HappyDays

I find it hard to believe Robinson will make it that far. Lesser prospects like Etienne and Najee Harris got taken sooner than pick 27. The word on Robinson is he's the best RB prospect since Saquon Barkley. To me that's a no brainer pick if he makes it to us but he won't.

Give him a chance to develop. He performed worse at the end of the year after an ankle injury and after he started getting more attention because Von wasn't there. 3rd year was always going to be his big step year anyways. He started just 13 games in college and took a year off from football during covid. He will be 23 when the season starts, younger than a lot of rookies will be. So he was never going to hit his ceiling right away. I'm really excited to see him reach his potential and I think we start to see it this year.

@GunnerBill I know you disagree with that post. But as an extreme example can you imagine the Patriots in their heyday ever looking completely unprepared for a playoff matchup? They didn't always make it to and win the Super Bowl but they were always prepared for their opponent despite not always being necessarily as talented. That's what great coaching gets you. You're always in it with a chance. This coaching staff under McDermott has not given the team a chance to win in each of the last two playoff exits. I agree the talent discrepancy between us and the Bengals is real but considering they were down three starting OL it was not as big a discrepancy as it looked on the field. Their players were put in a position for success. Ours were not. That's all I'm saying.

Part of that though is setting the players up for success. Calling runs out of shotgun on a snowy field, never getting the offense in rhythm with quick passes against a potent pass rush, the offensive line looking unprepared to handle delayed blitzes, etc. And that's just on the offensive side. On defense we were also totally out schemed. Free releases to their receivers, letting their below average run game run all over us because they managed to get Taron Johnson matched up against a pulling guard. Frankly the whole team was completely unprepared for everything the Bengals threw at us. That is not a case of their talent making a few more plays than our talent. It was a coaching mismatch as much as it was a talent mismatch.

Sadly this is where I'm at. I'll still enjoy each and every game. But none of the stats or rankings will mean anything to me. I'll be waiting for the playoffs to see if this coaching staff can finally do it when it counts.

It isn't just about winning the Super Bowl. It's about putting us in position to at least contend for a Super Bowl. 2020 I don't blame McDermott for. We were still getting our playoffs feet wet and weren't on the level of the Chiefs yet. 2021 coaching malpractice cost us a game we had won. 2022 we squeaked by a wildcard team on its 3rd string QB and had a poor gameplan on both sides of the ball in the divisional round and got blown out. So there is actually a downward trend. We are further away from a Super Bowl now than we were in 2020 despite being more experienced in playoff games. Get us to the AFCCG or the Super Bowl and we lose a heartbreaker because the other team's talent makes more plays, you can live with that from your coaches. That was 2020. Getting embarrassed for different reasons in consecutive playoff exits is not something you can live with. It falls on coaching. Next year if we still don't even sniff a Super Bowl appearance then yes I am ready to give someone else a shot.

Eagles 34 Chiefs 24 I could be wrong, I just don't like this matchup for the Chiefs. Eagles DL against Chiefs OL is probably a wash, but the reverse is a big advantage for the Eagles. I don't see how the Chiefs secondary holds up against so many talented pass catchers when they also have to worry about the run game. Whereas the Eagles secondary shouldn't have much trouble against the Chiefs receivers. Mahomes + Kelce means they will get their points but I see the Eagles pulling away fairly early and it never really gets close. The wildcard is Hurts. If he gets nervous in his first Super Bowl and regresses to his performance from the past two years then the Chiefs will probably win.

I would take Jalin Hyatt instead of Rice, if for no other reason than to keep him away from the Chiefs.

Mahomes held the Bengals to 20 points? I knew he was good but that's an unbelievable performance.

