Shaw66

I like this. And I agree. One of the points I was trying to make is that the 2924 roster is pretty solid, and your comparison shows it better than mine. We can't expect studs everywhere, and 2024 looks like a solid collection of athletes.

Yeah, Jerry almost caused me to do a player by player breakdown. He and Kyle were good. But the line goes eight deep, and Oliver and Rousseau are decent matches for Jerry and Kyle.

There was a lot of uncertainty every offseason with the Patriots, too. The difference was they had Brady and Belichick. The Bills have Allen. It's time for McDermott to show he can win.

For the past several months, I've always come back to the safeties looking like the weak part of the lineup. Assuming the linebackers are back to good health, the success of the defense will depend on the safeties.

Happy Independence Day! I don’t read or listen to much of what is said about the Bills at this time of year, because there just isn’t that much known about what these Bills are going to do or about how well they’re going to do it. Questions everywhere, and whatever some expert says is largely speculation. We Bills fans think we know, but until the real games start, it just isn’t knowable. Think about it. Run down the roster and ask your self whether you’re sure the Bills are set at position groups. QB? Got it. Of course. Running back? Yes, I guess, but I’m not overwhelmed. Offensive line? A lot of “should be ok” answers. Brown should be. McGovern should be. Left guard should be. The line should be pretty good. Receivers? Lots of great story lines, but which of those stories will have traction? Dline? Solid, on the brink of great and also on the brink of average. Linebackers? Ask the doctors and trainers, because no one ever can know whether guys will come back the same. Corners? Should be fine. Should be. Safeties? Maybe good (three young guys drafted in the second and third rounds should be talented enough) but really, no one knows until we see them and see what McDermott can do with them. All of that is what makes this season a serious test for McDermott. Starting with good talent with a lot of questions, can he build a team that wins?. It is, in fact, the kind of team that McDermott coaches best, a team without stars, a team where almost every player has something to prove. Thinking about whether this is a playoff team and possibly a serious contender, I began to think about the first time McDermott went to the playoffs - 2017. So, I compared the rosters:- RB LeSean McCoy* James Cook FB Patrick DiMarco Reggie Gilliam/Dawson Knox WR Kelvin Benjamin Curtis Samuel/Chase Claypool WR Deonte Thompson Shakir/Keon Coleman/Marquez Valdez-Scantling TE Charles Clay Dalton Kincaid LT Dion Dawkins Deon Dawkins LG Richie Incognito* David Edwards C Eric Wood Connor McGovern RG Vlad Ducasse O'Cyrus Torrence RT Jordan Mills Spencer Brown LDE Shaq Lawson Greg Rousseau LDT Kyle Williams Ed Oliver RDT Adolphus Washington DaQuan Jones RDE Jerry Hughes AJ Epenesa LLB Lorenzo Alexander Taron Johnson MLB Preston Brown Terrel Bernard RLB Ramon Humber Matt Milano LCB Tre'Davious White Rasul Douglas RCB E.J. Gaines Christian Benford SS Micah Hyde* Taylor Rapp FS Jordan Poyer Cole Bishop I like the 2024 roster a lot better. I’d take Shady, of course, over Cook. But oline, receivers, dline, I’ll take 2024. Corners are a wash – White was a rookie, good then, but not yet what he became. And Hyde and Poyer were in their first season together, first under McDermott – they were no less question marks at the beginning of the season then the current safeties are now. And then, of course, there’s the QB. If the starting 21 players in 2017 was good enough to make the playoffs with Tyrod Taylor at QB, then the starting 21 in 2024 certainly is good enough to go deep into the playoffs with Allen at QB. I like where the Bills are, rosterwise. And looking at those two rosters, it reminds me about the reality of the NFL: Every team, every team, has multiple guys in the lineup where the fans have their fingers crossed, hoping to see the good story and not the bad story. I've watched a few minutes here and there of games the NFL Network shows in the evening. Two, three, five, ten years old. One think I've noticed - how many unrecognizable names there were on good teams. No teams are loaded with studs; most teams at most positions have guys who are excellent football players fighting every play to execute and stay in the lineup. A year or two later, they're gone, replaced with a new guy fighting every play. I’m not here to argue whether the 2024 roster is better or worse than 2017, and I’m not here to argue that the 2024 Bills roster is as good as it needs to be. Looking at the collection of names, and the skills of the players, the 2024 Bills roster is a collection solid NFL talent and good rookies with a great quarterback. How far the team goes will depend on how well the team is coached. It’s a big year for McDermott. GO BILLS!!!

I hope they resurface for you. I reserved a trip with them, and as my plans evolved they weren't the best choice, so I requested a refund. They were easy to work with and I got my money back. That is, they did what they promised.

