HappyDays

I'd love to see the Bills do this but I need to know what the cap implications would be. You'd think any team would be up against the cap at this point in the season so maybe the Raiders are willing to eat some of his salary to push the trade through? Can his future cap hits be reduced with a restructure or extension?

I mean it will help for sure. But I'm not convinced getting all of our players healthy is going to solve what I consider to be more fundamental issues on that side of the ball (players and coaches included). Nor do I expect our defense to enter the playoffs fully healthy considering that's never happened before under McDermott. So I think it will take 30+ points in every game past the wildcard for us to have a real shot. And that will have to come from TDs, not FGs... Man the more I think about it the more I revert back to my offseason feelings that we are a guaranteed also-ran this season. In the past I've usually come away from losses 2-3 days later feeling better about the team and feeling like the loss didn't reveal any fundamental flaws. Like the more I talk and read about it the better I feel. This is the first time in the McDermott era I am getting the opposite feeling. The more I talk and read about this loss, the worse it makes me feel.

Also I'm not convinced we have true complementary football going... I know the Chiefs from last year are the epitome of the "small ball" philosophy. They made it work. But they had a defense that can shut teams down in an ugly game while their offense figures it out, and they had an elite kicker that is almost automatic within 55 yards. We have neither. So we have a defense that realistically needs us to score 30 points against any decent opponent to have a chance, we have a kicker that can't be trusted at all, and we have an offense that has to execute 10 plays to perfection to have a successful TD drive. It is the definition of low margin for error football. So yeah when everything goes right against a soft opponent we are going to demolish them, but the moment any adversity hits and we're dragged into a real battle we aren't remotely built for that sort of game script. Which is worrying because that is playoff football in a nutshell.

Yeah but the point is that Allen in the past would look in Hollins direction first and see one DB flat footed and the FS with his back turned and he would throw it out there 100% of the time. Whereas now he is looking to the sticks first and picking up the easy 1st down. And it's not like Allen has lost his fastball (literally). The deep pass that Coleman dropped was an absolute dime. We just aren't really trying to push the ball to that area of the field.

Wow that is stark to see on the tape. And think of all the 2nd and shorts where we are just running up the middle or an even more mind boggling QB sneak... There has to be a better balance between being risk averse and being big play averse. I hope Brady is seeing this stuff on film and they take the leash off of Allen a bit. Congrats, you successfully got him to throw zero INTs through the month of September. Time to open it back up now.

They are scheming the reads low to high now. For better or worse that's the new philosophy. They've gotten away with it until this game because of great YAC production and great 3rd down conversion percentage. In this game Baltimore shut the YAC down and we threw away too many 2nd/3rd and short opportunities with poor play calls and poor execution. Everything we've been getting away with on offense kind of snowballed on us all at once and it produced a totally nonfunctional offense except for one unicorn play. I don't know that the solution is to change the entire structure of the offense. Brady has to do a better job being ready to adjust to defenses that are dictating terms, the OL needs to be way better at handling pressure looks, and the pass catchers need to execute as well as they were in the first few weeks. With this offense's low margin for error a single drop or protection breakdown could be an immediate drive killer. If they want to change the structure of the offense they will need to add a legit outside WR.

That's the prevailing thought but is WR really a need for them? They have a #1 in Garrett Wilson (I know his chemistry with Rodgers hasn't fully developed yet, but still) and paid good money for Mike Williams. They need offensive line, offensive line, and more offensive line.

I consider that play a coaching mistake too. Reminds me of the 83 yard Breece Hall run against us last year. The defense was not aligned correctly... Ravens have heavy personnel to the right of the formation but our LBs are aligned to the left. As a result we didn't have every gap covered and the Ravens easily got to all their blocks, and all Henry had to was run forward in a straight line through wide open space. That's a coaching 101 failure. I'm kind of surprised McDermott didn't see it and call a timeout. Annoying to have to call a timeout on the 1st play, but better than letting the Ravens just get that play off when we weren't in the correct alignment.

Hopefully they don't trade him to their division rival...

