HappyDays

I really didn't have a problem with the back shoulder to Coleman on 1st down. Against the Ravens that play had become automatic. The problem is Coleman looked back towards Allen way too early in the route which gave the CB an easy read. When Coleman turns his head, the CB turns his head. The rep is lost at that point. He needs to sell the route vertically for a tick longer, but that's the kind of thing that happens when you're relying on an inexperienced rookie in a critical moment of a game. Allen is already gearing up to make an anticipatory throw before the rep is lost and it's not like he's going to go through his progressions in this situation. It's one read and throw the ball because that's what the coaches called.

I appreciate that after exactly two weeks the entire board and the rest of the Bills social media sphere has flipped around to wanting us to trade for a WR. Our fanbase quietly got smarter.

I can appreciate this analysis. Here's the play for anyone that wants to watch it: Last year some of Allen's INTs came when defenders that weren't covering the intended target were able to read the play and uncover from their man to get into the passing window. Good example would actually be Bernard's INT against Stroud in this game. Stroud makes technically the right read but Bernard is right there and recognizes it fast enough to make the play. Something I have noticed this year is that Allen is intentionally trying to avoid that scenario. So yeah I think it's very possible on this play he sees Coleman's defender with eyes on Allen and doesn't trust that the window will be there if he throws it before Cook gets behind Coleman. Like you said I don't know if that's a good or a bad decision, but it's better analysis than "Allen doesn't know what he's seeing" so I appreciate the attempt to figure out why he didn't make a throw that he has never hesitated to throw before. Allen obviously had an off game in the 1st half, I'm not going to dispute that. His internal clock seemed to be moving a tick too fast which led to the somewhat jumpy appearance of his play, before he settled down in the 2nd half. I have no doubt that trust issues with his OL and pass catchers influenced his internal clock, but he owns some of that himself either way. But my biggest concern coming out of the game is that when Allen has an off half of football (which is guaranteed to happen several times over the course of a season) the offense looks completely non-functional. I mean there is just nothing in the play design or the skill sets of his pass catchers that gives us any kind of margin for error, especially without Shakir. Like okay let's say the throw to Hollins was a tad overthrown. If Hollins has even average NFL speed or body control that is still a catch. Deep completions are not typically pinpoint accurate and they're as much about timing as accuracy. I couldn't tell you what our bread and butter plays are. Or even what our offensive identity is in general. We came into this game not having the necessary personnel to execute the proper game plan for Houston's defense, and not having the crispness of play designs and execution that the elite offensive coaches bring to the table. Allen will be fine. The other problems won't be. That's the takeaway that actually matters here IMO.

The plays I'm seeing they're not doing anything. It's mind boggling. They're standing still or moving in the opposite direction. Case in point: Look at all that space available for Hollins to sit down and make himself an easy target. Instead he cluelessly continues running across the field in the opposite direction of Allen's scramble. This should be an automatic conversion with Allen's skill set.

I've brought this up in a couple threads but the WRs need to do a way better job in scramble drills. In the past Allen has had WRs like Beasley and Diggs that knew how to make themselves available. A lot of our past 3rd down conversion success was Allen just making magic happen but he needs his pass catchers to be on the same page. Shakir is the only one that has done a good job of this. Against Houston alone there are plays on tape where MVS, Hollins, and Samuel each failed to do anything to help their QB during a scramble drill on 3rd down. Needs to be a focus of the coaching moving forward.

Joe Buscaglia's take: He also breaks down the almost INT that Allen threw back across his body. It highlights the issues I've noticed with our WRs on scramble drills. On that play while Allen breaks the pocket right, MVS continues running in the opposite direction and never tries to come back to make himself an available target. Meanwhile Samuel is just standing still way downfield letting himself be covered. Compare that to Shakir against the Ravens where he leaked behind the coverage and we got a big play. Something has to change. No answers exist on the roster. Getting Shakir back will certainly help but it's not enough to take this team where it wants to go.

It is alarming that we are running so often on 1st down but still not finding good success when we occasionally pass it. Defenses should be keying in on the run giving us easier opportunities to pass it based on these splits.

It hasn't been a solution in the last two games: I'm still of the opinion that as a fanbase we are searching for solutions that don't exist with the current personnel. Defenses know that there are very few things we can do well and it isn't hard to shut those things down when we have no counterpunch.

He's always going to hover around 50ish% of his throws coming from outside the pocket, just like the other stylistically similar QBs. IMO you don't ask those QBs to change. You build the offense around their skill set and make sure every single pass catcher knows how to respond when they break the pocket. Sometimes it will be an unnecessary escape. So be it.

Allen is responsible for some of it for sure. But like Simms says when an extremely talented QB has a historically bad passing performance it speaks to more fundamental problems in the offense. Not that that's breaking news or anything.

I think Chris Simms and Mike Florio nail it here: I'll admit what Simms says about possibly adding Davante Adams does give me pause. He says even if we add him, do we have enough else on the roster to really make a championship run? I'm naturally a very impatient person so I have been all in on doing whatever it takes to add Adams (or some other legit WR) to the room. But I can see the argument that the season is a wash no matter what so save your resources and push in your chips next year.

Yeah I know what the tweet is trying to say but I don't buy it. We didn't just "re-shape" the personnel. We failed to invest enough meaningful resources into the personnel, and the resources we did invest ended up being an overpayment pretty much across the board.

I don't know. Nobody was ever saying "the Bills offense needs to be built EXCLUSIVELY to beat cover 2 shell." The thought was that we needed some kind of answers built in to win against that coverage, while still retaining the ability to beat any other coverage. There has been a pervasive thought here and elsewhere in the Bills social media sphere that teams would just always let us get away with cheap yards over and over again, and as long as Allen remains patient we'll be unstoppable. It turns out well-coached defenses aren't going to just lay down and die for us. They're going to force the issue until we prove we can beat it. For two weeks now our personnel and our scheme haven't proven they can beat it. So the trend will continue.

