Beck Water

We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Goodwin was in my opinion a lousy route runner and poor at tracking the ball while he was with Buffalo. It was only when he got over making "career decisions" to save himself for his Olympic dreams and decided to earn his contract with San Francisco that his abilities as a WR leveled up. I mean, Come On Man, in his 4 years in Buffalo he had a catch % of 44%. Even in SFO his first year it was 53%. You do you, but painting that as "perfect for Allen's cannon" strikes me as highly revisionist. Foster Part Deux. You're entitled to your opinion but no, while I wouldn't say they were terrible, I don't think that's a particularly talented crew, especially for a raw rookie QB. I grant that the OL was halfway decent. You're kinda stretching Chandler's productivity. He did have one >600 yd year. Question: when has Tyler Dunne ever asked Sean McDermott a question, tough or otherwise?

Pacheco was a 1-man wrecking crew vs. Green Bay and vs. several other teams this season. "Angry Runs" all game. If he's unable to go this week, that would be a bit of a help, theoretically.

My take-away from that presser is the Dunne article and dealing with the follow-on (+ and -) has been a major distraction for McDermott this week.

OK, thanks for answering, fair enough. People who know Dunne do say "no", but your point about him being very close to people with well-honed axes is germaine.

From what I know, that's 100% correct. HC in the NFL are highly competitive and driven and have strong egos. That translates to "control freak" for many. But being a HC these days is also about motivating people, which requires being able to relate to them successfully. If McDermott's people-skills are as bizarrely bad and he's as actually lacking in personal accountability as the impression people are giving from Dunne's article, it's very difficult to imagine him having a 7 year record of 109-68 in the regular season as the Bills HC and 5 years of playoffs while being so out of touch and unable to relate. Caveat that I AM one of those who have not read the entire article. And I will also add that being a solid HC, and having the ultimate ability to be a SB winning HC, are different things - but we have seen examples where someone spent a long time as the former before becoming the latter. My jury is out on whether McDermott has, or can develop as, that ultimate warrior SB winning HC, but there's a lot of room between that POV and the feeling that he's a bizarre out of touch coach who can't relate appropriately to players.

Um.....Doug Marrone spent 5 years as the HC of the Jacksonville Jaguars after Buffalo, and after a 1 year gap, got employed as the OL coach of the NO saints. I 'get it' that people have different values of "washed out quickly", but by NFL standards, 5 years as the HC of another team ain't quick.

I'll grant you Bobby Trees. He had a good year, and I loved him as a player. Goodwin had 1 catch on 9 targets that year, so I don't think he supports your argument; I don't remember the story with Spiller, if he was injured or what, but also not contributing much that year. Chandler for me falls squarely into what Beane said once about "we never got to a point where opponents said we got to stop their TE from going off"

"ST lost game 1". You mean the season opener Jets game where Allen threw 3 INTs and fumbled? Any idea what the W-L stats are when a team has twice as many turnovers as their opponent? OK, I'm outta here. Not doing this with someone who comes to that conclusion about that game. Just for the record, I have never said the defense played well against Jacksonville ("what a wonderous game the Bills D played allowing Jax 500+ yards?"); it is logically consistent to feel the the defense has overall played well and kept us in games while the offense wasn't scoring this season overall, while not extolling defensive performance in one specific game. In the Jax game, there was an almost 2:1 edge in TOP for Jax.

My point is that there wasn't a lot of talent on that offense, and that the OC in name/HC do not have a track record of getting the best out of their QB - and rookie Allen was a very raw talent who needed his energy and competitiveness to be channeled and developed. Specifically, there are cases where you have a situation where a QB's performance drops markedly under one coach, then revives markedly under another, and in the case of Russ Wilson and Hackett you see that. I guess you could also argue that perhaps he got the most out of Blake Bortles in '16-'18. And just for the record, the bolded is nothing I've said or that should reasonably be inferred from what I've said. I think it would fall within "fair use" to share that and what they said.

Where on earth do you get that from anything I've written on this board at any time?

