brugler may be underselling him when he lists him as a 3rd round prospect. WRs have never been more important than they are right now so I'd be surprised if he drops even into the bottom half of the 2nd round. Somebody will bet on those traits.

We started winning games because our defense played much better after Brady took over. I agree the offense on the whole LOOKED better, but it wasn't really performing better than what it had under Dorsey especially after the initial bump we got from a new OC. I attribute the drop in efficiency to Diggs falling off a cliff right around the time Brady took over. Dorsey got to call an offense that featured a true #1 WR. Brady did not. That factor alone would more than wipe out any potential improvement we got switching from Dorsey to Brady.

His AFCCG opponents over the last two years scored 20 points and 10 points. Again, you know this. You're just playing your usual semantics game. Everybody with eyes can see that the Chiefs defense has performed better in the playoffs these past few years. Even in seasons when our regular season defense ranked higher than theirs, their playoff defense still performed better than ours. That's what the thread is about, yeah? Read the title. Read the original post. Then get back to me. Instead of repeating the same empty points that have already been debunked.

The Ravens defense stopped him 6 times yesterday. We have stopped him 4 times in 3 playoff games. Go on. Pretend you meant something different.

The obvious counterpoint to FireChans bringing up other games against weaker opponents is that the playoffs are single elimination. So the only thing that ultimately matters is what you do in your final game. We all know the defense can stop the Mason Rudolphs and Skylar Thompsons of the NFL. I thought the goal was to win a Super Bowl. Until we can at least slow down the Joe Burrows and Pat Mahomes of the NFL, we aren't coming close to a Super Bowl win. Hopefully one more playoff run that ends with an abysmal defensive performance will be enough to convince the absent billionaire who owns our team that it's time for a change at the top. If we're heading into Allen's age 29 season with McDermott still in charge coming off a 6th consecutive disappointing playoff exit, I will be convinced that the Allen era will end without a single Lombardi. Which is really just depressing to consider.

You're just going to play dumb on this and expect people to take you seriously?

In three playoff games against the Chiefs we have given up 7.4 YPP, 7.6 YPP, and now 8.5 YPP. In those years the Chiefs offense averaged 6.3 YPP, 5.9 YPP, and 5.5 YPP, which means each of those results was well below expectations. So it is not just a problem from this year, and I'm actually kind of sick of people using injuries from this year to hand wave away multiple abysmal playoff performances from our defense under McDermott. McDermott has never found a way to even slow down the Chiefs when it counts. I don't agree with your statement that McDermott has out performed Harbaugh in the playoffs. I believe Josh Allen has vastly out performed Jackson (and Huntley) in the playoffs. I believe that Harbaugh in his first shot at the Chiefs in the playoffs did a substantially better job than McDermott has ever done against the Chiefs in the playoffs. Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen have now reached the AFCCG the same number of times since entering the league together in 2018. Considering the wide gap between them as players, it is sensible to think that a gap between the head coaches is probably at least somewhat to blame for that result.