HappyDays

Seemingly all of our offensive linemen have taken a step back the past couple weeks. They were all playing quite well together, I'm not sure what happened. Here's PFF offensive grades from this game: 3 of our bottom 4 graded starters were OL in this one. Man am I sick of the same issues still holding this offense back. Poor pass protection. No run game. Zero production from our #2 outside WR.

His production against TB was a mirage. They ran a bunch of crazy off coverages and gave him free access that he never normally gets. On his TD it was a busted coverage.Davis does not separate in short areas if the defense makes an effort to stop him. But the Bucs defense is a joke.

10 weeks in and the coaching staff still hasn't figured out that Harty is not the player they thought they signed. What is Dorsey thinking sending him on a shot play when he has done nothing to inspire confidence that he will get open? Did Dorsey not realize the type of game we were in? Every down mattered.

I actually think this is a good example of what Erik Turner broke down the other day... In Dorsey's offense the route timing doesn't match up with the progressions. Dorsey just calls individual coverage beaters, there's no fluidity to anything. Allen is reading the defense pre-snap and if the coverage is different than anticipated or the read is taken away, he has to go all the way back to the other side of the field. In this case and a lot of cases the routes on the other side of the field are not timed correctly to make this full field progression matter. By the time he gets back to Knox it's too late. Ideally in a crisp offense read 1 should take your eyes to read 2 should take your eyes to read 3. After watching the Cover1 video on the Bengals game I've become convinced that this issue is why our offense looks so disjointed for long periods of time. The routes being called have no cohesiveness. Players aren't being schemed open. Here's the video I'm referencing:

It wasn't a hitch and re-load, he was pump faking towards Diggs to try and get CTB to bite towards the flat. The throw more than the read is what bothered me. You can't throw that on a straight line, it has to be up and over or leading Davis further upfield so that worst case scenario it falls out of bounds.

2-3 seasons?? Come on man. It's not the 70s. NFL teams can turn around fast under the right guidance. The roster change out is coming anyways on defense. If you're going to switch coaches, now is the time.

Why does an NHL hire from a decade ago have any relevance to this conversation at all? I don't watch hockey but even I know that managing NHL teams is entirely different from managing NFL teams. This is just fishing for reasons to keep McDermott around. Like honestly what do you think is going to happen, Pegula will shock the world and hire Hue Jackson? It isn't that complicated. The formula for hiring a head coach in the modern NFL has been established. I'll admit Ben Johnson sways my opinion in this discussion. Knowing that he is likely available this offseason makes this an easy call IMO. Given such an attractive and obvious candidate, there would be overwhelming support for that hire from everybody Pegula consulted. So I think it is the exact right offseason for Pegula to make this move without us having to worry about him screwing it up. If Ben Johnson ultimately fails as a head coach I can live with that. At least we'll have tried.

Like I said I don't think getting the head coach right would be difficult. These days you hire the next up and coming offensive mind and give them total control of the team. Pegula might not know that, but the people he hires to lead the search will. Ben Johnson is an easy choice, if he wants to be a head coach. I would give Bienemy real consideration. I'm sure there are others along those lines. To me the worst case scenario is we stick with McDermott and then Ben Johnson ends up with the Chargers, and our position in the AFC dwindles further.

McDermott was actually hired to do a different job than the one he has now. Seriously. He was hired to turn around a moribund franchise, and he succeeded with flying colors. I'll never lose my gratitude to him for moving mountains to pull us out of the drought years. Whatever consulting firm recommended him for that job, I'd happily take their recommendation again for the next one. But now his job is to turn a very good team into a Super Bowl winner. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the two jobs require different skill sets. Even in the corporate world there are guys that specialize in turning a flailing company around, before handing it off to a steady management team to take it the rest of the way. I think that's the stage we are at now. Also I think this hiring process would be relatively easy. One of the richest owners in the league offering the opportunity to coach the back half of Josh Allen's career, with a couple years still left of Diggs in his prime, a budding star in Kincaid, and a defense full of older players that can easily be switched out with preferred players for the new DC's scheme. It would be the most attractive head coach opening since Denver in 2015. The public pressure would be high to hire an offensive coach and Pegula would have his pick of the litter. I'd be shocked if it ended up a total disaster. To me the obvious answer would be Ben Johnson and I suspect that Pegula would eventually land on him as well. If nothing else, getting some new voices in the building next year might do wonders for the malaise that everyone on the team is clearly feeling. The new regime takes Diggs in a room to vent for an hour and promises to make changes. They sit Allen down and design a system around his strengths, remind him how much fun he used to have playing QB, and he enters the offseason feeling like a man on a mission. Just totally hit the reset button with all of the drama and BS that's bubbled up over the past few years and I bet it ignites a spark in the team. You don't think that possible outcome is worth a little risk?

I will admit to being a little entertained by this last month of laughable coaching, culminating in this rock bottom press conference. If the team isn't going to be good, they might as well be hilariously bumbling. Maybe it will even tip Pegula over the edge.

