Billy Claude

Ugh. Just more teams playing in playoff games with half their starters out. Go back to 16 games and increase to two bye weeks. The greed of the league and players, since they have to agree to it, has no bounds.

It's fun. I enjoy the Zach Wilson threads.

Maybe. One of the reasons mentioned by the executive was that Gardner should be called for holding on every play. I assume part of the survey was "who do you think is overrated?"

A flat tax has nothing to do with simplifying the tax code. Plugging your income into a website and having it spit out a number presents no difficulties. What tax simplification involves is getting rid of all the various deductions and credits that people are addicted to.

On jetnation there is a similar thread about how an anonymous NFL exec said that Sauce Gardner is one of the most overrated players in the NFL. They are similarly upset.

This top 32 business is getting pretty ridiculous. I am constantly seeing the complaint that the Bills only having two receivers in the top 32 in 2000 even though they had the 5th (Diggs) and 33rd (Davis) in 2022. Would the Bills receiving corp be any different if Davis had a few more yards and finished 32nd? Did KC having the 29th (Kelce) and 32nd (Rice) really mean that they were better than the Bills receivers in 2022? The Bills receiving corp may very well such even if they have two top 32 receivers. On the other hand, if by some miracle they finish with a top 10 receiver and a couple in the upper 30s or lower 40s they will be perfectly fine.

Allen was never in the MVP conversation last season. He finished 5th in the voting well behind Prescott, CMC, and Purdy. The MVP is 50% a team award anyway. Once the Ravens dominated the 49ers in Week 16, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Jackson was going to win it, especially since CMC and Purdy splitted the 49er vote pretty evenly.

Allen definitely needs to be more aware of game situations. Consider the Bills-Dolphins playoff game in 2022. On the first four possessions, the defense has intercepted Skylar Thompson once and held the Dolphins to 52 yards and two first downs. The Bills have scored on their first three possessions and are moving in 10 yard chunks in their 4th. Allen then decides to lob it 50 yards downfield. Xavien Howard intercepts and returns it 50 yards to give the Dolphins a short field and hope. There is zero chance that Patrick Mahomes would do something like that. In fact, I doubt any QB would do something that stupid in that situation except for maybe a rookie Zach Wilson. The Bills defense then holds the Dolphins to field goals after short fields from the interception and a long punt return. With 50 seconds left in the half, Allen throws an interception that is returned 30 yards to the Bills 18. Miami finally gets a TD and the score is 20-17 at the half even though the defense has given up just six first downs and under 100 yards. Allen fumbles on the Bills' first offensive play of the 2nd half. It is returned for a TD and the Dolphins take the lead. That's three turnovers in about a quarter of playing time leading to 17 Dolphin points. Allen tends to get flustered. When he makes a mistake there is often more coming until he can settle himself down. Given that, the statement that Allen is one of the most overrated player is ridiculous. I think he is underrated in the poll - I feel Burrows is rated higher because they probably ignore all the sacks that Burrows takes as well as Allen's elite running ability.

The Bills won't be able to avoid it. Pretty much all teams since 2013 on Hard Knocks are forced to participate by the NFL. The only exception were the Rams and Chargers who volunteered the year they moved into Sofi. The reason the Bills weren't on during the drought was HBO never chose them since there was no national interest in the Bills Afterwards, teams are allowed to decline if they were in the playoffs either of the two previous seasons. The playoff exemption does not hold for the new in-season and out-of season versions of Hard Knocks since the Dolphins were on the in-season version in 2023 after making the playoffs in 2022 and the Steelers will be on in the in-season Hard Knocks this coming season after making the playoffs last season. So expect the Bills to be on pretty soon.

I'm not disagreeing with you on either point, simply responding to badobilz argument that the Chiefs having two receivers in the top 32 in receiving yards are a big deal even if they were #29 and #32.

I changed the number because if someone said that last season team A had no receiver in the top 28 in receiving, the conclusion would be team A's receivers were not very good and it would be much more convincing that the receivers were good because they finished #29 and #32. Having two receivers in the top 32 in receiving yards is a totally arbitrary cutoff of no particular significance. During the 2022 season, the Bills had Diggs at #5 and Davis at #33 in receiving yards. Are you telling me that being at #29 and #32 is a indication that a team has good receivers but #5 and #33 means that they don't? Let's face it, the Chiefs receivers were statistically bad last year. For example, they led the league in drops. The Chiefs clearly thought so also based on the investments they made at wide receiver this off-season. However, if one needed to, I think one can come up with a much more reasonable argument that the Chiefs receiving statistics did not tell the whole story: Travis Kelce is a HOFer who has clearly lost a step or three, however, he can still bring it in big games in crucial situations. Rasheed Rice was #32 in receiving yards which is very bad for a WR1 on a team, however but he was a rookie and was much better than at the end of the season than at the beginning so that data point is underestimating his contribution in the playoffs.

