grb

Two points : "Even with such a good run game, Tyrod's net yards per attempt were 13th in 2015..." That's just plain wacko one-hundred percent wrong. In 2015 - the only time Taylor ever had two functioning NFL-grade receivers regularly on the field - his yards-per-attempt was 5th in the league, at 7.99 ypa. Maybe the poster is trying to do something clever with "net yards per attempt" as opposed to "yards per attempt"; who knows? As Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The fact remains the one year Taylor had a deep threat (who wasn't running on a broken left foot), he was in the top five in the NFL at yardage per pass. http://www.espn.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/yardsPerPassAttempt/year/2015 Now my point of agreement with Elroy16 : "The proof will be in what happens this year." Absolutely; and what's more, we'll all be back hashing it out right here in this forum, probably week by week. Hell, we can't stop arguing about the guy even during the dead of off-season, with him exiled to gawdforsaken Cleveland. I really wonder what some of the more buffoonish voices in this debate will do when real games are being played. Will Teddy KGB show his face then?

Pretty funny. Watkins plays eight games with a broken left foot - with all the pain that entails - but our own Thurman#1 is here to insist that wasn't a factor in SW running long routes. We can only assume Thurman#1 would be out at the track running sprints if his foot was broken. No excuses, huh? I understand it's every fan's right to be cavalier about athletic injuries, but you can take that to ludicrous extremes.

Yep. It was probably indifference rather than some elaborate con. He had an irksome chore and cut some corners.

Matthews? Who now says he was injured even before being traded by the Eagles, was double-injured the second day of training camp, and was then injured the entire season? Benjamin? He had (32) catches for 14.8 ypc in eight games for the Panthers before the trade, (16) catches for 13.6 ypc in six games for the Bills after the trade. Given his multiple injuries during those six games, inability to practice, questionable almost every game, etc, I see limited significance in that small drop-off. Another point : I just checked Robert Woods' numbers and was surprised at how small the increase was in LA: 2016 - Bills - 13 games played, 10 games started, 51 catches, 613 yds, 12.0 ypc 2017 - Rams - 12 games played, 11 games started, 56 catches, 781yds, 13.9 ypc Which led me to compare Watkins / Woods together - 2015 vs 2017, when both were relatively healthy : 2015 - Bills - 60 (SW) + 47 (RW) = 107 catches 2017 - Rams - 39 (SW) + 56 (RW) = 95 catches As for last season, the team's wide receiver room was like an intensive care ward with various practice squad scrubs drifting in as visitors. And Jones, of course. But he was so wide-eyed and confused he might just have wandered in by mistake. Hilarious. Bills' fans!!! The only place on Planet Freaking Earth where you can find someone make a negative of NOT throwing interceptions. If we are to take Elroy16 at his word, he'll be darn tickled-pink when Buffalo qbs are regularly throwing it up to the other team again. Bet Peterman made Elroy swoon......

As has been pointed out many times in the past : If you take all the time Taylor had Watkins and Woods on the same field it only amounts to fifteen games over two years. During those games, this resulted : 63.6% comp. 8.25 ypa. 27 td passes. 6 ints. Now, look only at bulk numbers, and sure : The Bills were 31st in pass attempts in 2015, and 32nd in 2016, and that means less targets. Though even given that, the sum total of touchdown passes is a decent number. Using the sixteen game '17 regular season as an (inexact) yardstick, that would tie for eighth with Kirk Cousins. Also : For the most part? Watkins definitely had the best season of his career with Taylor. Hogan is mostly a wash, though there was a one-year spike in yardage (if not number of receptions) his first season with the Patriots. There's little difference in Clay's numbers, Miami to Buffalo. Woods went from a number Two receiver to number One (with Watkins the exact opposite). The inversion of Watkins / Woods from Taylor to Goff is an interesting phenomena, but with the winner (Woods) there was a loser (Watkins). The clearest case is of course Goodwin, who blossomed w/ the Niners.