I know you have a background as a journalist, but I would have guessed it was sourced over more like a year. I would guess that as Dunne talks to people, he collects notes and quotes on what they say on several topics and of further sources to follow-up with, and collects them in literal or figurative "folders" which he reviews periodically in view of likely current topical interest. But are you saying that Dunne timed the release deliberately to damage the Bills season and to maximize the possibility that McDermott gets fired? Because journalists who know him have spoken out that Dunne is not a guy with an "axe to grind", but timing an article's release to maximize damage to his home town team's season and its head coach, kind of would sound like an ax. If I'm misinterpreting you, please do clarify and correct.

Leaving aside ToS, there is this thing called Copyright Law

Maybe. The 2014 Marrone-led Bills went to 9-7 on the strength of a #4 overall defense. They had a fading FredEx as their leading rusher, and Watkins (best season as a pro), and not much else as weapons. The OC was nominally Nathaniel Hackett, whom Aaron Rodgers likes a lot and who got a chance to flame out as the Denver HC based on that liking. He hasn't done a lot otherwise, which one could attribute to having Blake Bortles as his QB in Jacksonville and Zach Wilson with the Jets. Or one could look at it as, Hackett has yet to demonstrate that he can develop a QB nor work with a QB who showed success elsewhere (Wilson). I personally think this kind of revisionist speculation is pointless, and certainly debatable, but with the huge growth in Sports Betting it wouldn't shock me if you could actually make such a bet. By the way, a number of lines of evidence point to Marrone having a pretty giant ego, at least while he was with the Bills. Remember "Saint Doug"? And there was a reporter who wrote about a wierd private interview session he had with Marrone after publishing some info that made Marrone look bad, that had shades of the "Godfather" about it. I seem to recall several articles at the time.

The public also received the viewpoint recently (from an NFL insider) that McDermott's job will be evaluated after the season. There is a thread about that on the board. Like I said, I don't want to put words in your mouth. When you say "articles like these are required when a head coach is not getting the job done and an article comes out with sources close to Pegula saying there's no chance he gets fired after the season", are you saying Dunne specifically researched and wrote this article as a response to the Athletic article saying McDermott's job is safe?

Prior to the season, a number of people here expressed concern about Dorsey returning as OC. Serious professional journalists - Joe Buscaglia for one - tagged "returning Dorsey as OC" as the Bills riskiest off-season decision. So this isn't some "we all thought Dorsey was brilliant and now he's McDermott's 'Escape Goat' " revisionist thinking. I defended Dorsey's performance last season on statistical grounds and on the grounds that he lacked some critical pieces. This season, he got an upgraded OL and a first-round draft pick to work with as well as some solid journeyman acquisitions at WR and a "gadget" guy who was alleged to be an upgrade on McKenzie. The result IMO was objectively under-whelming and under-performing. Yes, the Bills D gave up some game winning drives, but if the offense is functioning at the level expected for a "gift from the Football Gods" QB, there shouldn't be so many games where a drive in the final minutes can turn the game - and the defense is also objectively depleted by key injuries at every level and has frankly done better than I expected. My opinion

Correct, I do not subscribe to "Go Long" and will not do so just to access this article; Boyst's work around didn't work for me. He probably did, but facility access is more than just pressers; not being in the facility does limit the people he will meet/develop relationships with/talk to.

You're the one making the statement, so the "burden of proof" is on you. It didn't strike me that way at all at the time. I'm looking for 1) proof that this isn't revisionism on your part, that it actually did strike you that way at the time 2) specifics about what you interpreted that way. Me going back and re-watching it will address neither.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, so let me be sure I understand you. You're saying that Ty Dunne researched, wrote, and published this article for the purpose of getting McDermott fired, or of persuading Pegula to fire him? In other words, it's a hit piece with an agenda by Dunne, and I'm giving him way too much credit that he's a more or less honest journalist following his business model and trying to write deep-researched pieces that will draw in subscribers, and since he makes his home in WNY (as I understand it) the Bills players and coaches may be easier for him to connect with?

Oh, Come On. " From his opening press conference you can see the arrogance", what a bunch of malarky. Show your receipts, Bud; show the posts where you commented on McDermott's arrogance in his introductory presser. Does McDermott have room to improve as far as game management, etc? Yes. But some people are just over the top with nonsense.

