SoTier

Why not?

Don't worry. Be happy. Trust the process. McBeane has a plan. Billieve.

If you truly don't care about this list, why are you replying to this thread? And so vehemently claiming you don't?

It's an observation of Beane's style. In his two plus years as GM, he's repeatedly gambled on players coming off injuries or with injury histories. He's also traded up to draft "project players" in the first round. The high risk/high reward game that Beane's played hasn't had a lot of success so far. That could change but at this point, it's been all high risk without real success yet. If I had my way, Patrick Mahomes and Robert Woods would be Bills.

Why is it "crazy"? Beane and McDermott accomplished their goal of stripping the team of all its established talent and replacing it with JAGs and non-NFL talents plus a youngsters of varying quality. The Bills had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, actual player salary total for 2018. Ex-Bills Gilmore and Woods, both sent packing by the current regime in 2017, made the Top 100. You claim not to care but here you are claiming you don't care. Tell me another one. FTR, it's players not media hosts who vote on the Top 100 players but keep up your whining.

But, but, but ... they wouldn't have been as good in Buffalo as they have been in KC and Oakland/Chicago so White and Watkins (who helped the Bills acquire Josh Allen) were "good picks". It's the typical Bills fan's defense of the Bills regime du jour's draft gaffes -- which are repeated with sad regularity (remember the Bills passing on Brian Orakpo to take Aaron Maybin????) and then compounded by frequently letting their best players walk in FA rather than paying them. FTR, both Stephon Gilmore and Robert Woods made the top 100. Brilliant!

Materialism has been a growing trend in the US since the 1920s when Americans started buying consumer products like cars, radios, refrigerators, etc. Consumer credit also became popular. The Great Depression and WW II put the brakes on consumerism, but after the war, Americans gave themselves over to things that made their lives easier, more convenient, and more comfortable. It's not a generational or even cultural thing (despite what many critics of American society claim), but something that seems natural for people in general: when people in undeveloped areas of the world get the opportunity to acquire consumer products/technology, they embrace it. In the 16th-18th century, when Native Americans acquired horses from the Spanish, they incorporated horses into their cultures so quickly and thoroughly that by the 1800s, it seemed that the Plains tribes had always had them. The growth of cell/smart phones use in the US can't hold a patch to the growth rates of their use in Asia. People like stuff! Thank you for saying this. We do NOT need more people to dig ditches or check out groceries in the US because we already have machines that can do that. We need more engineers and medical researchers and computer programmers right now, and we'll need even more in the future. STEM -- science, technology, engineering, and math -- is where the job opportunities are, not to mention the opportunities to make a difference in the world.

I don't know -- and anybody who proffers an easy solution is full of bull manure. I think that the best, and maybe the only solution, is the same one that Franklin Roosevelt came up with during the Great Depression: giving people some light at the end of the tunnel, ie, hope. FDR's concern was that the severity of the Great Depression would push Americans to embrace communism, and I think that he was right in his general fear if not in his specific one. Creating a permanent underclass is very dangerous to a democratic society. The rise of the right-wing extremist political parties in some European countries hint at that, and I think we see some of that, but on a much smaller scale, here in the US with the rise of fringe hate groups. People have to have hope that their hard work for not much can today somehow enable their children to have it better which means that there needs to be the ability for smart, talented young people to rise. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.

I'm not dumping on you --- unless you hold the reactionary views you spouted in your original post on this topic, in which case, yeah, I'm dumping on you.

The American dream has ALWAYS been to move the children up the financial ladder. The only people who didn't come to the US with that in mind were the 4 million or so Africans who were brought to this country as slaves. The problem is that the economy is changing and becoming more dependent upon intellectual ability and far less on physical ability, and we Americans stubbornly resist accepting that. I'm not saying that this is right or good or desirable but it is what is -- and will be more so in the future. BTW, who digs ditches by hand these days? There are big backhoes for big jobs and there are mini-backhoes for tight spaces that can do the trenching job with 1-3 workers in a few hours that would take a crew of 10 or so a few days to dig.

I doubt that the Chiefs knew "something" that Beane didn't know about Morse's concussion history. His injury history is part of the NFL's "public record". Beane chose to disregard it, probably because he's a gambler. He gambled on Benjamin, who was known to have bad knees in 2017 and again on Murphy in 2018. He also gambled that a raw QB prospect from a minor college program had "the right stuff" to make a franchise QB and that a very young LB with very limited MLB experience would make a top notch NFL MLB. In 2019, he made Morse the most expensive C in the league despite his concussion history. The thing is that gambler's occasionally win big but mostly they lose to the House.

I don't believe that the teams the can decide to put not put a player in concussion protocol during games. I believe that's a league call. I think the doctor who's on call for concussions is not a team employee so he's independent. It was Kevin Kolb in 2013 not Kelly Holcomb who tripped on the mat and having to retire -- unless that also happened to Holcomb earlier.

No. My argument is that embittered reactionaries who dump on younger -- or older -- generations for feeling "entitled" don't recognize their own sense of entitlement.

I didn't say you were. I said you sounded like one. There's no "vocation" in hauling bundles of soaked hides in a tannery or shoveling coal into an open-hearth steel furnace or riveting bolts on an assembly line. There's only drudgery for 20 or 30 years. People took those jobs because they didn't have better opportunities, especially the sons of farm laborers and coal miners.