You highlighted my statement that you can also say they had no receivers in the top 28 in receiving yards. It's a simple fact. Kelce was 29th in receiving yards and Rice was 32nd. You are the one making a big deal of the Chiefs having two receivers in the top 32 in receiving yards not me.

Pretty selective and intentionally deceptive use of cutoffs here. You can also say the Chiefs had zero receivers in the top 28 in receiving yards. The Chiefs receiving Corp was bad last year. The fact that two receivers barely made the top 32 at 29th and 32nd is a not going to convince folks that they weren't.

So these quotes pretty much confirm that there were locker room issues with Diggs though whether it was with the coaching staff or other players one cannot tell. My guess is that there were issues with both. Douglas' quote also doesn't seem particularly supportive of Diggs. He was very careful with his words and he didn't just gush about what a great guy Diggs is like Dawkins did.

As with any internet argument once it gets pass a few back and forths, it's just the same thing repeated over and over in a ever more strident manner. It's still interesting to observe in the same manner as a car wreck.

I think you are referring to the "Wisdom of the Crowd" idea. However, it only works when guesses are independent, for example, people don't know the guesses of many other participants nor are swayed by other forms of groupthink. If the Wisdom of the Crowd always worked we would never have had the dot-com nor the housing market bubbles. I am not sure the theory applies to a message board. It seems to me message boards tend to result in pushing opinions to extremes. In any case, I think the board's opinion on Bills players tend to be generally correct once you allow it to settle (definitely not at the beginning of the season) and if you tone the opinion down a bit, that is players are not as good nor as bad as the board thinks they are. With the exception of a few posters, I don't trust the board's opinion of players on other teams, for example. the board was still talking how much Tua sucked long after it was pretty clear that he is a decent, though not elite QB when not injured.

NFLmemes don't say where the numbers come from so they could have just made them up. However, the rankings are fairly consistent with this USA Today article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2023/09/06/nfl-ticket-prices-2023-cheapest-most-expensive-prices/70722888007/ The reporter interviews the CEO of TicketSmarter so I assume the numbers come from them The article starts by giving the highest and lowest average ticket prices and then the highest and lowest cheapest ticket prices (the rankings are close but don't quite match the tweet). They talk about how the price depends greatly on match up etc. implying that this is the secondary market. The price for the Bills was the 5th highest at $168 which is close to the NFLmemes tweet which had them at 4th highest. The date of the article is just before the season started accounting for the very low cheapest price for the Texans ($49!) since they were expected to be bad. A.I. (Statistia) gives the average ticket price for the Bills as $101.63 in 2023, second lowest in the NFL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/193595/average-ticket-price-in-the-nfl-by-team/ Again they don't say explicitly say this is the per game season ticket price and you have to pay to find out their source. However, the number is reasonably consistent with this SI article giving the average 10 game general admission package for 2024 as $1146 which they say is about 10% higher than in 2023. https://www.si.com/nfl/bills/news/buffalo-bills-season-ticket-prices-climb-2024-high-demand

As always, the devil is in the details. Both charts are true but are misleading by not giving details of what data was used. The first chart appears to be based on the average cheapest ticket price on the secondary market (it doesn't give complete details). This is high for the Bills due to the high demand for games. There are a lot of people traveling from out of town who already are paying for the flight and room so don't care too much about the ticket price. The second chart is based on average season ticket prices per game. The Bills had the second lowest price at $101.80 based on this metric.

Ravens rookies report today.

My argument against Yeldon being washed is that Beane brought him back for a second season. If Beane thought he was washed he would have just cut him and taken the small cap hit. Also, Yeldon was reasonably productive in his first season when he got a chance; 150 snaps, 13 receptions on 15 targets at 9.5 yards per catch and 17 carries for 63 yards for 3.7 ypc. Obviously the ypc was not great but he was there as a pass receiving back and 3.7 was still better than Frank Gore. I do seem to remember a fumble early in that first season that led him to being inactive for three or four games.

I'm sure you can always find someone on the internet to say pretty much anything. However, yeah, its a classic straw man argument.

A bit of context here. Jordan was cut from his HS varsity team as a 5'10 sophomore. He grew 5 inches from his sophomore to junior year. So he had to play JV another year. Going to the NBA directly from HS was not an option at Jordan's time. The NBA did not draft anyone directly from high school from 1976 to 1995.

Daboll has approached mythical status on this board (though not quite to the level of Andy Reid) even though there were plenty of complaints when he was with the Bills. The Jaguars game that season was probably as bad as the offense looked since Josh Allen's rookie year.

It's not a minimum, its a default. There has been four game suspensions but they are mostly six games with a few more than that. So eight games is more than normal, certainly not less.

I believe there is a 6 game baseline for first time offenders. However, Goodell can take into account both mitigating and aggravating factors so there appears to be a lot of leeway.