HappyDays

What are you talking about man? I've all but given up on the idea that Beane will do what needs to be done to make this happen. He didn't close on Von Miller in 2021, McCaffrey last year, and now Hopkins. He's unwilling to cross his strict value line, ever, unless it's for depth caliber linemen. I'm not happy about it but I'm not stretching facts to convince myself Beane will change his MO this time around.

I speak emoji. He's saying the report is BS.

So in your mind Christian McCaffrey, Aaron Jones, and Austin Ekeler are not lead backs?

I'm sorry but this post is insanely stupid. The Rams don't have any 1st round picks until 2047. Them trading for Josh Allen is impossible.

The following players will all be traded before the deadline: Davis Mills Jerry Jeudy Mike Evans

Josh Allen will be the only AFCE QB to start every game.

That's the last cry of a dying business. Just trying to cash out as much as possible from their active subscribers who either don't pay enough attention or are too senile to realize that their price suddenly skyrocketed.

I think a lot of posts in this thread are missing what the initial stat is saying. It's just about his TD passes. 4.5 yards on average per TD pass is indeed very low. That isn't really saying anything about Mahomes though, it's more a function of how good Andy Reid is at designing pass plays inside the 5 yard line. All those 2 yard shovel passes to Kelce at the goal line really bring the average down. In terms of average air yards per attempt for all passes, 2021 and 2022 Mahomes were nearly identical at 7.3 and 7.2 respectively.

Just to add something to this, in this down and distance Allen took a sack on an alarming 25% of attempts. Mahomes only took a sack on 7.41% of his attempts. Without looking at each attempt I can't say how much of that discrepancy is because of the OL versus how much is because of QB processing. But it shows one possible reason why 3rd down conversion rate without context may not tell us anything meaningful. It's also worth noting that the sample size we're working off of here is very very low. On the 3rd and 8-10 splits where Mahomes builds most of his overall lead in 3rd and 5+ conversion percentage, Mahomes and Allen have just 27 and 32 attempts respectively.

The seemingly random distribution of QBs on this list tells me it is a meaningless stat that you dug out because you think it proves a point. If you change it to 3rd and 4-7 yards to go, the results are very different: https://www.footballdb.com/statistics/nfl/player-splits/passing/third-and-4-to-7/2022?sort=passrate Allen's passer rating of 148.6 in that situation is much higher than Mahomes' 102.5. Ditto for Allen's first down conversion percentage of 68.75% compared to Mahomes' 56.60% in that situation. Here's a weird one - on 3rd and 11+ Allen and Mahomes both have exactly a 35% first down conversion rate, a 0% interception rate, and a 0% TD rate, but Mahomes has a much higher passer rating of 108.3 to Allen's 73.5. Where Mahomes really makes up ground is on 3rd and 8-10 yards. There he converts 48.15% for a 1st down, whereas Allen only converts 28.13%. By the way I don't think any of these metrics I posted proves anything. My point is that if you change the sample size for the data you get wildly different results each of which could be used to prove some hypothetical point if you stretch the data to fit that point. And the stat you posted also has nothing to do with what you're trying to argue. If we got rid of Diggs, Allen would have zero elite targets and Mahomes would still have one. Nothing you can possibly say will change that fact.

What are you even talking about? Protecting children? From Disney? I have no clue what you're on about. Avatar 2, a Disney movie, was recently the 3rd highest grossing movie of all time. Disney is still a massive entertainment conglomerate. The reality is that people just aren't watching live TV anymore. And it's only going to continue trending downwards with each new generation. Live sports is really the only exception. Used to be if you wanted breaking sports news you would keep the TV tuned to ESPN. Now you just open Twitter.

It has nothing to do with Disney or politics or anything like that. It's just the new reality that people don't watch live TV.

I'm surprised by how many people actively hate ESPN and want them to fail. Me, I don't care about them at all one way or the other. There are vastly superior ways to consume sports news these days than turning on a television channel. All TV journalism is going to suffer the same fate eventually. It simply isn't profitable anymore. It's been replaced by a more consumer-friendly product.

Diggs has been acting extremely immature since the 2nd half of the Bengals game. Whatever he is angry about, he hasn't gone about it the right way. But the primary reason for the bad PR around the Bills at minicamp was McDermott's poor handling of the situation. I think he let his emotions of the situation get the best of him and said the wrong thing. He had to contradict himself in front of the media the next day just to bring some kind of closure to the situation.

No, the drama was created by McDermott saying he was "very concerned" about Diggs' absence at day one of minicamp. All of the ensuing speculation and reporting followed from that. And it wasn't until the next day that anybody associated with the Bills threw water on the fire. It was a major PR blunder. Hopefully everything is truly resolved.

I'm baffled by any focus on what Allen needs to do to improve. He is by far the least improvable part of the team at any level. He had arguably the greatest playoff stretch in NFL history in '21/'22 and still got knocked out in the divisional round. We have a top 3 QB, no debate. If that isn't enough to win a Super Bowl, what is? IMO Allen has been good enough to win a Super Bowl since 2019 if he had the right roster around him. Moreso 2020 and beyond but even 2019 I think he was there if he had a loaded roster like the 49ers or Eagles. The problem with this discussion is everyone wants to compare him to Burrow and Mahomes but each of them have had superior coaching and surrounding talent for pretty much their entire careers. It doesn't matter how you rank them from 1-3; the difference between #1 and #3 is almost nothing for just a single position, even the most important position in all of sports. Does Mahomes hobbling on one ankle beat the Bengals with our roster? No way. So instead of worrying about Allen's performance I'm more concerned about the same issues that have plagued us for a couple years now - inconsistent offensive talent, questionable coaching decisions in critical moments, an inability to out-coach other teams in the playoffs. Each of these issues is fixable. Finding a better QB is not.

