HappyDays

Where is this narrative coming from? It is flat out objectively incorrect.

1st and 10 - false start 1st and 15 - Knox fails to reel in a vey catchable pass 2nd and 15 - shotgun draw for no gain No one is converting every 3rd and 15. That's crazy. The truth is Mahomes would not be put in that situation because his coaches wouldn't allow it. And I'm not excusing Allen's performance against the Jets, he royally sucked. But we had the ball first in OT, and a stupid play call plus poor fundamentals on special teams ended up killing our one chance to get an ugly win. It's a pattern. We have never won a game in OT under McDermott.

Here's an example of what I mean - imagine the Chiefs are down 2 scores in the 4th quarter. Mahomes leads a great TD drive and with 4 minutes left they kick off to the Jaguars. Does anyone here think that Jaguars drive ends with a 35 yard TD run putting the game out of reach? No chance. I guarantee the Chiefs get the ball back with plenty of time and end up pulling out the win, I've seen it a dozen times over the last few years. Why does our team always seem to fall apart in those critical moments?

The Chiefs are the KING of ugly wins. It's why they've been the #1 seed so often in recent years, they're not always dominant but they always find a way. The two teams we've lost to this year, the Chiefs had ugly wins against both of them. Mahomes was equal or worse than Allen in those games and they have less talent across the board on both sides of the ball compared to us IMO, but they still found a way to win them. It's almost uncanny how often they win games like that. And to me that represents a coaching gap between us and them.

Bills 34 Giants 6

Jeudy drop %: 2022 - 5.0% 2023 - 4.2% Davis drop %: 2022 - 9.7% 2023 - 7.7% Jeudy has caught 70.8% of his targets this year which is better than Davis has ever done, with a much worse QB and with no elite WR1 taking attention away from him. Not comparable players at all IMO. He would be a perfect fit for our needs.

Pretty much.

One major issue I have with McDermott is his inability to have the team prepared for ugly wins. That is what separates the #1 seed from everyone else. So far we've gotten drawn into two ugly games against inferior opponents and could not find a way to get it done in either case. Blowing out teams is fun but not sustainable. How are we going to ever make it to the Super Bowl if we can't eke some ugly wins from time to time? It's a legitimate concern. Against the Jets, we had a dumb 2nd and 15 shotgun run in OT and then the punt team blew it. Against the Jags when the offense was finally figuring it out, the defense gave up a 50 yard TD run. The final hook and ladder play was a mess with zero chance of working. I feel like we see too many of these momentum swing plays that turn 50/50 games against us under this coaching staff. It may be the one thing that prevents us from ever winning a championship under this regime.

Yeah there is no excuse for an elite QB playing a great game leading to just 7 points over the first 52 minutes. It reminded me of the Bengals divisional game a bit, Dorsey was totally outclassed and had no answers. At some point McDermott has to he accountable for the offense too. A lot of us talk about offensive coaching as it's completely separate from him, but he is the head coach. I don't know if he needs to be more active in game planning or in making gametime adjustments or what, but we can't keep having several games every year where our offense falls totally flat on its face mainly due to coaching issues.

The Jags offense has not been good though. The Chiefs held them to 9 points, the Texans held them to 17 points, the Falcons held them to 23 points. None of those defenses are super talented. And honestly they were moving the ball all day against us. If not for a few exceptional individual plays from our front 4 players, the game would have been out of hand by the 4th quarter.

Jet lag gave our players a disadvantage, not our coaches. I will cut the defense some slack because they lost players, the offense though has no excuse.

I hate to say it but we were badly out coached on Sunday. On both sides of the ball. Poor clock and timeout management, awful offensive game plan, we let their two best players Etienne and Ridley go off on us.

Officially there are 4 drops credited in this game - 1 each to Diggs (presumably the back shoulder along the sideline), Cook, Davis, and Knox. 4 drops on 40 attempts... not gonna win a lot of games with a 10% overall drop percentage. Knox is back to a rookie-level drop percentage of 15.8%... For all the talk about Kincaid, he has been by far the biggest disappointment on offense IMO.

