Rew

Sure, you can call it blaming others or call it accountability. It's a team game, and players need to both have talent and perform in their job. Isn't it literally McD's job to evaluate and call out when others aren't doing their job? Saying "we didn't play complementary football" might be somewhat a McD thing, but many coaches, including Superbowl winning ones, have put a similar emphasis on "do your job", "do your 1/11th", or many other variants of the phrase. It's not hard to understand, but every team struggles with getting all players to embody this on every play. If you want to turn this into a McD critique, start a thread discussing why (or if) we have consistent gap discipline problems spanning multiple seasons. While in the short term (single game evaluations) it is problems with players, a macro problem like this would be either a talent (gm) or coaching (DC/HC) problem.

When McD has used this I think it is quite a bit broader than defense help offense and vice versa. Everyone interpreted this to be a comment on high level game strategy, and while I agree that is a component I think McD usually means it more in the tactical execution. Complementary is about play calling philosophy and our expectations of players on each play. You can see our team building as a carry over from the tactical expectations that we have for players in complementary football. We want players who do their 1/11th. We don't want high risk taking by players, or guys that take penalties and put their team in a bad spot. Every player, on every play, with solid technique and high effort within play design. This also goes to play design and play calling. We want to run high probability plays most times that have a high floor when properly executed. In defense we want to take away explosive plays and force the other team to out execute us every play for a long drive. This will always give us a high floor if we can fill the team with people capable of doing the 1/11th. This is not always going to be explosive, but when you combine this strategy with higher end talent the ceiling becomes high. How does all this tie in to complementary? Every player on every play should not be trying to individually win that play. They should be doing their job to complement the other 10 guys doing their job. Good examples of complementary on defense are about gap discipline, zone discipline, and tackling discipline. Good examples on offense are following through on blocks, chipping when you don't have to, blocking as a receiver, and "selling" every route you run. When McD says "didn't play complementary football" he means that players weren't doing their job in system or that play calling got tunnel visioned and lost sight of game strategy, or both.

Prepare to be shocked

This was a pretty normal game until 5 minutes ago

Bills currently have the best odds in the AFC of going to the Superbowl. Not because this is our best team in the last several years, but because nobody else is that good either and we have the highest ceiling of the teams likely to make the playoffs. While we can all see an early out as possible, all the other teams look at what we are capable of and just hope that we don't put together a complete game against them. This is the same reason that the chiefs would also be a Superbowl contender if they squeak in. Good teams have bad games, bad stretches, and bad seasons. All that matters is what happens in week 19, and the Bills have as good a shot as anyone.

No, it's not even the worst this year

Enjoyable game. Team is playing decent, if Allen had 1-2 different decisions we're up by 10 instead of 1

What was the "blunder"

2 weeks? He looked terrific against KC

Cook is doing it with the threat of Allen throwing or running on the field. Taylor is doing it with... Daniel Jones? Cook is doing it in the #1 offense over the last 5 years. Allen is also an MVP candidate. There is no scenario where a RB has a shot at MVP when on the same team as a QB candidate (CMC should have won and didn't for this reason). Cook has been playing terrific, I wouldn't want anyone else here, and we'd be worse without him. However, it is entirely fair (and accurate from my viewpoint) for an external observer to say that Taylor means more to the Colts than Cook means to the Bills this year.

He's talking about a parlay type bet. When you mix together more than one outcome in a combined bet. The odds of each of these events happening may be good, but by combining them the reduced odds of them both happening result in a higher payout than independent bets would each have. This lets you feel like and root for more probable events, but still have the upside of betting longshots. A teaser is a parlay where you can adjust one or more of the betting lines to adjust the odds of the overall parlay. Usually this is for a bet that you really like, but stick in another side bet to get the payoff you want for the package. In this case he seems to feel that Bal winning straight up is a lock, and the bills +8 is a lock. In this scenario the "main bet" for him is probably the Ravens straight up, but he "teased" it with Bills +8 to improve the payout for what he feels to be little additional risk.

I would say FO is looking up this week. We just saw a good chunk of our offseason moves (FA and draft) in action for the first time. It looked good. Without Bosa/Hoect/O..../Hairston/Hancock/Thompson we are a bottom 10 defense. With all of them in we are probably a top 10 defense. We absolutely needed to turn over the defense from last year and we didn't really get to see what was done until yesterday. Obviously it needs to continue, including against top tier competition, but that defense looked better (this year and forward looking with youth) than we have seen since Von's injury/hyde.

Every team (especially true this season) has areas that need improvement. Despite the warts we are still on of the better teams in the league with one of the easiest schedules.

This has been a good reset of reality. We're not definitively the best team in the league. The gaps that we have in depth (like every team has) are becoming clearer. There are things to work on. However..... The bills are 4-2 this season, have one of the best consistent offense for multiple years running, and play many teams that are far more flawed than we are. They are going to win more games than they lose by a significant margin, most likely win the division, and still be competing for AFC champ. I still see us between 11-14 wins.

I didn't see the comments you're referring to. Everything I've heard from Josh is on players (himself first and foremost) executing better. If you have examples of him blaming coaching or talent acquisition, I'd love to see/read what I missed.