DCOrange

Hughes and Addison are already factored into us having $10 mil in cap space. There are a lot of levers we can pull to free up room though; some that are relatively painless (cutting Darryl Williams) and some that would be a bit more painful (cutting Beasley). Just messing around with Spotrac's Manage Roster feature, some money saving moves (including some that probably aren't ideal or necessary): Restructure Diggs - $7.1 mil Restructure Tre - $7.1 mil Restructure Dawkins - $5.3 mil Restructure Star - $3.4 mil (can cut him and save a little bit more but it's not a big difference) Restructure Milano - $4.8 mil Release Morse - $7.5 mil Release Darryl - $5.3 mil Release Beasley - $6.1 mil Release Poyer - $6.7 mil Trade Edmunds - $12.7 mil Add up all of that and we're at $76.6 mil in cap space.

I was finally able to find film of Quadir Copeland and Justin Taylor's IMG team. Only one game so far, so obviously dealing with small sample sizes, but my skinny on the two of them: Copeland: Impressive passing ability, but pretty much is always attempting no-look passes instead of just making the game easy for himself. That carries over to his shots as well; all 10 of his shots were at the rim, but he finished just 3/10 as they were pretty much all difficult shots where he had to contort his body to shoot around the defender. Shot 7/7 at the free throw line! Racked up 5 or 6 offensive rebounds Couldn't have been worse on the defensive end unless he just sat at half court cherry picking while his team played 4 on 5. Taylor: Shot 1/3 at the rim, 1/3 from mid-range, and 2/6 from the 3 point line. 5/6 at the free throw line though! Moves pretty well off-ball and makes his decisions to attack or keep the ball moving quickly. Comfortable shooting off screens and his mechanics are mostly good. There's 1 or 2 things I might nitpick but he's further along in that regard than Copeland and Chris Bunch. 2nd biggest player on the team and plays the back line of the zone and finished with 0 rebounds as far as I could tell. We definitely have more of a need for Copeland's skillset, but if he doesn't change his ways, there's no way Boeheim (or whoever could theoretically replace Boeheim next season) will play him. The good news is it's really as simple as him just deciding to play with any effort and I think his ceiling is pretty high if he does. Taylor is the most polished of the three recruits that I've seen so far. The rebounding is obviously scary considering what we're experiencing this season, but his offensive game is good enough to potentially play as a freshman.

First half was the best ball movement and tempo we've played with all season. Second half we reverted back to iso ball again and just fell apart.

I’m afraid Villanova just gave everyone the formula to shut down our offense. Just play tight, stay at home, don’t help. We don’t have anyone that can get by their man. The best we can manage is contested floaters from the Boeheims. We might be okay enough in the regular season to survive but anyone that really game plans for us should be able to make it difficult for us to score and we obviously know our defense isn’t good. We unfortunately lost the one player that was able to create easy looks for people.

Another day another embarrassing effort on the glass. This is I think the 3rd time this season we struggled to grab even 50% of available defensive rebounds.

I don’t think it’s squarely on anyone. It was a 4 point game and a lot of mistakes made. Any one of them fixed could have flipped this to a W. Coaches made some mistakes, though I think as always, a lot of people are mad at a bad result rather than a bad decision. Skme great plays and potential TDs were taken off the board by drops and missed reads. Just a lot of self inflicted wounds last night and that’s especially unfortunate considering how close it was and what the stakes were.

Watched my first Chris Bunch game today. My basic take through one game is that he's more of a run and jump defender than someone who will get down in his stance and go to work. Could make him a decent fit for our zone and press, but he didn't really disrupt anything defensively either so sort of a mixed bag. Seems like there might be potential there though. Offensively, he essentially plays as a spot up shooter and he shot 3/8 from 3 in this game. Having said that, he shoots with a very wide base and his lower body and upper body aren't really working together; I suspect that Boeheim will make some significant tweaks to his jumpshot. He's already considered a good shooter for a high schooler, so maybe cleaner mechanics will turn him into a great shooter. Or it could always go the other way too. At any rate, him showing up at Syracuse with a different looking shot is my personal expectation. Outside of the jumpers, he has a high and loose handle; I don't think we'll be leaning on him for creation any time soon but he did have one or two nice passes in this game. He seems to be in the same sort of mold as Woody Newton, who I did not like in high school, but I think Bunch is more talented at this point in time.

Edwards has shown really nice touch around the rim, but maybe more importantly, just keeping the ball high when he catches it is absolutely huge and it’s an issue that has plagued almost all of our big men over the years. Still too weak on the glass (but that can be said about pretty much all our players) but he’s improved a lot over the off-season. Cole finally got it going in the 2nd half too. Once he starts shooting like his normal self again, it should hopefully change the complexion of the team.

The definition for blind side block has nothing to do with being blindsided. It’s purely about the way the blocker is facing and the force of the block.

By the letter of the law, it seems like the correct call to me but my god, what a stupid rule for plays like that to be a penalty.

Huge performances from JG3 and Jimmy last night. Pretty gutsy win after we predictably went cold in the 2nd half and let them take the lead. Also, coming out with what was essentially a 1-3-1 zone was one of the most shocking things I've ever seen from Syracuse.

