HappyDays

Hines played 11% of our offensive snaps since the trade. McKinnon played 47% of offensive snaps for the Chiefs. This is a Dorsey vs. Reid stat, not Allen vs. Mahomes. Why we refused to use the explosive RB we traded for, couldn't tell you. Why we refused to throw the ball to the pass catching RB that we spent a 2nd round pick on, couldn't tell you. It goes to show that for all the talk of comparing talent, the biggest discrepancy between Allen and Mahomes this past season BY FAR is coaching. Mahomes got Andy Reid, whose experience designing plays and calling offenses goes without saying. Allen got a first year OC and first time play caller. This commonly gets ignored in the discussion. So if you want to say the offensive weapons are a wash, okay, but there is no argument whatsoever with the offensive line and with the coaching. Why is there even a debate if their situations were comparable? It is not close. I would love to see what the Bills offense looks like for one drive with Case Keenum at QB starting at the 2 line. If anyone here thinks he leads us to a TD, I'd like to hear your reasoning.

Allen definitely became noticeably less accurate on short to intermediate throws from the Vikings game on. Driving the ball was not a problem, but placing the ball was.

Now imagine if once Reid got Mahomes he made it to one AFC Championship game and that was the extent of his accomplishments. That's where we're at right now with McDermott and Allen. If the same kind of disappointing playoff exit happens next year I think it is fair at that point to call for a change. Having an elite QB changes everything about the evaluation of the coaching staff. The clock on Allen's career is ticking. If McDermott can't even sniff a Super Bowl appearance after 4 years of elite QB play, we have to try and replace him with someone that can. The alternate view is that we thank McDermott for making the long awaited cultural turnaround, and for whatever role he played in obtaining the elusive franchise QB after a two decade wait, while acknowledging that he is not the guy to finish the job. If we have to replace him after next season some people might consider his stint here a failure. I wouldn't. He was the right man for the job coming out of the slapstick Rex Ryan regime. He did what the franchise needed and got paid I would think tens of millions of dollars for his efforts. We like to think of football teams as more than just corporations, but that's all they are. Sometimes a failing corporation needs a turnaround specialist to come in and whip it back into shape. That specialist doesn't usually stick around to take the corporation to the next level once his job is done. Maybe that's what McDermott is.

It was the throw that ended the drive right before Diggs' outburst. I believe it was either a corner or a post where Diggs was running towards the sideline and Allen threw it too far past him. This is off of memory, I don't have the heart to go back and find the exact play. I think right after the play we saw Allen make a little motion with his hand like he wanted Diggs to run the route a different way but I could be conflating two separate plays.

Mahomes Teller Hodgins One of these things is not like the other.

Well, I had an issue with it before it happened. Experience matters in any career. It was entirely predictable that once we got to the playoffs an inexperienced offensive play caller against a highly experienced defensive play caller was going to be a mismatch. I worry that we wasted a season of Josh Allen in his prime on Dorsey's training wheels. Best case scenario he takes a big step and ultimately gets hired away to be a head coach. Do we then let the next first timer in line do the same thing? As long as McDermott is here he needs someone with experience calling plays. My #1 desire was Doug Pederson. Obviously that ended up not being possible. I would have been okay with Joe Brady. I think he was more of a fall guy in Carolina and he had experience. Pep Hamilton is another one I would have looked at, he ended up in Houston. Right now personally I wish we could get rid of Dorsey and hire Frank Reich but there's pretty much no chance of that happening so I guess we're stuck. I'm no expert on all of the available names. I just want someone that has done the job before because our window is going to close fast.

I would bet any amount of money that Davis' next contract will exceed Hodgins' next contract. I don't even like Davis that much but if you are just looking at stats to try to prove Hodgins is a better receiver than Davis you are not using sound analysis. Hodgins will perennially live on the edge of a 53 man roster/practice squad. Davis will perennially be a top 4 WR for some team.

