Typical TBD Guy

Agreed. I would change the Vikings, Pats, and Ravens games to losses, and there you have it: 7-9. Not too shabby for a rebuilding year. Next season: First playoff berth since '99, first division title since '95, first playoff victory since '95??? 2008 season: first AFC championship since '93, first Super Bowl victory???!!!

You could probably count the number of true McGahee haters on 1 hand. The vast majority here think he's an excellent - though flawed - back who should be re-signed in the offseason. Those flaws are (or have been): 1. Blocking ability 2. Receiving ability 3. Breakaway speed 4. 3rd-down effectiveness 5. Red zone effectiveness 6. Questionable attitude Willis can improve on all of the above, and in fact, I think we have seen the noticeable improvement over the past few years. Problems 4 and 5 are not just a McGahee problem, but a coaching/OL/blocking problem too. Problem 1 was a major problem on one obvious play yesterday, but there were also many plays where McGahee did pick up his blocking assignment. The truth is that many of the top halfbacks in the league miss on a black now and then. We were spoiled with Thurman a bit, perhaps?

Your comeback was equally interesting - judiciously editing out my second sentence and focusing on my first 4 letters? I ask you, what was your opinion of the pass rush from our DE's on the plays where Pennington did not make the quick dump offs? Pennington had 29 passes; not all of them were of the quick release type.

STFU. There were lots of pass plays that developed beyond the first few seconds, and our DE's were MIA.

Becuase he has a NOODLE arm! I don't care if Pennington can execute drives with great precision and not turn over the ball 3 times a game. Can he throw beyond 40 yards?

Denney and Kelsay - 2nd round busts. Unfortunately, we only get to play Culpepper twice a season. Denney is great against the run, but gets swallowed up way too often on passing plays. Kelsay is becoming quite adept at collecting coverage sacks. Too bad he can't get sacks within the first 10 seconds of a play. Schobel - Will probably end up as one of the most overrated players in Buffalo history. I've never seen a DE with as many career sacks as he has go for as many streaks without generating any pressure whatsoever. DT's - I'll group them all together because I haven't paid as much individual attention to them as I have the DE's. But as a group, these guys don't look fast enough to create the kind of pass rush essential this D system needs to succeed. And the run D is still not good. The Jets, despite their asbysmal run game, were able to get the runs they needed to sustain drives after the first quarter. Our little DT's are getting abused as these games wear on. If this franchise is going to continue to hate drafting OL in the first few rounds, I at least hope we use those picks to land a few more DE's and DT's. Because we need them badly. There is good news, though: our LB's and DB's look well-suited to this new D, and should become dominant once our safeties get more experience and once TKO comes back.

Why do you guys do this to yourselves?! This game is OVER. Face the facts: this season is a rebuilding season. Just relax, enjoy the fact that we have pro football in Buffalo, and watch this last quarter and the rest of the season in the hopes for steady improvement and 110% effort.

Check out the OL and the offensive blocking in general. They !@#$ing SUCK. This loss is all on them. Them and our overrated pass rushers. Same old story - Buffalo can't win in the trenches.

Pennington is no Culpepper either, as we are unfortunately finding out.

Yeah, but the last one made perfect sense. It would have been a 45-yarder into the wind.

Pixy Guy cares too much about what Boomer and Collinsworth think of JPL.

! Sorry, man, but it's hard to take this seriously after looking at your profile pic!

OK, but at some point in time you WILL be interested in those two-minute drives. I love our D and ST, but we're NOT the 2000 Ravens and probably never will be. JP will be expected to do more than Trent Dilfer to win games. Fact is that all teams - even the really good ones - find themselves down by the 4th quarter at times. If you're never a threat to come back from this point deficit, then you won't be considered one of the "good teams" for long. And sometime down the line (2-3 seasons from now), the majority of Bills fans WILL be turning against JP if he's consistently unable to lead the offense in a late-game comeback drive. I think that was Tornado's point. All he said was that he's not sold on JP yet, which IMO was a pretty tame statement because NONE OF US should be sold on him yet. If you already are, then you are either a relative of JP or a blind homer. Conversely, anyone who thinks JP is already an NFL bust: A. Doesn't understand football. B. Is still a closet Bledsoe slurper. C. Only looks at nfl.com stat tracker and not the games. D. Has no patience whatsoever.

Too late, tornado. The blind homers have already smelled the blood . While I'm 100% in agreement with the way Jauron has developed Losman in the first 2 road games, the reality is that you're right as well. At some point the training wheels need to come off if we want to beat teams above the level of Miami incompetence. Look for that to happen as early as game 4 (Minnesota home game) when the stakes of dropping an NFC game aren't as high, or as late as game 7 (NE home game) when we'll NEED to have a threatening passing game to win.