For me, it's Rapp. The biggest loss for the Bills has been the safety combo. Yes, last season wasn't their best, and that's one of the reasons last season's defense wasn't the best. Over the past several years, the mastery of the defensive scheme that Poyer and Hyde showed was a key to the Bills' success. Now, that mastery is gone. Except for the occasional star who comes along, successful NFL safeties tend to get drafted in the second and third rounds. The Bills have a trio in Rapp, Edwards, and Bishop, and the Bills need two of them emerge as the successors to Poyer and Hyde. They have the talent; they need to learn to play the game that McDermott teaches. And Rapp is, I think, the key. There have been plenty of flashes but not the necessary consistency. I think if he can raise his game, he can bring Edwards or Bishop along with him. That could have a big impact on the quality of the defense. I'm hoping Van Pran-Granger can step up and take over by mid-season. It would be great to get Von's sacks, but the Bills can win without him.

That's interesting, that you get it in Massachusetts. Maybe I'm not out and around enough. So true about the Giants. I have a friend who is from Portland originally. Die-hard Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and - huh? - Giants. It's true all over New England. Except that Belichick and Brady caused many of them to flip their allegiance to the Pats.

No "Go Bills!!!" in New England.

If I had made 9-12 a choice, then I would have needed a fourth category, 13-32. I didn't see the point; I didn't think many people would have the Bills below 8, and the poll results suggest that was correct. Maybe it should have been 1-5, 6-10, 11-32. Gunner would have liked that breakdown. I would have been in the 6-10 group.

People will jump on you, but that is a reasonable list. I would say that either Dolphins or Browns will make you wrong, but on the other hand, either one could make the Super Bowl with some luck. Each team has a QB who, with a career year, could go far. I doubt both will.

ESPN ranks the Bills fifth. Do you think the Bills will be better than that? Fifth through eighth? Or worse than that?

When you're old, you have a lot of them. For my oldest son, it was playing in the college Ultimate national championships, and several Ultimate mixed championships (as player/coach). For my second son, it was his season as the closer on his Little League Team. For my daughter, it was the NCAA Division III Basketball Final Four. All great moments.

That's a great comeback game story.

Certainly more hits than misses, so he's at least a B. But he actually has put the Bills in contention to win Super Bowls, so although I was torn, I gave him the A. I think his career as GM is an object lesson in the reality of being a GM. Every GM has misses, and he's had his. But wherever the misses, he gets enormous credit, enormous, for maneuvering up the first round to get Allen. It was brilliant. And in a minor way, he did it again this year, trading back twice and still getting the receiver he wanted. I wouldn't recommend playing poker with the guy.

There's a difference between minor tweaks and a more general overhaul. Coaches for years looked at Rivers throwing and said, "That's horrible," but everyone knew that trying to get him to switch to a more classic throwing motion would be a mistake. Pitchers tweak their mechanics all the time. Favre tweaked his mechanics all the way to the Hall of Fame. Golfers do it. Baseball hitters do it.

That throw to Davis is interesting. A perfect throw would have been about 2 feet deeper, to allow Davis to pull free a bit. But I'm not complaining - that's a great throw. What I find interesting about it is that Davis exhibits his limitations on this play. His right hand was not being held - he was using it to hold off Sauce. He was looking back and tracking the ball, so his brain should have been telling him when the ball would arrive. However, despite being able to see the ball the way, neither of his hands reacted on time. His left hand was too slow to react, and he left his right hand on Sauce's chest too long. Now, I'm not saying I would have caught it, but a veteran NFL receiver with adequate skills gets his hands on that ball. Davis simply wasn't as good as he should have been. I'd say a good NFL receiver catches that ball 75% of the time, and makes a better play on the ball than Davis did 90+% of the time.

This makes sense to me. I'm sure that it's important for Lamar Jackson, for example, to watch film of what teams have done against him lately, because pretty much every team is going to try to copy whatever some team has used successfully to stop him. Yes, he needs to know the general defensive scheme of next Sunday's opponent, but what's going to be important is how they vary that scheme to deal with what Lamar can do to really hurt you. The same is true with Allen. For a couple of seasons, for example, Josh killed teams when he scrambled to his right. He was deadly. Not so much in 2023. I don't know what teams did in terms of Xs and Os, but they did something, because when Josh escaped right last season he wasn't money. Teams figured out the weakness that Josh was attacking and how to adjust the defense to cover that weakness.

