HappyDays

Amazing what a new coach with a real personality can inject into a moribund team. Disclaimer for mods: This post is NOT about the Bills. It has NOTHING to do with Sean McDermott's fate here. I am merely commenting on the Las Vegas Raiders.

It's just the Shanahan scheme. By far the best offensive scheme in football right now. Bobby Slowik is in my top 3 for Bills head coaches next year. I don't care if he's young and a little experienced, his offense just works.

I don't care what anyone says, Goff is still a below average QB. Ben Johnson has hid him as long as possible. But eventually his deficiencies are what they are.

Bills 24 Jets 18

They were actually entirely different concepts. It's been explained better by others on here, but essentially the deep out route by Harty is a route designed to beat the exact quarters coverage Denver was playing there. It was not a high/low read like the one Allen misread against the Bengals. Two issues caused the 2nd INT: 1) Allen didn't throw the ball far enough towards the sideline. 2) Harty's route was disgustingly bad and made it easy for the defender to undercut the pass. I am less concerned about INTs caused by less than ideal throws than I am INTs where Allen misread the coverage or threw a stupid dangerous pass. Here he correctly identified the defensive coverage and threw the right route. The execution from him and Harty was just not good enough.

The other thing with KC that is just so frustrating is they have invested a lot into their defense lately, BUT it's actually paid off. I mean Mahomes led his offense to ZERO points in an entire half against Miami. And they won the game! That's straight up insane. 17 points against the Jaguars. And they won! Allen is performing better than Mahomes against the same opponents, but because Allen's defense is worse we have people questioning if he needs to see a psychiatrist. Maybe McDermott should see a psychiatrist for his pathological urge to pay fat lazy defensive linemen instead of above average pass catchers.

If they don't, it's a perfect time to change regimes. This regime didnt get it done on their first go around with a franchise QB. Why would we want them around for the second try? Get a couple new decision makers in the building now while they still have an opportunity to rebuild the team in the image they want.

This has been going on since after the Broncos game. McDermott has been in self-preservation mode. He praised the defensive players for playing their asses off, giving them (and his own play calling) no fault for the loss. He then went on to criticize the offense heavily and fired his OC the next day. When asked about the end of game FG debacle he commented that they had practiced that situation throughout the week but "failed to execute." His post game presser was completely unhinged. He blamed one player after another, never pointing the finger at himself. I can't imagine that landed well in the locker room.

Wow that is unhinged. Cook hadn't fumbled since his very first snap in his very first game. We lost two drives because of Murray's mistakes - on one drive he dropped a pass with only one man to beat in front of him, and then on another drive he got tracked down and tackled by a freaking nose tackle. McDermott is floundering IMO.

McDermott is usually very reserved and doesn't typically comment on his players' mental states like this.

This all sounds pretty bizarre: Ealier this week McDermott was asked about firing Dorsey and said "OC is a leadership position." Is it possible he felt that Dorsey wasn't getting Allen and the other offensive players into the right mindset and energy? And this more than play calling is what led to the firing?

I think you're safe if you have a great DC. I doubt Lou Anarumo, Steve Spagnuolo, and Jim Schwartz are getting head coach opportunities in the near future. It just isn't the way the league is trending. Demeco Ryans got the job with Houston, that was one exception. We'll see what happens when their OC Bobby Slowik inevitably gets hired as a head coach and CJ Stroud gets a new OC. Oh I completely agree. Just because McDermott has been the cause of a lot of team's issues, doesn't mean Dorsey was just a scapegoat. He didn't have his side of the ball working as well as it should. I do think though that firing him is somewhat of an act of desperation by McDermott. He knows his job security is slipping away and he was very close to losing the locker room and the fanbase, if he hasn't already. A big change in the middle of the season is, if nothing else, an announcement that McDermott knows his operation hasn't been good enough and needed some kind of spark.

They might get a good OC, even a great one. Who knows, maybe Joe Brady is the next up and coming offensive mastermind and is about to prove it. But in a best case scenario that great OC will be hired away as a head coach in 1-2 years. And then we will have to hire another one. And so on until the day Allen retires. That's how it works in the modern NFL. If you have great offensive coaching it's on borrowed time unless that coach is your head coach. Look at the Falcons after Kyle Shanahan got hired away. That's the inevitable fate of a defensive head coach.

