grb

The below numbers are post-Atlanta - I'm recycling data from an earlier response to SavoirPeterman, after he claimed Taylor rarely threw more than ten yards Plus-twenty yard pass plays via official NFL stats : Taylor had 11 in 99 attempts, allowing us to calculate a percentage to compare with other QBs Taylor : .111 Brady : .123 Brees : .105 Rodgers : .094 Ryan : .089 Winston : .078 Prescott : .077 http://www.nfl.com/stats/categorystats?tabSeq=0&season=2017&seasonType=REG&d-447263-n=1&d-447263-o=2&d-447263-p=1&statisticCategory=PASSING&conference=null&d-447263-s=PASSING_20PLUS_YARDS_EACH Truth be told, I don't have the heart to redo the math after the Bengals game. No doubt TT has dropped a bit. But - hey - that's what happens when your ONE single long pass threat goes out in the First Quarter.

Two points Carolina was not on Taylor. Even dismissing the oddness of ZJ's route and his embarrassingly clumsy play on the pass, the greater problem remains : He had zero idea where ball was until it was literally right on top of him. You don't run fifty yards downfield, hold out your hands and expect the ball to drop into place. Receivers at every level track the pass and tweak their routes on plays that long. That's just elemental. Any degree of ball awareness whatsoever and that play looks like an effortless touchdown. Watkins would have made that catch ten times out of ten. OK; I'm just curious : Putin ?!? Was Stalin, Hitler & Pol Pot already taken?

Let's look at his first two years, shall we? Taylor's stats in the 15 games where both Watkins and Woods playing 63.6% comp. 8.25 ypa. 27 TD passes. 6 int Taylor's stats in the 14 games without Sammy Watkins and/or Robert Woods 61.5% 6.55 ypa 10 tds, 6 ints Funny thing, huh? You give him a legitimate Number One & Two receiver to throw to and all those "issues" and "flaws" suddenly don't seem to amount to much. Imagine that. Just like every other damn quarterback in the NFL (Brady & Rodgers possibly excepted), Taylor needs someone to actually throw to. Hell, this season he's played pretty good even without anything close to a legitimate 1&2, making due with his TE. And Clay was on the way to another plus-100 yard day before he went down.

True. And it's also relevant to note Peterman may have been playing against 3s & 4s, but he was also playing with the same dregs. But it's fair to note Peterman's preseason play because of two reasons : First, it is the record we have to compare against Taylor's two-plus years playing regular season games. Second, people here seem to remember only half or a third of Peterman's preseason play. The rest seems to have vanished from their minds like they were hit with that forget-everything-device from Men In Black. I can understand a little rosy-colored-memory. Being a Taylor fan I've been known to indulge in it a bit myself. But Petermanians are taking it to a whole other level.....

Would that be the same preseason where Peterman barely completed half his passes - for only a bit over 5 yards an attempt? Where he didn't complete a single pass 30 yards or longer?? Does the term "selective memory" mean anything to you?

Please, don't say that. Football is the one area in life where I indulge in unbridled optimism. Such as : The Bills have a bye & could get close to being healthy. The next two games - Bucs & Raiders - are at home and very winnable. Following that is the Jets, Saints, and Chargers - all winnable. So: 8-2, going into the home stretch. Be of good cheer....

Taylor is the starter because : (1) He performed better in camp (2) He's played much better in real games than Peterman played in preseason games. What about that is so hard to understand?

Taylor is the only person on the Bills' offense who has consistently made plays. You'd see that if you weren't willfully blind. Clay has had his moments and McCoy has done what he can, but this is a team that schemed their way out of a league-leading running attack, has an offensive line full of holes like swiss cheese, and has probably the worst set of receivers in the NFL. Try going back to the Carolina game, where the Bills running backs had 14 yards total, Taylor had +80% of the rushing yards, +90% of the total offense, all the first downs, and came within a hair of winning the game - if an overwhelmed rookie had shown just a smidge of ball awareness. McCoy has made plays and gotten credit for making something out of nothing in games, despite his overall numbers. Fine; he deserves it. But Taylor has done the exact same thing and gotten as much abuse as credit. Half the NFL & a number of Bills' fans discredited the Falcons' win because Ryan was down his two receivers. How could you expect this franchise MVP quarterback to function given that? No wonder he played so poorly. Right. Welcome to Tyrod Taylor's world, week end & week out....,

300 yards, eh? Reality check : In preseason, against vanilla defenses, playing almost exclusively against 2s-4s, Peterman : Completed 54.4% of his passes Averaged 5.7 yards per attempt Had a longest completion of only 28 yards. Look, Taylor had a brutal game and the Bills lost. Obviously this board is full of people who'll give no sympathy whatsoever for the ugly situation Taylor finds himself in. After all, they trashed him after games where he played very well. But fantasy is fantasy, and that's what all of NP's dream 300 yard games is. He showed nothing in camp or preseason to play him over Taylor - which I'm sure the Bills' locker room is well aware of. But - hey - look on the bright side : With this o-line Taylor probably won't last the season anyway......

The anti-Taylor crowd has now taken to shouting. A few more victories - a few more sharp games by TT - who knows where their desperation will lead them.....

Diva-mentality seems to be an occupational hazard with talented wide receivers. It was pretty clear Watkins was afflicted, because every so often he insisted on putting foot into mouth. However, on the diva-scale, he barely registered against your Beckmans or Terrell Owens of yore. And I don't think I ever heard any suggestion he lost the locker room, or caused problems behind the scenes. One thing to remember is he played a lot of games last year for the Bills with a broken foot. It doesn't hurt to remember that.