This is bad. And I 100% believe you. It makes sense with what we saw against the Bengals, Diggs laying into Allen on the sideline and Allen just staring straight ahead ignoring it as if he's been through this a thousand times before. It's hard enough for an NFL offense to function without the QB having to worry about how one of his targets will react to any given choice he makes. It's why the Chiefs got rid of Tyreek Hill, they didn't like that he was demanding the ball which put pressure on Mahomes to force throws to him instead of taking the best available option. I really don't like where this is heading.

Somebody made that up. The mic'd up audio that we usually see after games caught what Diggs said, but of course the Bills will never release that audio. I have it on good authority he said "What is your excuse now Josh?"

For me personally my frustration stems from the fact that we finally have an elite QB after a two decade wait and the prime of his career is going to be gone before we know it. So the stakes have gotten much higher. I suspect that many fans feel the same way, consciously or not. The 13 seconds debacle was the epitome of this - our QB had arguably the greatest performance in playoff history but got screwed over by his coaches and teammates (mainly on the defense). So everything is coming to a head now and yes frustrations are boiling over.

Yes. McDermott is the head coach, not Allen. In that situation you sit Allen down and say "Look I know Dorsey is your guy, but I need to do the right thing for this team at this stage of our championship window." If he's scared to have that conversation with Allen he is not the right person to lead this team.

Diggs needs to take it down just a notch. There's a fine line between being an ultra competitor who hates losing and being toxic to your team. Airing his feelings publicly is not the right way to handle his frustrations. Someone else on here can probably verify this but what Diggs said to Allen on the sidelines in the Bengals game was "What's your excuse now Josh?" Apparently Allen had missed that throw a couple times in practice and told Diggs he would hit it in the game, but didn't. So Diggs laid into him. Which IMO is not the right way to handle it. Try to raise your QB up, don't hit him below the belt when he's already down. I'm sure Allen and Diggs are still cool but come on man.

He made a big mistake hiring a rookie OC. Josh Allen and Stefon Diggs in their prime deserve better. A sixteen year old driver doesn't start with a Ferrari. As a defensive minded head coach McDermott needs an experienced OC that he can mostly leave alone. It felt like they never really considered outside candidates. Dorsey "earned it the right way" so here's the keys to your Ferrari young man. I never got the sense that Dorsey was connecting plays together and he did a poor job keeping his star players under control. That's where his inexperience became a problem. And yes McDermott has to own that mistake.

I just looked on Spotrac. There would be a $12 million dead cap hit this year and a $26 million dead cap hit in 2024 if we traded him this offseason. So nevermind...

You know what, I don't think a Diggs trade is 100% off the table if they decide he's a little too demanding about his role. That's why the Chiefs traded Hill. He was demanding the ball so they were forcing plays to him instead of just running the best offensive play to beat the defensive coverage. They decided it was better to get a big haul for him and let Mahomes run the offense without Hill's demands in the back of his mind. I wouldn't personally trade Diggs but it's not off the table. BUT if we did trade him we would need to get back a 1st rounder obviously, and then find a way to get DeAndre Hopkins so we still have a #1 WR. Then use one of our 1sts to draft another WR. If we pulled all of that off I could see myself coming around to it. Still don't think it is actually going to happen though.

Hodgins is their slightly better version of Duke Williams. He is producing because they have no one else to throw the ball to. This is not a Wyatt Teller situation where we mistakenly let a legitimate top tier player go to another team. If Hodgins was here we would still have a big need at WR next year. He's just a placeholder.

Not just faster. He has a whole extra gear AND better hands than Davis. Those traits separate 1st round talent from 4th round talent. Also one scouting report I read said that he is also QB friendly in terms of adjusting routes and making himself an easy target. Davis is not very QB friendly IMO.

I'm not sure Hyatt will still be there at pick 27 but if he is it's a no brainer selection. I see people overanalyzing his talent like they did with DK Metcalf. To me it's simple - he can out run everybody on the field, he's competitive, he has good hands. All of that and he isn't a 1st round talent because he played in a spread offense in college? Let's not overthink this. Elite athletic traits win at the NFL level. Technique can be taught.

