SoTier

Are you Terry Pegula's financial godfather (aka Russ Brandon's ghost), making sure he doesn't spend unnecessary dollars to put a competitive team on the field? After all, not only does the tv revenue cover the biggest expense a team has -- player salaries -- but Bills fans have repeatedly proven over the decades that they'll support the team no matter how bad it. Coleman's dead cap hit is $3.5486 million according to Overthecap.com, and it's dead cap money that Bills cheerleaders are constantly using as an excuse for why the Bills can't afford better players, so you are the one "missing the point" -- and trying to change the conversation because you have no real defense for the Bills "process" of replacing talent with trash to save a few dollars.

Well, I'm not willing to wait 71 years for the Bills to make it back to the Super Bowl or 108 years for the Bills to actually win it. Maybe the Pegulas are building a Super Bowl team for the grandkids they don't have yet.

He's a starting LB for the Chiefs. Like so many other NFL fans, I've become a big Mahomes fan, so I frequently watch KC games, either live or on replay (one of the benies of retirement), and Ragland gets mentioned pretty often making tackles which suggests his knee injury is healed.

You left out Stephon Gilmore, Ronald Darby, Preston Brown, Marcell Dareus, and supposed 2nd round bust Reggie Ragland. Your group and mine are all starters on teams currently in the playoff hunt. McDermott/Beane packed off 9 starting caliber players they inherited and replaced all but a couple of them with career backups and bottom feeder FAs who play exactly like the career backups and bottom feeders they are. I suppose that was part of the great "design", too. A team can't keep all its good young vets because of the salary cap but keeping some of them might have avoided the shitshow that is the 2018 Bills.

What's scary is that this is a real possibility based on the track record of the culprits. So? They had a lot of picks this year, too, and wasted a significant number on trading up to get 2 players. With all the holes on this team, they can't afford to only end up with only 5-7 draftees because they became enamored of a couple of guys and trade up to get them. My guess is that the Bills go from the highest dead cap $$$ in 2018 to the most actual cap space in 2019 -- and the product they put on the field will be just as fragrant as this year's carcass. McDermott has control of player personnel -- who comes/who stays/who goes. Beane makes it happen by draft/trade/FA. That's why they are linked together. McDermott is a crappy coach. He's decent the way a front wheel sedan with snow tires handles winter in the Southern Tier -- you think it's good because you've never driven hilly, snowy roads in a Subaru.

That, too.

No, they'll let him walk away in FA at the end of his rookie contract and pass on a blue-chip QB prospect to trade back to take another first round DB. It's how the Bills roll.

We passed on Brian Orakpo (who's still playing BTW) to take Aaron Maybin, who was undoubtedly the biggest bust the Bills drafted in the 21st century (even worse than Mike Williams, who at least played decently for a couple of seasons). IMO, Marshawn Lynch was the best player that the Bills drafted in the 21st century. Brandon and his henchmen from Jauron through Nix and Whaley to McDermott and Beane, never had/don't have much tolerance for players who marched to their own music, no matter how talented.

We traded up (actually, traded back into the first round) to get him, too, because the Bills just had to draft a first round QB in "the greatest QB class since 1983". It doesn't matter if 10 QBs in the first round become "franchise QBs" if you're the team that drafts the guy who busts. What was even worse about 2004 was that the Bills 2005 first round (part of the pick package to trade up) was #18. Aaron Rodgers was in that draft and didn't go until #24.

I agree with the sentiments here. I left my small home town after HS and only returned to visit family, but I went to my 40th ten years ago and reconnected with some of my old classmates. This past year I volunteered to help organize our 50th reunion which was held this past August. It was a great experience because I not only reconnected with a lot of old classmates and former good friends, I made friends of some classmates who I wasn't friends with back in HS. I think for most people, HS is probably not a particularly great time, which colors people's attitudes towards early reunions (as a lot of the posts here demonstrate) but time really does change people and heal old wounds. If you're an oldie, go to your 35th, 40th, 50th class reunion if one comes up. I think you'll enjoy it.

It's not a "soft tank". It's "money ball", which is what the Bills played for more than a decade under Russ Brandon, only far more incompetently done than even when Dick Jauron was running the manure show. After all, it took Jauron more than 3 seasons to bring the Bills to a similar talentless state that McDermott and Beane have achieved in less than 2. What the Bills have been playing since Whaley got the axe in 2017 is "money ball" run by incompetents with no eye for offensive talent and a mindset stuck in the 1970s or 1980s.

Perfect!!! A passe' MNF opening theme that almost nobody remembers for a Bills team led by a Neanderthal coaching staff and FO that has successfully fielded a 2018 team easily as uncompetitive and outclassed by even mediocre NFL teams as most of the 1970s Bills team. Long live the 1970s!

"Tank" implies that the team is could win games but is deliberately attempting to lose games to get a high draft pick. Unfortunately, the Bills aren't losing deliberately. They're simply so lacking in NFL caliber talent, especially on offense, that they don't have to try to lose. Even their best efforts can't get them wins except when the sun, moon, and stars all align in some special pattern as they did in the wins against Minnesota and Tennessee. If you can continue to watch the Bills manure show, you have a far stronger constitution than me. I can get maybe through the first quarter before I start channel surfing to Sunday Ticket to find some entertaining football.

Bull manure. You need to stop making up stuff. The Bills incurred $32 million in dead cap space by trading away Dareus, Glenn, Taylor, and Ragland. All but Taylor are starting on teams a whole lot better than the Bills. Sure the Bills don't have those players big contracts, but they also don't their talent either. You can't build even a mediocre NFL team with bottom feeder and career backup talent. The Bills also incurred another $7 million in dead cap space by cutting/trading Corey Coleman, AJ McCarron, Marshall Newhouse, and Jeremy Kerley -- all players brought in by the player personnel geniuses named McDermott and Beane and kept only a few months at best. Coleman was with the Bills for about 10 days, and I think Newhouse was the only one who lasted into the regular season.