I recall three checkdown attempts when the Bengals game was still in hand. Two were tipped at the line (poor OL technique), one bounced off the hands of Singletary. There's the checkdown offense everyone has been screaming about. It isn't going to be fix our problems. I would like to see a little more short passing offense schemed up, especially getting guys like Cook and Hines intentionally involved as pass catchers, but Bills fans have all too quickly forgotten what happened in 2020. We spent much of that season throwing a lot of short crossing routes and hook routes to our less-than-dynamic receivers who more often than not got hit right away. We moved the ball but our receivers took a beating all year long. By the time we got to the AFCCG seemingly every starting receiver was banged up. That's what an offense full of unathletic route technicians gets you when you're relying on short passes. The Bills offense is not going to turn into a machine throwing 5 yard button routes to Diggs who immediately gets smacked in the back 10 times a game. Our offense was intentionally a downfield passing offense because it meshes with the QB and the receivers that we have. I also think Allen's elbow injury made him less accurate on shorter routes so they intentionally called less of those later in the year. Next year we need a better #2 WR and our offense as a whole needs to handle blitzes better. If everyone is running a vertical route and one of our OL gets confused, a delayed blitz is an automatic win for the defense. I'm begging Dorsey to figure out how to organically get the RBs involved in the passing game, not as checkdowns but with multiple designed targets every game. Use the offseason to figure out how to run a screen for the first time in a decade. Those are some of the ways we can get this offense humming with more consistency, not by throwing a million 5 yard curl routes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe he only played center in college, not guard. Not sure we could rely on him to be a day one starter at guard. And he's going to be a 24 year old rookie like Boogie Basham was. So this would be a disappointing 1st round pick IMO. If he makes it to our pick in round 2, sure.

I don't think it would require a rebuild. We aren't in cap jail and Beane hasn't been loose with future picks. It would probably take what it took Siranni when he took over the Eagles, one year of fine tuning the roster but nothing crazy. Our defensive scheme isn't so complicated that we have accumulated specific types of players that only work in one scheme. It's just Tampa 2 with a lot of double A gap looks. Our core of Milano, Edmunds, Hyde, White, Elam, Rousseau, and Miller fit into pretty much any 4-3 or nickel heavy scheme. On offense we need a rebuild no matter who our coach is in 2024. Our current core consists of Josh Allen and Stefon Diggs and to some extent Dawson Knox. Dawkins has fallen off a bit, Morse will probably not be here beyond next year, Davis and Brown haven't developed to the level we hoped. If McDermott can't get it done next year I would rather have the next guy in the room making decisions about the future of the offense. I think the idea of a multi-year rebuild is only for teams that are looking for their franchise QB. We got the most difficult part out of the way. To McDermott and Beane I say thanks for all you did getting us Josh Allen and you made millions of dollars each for that success, but now as a franchise we need to take the next step and I'm losing faith they can get us there.

Personally I would go the route that has been successful for most of the recent contending teams - hire an up and coming offensive coach. Nick Sirianni, Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Zac Taylor. Throw in Andy Reid and you have most of the last two years' conference championship and Super Bowl contenders. That's the group I'd like to be in. The best part is we should be able to easily attract any offensive coach we want. "You want to get your head coaching career started on the right foot? Here's Josh Allen and Stefon Diggs and cash-rich owners. Have fun." My personal preference is the Lions OC Ben Johnson. He's about the same age as Sean McVay and he looks like a true innovator with a knack for maximizing his talent. I saw what his offense did to our defense despite being ostensibly less talented than us and with a limited QB. Give him the keys to our offense, let him hire an experienced DC, and see what happens. You're right there is no guarantee he is better than McDermott. But one more year with a disappointing early exit from the playoffs and I'm done playing it safe.

The difference in these situations is they didn't have Josh Allen at QB. That's why I'm growing impatient with this regime. We have an elite QB and haven't even sniffed a Super Bowl appearance yet. I mean last year Josh Allen arguably had the greatest postseason run of any QB in history and we didn't even make it out of the divisional round. Why? Because our defensive head coach's defense fell apart yet again, and a huge coaching mistake cost us in the final 13 seconds of the game. I can't look at that outcome and what happened this year and compare it to Kyle Shanahan leading a who's who of mediocre QBs to a Super Bowl and conference championship. The Chiefs have now made it to 3 Super Bowls and always the conference championship since Mahomes took over. Mahomes may be better than Allen but he isn't that much better. The difference is coaching on both sides of the ball and at the top. So McDermott gets another year to prove he can finally adapt to playoff football. But I won't have any great expectations regardless of how the team looks in the regular season. We have seen them falter when it counts too many times and I have to start thinking that maybe that's just who this team is under McDermott. A team that wins a lot of games because of elite QB play but never gets over the hump. As usual your posts are much appreciated.

