DCOrange

I think a case could be made for John Brown. Tyreek Hill clearly is not deserving this year, though there's a few other WRs that were snubbed that you could argue ahead of Brown also. I personally would have given Brown the nod though. Beyond him, I don't think anyone else really has much of a case; Edmunds maybe being the closest. Hyde, Poyer, and Milano have obviously been very good, but they don't really have the numbers to get on to the Pro Bowl teams. Phillips has the impressive sack totals, but I think the underlying numbers (i.e. pressures) suggest the sacks have been a fluke/luck. So basically, Tre is obviously very deserving. I think Brown should have made it but it's debatable. I don't think Edmunds should have made it, but he's close. The rest I don't think should have been particularly close.

I’m not positive, but I think Hughes is leading the team in pressures by a decent margin.

Yeah there’s some really egregious ones that made it too. Brees making it over Dak while missing 1/3 of the season is insane too. Likewise with Jalen Ramsey.

The Pro Bowl doesn't really matter, so not worth getting too upset. But like Gunner said, I honestly don't think it's all that wrong that Buffalo only had one pro bowler. You could make a case for some other guys (particularly Brown in my opinion), but this is more of a team of solid players rather than a bunch of great players carrying the team. I'm really curious about the underlying numbers for Phillips. Obviously the sack numbers are great, but for example, he's not among the best DTs in terms of pass-rush win rate (which, ironically, Oliver is), and PFF rates him very low. PFF probably rates him far too low, but they don't just make the stuff up; I'd be really curious why they think so little of his play. Totally a guess on my part, but I'm kinda wondering if Phillips' sacks are mainly seen as coverage sacks or plays where we get pressure off the edge that forces the QB to step up into Phillips rather than Phillips breaking through to the QB himself. Edit: Not the complete answer I was looking for, but I saw a tweet from this morning that Phillips has 22 pressures this season; that's probably not even top 5 on the Bills. I know Hughes was past that a month ago and 3 or 4 others were right around there too. He's been awesome this year. Could probably make a case for a different corner to be in his place, but he isn't a bad choice by any means (like Pouncey for example).

My guess is we ultimately go DE round 1 and WR round 2

I imagine they'll get a small fine and that will be that. Seemed like the NFL was already putting out feelers for the idea that they don't view this as a big deal.

Alex Collins was on my list of RBs to pursue last offseason and Josh Norman was on my list of potential trade candidates coming into the year (before he seemingly fell flat on his face again). I still think both of them would make a decent amount of sense.

My basic plan for free agency by position: QB: No significant outside signings RB: Probably looking for a cheap compliment to Singletary; some examples would be Peyton Barber, Dwayne Washington, or Buck Allen WR: Probably pass unless Amari would come here TE: No significant outside signings OLine: Not going to pretend I can properly evaluate the free agent options here Edge: If they want to bring back Shaq, that's fine, but I'd probably rather pursue outside options like Ngakoue, Armstead, or Clowney. DT: Fine with bringing Phillips back; Javon Hargrave would interest me as well. LB: No significant outside signings CB: No significant outside signings Safety: No significant outside signings

Nobody said this. Anyways, I promise I'll stay out of this now lol.

Alright, I said I wasn't going to continue going back and forth, but it seems you misunderstood my point. I'm not trying to be mean here; I'm just attempting to be as clear as I possibly can be because I really haven't shifted my argument at all. Kick and punt returns are worth nearly nothing. Because kick and punt returns are worth nearly nothing, that means that having a player active solely to handle those roughly worthless plays means that that player is bringing roughly no value to the team. It is indeed an overall special teams complaint, specifically in regard to kick and punt returns. Andre Roberts is specifically a kick and punt returner and nothing else; therefore the complaint applies to him. One last time: It's not specifically Andre Roberts that I have a problem with; it's having anybody that is a dedicated kick/punt returner. It's the same argument as hating when we used to have a kickoff specialist. It's not that our kickoff specialists were bad at kickoffs; it was the fact that having a kickoff specialist, no matter how good they were, was poor use of a roster spot. The same is basically true of kick/punt returners in today's NFL.