And yet the Bills are 3-1 with a terrible running attack. That's against three very good teams with excellent defense too. Also as a reminder : A very similar team with - yes, the same quarterback - was top ten scoring last year. I won't bother quibbling over a very good vs great defense because I'm not sure which the team has. My main point? These anti-Taylor narratives have a strange tendency to veer off into fantasy. SavoirPeterman claims Taylor could never come back from 14pts down, ignoring the evidence of just a few games ago. He says Taylor rarely throws 10yds down the field, which is embarrassingly easy to disprove. Ktulu says Taylor can't win without a strong running attack, when that's exactly what they've been doing. It's pretty strange the anti-Taylor case has such a hard time staying between the lines of reality.

All too easy : Let's look at plus-twenty yard plays, shall we? Taylor has 11 in 99 attempts, so we can do the math for a percentage to compare with his peers : Taylor : .111 Brady : .123 Brees : .105 Rodgers : .094 Ryan : .089 Winston : .078 Prescott : .077 I'm sure this can be explained away because "stats are so misleading", right? http://www.nfl.com/stats/categorystats?tabSeq=0&season=2017&seasonType=REG&d-447263-n=1&d-447263-o=2&d-447263-p=1&statisticCategory=PASSING&conference=null&d-447263-s=PASSING_20PLUS_YARDS_EACH

Dang if I know. Two to Clay. Two or three more attempts to Jones. I'd say a minimum of 25% of total attempts, but that could be a low estimate.

So how's the weather there, in that parallel universe where Taylor "rarely throw the ball more than 10 yards"...... Hope you're having sunshine & warm temperatures !!!

ESPN recently did a “who’s a contender; who’s a pretender” thing looking at multiple teams, including the Bucs & Bills. With Tampa, they listed Winston as a plus with this logic : Why they'll stay in contention: Winning five straight so late in the season last year means you can't ever count them out. They also have a quarterback in Jameis Winston who has shown he can bounce back very quickly from poor performances. He went from throwing three interceptions against the Minnesota Vikings in Week 3 to having a three-touchdown, no-interception performance against the Giants. That struck me as kinda weird. The ability to have back-to-back three td & three interception games isn’t that notable and is hardly a virtue. Then it struck me : The sportswriter made such a lame case for JW because he didn’t have to do better. Why even bother to put in an effort? Winston’s awesomeness is already hard-wired into the narrative. Major college program, national championship, first overall pick, etc. It’s possible he can play his way out of awesomeness, but only by a long concerted effort. It’s possible he can make enough bad throws in a game people won’t gush over the good ones, but it’s going to have to be a pretty unbalanced ratio. Of course some quarterbacks aren’t on so long a leash……

Absolutely. Weird. OK. Let's do this again : (1) Take Taylor's record starting. (2) Go five games back. (3) What do you find? The defense was horrible The Bills were down 14pts three separate times in a single game It was a total shootout, with a thousand yards of total offense So what happened? Taylor played excellent and ran a two minute drive to throw a touchdown for the lead with just over a minute left. Will he do it the next time? We'll see. But its absolutely wacko how often people raise this scenario as something Taylor must fail at, all immediate evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

It depends how gullible you are. Consider that Taylor is : 8th in QB rating (the NFL version, not ESPN's) 13th in Completion percentage 10th in yards per attempt So, he completes a high percentage of throws, for a very good average per attempt, and he rarely makes mistakes. He's a playmaker, regularly delivering big-time passes and critical third downs. He's had a sub-par running attack and a receiver group among the worse in the league. And yet some people are gullible enough to believe all of this is some kind of illusion. It turns out ANYONE can have a top-ten quarterback rating, as long as the coaches bother to engineer the accomplishment - thru their effort, not the player's. Kinda makes you wonder why more coaches don't perform this magical transubstantiation, doesn't it?

If Taylor had missed so many throws so badly there would have been no limit to the rage and indignation. You definitely wouldn't see this milquetoast "some good; some bad". It would be screeching fury-style contempt. So, yes, a double standard.... Also, newsflash : Winston "left some plays on the field". So did Brady.

And yet with Tyrod as the quarterback the Bills were Top Ten scoring in the NFL last year. Funny that.........

I'm not sure that Baltimore isn't on the list.....

And you may find yourself Living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself In another part of the world And you may find yourself Behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house With a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here?

But we're Manly Feminists......

Currently, the Bills are ranked 13th in the NFL by third down conversion percentage, and that number is dragged down by the Carolina debacle. https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/third-down-conversion-pct

Three points : (1) The "Taylor is only a back-up" shtick is on it's last legs. My friendly advice? Don't be the last rat off that sinking ship...... (2) Though you didn't bring this one up, the "Bills were looking to dump Taylor" thing is based on zero evidence. Yes, a zillion sportswriters speculated endlessly it was the case, but they never got a quote from anyone - or a quote on deep background - or an anonymous quote - or a quote from someone quoting someone anonymously - or a quote from someone quoting someone anonymously on deep background. Personally, I think the Bills always had an eye towards restructuring from day-one. If anyone did denigrate Taylor behind the scenes, it was contract posturing - and they made damn sure nothing got out which might sour the deal. (3) Taylor never tested the open market. Now did he have an idea where he might go and for how much? Sure. And I'd bet he could have gotten the same money or slightly more than the Bills' deal, but it would have also been short-term cash. Remember, the new contract wasn't a pay cut by this year's wages, it just eliminated long-term guaranteed money for a short-term deal. The Bills didn't want a multi-year commitment, and TT was happy with that if he got his dime along with freedom going ahead. If I had to guess, I'd bet he didn't see any likely landing spots offering better success for his "prove-it" year than staying with the Bills