DCOrange

If the award MUST go to a QB and the Bills miss the playoffs, Lamar or Dak would probably be my choice. He's been mostly great this season and has just been let down by his teammates time after time. Basically the opposite of Purdy where he's been the relative weak link (don't really mean this to be a diss even though it sounds like it; he's played well, but his playmakers have been remarkable) of the team more often than not but his teammates have been good enough that it doesn't matter. Lamar is missing the touchdowns on his resume compared to the others, but it's basically just because once they've gotten to the goal-line, they've let their RBs pound it in basically every time. Gus Edwards has 11 rushing TDs this season and his longest TD is 7 yards; after that it's 3. This isn't the case for any of the other MVP candidates. But again, I really think it should be between Josh Allen (assuming Buffalo at least makes the playoffs), McCaffrey, and Tyreek Hill for MVP this season. I don't think guys like Lamar, Dak, Purdy, etc. are actually deserving this season. It's an underwhelming season for QB play.

Lance started and finished a grand total of 3 games, one of which was in a monsoon that barely resembled a football game (where Lance ended up with the most passing and rushing yards from either team). Kittle missed two of those three games and McCaffrey wasn't on the team yet. Clearly Lance was disappointing enough in practice/was just injured too often for SF to give him a real chance, but I don't think it was really ever proven that the offense wouldn't work with him. And obviously the offense worked quite well with Jimmy G at the helm, who is a below average starting QB at best. Having said all that, I think it's pretty clear Purdy is the best of the three QBs. I don't think he's proven himself to be on the same tier as guys like Mahomes, Allen, Lamar, etc. though, and I don't think he's the most valuable player on his own team, much less in the league (unless you maybe want to argue we should start factoring contracts into the MVP discussion in which his contract is obviously a huge bargain).

JJ and Quadir finally playing well these last few games has been a game changer. Hopefully they can keep it up.

I think Allen wins MVP if we win the division. If we are a wild card, he’ll have to play his ass off to have a chance. Missing the playoffs is obviously not an option if he wants to win MVP. Really though this feels like a year where a non-QB should win, be it McCaffrey or Tyreek. The QBs have all been pretty blah this season.

Looks to me like both feet are in bounds by a good amount when he gains full possession. Guessing your definition of possession is just a lot stricter than the NFL’s. He bobbled it and then secured it with both hands and had both feet down at that point and dragged his knee inbounds too. I think it was probably a very easy TD call on review. The last INT is the one that really could have gone either way. I think with the super slomo we have now, it probably wasn’t an INT but I think it was close enough that it made sense not to overturn it.

even Sharp’s video isn’t really slow enough to tell but this one is slow enough that I think it actually might not have touched. That has to be one of the closest calls I’ve ever seen.

In the very least, the new staff is working their tails off so far. I think we're up to like 8 four star recruits coming to visit this weekend, and it sounds like we're fairly certain a couple of them will end up committing. Would be a gigantic step in the right direction for us.

To be fair, if the DPI gets called, the running clock part probably doesn’t occur since they would have been at like the 5 yard line.

I didn't like Copeland much in high school but we'll see. Hopefully Chance comes back next year too to provide help there. And if we do ultimately lose by Judah and JJ, I would expect we hit the transfer portal so who knows really what the team will end up looking like. At any rate, I'm having fun watching the team again.

I'm not so optimistic about this year's team, but I generally like the direction we're headed in. The part that's really a bummer is we have IMO two starters on the team as currently constructed (Judah and JJ) and theoretically have what we're lacking coming in next season (Freeman as a stud forward and Elijah as the shooter we're sorely lacking), but there's a decent chance Judah and JJ both move on and then we may end up stuck in a similar position again. If we can convince at least one of the two guards to return for a junior season, we might have something here. Having said that, I'm not ready to take it to the bank that Freeman and Elijah will be studs yet either; I'm really glad both of them should be on TV pretty regularly/will have officially tracked stats to monitor how they're doing rather than just seeing highlight clips. I tend to be confident in Freeman like I was in Judah; Elijah I need to see more of.

Definitely a bit nervous about the defense. It's so nice to have a pair of guards as quick as Judah and JJ are though. JJ's jumper a bit concerning too; I feel like he had a reputation as a pretty good shooter but the numbers and eye test are both not good right now.

I think between this and Cover1's analysis, we're left with sort of a conundrum in terms of what you want in an offensive coordinator. Do you want to lean into what makes Allen who he is and create sort of a pedal to the medal offense that is very high risk-high reward in terms of the play design, or do you want a coach that can try to reign in some of the bad stuff (and likely some of the good stuff too) that comes along with Allen playing the way he wants? I tend to lean towards the latter personally, which seems to be Dorsey's thinking as well but I think there's a very fair argument to be made in both directions. When I watch Solak's video, I tend to agree with his takeaways that Allen is making the wrong decision in a lot of cases (and the very damning stats re: his accuracy on deep balls this year definitely matches the eye test). Cover1 seems to place more of the blame on Dorsey, but it seems to me like a lot of the plays where he's blaming Dorsey are issues of Allen beginning the play by already reading the wrong side of the field or forcing passes instead of just taking the easy yards to keep the chains moving. I definitely understand the frustrations that people are having with Dorsey though, but I also think a decent amount of it simply boils down to defenses playing a lot of two high looks to defend the deep ball while Allen simultaneously struggles to throw the deep ball and also wants to throw it deep as much as possible, which isn't really a great combination.