Diggs gets punished in the playoffs because defenses know if they stop him no one else behind him will pick up the slack. That was a problem for the entire second half of this past season too. Analytics shows that the #2 target is almost just as important as the #1 target in the modern NFL when it comes to reaching and winning the Super Bowl. The reason is because of what I just decribed... defenses are better and smarter in the playoffs so it's harder to funnel the whole offense through one guy. My explanation is that Mike Hughes had one of the worst individual performances I've ever seen from a player in a playoff game. That and Tyrann Mathieu was out of the game for the entire second half. Davis was the beneficiary of these factors, plus of course Allen played out of his mind. But if we want Davis consistently facing #3 and lower quality DBs on the depth chart in playoff games we can't hope for injury. We have to put players above him on OUR depth chart so that he automatically gets more favorable matchups. Like he did in 2020 which for my money is still the best season of his career when you account for target share (best yards per target, best TDs per target, and best catch percentage of his career). I mean this is ancient history. It's meaningless to even bring up. Recent NFL history shows that Davis is not worthy of being the #2 target for a Super Bowl participant. I already put this in another thread, but this is a list of the #2 receiving targets of the most recent 6 Super Bowl participants, the winners and the losers: JuJu Smith-Schuster Devonta Smith OBJ Tee Higgins Chris Godwin (in an almost dead heat with Rob Gronkowski) Tyreek Hill Tyreek Hill Deebo Samuel Julian Edelman Brandin Cooks Zach Ertz Rob Gronkowski As I said the last time I posted this, JuJu is likely the weakest link on that entire list and even he has a 1,400 yard season on his resume. This is the standard of the modern NFL era. Davis doesn't belong on that list. And unless something changes before December we will have to hope that the rest of our team is good enough to break a six-season trend.

No, just that Super Bowl caliber teams need a better #2 receiving target than Gabe Davis. That has been the case for all 12 teams that participated in each of the last 6 Super Bowls, at least. I don't need Chase and Higgins. I think Diggs and Beasley in their prime is likely the minimum standard for what a Super Bowl contender needs, and it's no coincidence that the one time we reached the AFCCG in the Allen era we had that minimum standard met. Davis is below that standard.

Kelce had two 1,000 yard seasons before Mahomes. Tyreek Hill and Marquez Valdes-Scantling had the best yardage seasons of their career with a different QB throwing them the ball. It's a myth that great QBs can turn WRs into somebody they aren't. Of course a great QB will elevate their weapons' production simply because the QB's added production has to show up somewhere, but WRs are who they are regardless of who's throwing them the ball. For example Gabe Davis is a limited WR that only runs one type of route at a high level and has a bizarre catch technique that leads to more drops than average. He will always be that receiver whether Allen is throwing him the ball or Mahomes or Nate Peterman. And if you do a modicum of research you'll see that Allen has elevated all of his targets throughout his career too.

That's more about Mahomes' play in 2021 than his play in 2022. As you know there were periods of several consecutive games in 2021 where Mahomes completely sucked. He was forcing throws downfield, abandoning the pocket early, had more frequent poor/lazy footwork; a lot of his bad habits from Texas Tech reared their ugly head. Temporarily he stopped being the god that he's been every other year of his career. The last 31 minutes of the AFCCG that year was a microcosm of his season. So it's disingenuous to compare his stats from 2021 to 2022. If Mahomes had played as well as he did in 2022 but with Tyreek Hill also added to the mix, no question it would have been an even better season. Losing Hill didn't make Mahomes a better QB. Mahomes himself did that by getting his standard of play back on track. Losing Hill changed the way Reid designed and called the offense. And considering he's one of the greatest offensive minds in NFL history and is used to designing highly productive offenses without elite WR talent this was an easy task. But you're of course avoiding the whole point which is that he still has arguably the greatest pass catching TE of all time as his primary weapon.

What is going on in this thread?

The timing of this feels more like a PR move than anything else. A contract extension for the coach and GM means nothing, Pegula could still fire them tomorrow if he really wanted to. There's been a lot of media pressure on the Bills in recent weeks, mostly the Bills' own doing - their handling of the Stefon Diggs situation was a major PR blunder. Extending McDermott and Beane now feels like a way to let everybody in the building know nothing has changed and there is no added pressure. And that's fine. I don't think McDermott and Beane are really on the hot seat with Pegula. But if the season is a disaster this extension isn't going to be the thing that stops him from making changes.

Well of course I am! You can't paper over the #2 target in a passing offense that hopes to win the Super Bowl. What you're arguing for doesn't actually work in practice. You can't just say "well these four players collectively will be the #2." That's just something fans convince themselves of to pretend the problem doesn't exist. Great depth doesn't cover up for middling top end talent, ever. Great depth with lack of top end talent has locked the Bills into the 2nd tier of the NFL. And I'm not just talking out of my *** here. This isn't a theoretical discussion. We have real evidence from recent seasons. Here are the #2 passing targets on the last five years worth of Super Bowl participants, the winners and the losers: JuJu Smith-Schuster Devonta Smith Chris Godwin (in an almost dead heat with Rob Gronkowski) Tyreek Hill Tyreek Hill Deebo Samuel Julian Edelman Brandin Cooks Zach Ertz Rob Gronkowski No doubt every one of those players in those respective seasons was substantially better than Davis. JuJu is probably the worst of them and he has a 1,400 yard season on his resume. That's the kind of #2 talent it takes to even approach the finish line. Case in point the closest we've gotten in the Allen era is when we had Beasley in his prime as our #2 target. We're seriously lagging behind that standard unless one of the players you mentioned suddenly ascends to that level.