In many ways Allen has become a victim of his own success. I've seen multiple people on here say "if Allen doesn't play like he did in the Miami game we can't win." Just a perfect 158.3 passer rating. Nothing too crazy. Expectations have gotten way out of control. I don't mind individual criticisms of Allen's plays, that is part of analyzing the losses, but I don't get these bizarre sweeping narratives that come out of nowhere and don't remotely match up with the data. As usual it comes down to some people getting Bills tunnel vision and not evaluating Allen in the context of every other QB.

Cover1 was pretty harsh with Dorsey's play calling in their film review this week. Good watch:

Correct. And there has not nearly as much investment on the offensive side of the ball so it's not realistic to expect them to carry the team in shootouts. The offense could certainly be much better but trying to put up 30 points a game deep into January with no running game and Gabe Davis as the #2 WR, that's an impossible ask.

Coming back to this: This is the result of predictable play calling. CTB baits Allen into thinking he's biting on the pump fake to the low route and then scuttles back to pick off the pass. I mean Allen still should have seen that CTB had leverage and shouldn't have thrown the ball, but it's also a bad play call that has become very easy to defend because of how often we put it on tape.

Because his play calling and personnel usage has absolutely been an issue. He has put his defense in bad spots at the end of games against the Jaguars, Pats, and Bengals. Poor blitz timing has led to backbreaking conversions on multiple 3rd downs. I mean you really think the only reason that our defense is the worst in the league is injuries? No way we have the worst defensive roster in the league, I refuse to believe that even with the injuries. So that leaves coaching as a major issue.

Sure. Based on some of his press conference answers yesterday, he may have finally gotten to that points. He and the other offensive players, not to mention McDermott, sounded perplexed that they are not running the style of offense they would prefer to run. I imagine Dorsey's seat is feeling quite warm right now... Hopefully that forces a change.

Yeah I can't believe that last 3rd down play against Cincy. McDermott takes Rousseau off the field in favor of Leonard and Miller. Guess what Cincy does? Runs right at Miller. It's just a clueless substitution in that situation. End of the Jaguars game. He takes Elam off the field in favor of Ingram. What happens next? Etienne runs right over Ingram and scores a backbreaking 35 yard TD. End of the Pats game. McDermott blitzes on 1st down. Have we figured out the pattern yet? Shocking no one, a screen pass goes for 40 yards. So miss me with the injury excuse. Injuries aren't causing these clueless end of game play calls from our defensive head coach.

Sure it does, but WLB is the least important position on the defense. I can't attribute all of the ineptitude to injuries. I think a lot of it is just McDermott's play calling to be honest. We gave up two quick TD drives to start the game. Most drives featured a 3rd down conversion that came off of a terrible play call. And then from there we mostly let the Bengals move the ball down the field. We would stop them at the 40-50 or so, but that meant we lost the field position battle for pretty much the entire game. When you're chasing a team and losing field position for an entire game, that is not a recipe for success.

This isn't a hot take. It's supported by analytics: I understand the injuries. But we have a defensive head coach and we are literally the worst defense in the league since the Jaguars game. And I get why fans are focusing on the offense, but none of that matters to our Super Bowl aspirations if the defense doesn't get back to at least the top half of the league.

Yeah I will say it appears to be structure of our blitz plays that fails us. Other teams blitz and it seems very unpredictable with coverage sometimes being rolled to the area where the QB would normally look to "replace the blitz." With us we seemingly just send extra bodies without any thought for the offensive line's protection scheme or the coverage.

There is that stat I've seen repeated that no QB/head coach combo has gone on to win a Super Bowl together if they didn't do it within the first 5 years (or something like that). I'm not saying this regime definitely CAN'T be the first to break that trend. But I haven't seen any reason to believe they will, and I'd rather try something else instead of gambling the back half of Josh Allen's career on a trend that's never been broken. As it is we had an elite team in 2020 and 2021 that wasn't killed by injuries. And in those years they really didn't even get close to a Super Bowl win. So why would I want to wait for this regime to build another elite team just to possibly falter again?

The difference is that other than the Eagles under Andy Reid, all of those QBs got their Super Bowl win first. Our best window was 2020-2022 and this regime failed to get us over the hump. That was what ultimately got Andy Reid fired too.

Here's a frustrating stat - McDermott blitzed Burrow on 30.4% of pass plays. On those plays he went 10/14 for 158 yards. We're the only defense I see that regularly blitzes without getting home. It's crazy. Every offensive line picks up our blitz without issue, meanwhile our pass protection scheme constantly fails against the blitz.

His INT last night was the same concept. And his first throw against the Pats. We have put that play on tape way too many times. And Kurt Warner after the Jets game in his film review pointed out that in our offense, the "high" WR on that play is not running it to a high enough level to really put the CB in conflict. So CBs are being taught exactly how to defend both areas and muddy Allen's read or bait him into an interception. I feel the way about these plays that I feel about goalline shotgun runs - conceptually I understand that they can be sound plays, but with our personnel more often than not they are killing us. So why does Dorsey continue calling those plays every week?