CincyBillsFan

On the Cowherd show Greg Cosell, whose opinions on QB play I respect greatly, said Allen played at a high end level and that as a #1 WR Diggs has to make the catch that turned into an INT.

You're joking right? This is sarcasm right?

The multiple elite defensive players & defensive coaches on the Jets team had a lot to do with Allen playing like he did that Monday night.

I have enough to worry about then to dwell on Lamar Jackson's receivers dropping his passes. Couldn't care less. I'll eave that to folks on the Ravens board to ponder. I disagree with you about Allen's game. By every statistical & expert evaluation I've seen he had a very good to great game. And my own eyes on watching the game confirm this. What we saw Sunday was a great example of the fact that football is a TEAM game. IMO the most concerning thing to me was that even though Allen played very well the offense could not get on track until late in the game. I'm hoping and confident that this was a one off in which a jet lagged team played poorly against a rested team. It would be like if 80% of your players were suffering from the flu on game day versus a team completely healthy.

I suspect that this is exactly how he would have wanted Allen to respond. Diggs has been very vocal about not making excuses and anything else from Allen would have come across as patronizing.

Keep in mind the NFL is not a static system: * some of those filling in for injured Bills may turn out to be studs * there are a lot more injuries in this seasons future. Who knows who might go down changing the landscape dramatically for the Bills chances.

No one is saying it's sacrilegious to criticize Allen. When you throw that out you lose all credibility in my eyes. It reduces you to being a troll. BTW, WR's break wide open deep all the time but for a variety of reasons are seldom even the recipients of a completed let alone hit in stride for a TD. On that play a PERFECT pass is a TD. A GREAT pass results in a 50 yard completion. Allen made a great pass. Period end of story. I wish he had made the perfect pass there but he didn't. So what.

What part of this don't you understand? "He also blames Diggs for the interception after watching a few replays. He says the ball was a tad underthrown but it went 70 yards in the air and Diggs gets both hands on it - that's a situation where he says Diggs simply has to win the catch."

Oh please. I'm critical of Allen when it's warranted. As a Bills fan why would I want to make stuff up just to be critical of our franchise QB especially given that most of the time Allen plays at a very good to elite level.

I'm not down on Diggs at all. The guy has been elite every year he's been a Bill. He's off to a great start this season to. He has earned the right to drop a pass now and then just like Allen has earned the right to make a bad throw. My point on that play was that there were some posters throwing it out as an example of a bad Allen throw when in fact by NFL standards it was a great throw that traveled 65 - 70 yards in the air. If you go back to 2020 when we beat the Raiders Diggs made a high point catch on a ball that was almost a carbon copy of the throw Allen made on Sunday with the exception that the Sunday throw was 10 yards further. This is a great and disturbing point. But given the offenses performance over the previous 3 weeks I'm going with jet lag. No one is saying this. But it's enlightening that you try to claim people are.

My main concern is that McD's reaction to the loss of key defensive personnel is to pull the offense in even more tightly and use it to protect the D. That means emphasizing TOP and long drives. This will negatively impact the big plays that make the Bills O most deadly. IMO this would be a mistake and likley exasperate the problems associated with losing some of our best Defensive players. I'm hoping that the Bills staff gets together and rethinks the strategic direction of the team in light of the injuries and decides to open up the offense and defense. That is return to a big play more Allen centric (including Allen running the ball) offense. And on D take even more risks knowing you will give up big plays but also get more 3 & outs and TO's. Giving up a 70 yard TD pas on an all out blitz at least gets the O back on the field fast against a worn out D. The worst thing IMO that can happen is teams routinely go on 15 play TD drives that keeps out O stewing on the bench for 8 minutes.

I think they both are students of recent NFL history and have only to go back to the Brady Bucs SP win to see that a team playing very average with a 7 - 5 record was able to go on a role and win a Super Bowl. I also think that they would tell you that the SB window is still open this year but would be open even wider if they were unleashed more.

Historically isn't that rather common for NFL offenses? There are more moving parts then the defense and at times the machine gets gummed up and nothing works well. Fans, including me, then try to ID the cause: it was the OC, the QB, the O line, the WR's, the RB's, the game plan, etc, etc, and etc. Yet in the end this may simply be the fate of every complex system at certain times and the key to success in the NFL is to minimize those times when the offense craps the bed. I always think back to the 1991 AFC championship game against Denver when a healthy Bills offense, at home and on a beautiful weather (for Jan) day could only score 3 points against Denver. And this was in spite of a season where they had one of the best offenses in NFL history and were loaded with future HOF players. I'm also starting to think that defenses have largely caught up with the offenses. I wouldn't be shocked if point totals plummet as the season goes on. Sure Miami got their 70 points but that was likely an aberration. I haven't looked at the numbers closely but this season seems like we're getting a lot of very low scoring outputs by some teams on certain days. Also the TO's seem up and the number of defensive TD's seems very high to.

