HappyDays

Bills 34 Pats 17

I'm taking the 3rd and 4 corner route to Kincaid. Two reasons: 1) The difficulty of the throw. That pass has to be dropped in a bucket with the CB in decent position behind and a safety closing. Kincaid doesn't even have to put his hands up to catch it, it drops right into the breadbasket. This is a throw that takes more than just Josh's natural physical talents, it is the culmination of all the work he's put in to fixing his mechanics. The definition of "uh oh, Happy learned how to putt." 2) The difficulty of the moment. It's easy to forget now but this was a critical play in the game. 3rd down, a punt here would have been devastating and let Detroit right back into the game. It doesn't get more clutch than making that throw in that moment to take all the wind out of Detroit's sails. As a DC you just have to shake your head and accept you aren't stopping this guy.

None of the players approve of Brittany because of the stunt she pulled the night before the Bengals divisional game.

No, on the whole it turned out to be almost exactly what I expected. Comparing to my offseason expectations - Shakir is about the same maybe slightly better, Hollins somewhat better, Coleman the same, Samuel immensely worse (Samuel alone means the WR room as a whole is slightly worse than I expected if anything). For TE - Kincaid has been worse than my expectations, Knox about the same maybe slightly better. The RBs are doing what I expected. There was a moment after the first 4 games where I wondered if my offseason expectations were wrong. But then Baltimore laid out the blueprint, the next couple teams followed it (as did Indy when Cooper was out with injury) and the passing game really struggled. It was exactly what I expected to happen. Look at the KC game - Cooper makes two huge catches downfield, both came on TD drives. I'm sorry but Hollins and Coleman aren't making those two plays. Without those two plays we probably lose. So yes our offense without Cooper was good enough for us to be a playoff team, which I knew coming into the season. But it was not good enough to contend with other playoff teams.

Why would they sign him? I was told on here that the Bills handed them the next Tyreek Hill.

They must really like Grable. They could have easily given him the red shirt treatment especially with RVD already on the roster as a steady backup, but they made it a point to activate him.

Spencer Brown for me. He's been a dominant force as a run blocker, arguably the best in the league. You saw the difference when Van Demark replaced him against KC. He's been very good as a pass blocker too if not dominant. What is there to criticize, a few too many false starts?

The Indy game? Our passing offense stunk in that game.

He's been an active factor in every game he played in. Including yesterday despite the zero targets. A lot of fans misunderstood the conversation in the offseason. Nobody was saying the Bills needed a Justin Jefferson caliber WR to have a good passing offense. What we were saying was that the Bills needed a WR that could match up with outside CBs. Before trading for Cooper we didn't have that. So we got into that stretch of games against Baltimore/Houston/NYJ and defenses figured out it was pretty easy to shut us down - just clog the middle and dare us to win outside. It was a HUGE problem. Claiming otherwise is the definition of revisionism to use your term. It became a problem again when Cooper missed the Indy game. With him on the field defenses can't cheat to the middle. They have to respect his ability to win outside. That opens up everything else. Eventually teams might start cheating back to the middle again and then Cooper's opportunities will open up. Adding him took us from easy to defend to one of the most versatile offenses in the league. Even if he has zero targets he is having an impact just by being on the field. Now we can attack every single blade of grass on the field. If you can't see the difference you're not paying attention.

Our second Super Bowl run can be nail biters the whole way through. Sure. Our first Super Bowl run can be against mostly PS players called up for injury for all I care. Just get one any which way and all the pressure will be off the organization for the rest of Allen's career. Mahomes getting his first one has made everything since then so much easier.

Hmm I don't know about that. We tend to blow out bad teams. Divisional games can be weird but the Pats have an utter lack of talent at all levels. Plus we're playing in a flexed semi-primetime slot so the team will be revved up to perform well for a national audience, and I bet they know they could set the NFL record for consecutive 30+ points games. I'll be shocked if we win by less than three scores to be honest.

I've completely lost faith that we'll ever have a championship caliber defense under current management. That's why I've been saying for a couple years now the Bills should go all in on building an offense that can steamroll opponents all the way to the Super Bowl. Because clearly that's the only way it's going to happen. To their credit they have seemingly done that this year, partly by investing and partly by Allen taking his game to an even higher level. It's hard to argue with 8 consecutive games of 30+ points scored, and 2 games now of 40+ points scored. I think once we're past the wildcard round all of our games will have to look something like the Lions game. Go aggressive on defense early to try and create negative plays, and the offense needs to just keep scoring TDs and be aggressive on 4th down. It's not the formula most Super Bowl teams have used in recent years but it's our best shot. And next offseason they can't tread water - re-sign Cooper or sign a similarly talented WR, and draft another one on day one or two. Just keep adding to the offense and make the defense practically irrelevant. And ideally next year we need the offense to run like this without Allen putting his body on the line every single week.