When I was in college, my undergrad tuition was $200/semester at Buff State, room and board about $600, books $50, fees another $50 or so ... and the federal minimum wage was $1.60/hour. This is nonsense perpetuated by the same people who claim that the way to improve the world is to give more to the rich by taking from the poor and who think that women need to be returned to a state of dependency upon their husbands "for the sake of the children". Maybe you think that re-instituting chattel slavery or imprisonment for debt would be good ways to fix whatever is wrong, too. Trade schools have rightly been "stigmatized" because too many of them conned naive students into taking out student loans in order to pay for substandard or totally useless "training" when those same students could have obtained better training in the same fields for thousands of dollars less if they had simply gone to a local community college. It's likely that most of this year's HS grads will be working in industries/jobs that don't exist -- or barely exist -- today. Most of those new jobs -- and probably all jobs -- will require people to think about what they're doing beyond remembering they had to do A first, B second, C third. The days of the people being paid decent wages for mundane, repetitive work are ending, but you can continue to pretend differently if you enjoy self delusion.

You sound like the stereotypical reactionary Boomer lamenting that the best time in your life happened before you turned 35 and that everything that's changed/happened since is for the worse. Get off your entitled arse and stop whining about people -- especially younger people -- who aren't as narrow-minded, bigoted and tone-deaf as you are. Your reactionary BS gives all Boomers a bad name. I agree. I'm an early Boomer born in 1950, and frankly, the complaints I hear from many other people in my age cohort in regards to younger people, whether they're Gen X, Millenials, or Gen Z are embarrassing. Not all Boomers are embittered old reactionaries but a lot of them are, probably because like Unbillievable they're stuck in the past because they remember "the good ol' days" like old photographs from the words of Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" ... "They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day " Times change, and nothing anybody does can stop it. Any organism with the life-span longer than that of a fruit fly is likely going to have to figure out how to live in an altered world or suffer for it, and turning the clock back to some mythical better time in the past isn't an option.

I totally agree. It's not like NFL owners would rollback ticket prices or do away with PSLs if they didn't have to pay players.

This is the absolute best description of the situation of the Raiders regime EVER!!!! So? I would be impressed if Bill Belichick or Pete Carroll or Frank Reich or Doug Peterman or Sean McVay thought Peterman had enough upside to sign him even as just a camp arm but neither McDermott nor Gruden have demonstrated that he can identify a good QB when he sees one -- or figure out that a QB is a waste of a roster spot before sacrificing multiple opportunities to win games because of his terrible play.

In practice, too. In games, not so much.

^^^ This is what makes this NOT "a non issue". If your favorite team, ie Bills, play a team that's considered a local team, you lose that game. For Nick, it's NOT just the first 2 games of the season but also the second Bills-Jets game -- and potentially the Bills game when the Jets have a bye unless both teams have their byes during the same week. There's a lesser chance that another Bills game might also be lost if the Bills played one of the other NFL East teams during the Giants' bye week and the local FOX affiliate picked up that game. IIRC, the local stations in the Binghamton area where Beast lives also consider the Jets and Giants as their "local teams".

The possibility that Allen isn't "the real deal franchise QB" is very real. About half of all first round QBs who aren't taken first overall fail. The list is voted on by the players, not by "national media types", so Buffalo being a small market is irrelevant. The Bills being a team that only won 6 games with an inept offense and a defense that couldn't stop the run too often, especially in the Red Zone, probably had something to do with it. Outside of White, who exactly on the Bills roster was an outstanding talent for most of 2018?

Actually, Miami has Rosen, the Skins have Haskins, and the Ravens have Jackson, all first round QBs in 2018 or 2019, so they have QBs with "legitimate expections that they will be very good" just as much as the Bills and the Jets. In fact, Jackson took the Ravens to the playoffs with a 10-6 record in 2018, and the Ravens appear to have retooled their offense to take advantage of his unique abilities and help him succeed. Tennessee is the only one of the teams that you named that doesn't have a proven starter -- unless you're still waiting on Mariota -- or a promising youngster. I think you missed that Tampa is still waiting on Winston to play like the #1 overall pick he was several years ago as he hasn't played better than or as consistently as his QB classmate, Mariota.

Taylor is competent which isn't the same as being a starting caliber QB, and I never said he was starting caliber. He can come into a game or he can start one -- or more -- and at least give a team a chance to win. On occasion, he can make some plays that could win games. We don't know at this point is Allen can do as well. Taylor played pretty well as a first year starter, but at some point in his second season as one (2016) he hit the proverbial wall that marked the upper limits of his ability. That could happen to Allen, too. I remember that Mark Sanchez looked like he was going to become the Jests' "guy" for the next decade early in his second season, but about midway through, he just stopped developing and never got any better. This is frequently what happens to first round and second round QBs who play well in their first seasons as starters but never develop into franchise QBs.

Excuse me, but how do we know that the Bills aren't STILL "missing the most important piece"? Allen hasn't proven that he's can even be a low level competent NFL QB at this point. Taylor was at least that.

The OP was talking about the Bills' WR corps not individuals. He ignored the fact that in 2016 the Bills had 3 good NFL WRs on the roster who were significantly better individually and collectively than the Bills current WRs. As other posters mentioned, in 2015, the Bills had an even better WR corps because they also had Hogan.