silvermike

http://sports.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnatio...46&sCat=365 If it's also leaving out the Cowboys and the Redskins, I think we can afford to not take it personally.

Lately, it seems like we'd be more likely to host a neutral-site championship game than win home-field advantage and earn a home AFC championship game.

I really like the format of the "best case/worst case" lists for the first round players. I'd have more confidence in the actual content, though, if it spelled the players' names right.

Ugh - this run of teams switching to the 3-4 is going to result in some very notable failures. Admittedly, it's not like the Chiefs had such a great defense that it should have been preserved, but spending extra effort changing schemes really rarely seems worth it to me. When you take over a team, look at your talent, look at UFA talent, look at talent you can trade for, and look at the draft. Then decide what scheme best fits that set of players. Rather than deciding on a scheme because it's popular, and then butchering your roster to make it fit. Sound familiar? Mike Tomlin is a Cover-2 guy originally, in Tampa and in Minnesota, and then, remarkably, he went to Pittsburgh, retained Dick LeBeau, ran a 3-4, and won the Super Bowl. It wasn't the magic of the 3-4, it was a team that was built to run the 3-4 really well.

Well, as you know, with McGee scheduled to leave after this season and Youboty after the next, we need to start planning ahead. The lines will just work themselves out with expensive free agent underachievers and undrafted players.

Not any more, shootouts are for all the marbles, there's just that annoying "overtime loss" category. So no ties in the NHL, NBA, MLB, NCAA(for football and basketball, anyway), or racing. What other sports to people watch?

...maybe I've just been studying too much formal logic lately, but this is not a true statement. Compare it to "Some people play in the NFL. Some people play in the NHL. Ergo, some NHLers play in the NFL." You can say, of course, that given the fact that there are an enormous number of dicks in this country, and a huge number of cops, it's almost certain that there are !@#$ cops in the US. But it's not logically certain, just practically.

I haven't heard that this guy committed any crimes. But I think police officers' conduct - and really, anyone's professional conduct - has to be regulated by more than just the criminal codes. Cops' highest job is to serve the public interest, and when they dramatically fail, they should be held accountable. And it sounds like the Dallas PD is working on it.

What kind of tile? Seriously though, even if you did nix OT for the regular season, you need SOME system for a playoff game, or else Donovan McNabb will lose all faith in the league.

Wow, that's a complicated and fan-unfriendly solution to a minor problem. The NFL isn't a three-ring circus - one set of action at time, please. Look for a simple solution instead of a complex one: ban field goals in overtime and keep sudden death; keep play continuous instead of stopping for a coin flip at the end of the 4th quarter, or just start sudden death after the first ten minutes of the game instead of immediately.

Other than Bledsoe, what had any of them done BEFORE they came to the Bills?

I was never prouder to be a Bills fan than when I saw Shaud in that video...it's been a sad fandom.

Peters had some buzz coming out of college, I remember being surprised that he went undrafted; most of us hear were calling for him when for some reason we drafted Tim Euhus. Also, it wasn't this staff that picked him up - it was Donahoe and Mularkey in 2004.

Nope - it's entirely based on how teams do in Unrestricted Free Agency: which means that it excludes any signings of players who have been cut, so in 2010, we won't be penalized for signing TO this year. We may well be in line for some compensatory picks next year: we signed Fitzpatrick, Pat Thomas, and Hangartner, (plus non-UFA street free agents TO and Drayton Florence) and lost Melvin Fowler, Duke Preston, Angelo Crowell, and Jabari Greer. Dockery and Royal don't count.

Nobody's cheating for the Patriots here, the formula is very predictable. They signed few notable UFAs last season, and lost, among others, Asante Samuel.

The Bills haven't drafted a guard in the first four rounds since Rueben Brown, and Duke Preston is the only center to come from those picks since 1986. No wonder our lines suck in the middle.

Somebody needs to run the numbers and see if the Wonderlic correlates to anything.

I STILL don't get the adoration for Steve Johnson. He's a solid pickup in the 7th round for potential and production, but he's not knocking on the door of being a breakout superstar. He ranked 28th among rookies in receptions, behind some fullbacks and several players who was drafted after him. He looked good on a few plays, and I'm excited about his future, but I don't know if he's yet broken out of the Fast Freddie Smith/Antonio Brown/Clarence Coleman range.

Since the Lions can negotiate with anyone, I wonder if they might be tempted to take a player not-rated in the Top 5, and pay him like he was the 5th pick or something. If they want a tackle, maybe go after Michael Oher, who's projected in the 10-20 range, and give him a deal worth much less than the #1 pick, but more than the #6 pick. Do you think his agent would let him do that? His other option would be to keep dropping.

I wouldn't count on it - although it is Detroit at #1, and they're the only NFL team to lose money last year.

I think the trick here is that there isn't really a big enough set of teams at the top to make a whole conference. The league isn't 50:50 - it's 27 teams that are more or less on par with the Bills, then the Patriots, Redskins, Cowboys, Jets, and Giants. The top 16 teams by revenue go from Washington ($327M) to Seattle ($215) while the bottom is the Giants ($214M: I'm as surprised as you) to the Vikings ($125M). In a free spending conference, it'd essentially be the AL East, with few big-time teams and a lot of mild ones who really don't play by the same rules. Sure, it wouldn't be automatic for the big guys, but it wouldn't really be fair, if that's the goal. Additionally, I think, once this is set up, it will be difficult to keep revenue sharing fair, and TV contracts equitable. The Money Conference is going to take up almost all the airtime, while the Other Guys will make up a minor league. It makes it too simple for the Jerry Jones/Bob Kraft wing to just try to sell their own games' TV rights, since they need so much less from the other owners in terms of weekly opponents.

Kansas City played a Tampa-2 under Herm last year, right?

Wow, that's a smarmy article. Look, of course it's unlikely anyone will make a mock draft that's more than 20-30% accurate. That doesn't mean they're worthless, it just means that the draft is complicated. If experts are swinging at 20%, that doesn't mean they're not experts. It means that there are well over 5 options for each pick, and they're beating random chance. And there's also more to a mock than individual picks. You want to give readers a sense of team needs, and the relative rankings by position of each player. They also go brag about their stupid monkey making picks, when the monkey's not really choosing names randomly, he's just randomizing the consensus picks. If the experts reach a consensus on the top 15 players to go in the draft, then they've done something that you couldn't do on your own.

They've made one big move, and then filled a couple of gaps with Hangartner, Fitzpatrick, and Florence. Granted, it was a hell of a big move, but they seem to hvae backed waaay off now.