They also need to stop wasting draft picks on trading up for projects. They traded up for Jones in 2017 and Allen and Edmunds in 2018, and all were "projects" for various reasons. The draft is always chancy -- only about 50% of first round picks become successful NFLers and have decent careers as starters, and the success rate for later rounds plummets after the first round -- so making a habit of trading up is a losing proposition, and trading up for "projects" is even riskier.

I bet he goes to a team with a decent offense and suddenly flourishes -- just like most of the other players McDermott and Beane have cut loose in their short tenure.

I think you've just defined "the process" that McDermott is always yapping about.

Do you bother to follow the rest of the NFL at all or do you only watch the Bills demonstrate their ineptitude every week and lap up all the excuses coming from the usual Bills propaganda sources? There is absolutely no question that the players the Bills allowed to leave in FA or traded away are significantly more talented than the players with whom the Bills replaced them (and yes, that includes both Tre White and Tremaine Edmunds, the only two who even come close). If you don't think so, then it's just sour grapes and/or blind loyalty to McDermott and Beane. Woods is tearing up the league in LA. Gilmore has become the Patriots' lock-down CB. Glenn is Andy Dalton's new best friend. Goodwin was on his way to becoming a star for the 49ers when he had Garappolo throwing to him. He still lights up the board on occasion even with CJ Beathard throwing to him. Watkins shines whenever he gets the opportunity in a star-studded KC offense which features different players almost every week. Preston Brown, Marcel Darius, Reggie Ragland, and Ronald Darby are all season-long starters for play off contending teams.

That's nobody's fault but McDermott and his henchman Beane. McDermott has mismanaged the team talent since he wrested control of player personnel from Whaley before the 2017 draft, and Beane has been totally complicit in deconstructing the team and has mismanaged cap since he was hired. About 25 or 30% of the dead cap money ($13.6 million) comes from voluntary and health-related retirements, so those don't count. Most of the dead cap dollars (about $32 million) comes from these players McDermot traded away: Darby, Dareus, Glenn, Ragland, Taylor. All of them except Taylor are starters on playoff contending teams, and Taylor is significantly better than Nate Peterman, AJ McCarron, or Derek Anderson -- and maybe better than all of them combined. Then there's another nearly another $6 million in dead cap space that Beane wasted on bringing in Corey Coleman and AJ McCarron for a few days' or weeks' try outs before sending them packing.

And the Bills repeatedly hire HCs who do their best to see that no QB looks too good because they don't like that new-fangled invention called the forward pass. I think Mularkey and Gailey were the only two HCs with offensive backgrounds since 2001, and only Gailey was really interested in having a passing offense. All the others were committed to "run first" offenses even in the face of NFL rule changes that make the passing game dominant.

I think this is a very real possibility.

If it's as rainy and cold as forecast, I think that many fans will just stay home. A significant part of the crowd will probably seriously anesthetize themselves before the opening kickoff, so they may be far more entertaining than anything the Bills do on the field. My guess is that the stands will be pretty empty by the middle of the third quarter, and I would not be surprised if a significant percentage of those left vigorously voice their displeasure at their own team. It was a harbinger of what was to come under the offensive juggerNOT that was the Bills under Dick Jauron. That would be the OP. He thinks the Pats won't even score 20. I'm thinking they score at least 50 because Brady and Belichick take particularly perverse pleasure in torturing Bills fans.

The lack of talent on Bills, particularly on offense, and the successes of the numerous ex-Bills that McDermott and Beane didn't think were good enough says that I'm right and you're a blind homer, but keep "Billieving".

The Jets have a rookie QB and 3 wins, but at least they are in most of their games. The Browns have a rookie QB and 2 wins plus a tie, but they've been in all their games until the very end except for the stinker they put up against the Chargers. The Bills have a rookie QB and 2 wins, but they've been blown out of 3 games, and lost badly to the Chargers even though the Bolts took mercy on them and sat most of their starters in the second half of that game. I watch the beginning of Bills games but that usually doesn't last long. Instead I switch over to Sunday Ticket and watch entertaining games.

I have never been a McDermott fan, but I used to think that he was at least a decent game coach who could get the most out of the talent he had on hand. I have come to the conclusion that that's simply not true. His lack of recognition of offensive talent is bad enough, but his stubborn insistence on keeping Nathan Peterman on the roster, and his pursuit of Carolina cast-offs to the detriment of all other options (there is absolutely no other way to account for the Bills waiting a month to find a better back up QB than Peterman only to bring in Anderson) have to sink him to the very bottom of the Bills coaching barrel along with the likes of John Rauch, Jim Ringo, and Hank Bullough. I think McDermott may even supercede my candidate for "worst Bills coach in this century", Dick Jauron, by a smidgen. I doubt that McDermott lasts until the end of the season, and if he does, he won't be back next season. At some point, he's going to lose the locker room as the blow-outs pile up which will only lead to more uncompetitive games. I think a number of players quit in the Indy game after the Clay fumble, and I think it will get worse. The real question is how much embarrassment can the Pegulas tolerate. After NE, which I can't realistically expect to be anything but another blow-out, the Bills play Chicago and at the Jets before their bye week. I can't seeing the Bills winning either, but Chicago might be a defensive slugfest because Mitch Trubisky isn't even half as good as a healthy Deshaun Watson or ten percent as good as Patrick Mahomes. If the Bills get blown out by the Jets, however, McDermott is probably not the Bills HC when the Bills face the Jags the week after the bye.