Richard Noggin

Great thread. I'll bet there is outside analysis (Cover-1?) on this particular play that could add a perspective, but not sure I have the focus at this hour to find it.

Either you're being intentionally obtuse, or it's not...an act. We all know it's about team travel and gameday logistics when these games get moved, as the NHL example provided for you on page 28 shows. Football should be played outdoors, on a natural grass field. I guess Arizona was able to tweak that equation enough (indoor venue but with a natural field that mostly lives outside) to provide a workable alternative for their unique set of circumstances. It's almost like football in HOT climates is a better candidate for indoor play, given the danger of rising heat indexes to those gigantic athletes.

So is critical thinking, apparently

Going out of your way to share a negative take? Weird...

Without yet watching this video, we know Warner's MO has been critiquing Allen's play based on a very conventional, rote interpretation of pocket passing and progressions. He's not going to appreciate the off-schedule and scramble stuff because he'll instead point out the play that could have been made in rhythm from the pocket (instead of holding onto the ball longer and/or breaking the pocket). It's the traditional, pedantic way to analyze QB play. He's not exactly wrong, but he's also not necessarily right.

Now he can lead an expedition to the EDGE of the earth...

Maybe this is the exciting part: we already know there is talent among the offensive weapons (especially when Knox gets has the ball in his hands), so seeing the offense diversify and distribute (including an increased role for Knox, among others) seems like a promising development. Red zone success has been an issue this year, and the recent success (11/13) bodes well moving forward.

Exactly. Then a bigger jump this week. Obviously we'll see if this continues, but there is HUGE value in the potential emergence of another target. Especially one who offers such dangerous RAC ability.

I thought he showed up a bit last week as well, no? With respect to targets and production. Possible that we're seeing an upward trend.

I definitely would. Can you point me in a specific direction? Appears you beat me to this topic by a few minutes. Guess I DID want to "start a new thread for this" lol.

He's no doubt been doing his 1/11th as a blocker (and admirably, at that) to date, but it's exciting to think that the Bills are starting to feature him more (or that Allen is actually looking his way more? It's really difficult to know where credit is due). I just watched more of the video, and was reminded of that brutal late 2nd quarter drop over the middle (and that Knox had 2 drops total). The drops thing is an issue that could singlehandedly be responsible for the fan angst over the 2022 offense.

Exactly what this offense has been searching for the 2nd half of the season, and one would hope what the organization envisioned when giving him a handsome extension: a dangerous mismatch for defenses devoting extra attention to Diggs. While Davis, understandably, suddenly became everyone's favorite WR2 prospect following his historic KC playoff explosion, I'd argue that Knox breaking out would be even more beneficial. Contrary to many of our well-honed eye tests, Davis IS having a pretty solid WR2 season (minus catch %). But man how great it would be if Knox continues to ascend. Here is Erik Turner's breakdown of Knox's night against Miami:

Love the breakdown of Tre's aggressive coverage. That's exactly what you have to do against this offense, as has been demonstrated for 3 weeks in a row now (and to a large extent, in week 3 when the Bills played it similarly). Take away time and space. As Greg Cosell and many others, including Baldy, have conceded: this aggressive approach WILL surrender a big play or two over 4 quarters. But, it will also stifle the Dolphins offense often enough to be a net positive approach. REALLY happy in retrospect that Frazier was an early adopter of this game-plan in the first matchup. Kind of disrupts the narrative that his defense is all passive and vanilla. I'm hoping this week to see a similarly proactive rollout of the same defensive game-plan the Bills used against San Fran back in 2020: if memory serves, they employed (often enough to be noticeable to me, a moron) a 5-2 front-7 alignment with Edmunds lined up on the edge and Klein playing MLB. Something akin to a 46 defense makes a lot of sense if the game is played in a blizzard.

Probably been said, but the way he dropped that bottle suddenly, but limply, onto the booth is so damning. So premeditated. He is utterly effed, and rightly so.

That IS, actually, ironic! Sincere congratulations on being the first person maybe ever online to use that term correctly. Hate those names lol

In response to the bolded: Statistically, Gabriel Davis is having his best professional season (or, if you like, the same kind of season but with a few more targets). Note that his poor catch % is perfectly in line with his first two seasons. And also recall that he also disappeared and/or underperformed for stretches each of the past two seasons (due to injuries and/or poor play). That KC playoff game has skewed everyone's expectations. This is who he is, just with a more prominent role.