He had Watkins for two games beginning the 2016 season, but SW was then shut down as ineffectual. This was because he was running on a broken foot. Watkins then sat for eight games before returning, but his injury wasn't healed. The remaining six games of 2016 he played with a broken foot and significant pain. Apparently you closely watched all those games yet still can't get your basic facts straight. But - hey - it's "pretty clear" as you remember it. Go figure......

Back for more? Aren't you a glutton for punishment! Yes, Taylor was 21st in number of tds passing. That's because Buffalo was 31st in passes attempted. Now I don't have much faith in your ability with higher math, so let me just cue you in : Those numbers suggest Taylor was more adept at throwing tds than many (if not most) of his peers. And lo & behold, this proves to be the case. Mr. Taylor's td percentage was 5.3, which was 12th in the NFL - tied with Kirk Cousins. Those quarterbacks trailing Tyrod in touchdown passes per throw included : Drew Brees, Andrew Luck, Philip Rivers, Alex Smith, Matt Ryan, Jameis Winston and many others. I won't mention Taylors touchdowns rushing. That would just be piling on.

Yeah; I'm sure Taylor averaged 7.99 yards per attempt in 2015 "taking safe conservative throws".

When Taylor had a comparable amount of offensive talent around him in Buffalo as now in Cleveland? He finished seventh in the NFL by passer rating - ahead of Cam Newton, Matthew Stafford, Alex Smith, Ben Roethlisberger, etc, etc. Maybe that's worth considering too. http://www.espn.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/quarterbackRating/year/2015

Being in a querulous mood, I decided to pull the above quote out. Hogan's last four seasons : 2014 - Buffalo - 41 receps, 426 yds, 10.4 yds per catch 2015 - Buffalo - 36 receps, 450 yds, 12.5 yds per catch 2016 - New E. - 38 receps, 680 yds, 17.9 yds per catch 2017 - New E. - 34 receps, 439 yds, 12.9 yds per catch There was a spike in yardage in '16 to be sure, but otherwise not much difference. It isn't that the Patriots can get a lot more mileage out of a Hogan, but that the Bills didn't care enough about Hogan's mileage to pay for it. If Hogan had been a Bill last season, he would have easily been their best receiving option. That's a sign of the talent drain from the offense.

The quote to pull from this massive effort is this : "A QB with "average NFL QB smarts" will do just fine in the EP. A really smart QB can make this offense nearly unstoppable, even without the best talent around him. This idea may shed light into why AJ and JA were brought in." I'd bet Dennison said something very similar in convincing McDermott to bench Taylor for Peterman. And how did that work out? I don't want to get into a discussion of NP's performance against the Chargers, Patriots, Colts, and Jaguars, but the evidence didn't support the conclusion you can take an unskilled QB, mediocre pass protection and sub-grade receivers - add "System" - and suddenly make gold thru alchemy. The past two seasons the Bills dumped Woods, dumped Hogan, dumped Goodwin, dumped Gillsilee, saw Harvin & K Williams' careers implode, dumped Watkins, scared off Boldin (who saw the Watkins trade as a tank-move), and saw the lesser talent they brought in under-perform by injury or rookie-flusters. They just traded away their best tackle, while seeing their best center and guard retire. In the draft they did next to nothing to solve any of this. If you want Allen to succeed (much less McCarron), then don't set him up to fail.

They might also want to make the effort to set him up to succeed. One of the wonderful things about having your Franchise Future as a quarterback is it suddenly becomes important to have a line which can pass-block, or receivers who make plays, or something close to a deep threat. Allen is universally held to be raw and unpolished, yet people are eager to rush him out into an offense universally predicted to be crappy. Why set him up to fail? Doesn't the "Process" have anything to say about that? Of course the Process didn't do Nate Peterman's career any favors........

True enough. I qualified Expert on a M-203 grenade launcher precisely because of that. Lord knows I didn't actually hit anything. (I wasn't bad at horseshoes either. Almost seems to be a specialty of mine)

1. He took the better offer, which is natural enough. Someone up-thread was whining about him saying nice things about his new team, which is a strange complaint. 2. After successive years of having & losing Karlos & Mike, I think the team (if not the fans) grew blasé about back-up RBs. Thus, Tolbert. 3. Sometimes it seems like Belichick goes well out of his way to overpay Bills free agents. If millions of dollars weren't involved, it would almost look like trolling...