Kadary has mostly struggled for Seton Hall, including losing his starting spot already. This team would look so much better if we had someone like him that can beat his man off the dribble and get into the paint though. I think we pretty much all knew Boeheim was playing Guerrier to his strengths. The issue is that Guerrier wanted an opportunity to expand his game to show off NBA traits. Unfortunately I just think he doesn’t have NBA traits. Shocked how bad Oregon has been as a whole though.

Eventually he’ll stop taking all our scorers off the floor at the same time and starting mixing our talent around a bit and that will help but it just isn’t a very talented bunch to begin with.

Another hideous performance. I’ll never understand the people that thought this might be a top 25 team. There just isn’t much talent here and the talent we have doesn’t fit together to form a team.

Swider eventually knocking down the shots we know he usually makes should improve things a lot, but at the end of the day, this team has too many uncorrectable issues to be more than a bubble team IMO. Three years in and Girard still folds against ball pressure and he’s our only ball handler (outside of Torrence who is pretty much unplayable right now). Benny being a complete liability on the offensive end so far has really hurt our upside.

Yes he made it.

I’m hopeful but a part of me wonders if he and Devin Hester split “special teams” votes so that neither one gets in this year.

It doesn’t matter if they actually lead to points for this metric. It matters if they lead to expected points (i.e. how likely a team is to score as a result of the INT). A pick 6 on first down at the goal line would be the worst possible play in this system since it’s essentially a guaranteed 14 point swing. So again, pretty much every Allen INT either took points off the board for us or handed points to the other team (the fact that opponents routinely shot themselves in the foot after the fact doesn’t matter). That is not normal QB play as evidenced by the fact that he’s nearly the worst in the league in this regard. You can argue it’s just bad luck and we’re talking about 10 or so INTs so it’s probably not a meaningful sample size to extrapolate from, but nobody is extrapolating anyways. They’re just saying he’s been nearly the worst in the league in terms of EPA subtracted from his INTs and saying if that improves, it’ll help the team.

It’s specifically the expected points added (and subtracted) via INTs. So throwing an INT when you’re about to score is bad, but throwing an INT that puts the other team in position to score is also bad. In the week 2 blowout against Miami, he got intercepted at our own 25 yard line, instantly putting Miami in scoring position. The INT against Houston gave them the ball at our 11 or 12 yard line. Same deal with the one against Tennessee. His first pick against Jacksonville took at least a field goal if not TD off the board and the 2nd put Jacksonville in field goal range. The INT against the Jets put them in field goal range (though not a gimme at that distance). I don’t think the stats were updated through the Colts game, but if they were, one of his INTs was returned into FG range. Long story short, the only “meaningless” INT he’s had this season in terms of expected points added was his first INT against Indy. All of the others have either taken points off the board for us or almost surely handed points to the other team.

I think that's mostly just fodder for the press. Beane wanted to improve the pass rush because everyone wants a good pass rush and ours was not good.

I do feel like Allen has just been off target more often than he was a year ago, but one flaw in the completion % above expected metric is that you don't really know if it's the QB or the WR. For example, ESPN was running with a graphic showing the comp % above expected in the preseason for the rookie QBs and how Trey Lance was at like -20% or something absurdly low like that (obviously dealing with small sample sizes in the preseason, but I digress). But the biggest factor in that was that his WRs were dropping around 20% of his passes. I can't verify SportRadar's numbers as I believe that's some sort of premium subscription, but those "on-target percentages" that PFF and apparently SportRadar produce are probably better gauges of a QB's accuracy. I'm not sure what limitations there are with SportRadar but I couldn't help but notice that the author chose to cite their number specifically for passes to Diggs while citing a lower quality number for the overall passing; I wonder if SportRadar just doesn't have overall numbers or if the overall numbers wouldn't match the author's argument. At any rate, it was a nice breakdown in that article and certainly gives you a few things to keep an eye on moving forwards. We've pretty much been the least injured team in the league, and by some metrics, are literally the least injured.

He's talking about Australia Rules Football. It isn't soccer. It's where a lot of punters come from nowadays. It's an awesome sport.

If by "true draft busts" we mean it in the sense that you wasted a pick on a guy that should never ever start, it's hard to really point to anything honestly. If we're talking from the broader sense of guys that are disappointments/improper use of resources for where they were drafted (some of these are admittedly stretches): Phillips - maybe due to injury though Edmunds - gave up a lot for a LB that has been unremarkable up until this season IMO Ford - this is a given Singletary - this is a given Knox - was pretty much terrible until this season Epenesa - showed some nice flashes early in the season but is once again buried on the bench Moss - just hasn't done much Basham - just hasn't done much (obviously very early with him though) I think from the broader sense, Edmunds and Basham can be argued the other way (some people have been very high on Edmunds from Day 1 and it's obviously very early for Basham), but the others have obviously been disappointments the majority of their time here.

I mean, it's an objective fact lol. Knox, Edmunds, Star, and Brown have missed a couple games and that's pretty much it. Another way to look at it can be found on Spotrac, where they track the % of a team's salary cap tied up in players on reserve lists. https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/injured-reserve/ Buffalo is #31 out of 32 with $5 million worth of players on reserve. The Chiefs are dead last at $4.4 mil while the average team (excluding Buffalo) has $22.5 mil on reserve (Denver is #1 at $40.8 mil). Buffalo is almost always near the bottom of the league in terms of salary wasting away on reserve lists; be it weirdly good luck or something our medical team does, we're pretty much always significantly healthier than our opponents.