The snowball throwing was disappointing throughout the game. Aiming at on-field security personnel is one thing (which is stupid), but lobbing snowballs into the endzone where defensive players are lined up during a play is an entirely different, even dumber, thing. Such a bad look for Bills fans. My seats are in 137, which is along the left/west goal-line on the Bills side, and the fans near me who were throwing snowballs were mostly younger, drunken dummies. Even from the upper rows of the lower bowl it's easy to reach the field with a well-packed snowball. While I hate policing my fellow fans, I was able to confront and stop a couple rows of boisterous youngsters from continuing to target the field. It's so dooshy to light up sideline photographers and reporters (Sal Cappaccio took a snowball to the neck/head from someone nearby) and workers who aren't able to defend themselves due to divided attention. It's even dooshier to try to affect the field of play. I don't know how it looked on the TV broadcast.

That's the Cincinnati playbook against KC...rush 3 or 4 plus a spy who often ends up crashing down on a delayed blitz. Holland is a beast.

It was fun to be there tonight, as always. The weather was fun. Josh Allen was fun. The fans were fun (minus the snowball-throwing dummies...).

The question remains, though: aside from an obvious mitigation of the sun's angle of incidence from early afternoon to late afternoon (as the sun gets lower in the sky its radiation is considerably more filtered out by our atmosphere), DOES that acceptably alleviate the dangerous conditions on the visiting sideline?

100% agree. Catch is, if an otherwise great QB logs just ONE bad quarter per game, that QB is not playing great anymore. Allen went from a historically great stretch to suddenly posting these quarters or entire halves of puzzling regression. There could be SO many legitimate explanations for this regression to the mean, but the fact is that #17 was overcoming all those explanations until suddenly he wasn't. I'm sure he'll learn from and grow because of this adversity, and hopefully the team (and coaching) around him will do the same.

But Allen was playing at an ELITE level with this same cast until he wasn't. It's not primarily about his supporting cast, except that maybe Allen feels more pressure to be a hero if we believe he sees his weapons as unreliable. Either way, he fell back into bad habits. He got sloppy, mechanically and cognitively. Hopefully, Beasley helps him regain his zen.

Allen's recent numbers are NOT great, FTR. They are "cleaner" lately, which has been good enough against some meh offenses (and good defenses). After an 8-game span of historically ELITE performance (2021 playoffs through week 6 of 2022), we CANNOT ignore Allen's sudden and stark regression beginning with the 2nd half against GB and lasting into the 4th quarter of the Thanksgiving game. There are SO many contributing factors to this regression to the mean, including injuries to Allen and his supporting cast, but NONE of that excuses Allen's sudden refusal to take what defenses give him and distribute the ball patiently and precisely. He kinda got the yips, TBH. Of course we still saw flashes of the absolute maestro he's become, but over the course of those 3-4 games we saw a surprising amount of bad reps from #17. It happens over the course of a career. He's by no means alone in the blame for these uncharacteristic stumbles. As for his supporting cast, they'd look a HECK of a lot better if the offense designed more plays for Knox. Use HIM as the #2 option, maybe? Let Davis be a third or even fourth option on some plays and see if that operates better. People weren't so down on Buffalo's skill positions last season, seemingly. And I KNOW Sanders wasn't some plus target down the stretch.

I've read comments on here suggesting the direct sunlight and heat index disparity is mostly a 1 PM kickoff issue? That maybe a 4 PM start mitigates it enough to at least keep these giant athletes safe? I did live on that godforsaken peninsula for the better part of a decade, and I have attended a couple early-season games in that South Florida nightmare factory (PRE-awning installation)...heck, it was the home team's "fans" who spent a LOT of time in the concourses avoiding the extreme sun/heat. It's no joke. I don't know if a later kickoff (combined with the new awnings) would alleviate some of the extreme conditions exacerbated by the relentless, direct sunlight of early afternoon in the tropics. We don't call it anything.

But WERE they really "rounding into an absolute buzz saw late last year"? Obviously, they were just on another level in the playoffs, and for a number of games early this season, but I remember some scrappy wins to close out 2021. Am I completely omitting a late season game or two? I more closely remember the Bills establishing an effective RUNNING game in the last handful of contests, before exploding in the postseason.