Or - as an alternative - I could wait until the season begins, wait until some games are played, wait until Taylor's performance as a Brown becomes a thread in this forum, and then tell it to you. But will you show up to hear? That's the question.......

Sigh. Three points : The Bills have been a heavily RUN FIRST TEAM the past three seasons. It was announced they would be run-first way back in the earliest Days of Rex, before Taylor even signed as a free agent. They had the second most rushing attempts in the NFL in both 2015 and 2016. They had the lowest number of passing attempts in the NFL those same years. Now, I'm not a Doctor like the poster above, but I'm willing to postulate a correlation between number of attempts and how many shots a receiver gets at the damn ball. Yep, I'm going out on a limb here, but there seems some kind of relationship there. As for Woods, what's interesting is he was clearly the secondary choice for Taylor, with Watkins the go-to-guy. As BuffaloHokie13 points out above, SW shined with Taylor in a way not seen with any other quarterback. Then both receivers go to Los Angeles / Goff, and everything is completely reversed. Woods gets the majority of the targets and Watkins' numbers shrivel to anemic lows. I haven't seen too many theories on this inversion - whether it's a factor of qb-style, skill-set, or just the relationship that can develop between passer and receiver. Once again (for the gawdforsaken zillionth time), there was nothing wrong with TT passing to Woods and Watkins, except they were on the same field together only 15 games over two seasons. The result? 63.6% comp. 8.25 ypa. 27 td passes. 6 ints. For the sake of comparison, let's look at Goff's 16 game season last year, throwing to the same players: 62.1% comp. 7.98 ypa. 28 td passes. 7 ints. Of course if all you can see is total number of passing attempts.........

The only time Taylor ever had a Number One & Two receiver on the field that wasn't a cripple, cast-off, or painfully-overwhelmed rookie was the 15 games from 2015-2016 when Woods and Watkins were both healthy. In two years that's the amount of games both were on the field with Taylor : Fifteen. When they were, Taylor's numbers : 63.6% comp. 8.25 ypa. 27 tds. 6 ints. Obviously, it was a heavily run-first offense, so the bulk numbers weren't there. But the ypa is top-of-the-league grade, the tds would have tied for tenth (with Kirk Cousins) using last season as a benchmark, and the interception number was exceptional. The problem with Taylor was he had less&less to work with each successive season with the Bills. By last year, with Matthews hobbled, Benjamin hobbled, Jones a deer in the headlights, Clay out a hunk of the season and often unable to practice, and everyone else other-team-rejects, it was particularly obvious. The damage to the running game by scheme change didn't help, and pass protection was spotty at best. What'll happen in Cleveland? We'll see........

Yep. Pretty much this. All of the four top quarterbacks have talent, potential and problems. All could be top quarterbacks; all could be busts. Per draft history it's little more than the roll of the dice. At this point it's kinda silly to be frantically "selling" what you yourself purchased, or trashing the other options you decided to pass up. Water under the bridge, huh? Might as well wait and sees how it plays out on the field. As for Rosen, it's getting more and more bizarre watching people trash him on the basis of nothing. whatsoever. Geez, the guy makes a I Want To Prove The People Who Didn't Draft Me Were Wrong comment - one of the oldest sports cliches in the business - and heads of snowflakes everywhere explode. I guarantee if Mayfield went tenth he'd have made a very similar comment and people would have found his cockiness admirable. Yet Rosen doesn't just get hate - but passionate hate to boot. Me? Pretty much the old sports figure I hate is gawdforsaken Brady - and he had to be insufferable successful, win far too many championships and marry a supermodel before being worth the effort. What has Rosen done to deserve all this spleen?

