SoTier

I bought into the Donahoe/Williams, Nix/Gailey, and Whaley/Marrone. I even bought into Jauron as HC for a while until I realized exactly what he was doing to the team. In hindsight, I think that Nix/Gailey was the best of a poor lot since Butler/Phillips in 2000. Thanks to Jauron, the Bills by 2010 were probably as talent-less as an expansion team. Nix improved the talent immensely, and Gailey managed to get that crew to win a few games even though they didn't have a defense and a limited offense with Fitzpatrick at QB. Nix's only major faux pas, IMO, was trading Marshawn Lynch, and my guess is that that may have been ordered from higher up the corporate food chain. I think the Bills had decided to get rid of Lynch in 2009 before Nix became GM, which is why they drafted Spiller.

Are you serious???? Oh, geez, RR was a buffoon who was a lousy NFL HC so let's go back to a walking cadaver who was an even worse NFL HC! There are probably at least a half dozen current NFL HCs you could wish McDermott could be like, and dozens of retired ones who at least had winning records!!! How about hoping McDermott could turn out to be another Belichick without BB's penchant for cheating? Maybe Pete Carroll? Maybe Andy Reid? How about Tom Coughlin without the anger management issues? Mike Tomlin? Even younger guys like Adam Gase from Miami or maybe Jack Del Rio from Oakland? Jauron???!!!! Chan Gailey or Doug Marrone would be infinitely better choices than that soulless cretin Jauron who has to rank among the absolute worst HCs the Bills have ever had, and that's including the likes of Jim Ringo and Kay Stephenson. BTW, don't confuse reticence with humility. With Jauron, it was his way or the highway, as witness how he drained off virtually all the Bills talent in order to fill the roster with compliant special team caliber players while sending bonafide talents packing (ie, Jason Peters among others).

I'm not sure what you mean by "nostalgia" somehow "wearing off". Maybe you mean the connection between current fans and those rapidly aging memories ... there's an entire generation of younger fans to whom names like Kelly, Thomas, Reed, and Smith are merely legends because they never saw them play except on YouTube clips. It's what happens as people move further away in time from any event important to them, whether it's the "Glory Years" of a football franchise or some important historical event (like the US entrance into WW I, which happened 100 years ago this year). The 1990s teams will always be the benchmark that Buffalo Bills teams are measured against until such time as the franchise approaches or surpasses those teams. Unfortunately, that doesn't look likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

For all you Tyler Perry/Madea fans, just in case you missed it, you can purchase your very own copy of Madea's Family Reunion on Amazon video for $4.99 ...

Oh, I don't know ... maybe because as Bills fans we've been down this road before? Donahoe and Williams back in 2001 ... GM by Committee under the nominal head of Marv Levy and Jauron in 2006 ... Nix and Gailey in 2010 ... Whaley and Marrone in 2013 ... If you could resurrect all the pertinent posts on TBD and BBMB from when those combos were all new and shiny (ie, May/June of their initial years together), I'm sure you'd find at least as many posters "being all in" with those combos as with McDermott and Bean these days. You can cheerlead for the new regime if you like, but I'm skeptical that I'll be happy with them come December. Only 10 wins or a playoff berth will make me "all in with the new way of doing things", and I don't see that happening ... or likely to happen in the foreseeable future since the "new way of doing things" has too many disturbing echoes of "the old way of doing things". If things truly change, ie, the Bills start winning football games, then I'll gladly eat crow, but I doubt I'll have to be prowling food.com for crow recipes any time soon.

It certainly has been as evidenced by all the comments in this thread gushing over the latest Bills regime. Apparently, for many Bills fans, fresh faces in the FO and on the coaching equals "vast improvement", and they're "all in" with the new regime even before a single game has been played. I hate to point out to all you admirers of the Emperor and Empress's new wardrobes that their new togs look just like the old Emperor's ones repeatedly did at the same points in football year calendar. For me, the more I read and hear about the new regime, the more skeptical I'm becoming that it is going to be any different from all the previous failed regimes.