But that strategy worked... Two 3 and outs as soon as we changed it up. That needed to be the plan coming into the game IMO. So what if he got a lot yardage on one play three drives in? He got an 87 yard TD on the first snap the way that we played it. I said it in the score prediction thread - the one way the Bills lose is if they let Derrick Henry take over the game. He took over the game from the first snap and they never looked back. The book on Lamar Jackson is force him to drop back and throw outside the numbers. When we did that we didn't dominate them by any means but we forced a few mistakes and we got them off the field. Maybe none of it would have mattered anyways because the offense was so awful. I guess I give a little more grace to Brady (other than the trick play) because the Ravens threw some things at us that we hadn't seen yet. It is still early in the season and the OL should gain more chemistry and be more prepared to deal with exotic pressure looks as time goes on. I take it as hopefully a learning experience for Brady where he'll develop some counters to that style of defense, which we'll need against the Chiefs. But for the defense I find myself giving the coaches very little grace, even with the personnel issues. We came into the game knowing exactly what the Ravens wanted to do and we made it easy for them. 5.57 yards before contact per rush... And the Ravens are known to have issues up front. So that is primarily a scheme issue, not a personnel issue IMO.

I think the idea is that you just have to take your chances and not let the Ravens dictate the game. Even given the personnel issues, if they're going to dominate you, at least let it be on your terms. I mean the only time our defense ever really won reps in this game was when Lamar had the ball. He almost threw a terrible INT that got saved by Agholor. His fumble was a huge momentum shift that gave us life. The first play of the 2nd half we blitzed him and he foolishly drifted back and ended up taking an intentional grounding penalty which killed the drive. Yeah you are going to get burned by him sometimes, but that's better than letting Derrick Henry get a full head of steam before you even get a hand on him all night long. You've said it yourself, the Ravens don't have outside WRs. Our game plan didn't even try to punish them for it. Our whole defensive philosophy is to invite the opponent to pick up cheap yards but don't give up any big plays and hunker down in the red zone. That plan doesn't work when the opponent is rushing with the type of efficiency the Ravens were. Eventually you have to just force the issue, and if you go down swinging so be it.

Joe breaks down losses better than anyone else in the Bills media sphere. I highly recommend listening to the entire episode. Here are my notes: -Joe was blown away (in a bad way) by our plan on defense. He points out that the Ravens ran the ball out of heavy personnel 82% of the time. The Bills responded by giving them light boxes on 41.2% of rushing plays... Heavy boxes on only 8.8% of rushing plays... Derrick Henry was getting 5.57 yards before contact, and the Ravens as a whole were gaining 8.0 YPC, but we never adjusted. And this was coming off a week where the Ravens rushed for over 270 yards against Dallas so it's not like their offensive game plan was a big shocker. Our defensive game plan gave the Ravens the exact game script they wanted. -Joe says the Ravens also took advantage of our defensive line tendencies. We run a penetration style defense and the Ravens repeatedly invited Ed Oliver to get up field before wham blocking him out of the play. Again Joe blames defensive coaching for never adjusting to get away from our tendencies, which made things too easy on the Ravens. -Overall on defense he says he wishes some of the players at all levels played better, but he mostly blames the coaches for putting the players into positions where they couldn't be successful. He says Derrick Henry is obviously a great player, but that any RB could have ripped off his two biggest runs where we didn't even lay a finger on him. We needed to force the Ravens to run their offense through the passing game, and instead we gave them easy opportunities to run against light or neutral boxes and they gashed us all night long because of it. -On offense Joe doesn't have as much to say. His big takeaway is that the failures on offense were less about pass catchers uncovering, and more about complete breakdowns in the protection scheme. He points out the Ravens only blitzed 25% of the time, but the threat of the blitz forced us to max protect so frequently that we were sometimes sending 2-3 pass catchers into 5-6 coverage players. The OL did an awful job of passing rushers off which led to too many jailbreaks before routes could develop. So those are his takeaways. Less on the players, more on coaching. On defense we were stubborn and decided to just "do what we do" instead of adjusting our style for the opponent. On offense Brady did not have his players ready to deal with any of the Ravens pressure looks and he never found any answers. We got out coached in pretty much every facet of the game and it showed up on the scoreboard. One positive takeaway - all of these issues are solvable. Failure to execute is a tough problem to figure out in the middle of a season, but failure to gameplan and adjust is entirely fixable if the coaches hold themselves accountable.

Our weakness is WRs that can make catches downfield and outside the numbers. Coleman is not ready for that sort of role right now.

That's possible, and he's had these questions asked about him before. But it is just a half season rental with zero commitment beyond this year. You take a chance that a change of scenery to a real contender with a real QB gets his mind back straight. I know people praised Joe Flacco for his play down the stretch last year but a lot of that was just Amari Cooper making ridiculous contested catch after ridiculous contested catch downfield. Adding his skill set immediately transforms our offenses's biggest weakness into somewhat of a strength. This is a no brainer IMO if Cleveland is willing to punt on their season.