This may apply to you but it doesn't to many of the posts I see on 2BD criticizing Allen. Obviously no sane football fan can openly trash Allen. His production and achievements make that impossible for all but the most hateful lunatics. But what these people can do is go after Allen in a classic passive/aggressive way. I see it in the football media as well and I think it arises from so many people being so wrong about Allen's NFL prospects. They went way out on the limb telling us Allen could never be an NFL starter let alone an elite franchise QB. I can't speak to other posters ultimate motivations on criticizing Allen. But I can see patterns. I do believe that you are not an Allen hating person criticizing for the sake of criticizing. I don't agree with you but debating you on Allen is part of what makes 2BD a great place to talk Bills football. But there are other posters who either have never gotten over trashing Allen on draft day or who are simply trolling Bills fans.

How many air yards was the pass? There is a limit to how far even Allen can throw the ball. In the article that Happy attached it says "70 yards" but I didn't think it traveled that far. But anything over 60 is the realistic maximum distance for even a guy like Allen. And again that was a very catchable ball that a lot of the WR's in the NFL make. In fact I suspect that Diggs catches that exact same pass 4 out of every 5 times.

That's almost as many degrees of separation as exists between everything and Kevin Bacon.

Yea and you made it all about what Allen wasn't doing right. Which wasn't what the guy was saying in that first paragraph.

Ignore this new angle the bitter Allen hating deadenders are throwing out. Remember how it was that he wasn't working out in the off season; or that he was making to many commercials; or that he was going to to many golf courses; or drinking to much; or dating Hollywood starlets, etc, etc, etc. Then after week one Allen was regressing, he couldn't control his impulses he was destined to play on a sugar rush in every game. He was careless with the ball. But after 4 straight games in which Allen has played good to great and in which he has been phenomenally productive and careful with the ball these people have to come up with new reasons to trash Allen. The two most recent are: * Allen isn't a big enough cheerleader on the sideline and doesn't get in the faces of his teammates enough - you know "leadership" stuff. * Allen doesn't audible out of run plays enough. Trust me, even if Allen leads the Bills to a Super Bowl win these people will come out of the woodwork with their criticisms at the first sign of trouble.

Nuanced! Oh please. The only "nuance" I see is that you're going after Allen from a different perspective. The fact is that if you were to list the top 10 reasons why the Bills lost to the Jags on Sunday Allen not changing a couple of running plays based on pre snap looks would not be one of them. So yea I guess it is nuanced. Legit criticism of Allen is fine. But you people come up with the weakest, least relevant and flat out strangest stuff to go after Allen with. And then when Bills fans on a Bills message board push back and call you guys out we're labeled "homers" or that we view any criticism of Allen as "sacrilege".

There are all sorts of reasons the run game can get blown up. The alt 22 reviews conclusion on Allen was: "Allen played terrific and really wasn't to blame at all for any of our passing struggles." What part of Allen played terrific do you have hard time understanding?

Oh please. This is utter garbage. Throwing out Allen's contract as reason that he should never screw up (if he even did screw up) pre snap calls is ridiculous. Claiming that because Allen makes more money then the entire coaching staff means he should do the coaching to? This is either trolling or crazy talk. Allen is a bargain from a contract standpoint. He's what the 10th highest paid QB while easily being the 2nd best QB in the NFL. Judas Priest.

What part of this alt 22 review did you not understand? -As far as the passing game, Joe said that Allen played terrific and really wasn't to blame at all for any of our passing struggles. He said there have been times in the past where he's seen Allen turn down easy completions, but in this game he was executing his reads the way they were designed and manipulating the pocket well. -He blames several of our stalled drives on skill players. Cook dropping a pass on the first drive, Knox dropping a pass on a 3rd down, Davis dropping a pass on a 2nd down, all of these he says the pass catcher definitely should have come down with them. He also blames Diggs for the interception after watching a few replays. He says the ball was a tad underthrown but it went 70 yards in the air and Diggs gets both hands on it - that's a situation where he says Diggs simply has to win the catch

I suspect it's a big reason.

We are definitely in the class of KC & the Eagles. If we played them this Sunday they would be close games that could go either way. I agree that TODAY on October 9 we are not in the same class as SF. No one in the NFL is. But that is also a completely irrelevant fact as what you are today rarely turns out to be what you are in week 17. Did you notice that at home Tua threw 2 INT's against the Giants? December Tua, if he's still playing, may not be nearly as formidable as September Tua has been.

As were last season's AFC conference championship runner ups.