Sullivan is not a very insightful football writer. Drew sucks, TD sucks, the Bills for the past 5 years suck...these are all things I've been insisting about as vocally and eloquently as has Sullivan (as have many others around here). However, I think he gets a bad rep for the negativity because, quite frankly, he tells it like it is...and "it" has not been very positive since Homerun Throwup. He very rarely makes ridiculous, unreasonable statements. Many of his attacks against players and coaches have been backed up with stats, which is more than we can say for a lot of posters who - in typical fan fashion - make off-the-wall positive declarations about everything regarding the Bills and take personal offense to the slightest of slights from the media.

Bill, I'm with you 100% on your OL crusade. I'm convinced that this team will never make the playoffs until management starts getting serious about the OL. Reyes, Fowler, Gandy - all nice guys, great backups, subpar starters. Villarial is done. Peters is good but needs more experience, and should be a LT as well. Preston, Merz, Pennington, Butler - to be determined, but given the OL drafting success of Buffalo's scouts the past 20 years...I'm not holding my breath. Having said that, I'm still very happy with Marv's 1st draft and you should too. A few years from now, it may not be unreasonable to say that we scored a perfect 6 of 6 in terms of finding starters on D. Better than getting nothing, right (a la 2005 draft)? Next year, I fully expect Marv to address the OL and any other roster holes. This year, we just had too many problem areas - so management decided that the defense was to be fixed first. A reasonable decision. Also, it has been said many times over that the cover 2 is a defense that doesn't rely heavily on superstar CB's, and it places a greater emphasis on safeties with the athleticism and coverage skills of a CB. We kind of saw that in the 2006 draft. Moreover, we have PLENTY of cap room to sign Clements for market worth and still address other free agent needs next offseason. The only people convinced Clements is a goner are the armchair GM's of Two Bills Drive. My point being that a 1st round CB in the 2007 draft is not at all a foregone conclusion. I truly believe by this December that we'll only be 4 OL and 1 DT away from a team that can go deep into the playoffs year in and year out. And those 5 positions should and could be taken care of with our day 1 picks and free agency.

That's not really true. Where the safeties end up on the field depends a lot on what the offensive formations are. Many times, a safety will play like a LB regardless of the defensive system (46 D, cover 2, etc...) - more so for the SS than the FS.

That was a joke I first heard on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Wire's not Canton-bound. He's no Tasker. And he's not a special teams "ace." But he's good enough at it to still be hanging around the best ST unit in the NFL. Bobby April has a wealth of special teams knowledge, game film, and familiarity in practice to justify Wire's roster spot. You, stevewin, use the nfl.com play-by-play tracker to rehash your dead-horse-esque hatred for a backup SS . So don't get annoyed when a few of us around here aren't buying into the incessant Wire ST bashing. My advice? Let the Wire topic go. Or put the fact that you think he sucks at everything in your sig line, and move on from there. Otherwise, you're a good poster with lots of interesting stuff to say.

Agreed. The "nitpicking" that posters like bluv complain about is what makes for interesting football talk. It's possible that a fan can be both happy for a win and critical of certain performances at the same time. People are already declaring us to be a playoff team and are saying we're going to blow out the Jets next week . I, myself, am sticking with about a 6-10 season prediction until our run defense stops playing like sh-- and until JP shows that he can carry the team for a series or two. The future looks bright, but I'm not sure just how soon that future is - this season or next.

If you're not happy with JP's development as seen from this game, then you should take it up with the coaches (and the OL) as much as you do with JP. The coaches played it ultra-conservative with him. JP did what he was told to do, and he did it reasonably well (no turnovers and 90.7 QB rating). Kind of hard to argue with the result, though, eh? A road win in Miami in September with TKO and Vincent out.... Next week is the home opener against a suspect Jets secondary. Look for the coaches to open up the vertical game, and hopefully that "progress" of JP's that you're looking for will show itself.

Which is it? In the context of your sentence, it's "re-signed."

The OL was terrible....yet again. On some of what I thought were JP's worst plays, guys were charging at him completely unblocked. When this franchise wants to get serious about featuring an offense powered by JP and Willis, they will start replacing the Mike Gandy's and Chris Villarial's with actual starting-caliber talent.

Whitner, Simpson, Williams, Ellison....'nuff said. Youboty - the hammy injury and the family tragedy are (obviously) perfectly valid reasons for being inactive the past 2 games. This is a guy who would have probably been a mid-1st rounder next year if he stayed in college. I bet he'll be starting at nickel by the end of this season. McCargo - just look how long it's taken for Kelsay and Denney to come around... and he's already doing a respectable job of spelling his starter - Tripplett. Like the other draft picks, McCargo fits our new style of D very well. 5 years from now, we may be speaking of McCargo the pass rusher like we speak of Schobel. The OL rooks, on the other hand...well it's WAY too early so I won't comment...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The D still sucks a fair amount of balls against the run. However, the future is VERY bright for this unit. I really like what I saw from Kelsay and Denney against the pass today. This would have been a 10-11 sack game if it wasn't for the heat/fatigue factor. KO and Whitner are not playing like rookies, and Ellison and Williams look pretty good as well. And yes, getting TKO and Bowen back will be huge.