One thing I will say is it took Brady too long to give him that volume. We were getting killed so bad by the Ravens pressure looks that we started going max protect and sending out 2 or 3 man routes. Too often in those situations the Ravens dropped back instead of actually blitzing and all of a sudden we have 2 WRs running towards 5 secondary players. No way that's going to work. We lost that chess match big time. Eventually Brady spread out all his pass catchers and that's when Josh started hitting Coleman in 1v1 sideline coverage. By then it was too little too late. Hopefully Coleman showed enough on those plays to make Brady and Josh trust it more going forward. That back shoulder needs to become a staple of our offense, make defenses at least think about just crowding the middle and leaving Coleman on an island.

This is true. We have a penetration style defense that rushes upfield and the entire Ravens run game plan last night was to take advantage of that. Oliver got walloped a few times not because he did anything wrong but because he got wham blocked out of the play. However on normal pass plays you have to admit we never once made Lamar Jackson uncomfortable except when we had the occasional successful blitz. On those plays it didn't look to me like it was a stylistic choice. It looked to me like guys up front weren't winning their matchups. Can't just give the QB a squeaky clean pocket on every play and excuse it away as a "contain rush." Someone up front has to get off a block and win their matchup.

He hasn't been impressive at all IMO. Ty Johnson is flat out the better RB at this point.

This game was a perfect encapsulation of how small our margin for error is on offense with this group of weapons. Until now we have been making it work because we've had no drops, we've been converting 3rd downs at an elite clip, and Josh has had time in the pocket to get past his first read. Unfortunately we found out what happens when those statistically unsustainable metrics revert to the mean - the offense becomes a complete disaster. It only takes one drop or one protection breakdown to ruin a drive. That is the problem with playing small ball. Every single play needs to be executed well and you need to thread a lot of needles to sustain drives. And no it isn't just the Ravens game. People trying to chalk this up as one bad loss are missing the larger picture here. This game script is exactly what happened to us in the divisional round last year too. We sustained more drives against the Chiefs for sure, but ultimately our small ball offense was unable to keep up in what essentially had become a shootout. The Ravens game is a preview of playoff football. You don't get soft teams like the Dolphins and Jaguars past the wildcard. You get punch you in the mouth teams like the Ravens and Chiefs. Our offensive personnel is not up for the task, and frankly we don't have the Chiefs defense that can win games for you when the offense has an ugly day. The only possible solution is adding a real pass catching weapon before the trade deadline. Brady certainly needs to do a better job as well. Play calling was a big problem yesterday, he never adjusted, and we came in totally unprepared for Baltimore's blitz packages. But the problem starts with talent. We have an inherently limited offense that will get exposed by tough defenses.

Haha what?

So in your opinion, Mahomes wins the game tonight if he's our QB? Or what is the point of this post?

Disagree with this. The big play was all Josh Allen being a unicorn. Other than that he was having trouble separating because the Ravens wisely put a true CB on him. Shakir still is not a separator IMO. He's a YAC specialist that needs to get the ball in space. You can't run the passing offense through him. No pass rush because our guys couldn't win their matchups... Ed Oliver has been almost a non factor as a pass rusher this season. One big play against the Dolphins, invisible otherwise. Rousseau is maddening with his inconsistency from game to game. He should have had a big advantage going against a struggling rookie tonight and instead got swallowed up. Von is meant to be our closer, he is not going to have consistent impact through a game. Epenesa is a JAG. Rousseau and Oliver are supposed to be our guys up front and they didn't ever make Lamar uncomfortable tonight despite facing a middling OL.

Yeah the way the defense played after that, I can't just blame that one play call. We adjusted briefly on defense but the Ravens adjusted themselves soon after and I don't think there was ever any hope of us stopping them the number of times needed to get us back into the game.

Again it's not about the loss, even the blowout. We have some pretty stark vulnerabilities on offense that got exposed tonight. This was not just an off night. This was all of our flaws laid bare. All the concerns I had about our ability to be a championship caliber offense are right back at the forefront. And hey I don't think trading for Hopkins (or whatever other legit outside WR) solves every problem we have on offense, but it sure would help. I weirdly enough don't feel terrible about the defense even though they got punched in the mouth. All of their issues tonight seem fixable, especially when our injured players come back. The issues with our pass catches on the other hand I don't feel are fixable. The talent level in the room just isn't good enough.