HappyDays

$12 million in year one. The combined cap hits of Poyer, Settle, and Hines this year is $12,674,000. Or replace any of those 3 players with Neal or Harty to get the same result. Or just 2 of the mentioned players plus a restructure of White or Dawkins. That's the frustrating part. This contract was easily manageable and it would have barely impacted our future cap situation beyond 2023.

In each of the past two seasons, there has been at least one game where a Gabe Davis drop directly led to a loss. One game was the difference in us having the #1 seed both years. My fear is that at the end of this season we will look back and see the same exact outcome because nobody replaced Davis as the #2 target. At this point the realistic options to replace him as the #2 target are Kincaid hitting his stride by November, or trading for someone like Jerry Jeudy or Mike Evans before the trade deadline. If neither of these things happen and Davis is again the default #2 target, that is a major obstacle to overcome to win a Super Bowl.

It's over.

Sometimes I think we get too lost in rankings. Everyone who watched the games last year knows the Bills offense had a ton of unforced errors. Clean up some of those errors and the productivity WILL improve. So saying productivity is not likely to improve is obviously false. It's not about being ranked 3rd or 1st across the whole season, it's about finding ways to win enough games to be the #1 seed and then advance in the playoffs. A lot of times the difference between the #1 seed and the #4 seed is a few critical moments sprinkled over just 2-3 games. Those are the moments where the Bills have fallen short and that isn't going to show up in any kind of statistical analysis.

So the Chiefs relying on Travis Kelce (33), Jerick McKinnon (30), and Joe Thuney (30) was a mistake in your opinion?

Sure it was. Beane openly pursued OBJ at the end of last season and in free agency. He tried to trade for Hopkins, then made him an offer in free agency. Beane wants Davis to be "outright replaced." He just hasn't closed the deal.

The problem is we're counting on some of these players to be more than they've been in recent years. We have to count on Shakir to progress, count on Harty to stay healthy, count on a rookie TE to make a huge impact, and/or count on Sherfield to be more than the last WR on the depth chart. If Hopkins was here any of those things happening would be a nice bonus, not a necessity. As it stands those players are going to determine our offense's floor. If Hopkins was here they would instead determine the ceiling. A bunch of question marks with high risk but also high upside as depth is a great thing. It's counting on them to be more than depth that concerns me.

For a few minutes that night I was certain that we had just witnessed the first live death in an NFL game. The initial reports that they were using an AED sent chills through my body. The training staff deserves every bit of praise they get. A man's heart stopped beating and a mere 6 months later he's back playing professional football. Miraculous... As a side note, many people on this forum would have their experience vastly improved if they used the ignore function. It cuts down on a lot of BS in certain threads if you use it appropriately.

So I will say I very much support the Floyd signing. We need a capable edge across from Rousseau while Von Miller recovers, and someone to keep Basham off the field once Miller is back. I get the desire to go all in on offense, but you can't ignore defense entirely. Spending a modest sum on a more than capable pass rusher was a necessary move IMO. Edge may be the 2nd most important position on the team, or at least equal to or just behind WR. On Poyer I agree. I don't share the excitement that most of the fanbase does on spending critical cap dollars on an aging safety. Despite my appreciation for what he has meant to the team these past few years I was ready to move on. I wish some other team had given him the contract he wanted. We could have Hyde in his final year and Rapp on a cheap contract. I don't need more than that from the safety position... I'm guessing it was kind of the inverse of the Hopkins situation, Beane drew a line in the sand about how much he would be willing to pay Poyer, and when Poyer came crawling back to accept the lowball offer he felt that he had no choice but to re-sign him. It makes me think that maybe Beane should stop obeying his lines in the sand and instead should use his salary cap as efficiently as possible.

What is a recent example of "WR2 by committee" that was successful? There's really no such thing. Somebody has to have the 2nd most receiving targets on the team. Last year it was the highly inefficient Gabe Davis. Having a lot of solid depth behind him doesn't minimize that inefficiency.

Then say that. Don't hide your misevaluation of a player's value under the guise of "he should be willing to take a discount for a playoff team." It's been well established what restructures and/or extensions could be executed to afford Hopkins at his real market value. Beane is pretending that he can't afford more than a couple million per year but that's a lie. For whatever reason Beane has been willing to drastically overpay the Vernon Butlers and Trent Murphys of the world, but not the OBJs and Hopkins. The combined cap hits of Hines, Settle, and Harty this year is $11,569,000. I bet that right there gets you Hopkins, maybe with a Dawkins or White restructure thrown in for good measure. I can almost guarantee you Hopkins' value will exceed the combined value of those players this year. So don't believe Beane when he says "this player is only affordable if he accepts a discount." He has shown through previous contracts that he will pay certain depth caliber players their market rate and then some. Our inability to afford Hopkins within our current salary cap is not just a matter of "oh well, that's the nature of the NFL" like Beane is presenting the situation as. It's a direct outcome of Beane misevaluating various players' values over the years. Sure, this is my last bastion of hope. Jeudy in particular is the one I have my eye on if Denver's season goes the way I think it will. If we don't obtain Hopkins but we ultimately trade for an upgrade at WR2 I am good with that.

They also openly flirted with OBJ near the end of last season, and Beane earlier this offseason in response to a question about Hopkins said something to the effect of "We still haven't closed the door on OBJ either" (before he signed with the Ravens). So yes he clearly understands we need an upgrade at WR2 and he hasn't been shy about admitting it. I don't know how any Bills fan looks at these pursuits and thinks the team is 100% satisfied with Davis. I'm getting tired of Beane's recurring line - "if someone wants to come here and chase a Super Bowl, we would love to have them." The implication being that players like OBJ and Hopkins should accept less than they're worth because our organization is oh so great. It's an excuse that insults both the players and the fans. Von Miller didn't accept a discount. Beane knows what every player is really after. And everyone knows Hopkins is attainable if Beane pulls on the right strings. His public attitude of "oh well, what can we do?" is getting old. But somehow some fans still buy it.

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.