PBF81

No doubt. We know that McD doesn't have anything to do with any of it. He's just a neutral bystander that's created an elusively defined "winning culture.". Things should be running themselves by now based upon the foundation that he's created.

FWIW, I read somewhere this morning that McD is the only coach in history to have 6 losses by 6 points or less.

The last five are going to be interesting. KC's better than we are. Miami's more consistent. We haven't won @ Chargers since the Knox/Fergy days. Belichick will outcoach us, whether we win or not remains to be seen. Dallas, at home, they're a better and more well-rounded team.

Shades of South American soccer refs.

Uh oh, it's not Gabe's fault. Hmmm. Now what?

2-year contract at a reasonable price maybe. He'll be 32 next season.

The worst thing about it is knowing that it doesn't have to be this way.

They can't afford to. I don't think he'll be with the team next season. It'll be interesting to see how he plays and in what role elsewhere, and depending upon the QB. The only scenario that I envision him staying under, is maybe for $10M/ssn or less. But what do I know. LOL Besides, there are so many factors in play. We don't even know if Beane's going to be here. I'm not suggesting he'll be fired, but at this point given the circumstances, who knows what Pegula will do, if anything.

Indeed, but think about what Allen does on a good day w/o an elite group like that. It's inexplicable as to how we put up half of what we usually do for a string of a half-dozen games, particularly not even against great defenses generally speaking.

Again, touche! Given the choice however, i.e., if someone had told me one or the other with the 1st pick, I'd have gone Stroud w/o even thinking about it.

Yeah, I'm sure that there are a number of reasons why Dorsey is implicated, but one of the most visible ones to me was when we were running just fine, the D giving up chunks of rushing yardage, and for no explicable reason we'd abandon the run when it's carrying the O, and start throwing, often with bad results. This isn't the '90s and we don't need a RB to run for 100 every game, but when it's working, hell, keep doing it until they stop it. Again, just one thing. At the end of the day there's a lot of stuff going on that falls upon the shoulders of the one coordinating the entire enchilada, which is McD, and he's finally getting some heat for it. Like which ones, besides the Eagles game? Here's the thing, he's also been quite instrumental in wins, particularly the biggest playoff game, and really only relevant one we've had, under McD. He's also contributed to a lot of wins. To not give him credit alongside the blame is wrong. And again, people blame him for not being a bona fide #2 WR, but those people are misplacing their dissatisfaction on Davis when it should be on Beane. Davis didn't put himself in this role, Beane did. I wouldn't typically automatically assume that a WR drafted in the mid-late 4th is going to pan out as a #1 or #2 WR. We could even say that we're very fortunate for getting out of a 128th overall pick what we've gotten from Davis, whom Allen clearly likes. As mentioned, if we got that kind of value from every draft pick, we'd have a team full of all-pros. (aka if our 1st and 2nd rounders played up like that)

Exactly on Hurts, he did his work at OU. As to Tua, would you want to rely on Tua for the next bunch of years? He hasn't even finished a full season yet. Everyone's different, that's simply my take, if I were a GM. Bama used to produce excellent DL-men for example though. Some schools simply consistently produce at certain positions. I've lost track since I don't do much draft analysis anymore.

Ya think? That seems like a reach. It's a whole lotta things. What bothers me is that this is a Beane thing, yet he's not taking nearly the heat that he should be. These cheap 1-2 year free agents seem to be his thing on offense. No doubt he's getting direction from McDimwit to keep stocking the D so that McD can play FFL with the D roster. The other thing that bothers me is that Davis comes at a fraction of the cost of Knox, Harty and less than Sherfield or even Shakir, contributes far more, and yet takes more heat than all of them combined. Talk about illogical. And again, that's a Beane issue. I'm not defending Davis, but he's hardly the biggest issue in our WR corps. Dollar for dollar he contributes more than anyone.

It's quite possible that Harty, and Sherfield for that matter, were both overrated by everyone. Neither has done anything significant in the NFL to date in 11 combined seasons. Neither appears to be on the cusp of doing so now, ... with Allen at QB. Understandably, when a player is signed there's enthusiasm, but there has to be a logical and real basis for it, which there isn't for either of these two. Both are getting paid more than Davis as well for the record. Harty what, 2 years $10 or so. Harty had one good season, ... for a 4th WR or so, nothing more. In that season he had 3 TDs. One was against a garbage team. One was in extreme garbage time in a loss in the waning few minutes. The third was in a blowout win in the mid-4th quarter putting the Saints up by 35. No clutch TDs. On that team, his only good season, the WRs that he was competing for for playing time almost no one here even knows or can name. None that were on the team for any length of time that season have ever done anything beyond WR4, WR3 tops, production in the NFL. Several, and not for age related reasons, are not even in the league anymore. It's not difficult to log 570 yards and 3 TDs when you're one of two functional WRs on a team. If that team had had a decent WR1 then Harty likely wouldn't have had that many yards. To date in 2023, with a full third of the season remaining, 68 WRs have already posted 3 TDs, one of which doesn't even have 100 yards receiving, several more that don't have 200, a bunch we've never even heard of. So again, it's quite possible that the enthusiasm for Harty and Sherfield outpaced the reality when we signed them. Understandably, nonetheless.