Davante Adams would still be there too. Having an elite QB creates a snowball effect on the rest of the organization from top to bottom. You attract talent, you attract good coaches, you stop having to spend picks on QB, there's no wasting a bunch of training camp reps on the QB competition. It's impossible to quantify how much of a positive impact several years of established elite QB play has on any given franchise.

Skimming the last few pages and for a moment I just want to take a step back and appreciate where we're at as a fanbase. Does anyone else ever think about the times when we were coming into training camp wondering if like Matt Cassel would be the answer? I think about it somewhat regularly. I make it a point not to forget that I lived through those times even though it feels like an eternity ago. Back when the raging debate was "is it too soon to pull EJ Manuel for Kyle Orton" I couldn't even imagine that a player like this could wear a Bills jersey, or maybe any jersey. Now the raging debate is whether Allen is the greatest Bill of all time, and on his current pace it will soon be whether he's one of the greatest players of all time. I really don't want to take it all for granted. The past version of myself who lived and died with every Jeff Tuel OTA rep deserves that.

You absolutely can't sub Bishop in for Hamlin when he's healthy. Hamlin is replacement level but he doesn't get beat deep. Bishop has gotten beat deep twice in two games played. Can't live in that world. Bishop needs to play in the box for right now, he has no business roaming deep until he gets acclimated to NFL speed. Maybe create some subpackages for him where he's basically playing as a strong side LB when we face teams like Baltimore, that should be his only role. Elam I am more intrigued by. He was not outstanding or anything like that but he also wasn't routinely abused like Douglas was against LA. I would keep Douglas on the bench for at least the next game under the guise of injury recovery and see if Elam can't grab a hold of the starting spot. I worry that Douglas has hit the age 30 wall and will be exploited from here on out. Athleticism matters in the playoffs when scheme alone isn't enough to defeat quality opponents.

No one's doing it better than Dan Orlovsky right now. His analysis has become a must watch after every gane.

These snippets from Mike Silver's article in the Athletic are pretty interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5997141/2024/12/16/josh-allen-bills-lions-mythical-play?source=user-shared-article

Big difference from last week to this week is this week we came in knowing what kind of game we were about to play. We knew it was going to be a shootout and gameplanned accordingly. Last week I think LA really took us by surprise and had us playing on our heels right from the start. Nobody expected them to be able to put up 40+ points. Once we figured out what kind of game it was we adjusted and got back into it but it was too late. This week we got our shots in early and forced Detroit to play catch up.

Sure we got lucky with that injury, but also the 49ers players were mentally back in sunny California by the 3rd quarter while our guys were making snow angels for fun. It was a HUGE advantage that for some reason a lot of our fans want to take away.

If we had played the Rams in our snowy weather we would have won that game IMO. Probably not as badly as we beat San Fran but that game shows you how a nice weather team performs when they come to our turf. Every offense gets worse in that weather, but ours gets less worse because we have Allen and our team practices in it. So I'm still anti-dome even though it's an increasingly unpopular position.

Ben Johnson has lost a step

Per Joe Marino's substack - On the year we have a 30.6% pressure rate which is 17th in the league. So perfectly average. The pressure to sack percentage is only 9.6% which is #1 in the league. So yeah I agree, I don't think the pass protection is quite as good as most fans think. On the edges I think we've been excellent in run and pass blocking, but the interior has been more middling. Allen erases most of that all on his own. Although Joe pointed out that the pressure rate has gotten better, falling from 42.1% in weeks 1-6 to 22.5% from weeks 7-13.

Then we don't really disagree on anything except for semantics. I will tip my cap to Brady not just for calling a great game (the awful 3rd and goal sequence excluded) but having a great gameplan to start. All day long we attacked the Lions injured LB corps and avoided their safeties at all costs. Committing to the run kept us in manageable 2nd/3rd downs on almost every series. If I'm going to credit one person other than Allen it would be him for sure.

Genuinely curious how many QBs you think would have won this game for us today? I'm biased and I know it but I really think Allen is the only one. There was just so little margin for error. We needed our QB to make zero big mistakes and only like 3 minor mistakes, while also making multiple otherworldly plays that went way above and beyond the play call/surrounding talent.