None of these players would have started for the Bills. Not because they aren't good but because this coaching staff for some reason refuses to develop its rookies on the field. McDuffie a man only corner would have been made inactive at one point for washed up Xavier Rhodes. Mind you I'm not saying that would have been a good decision but that is the reality of this coaching staff. I saw plenty of flashes from Elam, Cook, and Shakir but they didn't play.

Two examples from yesterday I will use: 1) 4th and 1 in the red zone, Mahomes has Smith-Schuster open in the flat for an easy 1st down. He instead tosses it to Kelce in single coverage downfield in the endzone. TD. 2) 4th and 6 at midfield, Burrow launches a deep ball to Chase in double coverage. Huge completion and sets them up for a TD. Our version of that play - 3rd and 2, Allen launches a deep ball to Davis. Bounces off his hands and we punt. What's the difference in those plays? Not the decision. Mahomes' and Burrow's guys made plays for them. Our guy dropped his. So of course our fanbase screams at Allen for being over aggressive. Yeah this stuff really bothers me. Throwing deep in short yardage situations a lot of times is a good thing because the defense is overplaying the sticks. I don't ever want Allen to lose that part of his game. Instead I want Beane to draft guys that hold up their end of the bargain for him.

His not great defense held the Bengals to 20 points and carried him to victory after he personally made big mistakes on several drives in the 2nd half. His #3 WRs and no running game didn't stop Chad Henne from learning a 98 yard TD drive a week before. Sorry but the support system around him is much better. Allen has to play perfect for the Bills to have a chance against good opponents. Mahomes can leave the game for a quarter or singlehandedly cost his team 3 consecutive drives in the 2nd half and still end up the victor. Not taking anything away from his greatness. But greatness still needs support from time to time.

It is a reasonable excuse for this year, but not 2021 or 2020. We had a fully healthy defense when Philip Rivers on his last legs nearly pulled off an upset in the wildcard round. So our defense faltering in the playoffs has been a trend, not an exception. The Chiefs don't have an especially talented defense. Chris Jones is of course elite but other than him it is just a decent group of players. Yet they held the same Bengals offense we faced to just 20 points. The Bengals almost scored that much against us in the 1st quarter... To my eyes it was not because the Chiefs are that much more talented than we were last week, it was because their scheme was unpredictable from play to play and they took chances. We played the Bengals the exact same way we play every offense we've faced for the last 5 years. That makes it way too easy for them to figure out. I don't want to read too much into our first game against them but it was looking just as bad in that one, so with the added context of the divisional round I think it is fair to admit our defensive scheme simply does not work against talented well-coached offenses at the end of the season.

The Chiefs traded away one of their top end difference makers and still made it back to the Super Bowl. They even did it while playing their last game and a half with Mahomes hobbled. They have multiple 6th and 7th round players playing key roles on their team. To me that is a sign of a major coaching discrepancy between us and them. Across the board I don't believe they are really more talented than us. But they keep getting it done when it counts.

It's two straight years now that poor coaching cost us at the end. I'm not asking for anybody to get fired now but if it happens again they need to pull the plug. I'm sick thinking about how many years of Josh Allen we'll have wasted if Pegula isn't willing to demand better.

Can you imagine the Bills holding either of those offenses to below 24 points in a playoff game? Yet both of those defenses were able to pull that off despite being lower ranked than us throughout the entire regular season. I'm more and more convinced we are being held back by coaching. What other conclusion can you make?

The game was not decided on that one play, that's ridiculous. The kick probably would have been good from 55 anyways.

That sucks for Ossai, it's tough to stop your momentum on that play. He's sitting there thinking the whole game is his fault.

This has been the most one sided officiating half of football I have ever seen.

There was a missed block in the back on that punt return. Chiefs homecooking has been strong this half.