Well and also Joe Staley's speciality was defense and their defense was legitimately terrible. Saleh's defense has been elite, probably the best in the league this year. So what improvements is Ulbrich supposed to make? Hackett is still there so the offense isn't changing. There's really nothing positive that can come from making the change now.

I don't think this is going to be a traditional "interim head coach" bump. That usually comes after everybody on the team knows the season is over and the change sparks some kind of excitement. This feels like the opposite. They are five games in with a chance to take control of the division on primetime and suddenly the rug gets pulled out. I think the team will be demoralized if anything. I was planning on predicting an ugly Bills loss but now I predict an ugly Bills win.

Feels like that takes the Saints off the list.

Just speaking for myself here, I have never been one to say a coach should always be aggressive. I think coaches that always go aggressive hurt their teams as much as coaches that always go conservative. You have to weigh each situation in the moment and make the appropriate decision for that moment in that game. On the whole I've actually been very happy with McDermott's 4th down decision making for several years now. I would say it's a strength of his, knowing when to go for it and when to take the points. The Ravens game was the first time in a while where I thought he wasn't aggressive enough at certain points but every coach has those moments so I won't rake him over the coals. As far as the end of this game - it doesn't bother me as much as it did in real time. I understand that the reactionary media is always going to latch onto the final seconds of the game. I just feel very nonchalant about the whole sequence. Kind of the same way I feel about the end of the divisional round actually, where the only thing anybody wants to talk about is the missed throw to Shakir in the endzone and for me that play barely registers in my mind when I'm thinking about reasons that we lost. Part of my feeling is that I never truly felt like this was a game we were going to win. Houston (Stroud in particular) made several very goofy mistakes that gave us any kind of chance at all. Obviously I wish we had made it to OT but can I say I felt particularly confident that we would have won it there? It felt more like a game that Houston tried to hand to us and we did the courtesy of handing it right back. Nothing about that final sequence strikes me as a microcosm of why we lost the game. I can't find any one moment in that final sequence where I feel the coaches let the team down when I really reflect on it. I'm more interested in how the rest of the game exposed pretty severe vulnerabilities in our offensive personnel and coaching.

Since this has turned into the semi-monthly Fire McDermott thread, here's what I'll say - I think we will know by the trade deadline if McDermott and Beane feel any pressure about their jobs. If they make a trade for a legit WR that will tell me they feel some sort of pressure to turn things around. If instead they keep the status quo which means Mack Hollins continues to be a regular part of the offense which ensures Josh Allen getting the snot beat out of him for the next three months, that tells me they have been told they have nothing to be worried about. The arguments on McDermott have been hashed out a million times and nothing that happens this season is going to change anyone's mind. But there's only one person in the entire world whose opinion on the subject actully matters and I am very curious to know what that messaging has been like.

Honestly I don't have a great answer. I think defenses figured that system out and our offense grew stale. But of course I am in favor of having more pass catching talent. The players will always outweigh the scheme. So I don't look to Daboll's scheme as the primary engineer of that 2020 production, I look to the players (and partly defenses at the time not being prepared to defend that type of offense, whereas every defense now is built specifically to stop it). It's a very rare group of offensive coaches out there that can seemingly make it work with almost any group of talent. Andy Reid has modified the Chiefs scheme several times since taking over. With Tyreek Hill they had almost an air raid offense. Defenses adjusted and they traded Hill so he changed to a short passing/run heavy offense. And I don't even know what I would call the scheme that they were running last night. So there is not one specific scheme I am in favor of. I'm in favor of having either an elite offensive coach or having elite offensive talent that an average coach can work with. And then you let the talent determine the scheme.

No the only thing I ever hear is injuries and the occasional free agent signing.

I don't understand what the Jets play is here if your theory is correct. How does their DC taking over as head coach better prepare them to introduce Davante Adams into the room and increase their odds of winning a Super Bowl? Maybe this is all Rodgers engineering exactly what he wants to happen and Woody Johnson is just submitting to his will because he has too much invested in him not to. It just seems like if you're going all in on a one year window you can't fire the head coach at 2-3.

The reason I ask is that if you watch their offensive system compared to ours it is like two different sports. Mahomes played fantastic but it is almost like he is playing a different position compared to Allen. I saw a stat after the game that Mahomes threw zero tight window passes in that game. That takes nothing away from his ability to read the defense and deliver the ball appropriately, in addition to his uncanny ability to get away from pressure in the pocket and create positive plays from nothing, but still it is not comparable to what Allen has to do on a down by down basis within our offensive system.

There's a whole thread about this play. I'm welcome to being wrong on this but this is what I saw: Looks like a sluggo and Allen is reading the leverage of the safety to determine which shoulder the ball goes to. Safety bites inside so he throws outside shoulder. When Allen gears up to throw there is nothing about his mechanics that indicates the pass sailed on him or drifted to the right. He is clearly intentionally aiming the pass outside shoulder.

Genuine question for you - did you watch the Chiefs game last night?

I think that's a band aid, not a sustainable means of offensive production. Baltimore and then Houston made it a point to not let him get away with cheap yards. 2nd and 10 after Josh comes back in the game, Houston rolls down a safety to cover him man to man and he has no chance of converting the wheel unless he makes a circus catch. Defenses are going to continue keying in on him. He is very talented so sometimes he will make plays despite the attention but eventually you have to get the ball downfield and we just can't do that with any type of consistency right now.