There are some stories about what it was like to be an assistant on Belicheck's staff that aren't pretty, especially when his former assistants went elsewhere and tried to implement the same models but without the sustained team success that led people to put up with it. Why would you think McDermott doesn't connect with players? Or that he doesn't have something to do with the locker room culture what was built? I don't think being an assistant football coach is a lot of "fun" anywhere, a lot of Grind.

OK, I see your POV, but I think because of Ty Dunne's business model, he is not very plugged in to a lot of that. A former player or coaching assistant talks to a personable independent reporter about his time with the Bills and his interactions with Sean McDermott, maybe in the off-season when guys have more time and it doesn't have to be scheduled - why would he even mention that to his agent, to be discussed with the FO? I don't think Dunne would write about a lot of the topics you mention because I don't think he has access to the current employees and family members he'd need access to, to write those articles.

Nah, not worth searching for what I wrote. I was using a clever analogy to Hamas planning the attack on Israel.........KIDDING!!!!!!! I don't at all think Ty Dunne is making stuff up. I'm sure all the people he interviewed really said what he quotes. Nor do I think he has an "axe to grind" or decided to do a "hatchet job" on McDermott. I think he started with a handful of former players and assistants who may have had a bit of an "axe" (Isaiah McKenzie, his coaching idol Chad Hall, Harrison Phillips, etc), and likely went where that took him as far as others to talk to. He doesn't have free access to the Bills facility that would give him contact with current Bills players and coaches. That's not his fault, but it does color what information he got. I referenced a movie I didn't remember the name of at the time. I got it now. Alan Alda, "Sweet Liberty". In the movie, a group of historical re-enactors agree to put on a battle scene for a movie director, who wants them to change it completely from historical fact to support his movie plot. The re-enactors rebel, and do the battle scene historically correctly. Alda apologizes to the director who says something like "we filmed it from 30 different angles, I can make it look like anything I want". I DO think Dunne is trying to grow his business, and that putting out a controversial piece about a HC whose team has struggled this season and is now 6-6 and flirting with no longer "playoff worthy" is a subscriber-generating move. I think he slanted the article to focus on painting a bad picture of McDermott, because "reading the room" in Bills-land, this is a great time to sell such a piece. I think if you probably intensively and in depth interviewed current and former players and assistants about the majority of the current or former HC in the league, you could probably come up with an article that put them in either a very bad light, or a very good light - depending on who you talked to, what you chose to include of what they said, and what you chose to opine wrote around them. Heck, I'm nobody and not well connected and even I could write a little piece about former St Louis Rams coach Mike Martz that would make him look like a incompetent twatwaddle who's a bag of peas short of a casserole. Successful football HC are a breed apart. They are dialed in and focused in a way 99.98% of the human population just isn't. They work incredibly long hours. They have to schedule time with their kids and spouses during the season. I most truly dislike bringing up a story that casts someone in a very poor light, but is FOUR YEARS OLD and was realized to be a bad move and apologized for at the time. I mean, in all but a few states the statute of limitations for most crimes is less than four years. I used to listen to the Isaiah McKenzie show led by Ty Dunne because parts of it were very funny, until it started making me very uncomfortable with how Dunne handled it. He wasn't exactly putting words in McKenzie's mouth, but he definitely asked questions and said things himself that drew a certain slant of stories and interpreting events out of McKenzie, that I don't think was in McKenzie's self interest for player development. My take is that the whole thing is very unfortunate in that it's likely to cloud decision making about McDermott instead of lasering on what should be focused on - game management, decision making, whether some of the core principles of his defense are really sustainable under the modern salary cap.

Concur

Like I said up-thread, I think Pegula is sensitive to public embarrassment. So if the fallout from this is lasting public embarrassment, Right or Wrong, I think McDermott is gone. On this, my personal feeling is that something which happened 4 years ago and was dealt with at the time, should remain at rest. I think it’s BS to dredge this up now.

Trubisky just looks like his dog died and his wife told him to sleep on the couch