Absent politics would we have a whole thread of spittle-spraying rage over a kid's "They Picked Those Guys Before Me But I'm Going To Prove Them Wrong" speech? I seriously doubt it. That's what it has to do with politics.....

Geez people; really? We've all seen this interview a hundred times from a hundred players. It's the standard "They Picked Those Guys Before Me But I'm Going To Prove Them Wrong" shtick. In the sports cliche Hall of Fame it probably has a whole wing to itself. When Baker Mayfield says stuff like this we say he's "competitive" and even the schoolmarmish types have a note of admiration over it. Look, we get it: Rosen doesn't like Trump. Who the hell cares? Personally, I don't spend a second worrying whether an athlete does or doesn't like Donald-gawdforsaken-Trump. There are much bigger things to worry about, aren't there? I don't care if a quarterback likes Trump; I don't care if the guy two desks down likes Trump. A whole thread full of people twisting their innards into knots with seething rage - just because some some kid athlete doesn't like Trump. Sad!

Or 16th, a smidge below Matt Ryan and right above Dak Prescott, Andy Dalton, and Derek Carr. http://www.espn.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/quarterbackRating Of course that's if you're sensible enough to judge a passer by anything more than the number of passing attempts called. Yeah; it's amazing there are people who lack even that much common sense, but that's the world we find ourselves in. Speaking of which : Imagine if Taylor found himself with anything like the offensive weapons Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott, Andy Dalton, and Derek Carr all have ?!? Probably would have been closer to the below. Before the Bills dumped Hogan, dumped Woods, dumped Gillisilee, gave up on Percy & Karlos, dumped Goodwin, scared away Boldin, dumped Watkins, and screwed-up a league-leading running game by useless scheme change. http://www.espn.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/quarterbackRating/year/2015

I dunno. Seems to me fiery implacable hatred has to be more exhausting than an overly generous regard. More wearing to the spirit, ya know?

Lord above, isn't this a tired old debate? Still one point, starting with a quote : "Taylor had been playing poorly enough that he created the opportunity." Yes, he played poorly against New Orleans, but in the three games before - New York, Oakland & Tampa Bay - Taylor played well. That's not what you see in many a comment above, where it's gospel that McDermott had to make the choice "given how Tyrod played vs. NO and the NYJs the weeks prior", but that opinion is based on : People who don't remember watching the Jets game The Bills lost the game, ergo Taylor played poorly The fact that Taylor played well in three games, had a bad game, and then was benched makes no sense. Therefore he must have have played bad against the Jets too. As for McDermott's decision, here's what happened : Over a four game stretch a defense-oriented coach watched his team give up the most yards in the NFL He didn't have any answers The OC said his scheme was perfect - pure genius - except for that Taylor guy. So put the other guy in and pure genius will shine. I'll grant that's a bit exaggerated - but not by much. As for the Jets game, Taylor was one of the few Bills' players who actually showed up to play. Think otherwise? No problem. But this guy wants to fight you : https://www.buffalorumblingbut s.com/2017/11/3/16602430/analysis-tyrod-taylor-was-not-the-problem-in-thursdays-buffalo-bills-loss-to-new-york-jets

When the Bills had two NFL-grade receivers playing - the 15 games with Woods and Watkins on the field with Taylor - this happened : 63.6% comp. 8.25 YPA. 27 TD passes. 6 Ints When the Bills fielded cripples, cast-offs, practice squad rejects, and a rookie like a deer in the headlights - then less so, I admit. The Browns have receivers and don't intend to waive them. Let's see what happens........

A couple of quibbles : Cousins did play intermittently his first three years - he was just bad. That's how he got benched for Colt McCoy. By accounts RGIII had a clumsy locker room presence and maybe did tweet too much (if you think counting them is absolutely necessary), but really? The man's real problems were a terrible injury and three-ring-circus of a professional environment. An example might be the coach who used RGIII as a pawn to engineer his own firing - to walk away from the team while collecting money on his contract. Or an idiot of an owner, who picked the quarterback to adopt as his best buddy. Griffin may has his flaws, but IMO he was more sinned against than sinning.....