It doesn't matter who is to blame. Those penalties are coming no matter who the punt returner is and they're coming for every team in the NFL. That's a big reason why punt returns are essentially worthless; you're as likely to lose yards as you are to gain them even if you have an elite returner. We would probably be better off selling out to block every punt so that we can't possibly be called for illegal block in the back and then just fair catch the punt (or let it bounce if we think it'll be a touchback). The EPA on our punt returns relative to the worst team in the league is a difference of 6.5 points in 13 games. The only team with an EPA of more than 1 point per game relative to the worst team in the league is the Saints, who are 6 points better than the #2 team. Anywho, don't really want to argue back and forth on the night that we clinched a playoff spot. Let's just agree to disagree and enjoy the postseason

You literally pointed to two plays that had negative or no value as evidence of Roberts having value.

So you agree those returns didn't count for anything then.

I really do feel like Tyrod might be better at this point in Rivers' career. Probably not worth benching him at this point though since they aren't competing for a playoff spot anyways. Respectful thing is to just let Rivers play it out this year and then draft his replacement in the offseason.

I imagine it's probably never come up in Dak's career before. He probably didn't know there was a difference, but regardless, the ref asked him if he was sure, Dak responded by saying they want to defer to the 2nd half and then the ref decided to just ignore that. It's probably not the ref's responsibility to do the ole "Are you suuuuure you want to do that?" thing, but once the ref asked Dak to clarify, he should have abided by what Dak actually said instead of just doing whatever he wanted to do.

I’m betting whoever chose to kick plays Madden; they’ve apparently screwed this up in every football video game ever made. What I don’t really understand is: how do you get it right weeks 1-14 and then get it wrong in week 15?

Per FootballOutsiders (I know I know), our return game is 10 points better than the worst return team in the league. Less than 1 point per game. I’m not sure any of our reserves are good enough to warrant benching Andre, but I think it could be argued that Andre isn’t really bringing any value anyways so might as well try the WR that gives us a different aspect to the offense. At any rate, we can agree to disagree. Hopefully we can move on after the year is up when we hopefully have a more talented roster.

Basically playing just as well as us the last two games with Duck and I’m sure in their minds he’ll get better, not worse.

I think most would agree he’s a good returner. Where we differ is that being a good returner still isn’t valuable in today’s NFL

The interesting thing about this week’s game is I bet both team’s fans would tell you their team is better both offensively and defensively. Gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out.

Yes, they were pretty much the first group to actually take that into account. That's what their adjusted completion % numbers are for.

That's certainly your opinion but I think the MVP race is over barring something catastrophic happening. I think Vegas had Lamar's MVP chances at roughly 80% before last night's 5 TD game.

It seems like a pretty ***** article overall, but that part isn't really their fault. He was supposed to be back this week up until this morning.

Assuming most people didn't seek out the actual article that Talbot's excerpt was pulled from; it's basically two PFF guys; one guy makes his case for his Vegas pick and the other guy does a counterpoint. In this case, the guy was making his case for the Steelers. I'm not sure if the article was edited after the fact or if Talbot removed the text himself, but the writer mentioned that it's obviously a very small sample size for Hodges so far, but he apparently has the highest grade in the league from a clean pocket the last two weeks. Not mentioned in the article, there's a side-by-side comparison of Allen and Hodges in one of their other articles with the following numbers (Allen on the left, Hodges on the right): Passer rating when clean: 98.8 vs. 111.5 Passer rating under pressure: 54.2 vs. 76.0 Big Time Throw %: 1.98% vs. 4.72% Turnover Worthy Play %: 4.55% vs. 1.89% On the flipside, Talbot didn't include the guy making the case against Pittsburgh, which I honestly think was way worse as he was legitimately just making fun of Bills fans instead of making an argument in favor of them:

Idk if Duke is good enough to sacrifice the kick returner, but it's definitely something I'd be thinking about. Roberts has been good in the return game this year; unfortunately, being good in the return game is effectively worthless. According to Football Outsiders, his return skills (which have been among the best in the league this year) is good for roughly 5 points above the average team (0.36 points per game). Compare this to Baltimore, who literally just let all the punts hit the ground and roll against us; we're getting 5 more points over the course of the season than they are out of the return game. As the OP mentioned, playing a guy purely for their return skills is just a waste of a roster spot at this point; it would be like using a roster spot on a kickoff specialist. Duke might be worthless too, but I think it's absolutely worth thinking about if perhaps Duke's ability to make contested catches could provide more than a fraction of a point per game for us.