Thank you. They also traded away Jason Peters, All Pro left tackle at the time and in the future, for a late first rounder (not even Philly's higher first rounder) and a couple of other picks because of a contract dispute ... when they didn't have anybody to play LT, not even a body. IIRC, Jauron tried to force Langston Walker to switch to LT, and he refused, so he was axed. Eric Wood was the late first rounder, and Andy Levitre was the 2nd rounder but they refused to pay Levitre, and he left for Tennessee I think. A decent center and a journeyman guard are hardly worth an All Pro (and likely HOF) LT. If you want to go back to ancient Bills history, consider that the Bills traded away a young QB, Darryl LaMonica, in 1967, for an older journeyman QB (Tom Flores) and a WR . LaMonica, "The Mad Bomber", went on to become one of the most exciting QBs of his era and took Oakland to multiple playoff wins and a Super Bowl. Flores lasted less than 2 seasons as a starting QB in Buffalo. Getting fleeced in trades is a Bills tradition. The better the player the Bills are peddling, the worse deal they're gonna make. Chuck Knox and Bill Polian were the only ones who were successful traders for the Bills.

Quintessential "Billsy". Buy high and sell low is how the Bills roll! Even more Billsy: the Bills trade Watkins for a late second rounder who turns out to be a journeyman WR or RB, and Watkins goes on to have a HOF career.

First of all, when 8 of 30 first and second round draft picks over more than a decade are outright busts -- they were essentially useless for the Bills and every other NFL team -- how is this a result of "the coaching carousel"? If they were good players, they could have been traded or they would have been picked up and gone on to have solid NFL careers with other teams. None of them did. The first and second rounders who left the Bills who went on to have good or great NFL careers for other teams had good or great careers for the Bills, too. That says that the Bills have had serious problems with talent evaluation since at least 2000. If they can't hit on first and second rounders as often as they should, then they're not likely to have a lot of success finding talent in the lower rounds, either. Secondly, the Bills have continually let many of their best talent -- some of them bonafide Pro Bowl and All Pro talent -- walk rather than pay them the going rate for players of their caliber or sent them packing because they didn't demonstrate proper submissiveness to the aims of the football geniuses at OBD, and then the team has had to use draft picks to replace them. That's not on "the coaching carousel", either. I'm sure that Marshawn Lynch, Jabari Greer, and Chris Hogan all thank the Bills FO for their Super Bowl rings BTW. Finally, if the sniping of jackarses in the media has much influence on coaches' tenures in Buffalo as you seem to think it does, then that's yet another indicator that the real cause of the Bills' failures over the last 17 years can be found upstairs at OBD rather than in the locker room or on the field. "The coaching carousel" is simply a manifestation of the incompetence and dysfunction in the FO that has existed since at least the departure of Butler and Smith in 2000, and which may go back further to the departure of Bill Polian.

Just about all local and/or regional retailers like Kobackers, Sattlers, Hengerers, JN Adams, AMAs, Hills, Ames, etc from everywhere around the country are long gone as well as many national retailers like Woolworths, Neisners, Montgomery Wards, etc. Likely soon to be gone from malls near you are many currently familiar names like Sears and JC Penney. I noticed from an article in the Buffalo News that Macys has left most of the malls in WNY. In fact, there have been a lot of articles recently about all the problems retail stores, especially department stores in malls, have been having. It's a consequence of changing trends in retailing, which happens fairly regularly in the retail industry. There's also a lot of doom and gloom about shopping malls in general because of the problems in retailing. Mall foot traffic is seriously diminishing. When I go to the Chautauqua Mall, I go for specific stores: Jo-Ann Fabrics, Office Max, and this kitchen gadget store -- or the restaurants. When I go to the McKinley Mall, I don't actually go into the main mall but to its outlots: Pier One and Olive Garden. The last time I was actually in a mall just to "window shop" was probably four or five years ago to the Summit Mall in Erie, PA. I do my "window shopping" on line, and I think I'm more in mainstream these days than my friend who never shops on line (doesn't even have a computer) and regularly shops at malls.

I use Intellicast on the PC and 4Warn Weather on my phone, preferring Intellicast because it's more specific to Jamestown and the Southern Tier. 4Warn will give weather alerts for Jamestown & Chautauqua County, but its forecasts seem more geared for the immediate Buffalo area, and Jamestown is 80 miles south. In some parts of the country, there might not often be all that much difference in climate over 80 miles but in western New York/northwest PA it is because of the lakes, especially Erie, and the changes in latitude and elevation. It's most noticeable during the winter, of course, because of WNY's lake-effect snow storms but you can see it in temperatures, first and last frost dates, etc. The lakes and hills create lots of microclimates. My gardener friends in Dunkirk/Fredonia can grow lots of plants I can't on my hill in Jamestown.