More PTSD from watching him for the Bucs lol

Unfortunately he is not. I think he’s literally the lowest rated pass blocker in the NFL since he joined the league on PFF and having watched most Bucs games every year, he routinely missed reads and got Brady lit up. He was also low key terrible at short yardage runs and also zero threat for long runs. He does have good hands as a receiver though (but we should be wanting Cook to get those reps). I think Brady, like so many before him, loves the idea of Fournette without realizing what kind of player he actually is (and Tampa admittedly had nothing at RB so they were desperate for any sort of veteran help they could find). Still, if he’s just a third RB or whatever you can do worse. If we had any semblance of a RB screen game, he could be helpful there.

Fournette has long been one of my least favorite RBs to watch/have to root for as a kinda sorta Bucs fan. Hopefully this is purely a depth signing. He made Tom Brady take a lot more hits than he should have due to his horrendous pass blocking and I believe is ranked among the worst pass blockers in the league every season since he was drafted. Not a good runner either.

It was picked up because it wasn’t a penalty. At the time the pass was thrown, his back foot is less than a yard downfield, therefore no penalty. https://x.com/benvolin/status/1716471004346642806?s=46&t=LzlSJJUF6bvvDA1Ph6jBcA

Feel like you have to be more pessimistic now than you were at the beginning of the season unless you were weirdly low on this team to begin with.

Yep, this is the alarming part to me. I don’t at all buy what Allen is selling when he says he’s fully healthy right now. He looks like his arm is bothering him on the field. I’m willing to let some of the coaching stuff slide for now in the hopes that they’re treating the season as a marathon and will ramp up the QB runs as Allen gets healthy, ramp up Kincaid’s usage as he gets more experience, etc. (but if that stuff doesn’t change, I will be quite upset). But things like running into sides of the field that the defense is overloading and generally processing the defense slowly are serious concerns to me, and particularly frustrating because as you mentioned, we know from experience that Allen can do better.

The kinda sorta workaround I've found is I just select one of the multiviews of 4 games that I'm interested in and then once that loads up, I'll click on the Bills game from there. Then, any time you want to switch feeds you just hit back once and it brings you back to that multiview and you can select one of the other 3 games quickly.

If Chance is 100% healthy, I suspect he'll be a better offensive player than Bell too, but shooting is definitely an edge for Bell and may make him a necessary starter for us given the other guys expected to start. First time in years that I'm legitimately excited about a Syracuse basketball team. Pretty high ceiling for this group if things click, and it feels like they should probably be back in the tournament next season.

To be fair, it makes perfect sense that he'd be putting that out into the public right now. He wants to stay in the draft if at all possible so it makes sense that he's at least projecting that he's all in on it. But yeah, I'm kinda back to assuming he's gone and if he returns, it'll be a lovely surprise.

The short answer is yes. He just didn't put in the same level of effort that Red is putting in and there was only so much Red/GMac could do as the assistant coaches. Recruits want to see the head coach and when they're getting recruited by 10 schools and 9 of them are sending their HC out to meet with them and the 10th is sending an assistant...it just doesn't look good. Other schools told recruits they didn't know who they'd actually play for at Syracuse and it worked; kids don't want to go to a school and then find out the coach is gone and they may no longer be wanted. Boeheim vetoed some recruits that Red/GMac had worked and had ready to commit. Point #2 isn't really Boeheim's fault; just kinda natural when you get up there in age. #1 is pretty much inexcusable. #3 depends on the reasons involved. I think it also helps that Red and the new assistant are extremely connected in the DMV and that's where we got guys like Freeman to suddenly be a lot more interested in Syracuse. Today is the day for the Judah Mintz decision; seems like everything has gone dark and nobody knows what he's thinking right now. My own speculation is that he's probably holding out hope that he'll get a team give him some good news before the deadline...I think he's probably looking for any reason to stay in the draft, but selfishly hoping he comes back to school (mainly because I want us to be good, but also because I think he's one of the rare Syracuse early entries where he could improve his draft stock by returning).

I haven't heard anything personally, but I've heard from a couple people that do have sources with the Syracuse staff. One said the staff thinks it's 50/50 on Judah coming back at this point. The other said the staff is expecting him back.

FWIW, seems like Judah had a relatively disappointing first day at the NBA Combine. Measured as one of the smallest players in terms of wingspan and weight and was below-average in the shooting drills. Had a few good athleticism scores though, including one of the top 5 fastest lane agility times in the last 5 years. He's going to want to kick ass in the scrimmages and team workouts to solidify his draft position.

I've heard it's pretty much a done deal we're getting him. Hopefully he fits in well but I'm more nervous about the PG position at this point as it's starting to sound more and more like Judah is gone.