Dorsey was a bad hire from the jump IMO. You have an offense led by Allen and Diggs in their prime, and you hand the keys to a first time play caller. We were his first audition at the job when we needed an experienced play caller to take over a championship ready offense. This was entirely predictable. Our offense was past "potential." These were our best years and we threw them away for on the job training. Look at what Daboll had to do to work his way up the chain. He spent a while learning under two of the greatest coaches of all time in Bill Belichick and Nick Saban. He was given the keys to untalented offenses with unserious QBs for years, learning what it takes to do that job at the NFL level without any lofty expectations weighing him down. Then, finally, after years of thankless work he was given the keys to a franchise QB. And after all that his replacement is just a QB coach that had learned under the likes of Ron Rivera. It was an awful hire. And McDermott ultimately has to take responsibility for that failed hire. Allen may have endorsed Dorsey but Allen is a kid and was riding the highs of several years of elite offensive football. McDermott is the coach and needed to step in and make the mature practical decision, not the "I'm loyal to my guys and that's that" decision. Long term the only way we are getting elite offensive coaching for the remainder of Allen's career is to replace McDermott. That is an undeniable fact.

They still are! 70% completion percentage, 3rd highest in the league even with all of the drops, and they want him to take LESS risks. It's crazy. It's a no-win situation with this personnel though. We can't throw the ball downfield, and our pass catchers have no YAC potential. Basically our only avenue to success is run the ball effectively and try to work down the field meticulously.

This is a result of us doing what the fans have wanted and going all short passing all the time. It's great for completion percentage but it also creates long meticulous drives with a lot of chances for something to go wrong. Defenses have no reason to fear this group of pass catchers getting behind them so they can squat on short and intermediate routes which means they're getting tackled at the catch point. The margin for error is too low in that kind of offensive structure.

I will criticize McDermott as much as anyone, but the bolded is objectively true. Every drive that we stopped running the ball was a bust. Our best looking drive of the night featured zero pass plays. I don't understand the resistance to running the ball on here. Look at the highest scoring offenses in the league this year and you'll see an elite run game. It's the natural response to how defenses across the league are now playing.

So my one point of contention is that with mobile QBs, beating the OL in front of you isn't enough to count as a win. If you beat your man and then rush yourself out of the play I wouldn't really call that a win. It's just a good 1v1 rep. But I understand what you're saying.

Maybe you saw it differently but I thought a lot of the pressure was undisciplined. Like Oliver running right by Wilson at full speed and giving him an easy lane to step up into multiple times. Sure it counts as a pressure but it doesn't lead to a negative outcome. Or a blitzer failing to account for the leaking RB - we gave up big 1st downs several times on this same play, and it was especially frustrating to see Denver hit it on their first play of the last drive for a big gain which immediately took the pressure off them and put our defense on its heels. I don't understand why we hadn't adjusted to it by then. I watch other defenses against us and they wisely have spies making sure Allen can't just step up like that or dump the ball off to a RB with 10 yards of separation. They do a mush rush where they barely even try to sack Allen off the snap, they instead prioritize making sure he can't escape the pocket and slowly compress in on him from all sides. Whereas I felt that most of the night our pressure looks let Wilson off the hook and gave him easy answers.

Just posted this is another thread: He has had awful turnover luck this year. As far as I can remember zero dropped interceptions and every one of his fumbles has been recovered by the defense.

I mean this is crazy: I know "turnover worthy play" is kind of a subjective thing, but we have all seen that almost every single possible interception has been caught. Some plays that shouldn't have been intercepted have turned into interceptions. Every one of Allen's fumbles have been recovered by the defense. It is unprecedented bad turnover luck driving a lot of this conversation.

Not this year though. Mahomes and the Chiefs are struggling for the same reason we are, a poor group of pass catching weapons that don't complement each other at all. They are winning because of defense. I mean we crow about how well our defense performed against the Dolphins giving up 20 points. The Chiefs defense gave up 14 and scored 7. What frustrates me most about the McDermott/Beane era is they have completely stripped away what makes Josh special. And to be fair, that is what a lot of Bills have inexplicably been asking for. Fans on one hand lash out at Josh for failing to throw checkdowns, and on the other hand say they wish we had 2021 playoffs Josh back. Does anybody on here actually remember what he did that year? He wasn't checking the ball down when Gabe Davis racked up 200 yards and 4 TDs in a single game. So what do we do to a QB with elite physical skills and arguably the greatest arm in NFL history? Try to turn him into Tom Brady and surround him with average physical talents. Throw potshots at him in press conferences over his willingness to put his body on the line. Ask him to execute 12 play drives throwing the ball to smurfs over the middle. That just isn't who Josh has ever been or ever will be. I mean his downfield weapon this year is Deonte "Turf Toe" Harty?? Give me a break. We missed an opportunity to create a historically amazing offense by going all in on pass catching weapons that fit the mold of what Josh does well. And then fans get mad because he doesn't hit a 4th and 2 pass on the run to his smurf WR with t-rex arms. The more I think about it the more I am certain they need to reset everything in the front office and coaching staff. Get an up and coming offensive mastermind to lead the team and a GM that will start prioritizing the right pieces.