When I worked in suburban Albany, NY, we had a moose on the loose in the area just west and south of our site. It didn't actually invade our parking lot, but it was playing in traffic on the nearby expressway during morning rush hour and caused a major traffic jam as DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) staffers tried to herd it to a safer area. Smacking a deer with your car is bad enough ... smacking a moose is likely to be terminal. They weigh about a ton and stand like 6-8 feet tall at the shoulder I think. I worked for the local community college here in Jamestown, and we had migratory Canada geese nesting and raising broods on our pond every year. One year one of the young geese had a deformed wing that prevented it from flying. The family wouldn't abandon the handicapped goose, so they wouldn't have migrated south in the fall, so when the geese were moulting and couldn't fly, we had a "goose round up" to catch the handicapped one and send her to a nearby nature preserve (where she's still living), and her family would be able to leave on time with all the rest of the migrants. We had probably 50 people, and it was still a hilarious disaster. Luckily, nobody gotten bitten.

My list of major misses was for first and second rounders, the supposed blue chippers, not Day Three scrubs destined to spend their careers playing special teams if they stick at all. All teams miss on high picks on occasion but I don't think winning organizations regularly miss at the rate of 27% (ie, more than 1 out of 4) on first and second rounders. Moreover, I didn't include any of the first rounders in that group who most consider "disappointments" like Whitner or McKelvin but just the guys whom everybody considers busts. Frequently gambling on drafting guys with physical issues in the first and second round -- sometimes even trading up to get them like the Bills did for McCargo -- is plainly a stupid strategy ... like counting on winning Power Ball to fund your retirement. How Is having to draft DBs with regularity in the first round to replace the good ones the Bills let walk not just another example of FO incompetence? The Bills have been shedding top class DBs with regularity long before the rookie salary scale came along. The Bills started that when they let Antoine Winfield, their 1999 first rounder, leave for Minnesota where he was a Pro Bowler several times.

That's because winning in college ball is 99% about school name and recruiting success. Successful big time college coaches collect and stockpile talent, blow out conference weak sisters and run up the scores against modest programs like UB or Ball State so that the idiots who produce the collegiate rankings are suitably impressed with the teams' awesomeness ... and proud alumni donate millions to stadium renovations, weight rooms, scholarship funds, coaches salaries, etc. The failure of big name collegiate coaches crashing and burning in the NFL goes back decades, probably at least to the 1970s. It's become even more noticeable with the salary cap leveling out the talent among pro teams. When big name collegiate HCs try the NFL, 99% of them fail because they have to be good, smart coaches with sound game strategies. There are no UBs or Ball States for the Oregons or Alabamas to overwhelm on talent alone since the talent difference between the best and worst NFL teams is only marginally different. Moreover, since pro players have years to hone their skills and knowledge of the game, they're a whole lot smarter than college kids, so NFL game plans on both side of the ball are much more sophisticated. The few collegiate HCs who prosper in the NFL tend to be like Pete Carroll -- guys who already have NFL HC experience. In Kelly's case, his "system" really was a gimmicky one. He won a lot of games in Philly while defenses were figuring it out, but once they did, that was all she wrote for Kelly in the NFL.

That was a great game. I haven't been a hockey fan in a whole lotta years since the Sabres have been about as pathetic as the Bills and I just put the game on because nothing else appealed to me, but I'll probably watch the Finals now.

I have perennial gardens to weed at home and the remainder of my veggie garden to plant at my camp (tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants). On Monday, if it doesn't rain, my neighbor and I will attend the Jamestown Memorial Day Parade and the wreath laying/flag raising ceremonies at Lakeview Cemetery. Her grandson's paternal great grandfather is being honored for service in World War II at the ceremony. We'll probably attend the ceremony even if it rains.