He is a good blocker but I wouldn't say he excels. And he's an inconsistent route runner and pass catcher to boot. Ideally 12 personnel you would have a blocking specialist. When Beane talked about it after drafting Kincaid, he said our 12 personnel would really be 11 personnel with Kincaid as the SWR taking on Beasley's old role. That was my expectation as well. But that hasn't really come to fruition at all. Which brings me to my point of Dorsey using 2TE sets because he feels like he has to, not because he actually knows how to use that package to create mismatches.

On coaching- It does sometimes feel like Dorsey is making moves reactively versus proactively. "We have two good TEs. Run a lot of 12 personnel." "Defenses are taking away deep passes. Go full on dink and dunk all the time." And then when we end up in games where our usual solutions aren't working, Dorsey is way too slow to adjust. Multiple offensive duds each of the past two years including one in the playoffs. There's too few games in a season to have this many gameplan clunkers. On personnel - Maybe our offensive weapons don't mesh together well, I don't know. We have zero YAC specialists. We have like 4 guys that all perform better in the slot. We run a lot of 12 personnel without a TE that excels as a blocker. Davis is a poor fit as a full time outside WR2. It's kind of just a hodgepodge of guys with incongruous skill sets.

Other top tier offenses don't have persistent issues like that. I guess it could be tunnel vision, like we're Bills fans so we only see bizarre spacing and execution issues like that when it happens to our team. But I feel like the Chiefs, 49ers, Dolphins, etc. don't have those problems. Our offense as a whole just looks a lot less crisp than other championship contenders.

Yeah on balance my biggest takeaway from this game is that we had an elite QB play a terrific game, which multiple sources and grading systems agree on, and we still only scored 7 points for the first 52 minutes of the game... I mean that is a really really bad sign about the offensive structure and supporting cast. Hopefully it was just jet lag leading to a poor performance. The alternative is that teams with decent DLs and a good coaching staff are going to easily stifle our offense, which means we are toast in the playoffs.

There is a professional defensive coach in this thread saying that Joe was wrong and that our failures in the run game had nothing to do with numbers disadvantages. I'm inclined to believe the guy that schemes defenses for a living versus the professional content creator, as much as I respect what Joe does.

From Joe Buscaglia's Athletic article today: This lines up with what I've been seeing. We are almost exclusively using him as a checkdown option near the LOS. Like Joe says this is going to need to change if our offense needs to pick up the slack for a defense missing some of its best players.

Erik Turner is just an amateur who has a lot of time and good video editing tools. A professional like @HoofHearted will make him look clueless on occasion but for video content he's the best we got. Joe Marino at least was a founding member of a professional scouting organization so I think he has more credentials than Turner, but he hasn't worked for any NFL teams as far as I know.

I will say I think this was by far the worst the OL has looked this year. I would like to think that the travel and the jet lag on a tight schedule contributed to some of their struggles in this one, and that they will look much better in normal weeks. Most of football comes down to the trenches and we lost that battle on both sides of the ball.

Thank you for your comments. When you say there were plays to be made, do you mean the RBs missed the plays or do you mean they weren't blocked properly? Or some of both?

But there are at least 5 drives he points out where the skill position players directly led to the drive stalling out. Allen led his offense to more points than Mahomes led his offense to against the Jaguars. Was Mahomes to blame for that one? No. It's a talent issue around the QBs. As far as the run game woes, I tend to blame coaching for that one. If the rules of the offense say check out of a run play against a heavy box, Allen isn't going to just ignore that rule. And in general I find our run designs to be extremely vanilla. No misdirection, no trickery, the 3-4 run plays we have all look exactly the same every time. Like I said in another thread, a lot of the offensive designs both in the run and pass are just "line up and beat your man." But we don't have the talent to do that consistently. Cook isn't the best at reading leverage, we know the pass catchers other than Diggs are not going to win 1v1 coverage matchups. The receivers are getting confused and ending up right next to each other or not getting to their spot according to the timing of the play structure. A lot of it just looks very messy or more difficult than it needs to be. I think Dorsey is fine but I'm not convinced his offense is anywhere near as crisp or creative as some of the best offensive minds in the league, and that's ultimately who we are going to have to overcome to bring home a Lombardi.

These are weird criticisms to make coming out of 4 consecutive games where he has been executing within the structure of the offense and throwing receivers open. Honestly if he has any issues in that area, it's that he doesn't trust anticipatory throws to pass catchers not named Stefon Diggs. But why would he?