I'm reluctant to dive in here, because occasionally I get into deep discussions with Thurm, on the one hand, and with Beck, on the other, and those deep discussions sometimes have a tendency to spiral into disagreements that aren't work having, especially because both of you have great things to say. However, I want to add a couple of things. First, the most important point is that we really don't know what Josh does during those three or four months. He says things, or we see photos of him someplace, and many of us tend to generalize from what we hear or see. Second, in the 50s and 60s, pro football players often did nothing at all during the off-season and often got out of shape. They would use training camp as the place to drop 20 pounds, increase their stamina, etc., and the coaches say it as their job to drive the players to get them back into shape. Those days are long gone. Players, almost all of them, have a commitment to the game and to their teammates that makes them understand that it is their job to stay in shape and to work on their games all year-round. I seriously doubt that Allen is not thoughtful all year round about what he eats and drinks and about his conditioning. He understands what he needs to be able to do the day he walks into the facility when OTAs and training camp begin. Third, I've mentioned before what I heard JJ Reddick say one time, which is that someone told him his rookie season that every off-season he had to work on improving some part of his game, because if he came back to the NBA in August without something added to his package of skills from last season, his days in the league would be numbered. I think pretty much every player operates with that kind of attitude now. Every veteran will tell you how much better he is now compared to five years ago. I remember something Diggs said a few years ago about he and his trainer having decided that it's nice to develop the muscles needed to get out of his break quickly, but that it also was important to work on the muscles he needed to decelerate going into the break, a different set of muscles. So, one summer he worked on those muscles, and he added them to his ongoing training routine. By all reports, all of the good players are working on developing their game in ways like that. Fourth, that kind of development for veterans requires serious focus, but it doesn't necessarily take a lot of time. I recall hearing a veteran defensive back talk about film study. He described spending hours on Monday studying film of Sunday's game, fast forwarding through the game to find plays where he was the field, winding and rewinding to look at things. He said that now when he gets on the plane to fly home from an away game, he gets a tablet with every one of his plays from the game preloaded - no time wasted scrolling through anything. And more importantly, he's much more skilled watching film, so that he only needs to watch a play a couple of times to see everything that he needs to get from the film. Same thing for prep for next week's game - he can see pretty quickly what he needs to know about the opponent's scheme, routes, moves, and tendencies. My point is that a veteran like Josh, for example, can be working during the off-season on his footwork without spending hours every day for a month or two on the field. Josh already has, naturally, better footwork than 99% of the QBs in the world, and what he's doing is tweaking compared to what most college QBs would have to do. My conclusion is (1) I seriously doubt that Josh takes the off-season off or shows up in Orchard Park out of shape, and (2) at this point in his career, Josh can do serious off-season work on his game in ways that don't require him to be on the field, gym, or film-room full-time. Patrick Mahomes has been courtside at the Mavs home playoff games, but I don't think for a minute that he doesn't put in some productive football work, physical or mental, on those days.

I have a couple of things to say. First, this is a really good point. Cook does fit the offense very nicely. Drops and fumbles are a problem, but he fits nicely. If the Bills win in the next few years, we'll probably be praising him. Second, unrelated to you post, is that many people here responded about stats. They said he hasn't been playing long enough, as though in a few more years he'll have more total yards, and then he'll look better. I wasn't talking about that. I was talking the eyeball test. I don't doubt that he'll put up nice numbers if he stays healthy, but I don't care about that. I was talking about how useful a weapon he is, and I know that regardless of stats, he's not as useful as most the guys we've talked about in Bills history. He's not a weapon who takes over games. Take most of those other guys and put them in place of Cook, and the offense would be better. And put Cook in the place of most of those guys, and those offenses would get worse. You could count on McCoy and Lynch and Thomas and Simpson to carry you in games when nothing else was working. Not Cook. But having said that, you're correct, for this QB in this offense, he's a pretty effective guy to have.

I'm so sick of you trashing the Bills at every opportunity. I may have to put you on the ignore list. 😉

Oilers Titans is a great list.

Thanks for this. I only saw a few of his games, and my recollection is that he was special in the way you describe. I remember just wondering how he could be that quick and that elusive. I thought it was a lot of fun to watch him, but as I said I didn't see him enough to form the opinion I have of someone such as Simpson or Thomas.

Hey Folz: All day long I've been thinking about getting into this thread, because I've always been a big believer that it's imperative that Allen needs to reduce his INTs. In my head, I decided that turnovers average someplace around a four-point swing, and those four points can be the difference between a win and a loss in maybe a couple games a year. And then I read your post. First, I pat myself on the back, because apparently the article you cite backs up my four-point estimate. But second, your analysis of point production net of INTs (with or without fumbles) shuts me up. His point production is so far in the stratosphere that the INTs are negated. I think you're right. (It's sort of like managers putting up with their star's strikeouts when he's crushing 50 dingers.) Still, I'm not completely convinced. I've been arguing for years that Josh always will win less until he gets his passer rating up where the best ratings are. He's several points behind the best passer ratings. Why? Because his completion percentage is lower, and his TD to INT ratio is lower. Why are they both lower? Same reason - he's not as good a decision maker as he needs to be. Josh needs to take the hig percentage throws over the high risk/high reward throws. When he does that, he'll be otherworldly.

KENNETH DAVIS!!!!!! Wow! If the was a Hall of Fame for backups, he would be in it! And I don't disagree. He and Cook are a push.