I totally agree. The idea that the Bills' low talent retention rate is because of anything except the product of FO incompetence doesn't fit the facts. The Bills have sucked at drafting, especially in the first two rounds, since John Butler and AJ Smith left for San Diego after the 2000 draft. It has absolutely nothing to do with changing coaching schemes sending lower round picks packing. The Bills have drafted the following in the first and second rounds since 2001: 2001: 1- Nate Clements (#21), 2- Aaron Schobel (#46) 2002 1- Mike Williams (#4), 2- Josh Reed (#36) 2003 1- Willis McGahee (#23), 2- Chris Kelsay (#48) 2004 1- Lee Evans (#13), 1 - JP Losman (#22) 2005 2 - Roscoe Parrish (#55) 2006 1 - Donte Whitner (#8), 1- John McCargo (#26) 2007 1 - Marshawn Lynch (#12), 2 - Paul Posluszny (#34) 2008 1 - Leodis McKelvin (#11), 2- James Hardy (#41) 2009 1 - Aaron Maybin (#11), 1 - Eric Wood (#28), 2 - Jairus Byrd (#42), 2 - Andy Levitre (#51) 2010 1 - CJ Spiller (#9), 2 - Torrell Troup (#41) 2011 1 - Marcell Dareus (#3), 2 - Aaron Williams (#34) 2012 1 - Stephon Gilmore (#10), 2 - Cordy Glenn (#41) 2013 1 - EJ Manuel (#13), 2 - Robert Woods (#41), 2 - Kiko Alonso (#46) 2014 1 - Sammy Watkins (#4), 2 - Cyrus Kouandijo (#44) 2015 2 - Ronald Darby (#50) 2016 1 - Shaq Lawson (#19), 2 - Reggie Ragland (#41) The outright busts: Williams, Losman, McCargo, Hardy, Maybin, Troup, Manuel, Kouandijo. That's 8 total wastes from 30 picks in Rounds 1 & 2 between 2001 and 2014, which is almost 27%. That, boys and girls, is abysmal drafting. One striking thing about the list is the number of players who had physical questions about their health when they were drafted. Mcgahee, McCargo, Troup, Kouandijo, and Lawson all fit that category. Of the veterans, only Mcgahee worked out. We'll see about Lawson. Another striking fact is how many of the guys who actually did work out, some of them Pro Bowl players, the Bills either let walk or sent packing in their primes. That would include Clements, McGahee, Lynch, Posluszny, Byrd, Levitre, Gilmore, and Woods. Certainly the most egregious example of this is Marshawn Lynch. If you think that the Bills haven't made the playoffs in 17 years for any reason other than front office incompetence, I have a sllightly used but recently rehabbed bridge over Chautauqua Lake that I'd like to sell you. As for the new administration, they'll have to prove themselves before I fall for OBD's shell game again.

I guess 17 playoff-less years has made me a skeptic .... it's wishful thinking until it happens.

Sorry, but this is just ANOTHER excuse for the Bills' futility. Other teams win 10 games and even make the playoffs with flawed rosters. A number of teams have not only won 10 games but even made the playoffs during their first season under new coaches. We're not talking about winning the Super Bowl, just about winning 10 games, something that the Bills have not done since 1999 even though numerous teams do it every season and some even do it with regularity. Hell, the Bills have won as many as 9 games only twice since 1999, so even winning that many would be a moral victory I suppose. McDermott has far more talent, especially at key positions, than any of his predecessors have had in their initial seasons going back to the 1970s ... except for Wade Phillips whose 1998 Bills team won 10 games and made the playoffs. If McDermott is the real deal, he'll demonstrate it this season, but I'm not jumping on his bandwagon until I see results.

Actually, Rodgers could have easily been a Bill. Donahoe traded back into the first round in order to draft JP Losman, giving up the Bills #1 pick in 2005. The Bills' 2005 first rounder turned out to be #18 which Dallas got. Rodgers didn't go until 24 or 25. When I read or hear people claiming Whaley was such an awful GM, I remember the trade that landed Losman here and LMAO. Methinks I've heard this song before ... several times. I'll believe it when I see it ... just like I'll believe that the Bills are going in the right direction this time when they actually win 10 games and/or make the playoffs.

Agree with all these points. Another problem with running a no huddle -- and a major one IMO -- is that it lends itself to shortened TOP which puts your defense on the field longer so that they tire out, too. Moreover, the NFL isn't the same league in 2017 as it was a quarter of a century ago just as the world isn't the same either.

Last year under Rex clock management, along with the defense, sucked. It was almost reminiscent of the clock mismanagement under Jauron. Therefore, even barely competent clock management this year will be a noticeable improvement.

Ms Williams don't let your babies named Mike grow up to be football players ...

Whatever. True believers will believe anything. Some people still make excuses for Joe Paterno, too.

Yeah, American Graffiti is a " High School movie". It's about kids who are either in HS or just out of HS. It's also about decisions HS kids had to make -- and still have to make -- about their futures.