I can't pretend that I care about positional coaches. Aaron Kromer was supposed to whip our OL into shape, and instead they turned in a miserable performance for most of the year. I don't blame Kromer, you can't magically turn bad players into good players. I can't imagine any WR coach is really that much better than any other, there are no secret techniques that Chad Hall taught. So, whatever.

I don't consider the Dolphins with Skylar Thompson at QB to be a good team but your point is taken, that is a reasonable example where the defense stepped up to keep us in the game while Allen and the offense floundered for several drives. Just to tie up this discussion, my point is not to compare Allen and Mahomes as QBs. I recognize that Mahomes' overall body of work is better than Allen's. I just hate when people say things like "great players find a way to win" as some evidence that Mahomes is SO much better than Allen. I think the gap between their support systems is much greater than the gap between the QBs. Mahomes literally "made enough plays" to win the AFCCG but he had a lot of help from his team and his coaches.

I sincerely cannot think of a single time Allen has made that many mistakes against a good team and the Bills still won. The closest I can think of is the Packers from earlier this year and they weren't even a playoff team. The story on the Bills is that Allen has to play perfect for the team to have a chance against other playoff teams, and sometimes even that isn't enough (see: the divisional round last year). Do you think the Bills would have beaten the Jaguars in the divisional round if Allen was hopping on one foot for the entire 2nd half and got relieved by Case Keenum for a couple drives? I don't. You're correct that this is all hypothetical, but there are enough data points over the past three seasons to know that the Bills don't beat good teams if Allen doesn't play at an elite level for 4 quarters. I mean he had arguably the greatest game in playoff history and the gap between the two teams was otherwise so great that the Bills still lost. I agree. What if Joe Thuney was our LG instead of Rodger Saffold and Allen was able to make that pass without getting hit at the same time? Maybe Diggs scores a long TD which would have changed the game.

But everything I said there is true. Of course Mahomes is an elite QB. He made a number of great plays in that game, like he always does. The numerous mistakes however would have sunk him if he was the Bills QB that day because our defense would not have held the Bengals for that long, our #2 WR would not have made several great catches and plays to keep drives going. Allen played like crap against the Jets but made a great play at the end that should have gotten us right back in it... and instead it bounced off Davis's chest. I've seen this story too many times in Allen's career so the common narratives are really starting to frustrate me. So many times I've seen Allen put the team on his back against other good teams, and not once have I seen the team do the same for him. Sure against the Bears and Falcons of the world he can play below his standard and the Bills still win. But if he made that many mistakes against the Bengals we lose every single time.

Allen did not perform well against the Bengals. I'm not comparing their performances. I'm saying the notion that Mahomes "willed his team to win" is ridiculous. Mahomes didn't have his best performance against the Bengals. He only "willed his team" to one more TD drive than Allen did. The difference is his defense held firm again and again and again and didn't make excuses. I mean there are people on here that said you can't blame the Bills defense for giving up a TD drive to Miami because Bass's kickoff went out of bounds and they started at the 40. The 40.

No, he absolutely did not. On a good looking drive that could have put the game away he inexplicably fumbled with no pressure. On one drive he missed a pass to a wide open Sky Moore which caused a three and out. After Burrow's 1st interception he couldn't take advantage of good field position to put points on the board. After the officials gifted him a free continuation of a drive he threw a bad ball on a crossing route and the Chiefs had to punt. I've seen enough Bills games the past few years to know that if Allen makes this many mistakes against a good team, we lose 100% of the time. Find me an example that says otherwise. Even in Allen's worst games he still makes a lot of great plays. Mahomes did the same thing in this game.

See the problem is I actually watched the game so I don't fall for this crap. In the 2nd half Mahomes made a number of mistakes and bad throws that invited the Bengals back into the game. If his defense hadn't stepped up it would have been two years in a row with the same ending. If Allen led his offense to 23 points against the Bengals we would have lost by at least 2 scores. It's weird how quick certain people on here are to point out Allen's mistakes, but Mahomes' mistakes dont matter because he "willed his team to win." I guess he willed Chad Henne to a 98 yard TD drive the week before too.