Yeah it did. The momentum really shifted after that, it sparked the Eagles. They were jacked after that, on both sides. Almost as if they were looking for the moment to come alive, which they did. It was a bizarre pass by Allen too. He threw into obvious double-coverage, on 2nd-and-8, to Diggs who was positioned 4 years shy of the 1st-Down. Davis was WIDE open down the left sideline for an easy 1st-Down pass. Cook was open cutting across the middle on the right too and likely would have gotten the 1st too. It was almost as if Allen was throwing to Diggs to keep him happy or something. It was one of Allen's worst INTs of the season. It was a very I'll-advised pass. The Eagles logged 17 points, 136 yards, and 7 1st-Downs on the straight drives after that and starting at the 12-min mark of the 4th or so.

Well, again, it was rhetorical. In general I don't disagree. I was simply asking which would be more heart-wrenching. For me it would be underachieving in the playoffs as we now have a pattern of doing under McD, resulting in an egregious inexplicable loss. In shooting perfectly straight, I don't care much for the NFL. It's a corrupt league with scripted games at least to some extent. These official "mistakes" aren't always mistakes. It's rampant now. It's not longer driven by pure competition, it's driven by corporate greed. If the Bills ever did move I would hardly if ever watch any games. The second that the NFL was directly linked to Vegas it was over. My only interest is our Bills. I haven't watched a Super Bowl that we weren't in in years. I hate the f'g commercials, the length of the game, the overly commercialized aspect to all of it. It's not designed for football fans, it's designed to be a pop-culture attraction. Even when I used to watch, I'd turn off or mute the entire halftime crap. But where I will disagree slightly with what you said, is that if I knew now that we'd "make the playoffs," but then lose decisively as we did last season with poor underachieving play and siht coaching, that would not be a fun, entertaining, much less enjoyable game to watch, for me. So much so that I'd I knew ahead of time that that would happen, I probably wouldn't bother watching. Obviously we don't know these things in advance which is why we watch, so it's a weird angle. But for me it'd be like watching your kid "play" baseball in the outfield, while he's thinking about bees and butterflies as the ball goes sailing over his mindless head. I think I'd be poking around on my phone at that point and asking my son why he's on the team after the game, suggesting that maybe he quit the team.

Well, sticking with the context of your original post that I quoted, the implication was that playoff performance mattered more than the regular season. Or another way of putting it, bouncing back should include the entire season, bout merely the regular season. It's understood that some fans are content with good regular season performance, but the season isn't over then, the players know this as well. They play for the postseason. You've now insisted, literally, that we're going to finish 5-0 and make the playoffs. If you want to get technical, no, there isn't any history of us coming back to go 5-0 against the likes of the opponents that we'll be facing, or at all for that matter, to emerge from what is essentially the 10th "seed" to make the playoffs. Insisting that there is is not accurate. As to our playoffs, they keep getting worse under McD, particularly on the defensive side.

The others can't run those routes then? Either way, a TD is a TD. Not sure why people, not necessarily you, try to distinguish between the styles and types of TDs. 7 points is 7 points.

Well, OK, then why do Cook, Kincaid, and Shakir have combined what Davis does, on a combined three times the catches? And why does Diggs have 37 TDs on 605 catches to Davis 26 TDs on 157 catches over the four years that both have been here, with Diggs as a polished receiver coming here, Davis a rookie? ... a fourth the number of catches, 70% of the TDs?

The point being, don't blame Davis for being thrust into a role due to the mismanagement of the roster. If we got that kind of performance from every player on the on a per-million-dollar-earned basis, we'd have a team of all-pros. A lot of teams would be quite happy to get the kind of WR that Davis is in the mid-late 4th-round. He has two fewer TDs than Jefferson from the same draft. He has half the catches, about 55% of the yards, and the same TDs as CeeDee Lamb. Both of those were 1st-round picks. Not bad for a 4th round pick.

And don't think for a second that coaches like Belichick miss things like that going into games. Makes one wonder what the breakdown of our first game with NE was like in that regard.

Well, I guess we'll simply have to expend more than a mid-4th round pick or spend more than $1M/season on getting good help at WR then. These Davis threads are tedious. Blame Beane, not Davis. It's not like Davis was a trade-up 1st-rounder or anything. He was the 128th overall pick. 18 players were drafted by Beane higher than 128th. Two of them suck, 6 are no longer with the team, one or two are questionable.

I thought that it was Allen's picked off pass to Diggs early in the 4th. We had recovered from that FGA and scored a TD on a 70-yard drive on the series prior to go up by 10. Then on that drive, on 2nd-and-8, no need to take any risks, Allen makes one of the dumbest pass decisions of the season. He forces Diggs who's not only double-covered, but also about 4 yards shy of the marker. Meanwhile, Davis is wide f'n open for a 1st-down on the left sideline. Cook is wide open on the right likely to run for the 1st a few yards shy of it. Kincaid and the other WR, I think Shakir, in the 5 WR set took defenders downfield with them. That set the Eagles up at our 24 for the go-ahead TD. It was almost all Eagles after that. After that, in the last 12:46 of the 4th and OT, the Eagles logged 17 points, 130 yards, and 7 1st-downs.

Master Blaster

Just defining it. What's McD being a good guy have to do with game day decisions or hindsight re: games?