RJ (not THAT RJ)

Furthermore, all of the Jills are waaaaay out of the league of the average poster on TSW. Someone had to say it.

A temper tantrum? In what thread? I decide to go to work one day and I miss all the good stuff....

What's new, Harry? Go Bills!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=douche+bag

So, I am doing my afternoon research, reading the online version of the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL, when I see they have an article previewing the upcoming NFL season. No, really. Anyway, the article mentions, among other things, TO and the Bills, and alongside the article is a poll asking "Wer wird NFL-Champion 2010?" The Bills are one of only eight teams specifically listed, probably because they were mentioned in the article. Because I am a crazy Bills fan, I clicked the Bills, of course. No surprise that the P*ts and Steelers got the most votes, but I was shocked to see that I was not the only SPIEGEL reader who selected the Bills. There are three votes in total. http://www1.spiegel.de/active/vote/fcgi/vo...mp;x=25&y=7 Heute SPIEGEL ONLINE, morgen die ganze Welt!

All this back and forth about insulting daughters and punching people, and not a single post responding to my question.... probably because no one can. Would he really still be here 16 years later? Ah Internet, you cause such pain....

Since Butler was a Polian disciple, I rather doubt it. Bill wanted--and got--the challenge of building up teams from scratch. (That was what Butler wanted too, which is why he cut and ran in 2000 to go to SD. Nothing wrong with that, but itneeds to be said.) Polian did a wonderful job in all three places has has been GM, but did not manage "roster turnover" in either Buffalo or Carolina. Whether he will in Indy remains to be seen. I will wager that his genius will last until Peyton retires.

Indeed he was. One of many examples of the "Scotty Bowman Syndrome," in which professional coaches/executives are successful before and after their time in Buffalo, not during. Also known as "Donohoerreah," by the way, the opposite of "Levyitis..."

Amen my brother... I will be watching, and hoping. Why the hell not, right?

He did not get along with people on Ralph's staff (Jeff Littman, Linda Bogdan). Before this discussion goes any further, however, and in response to the dozens of "woe unto us for allowing Bill to leave" Jeremiads that have been sprinkled across TSW like so many pinches of pixie dust hindsight in the last weeks, months, and years, please allow me to ask a question that has been nagging at me, namely: Bill Polian was fired more than 16 years ago. (February 1993!) Does anyone really think that if he had not been fired then that he would somehow magically still be Bills GM today? John Butler, who followed in Polian's footsteps, was ready to bail by 2000 realizing that the end of the line had come... would Polian have been any different? One might as well mourn the Lamonica trade. It still hurts, and worrying over it has exactly the same practical effect. Carry on!

Golly... where would you get a crazy idea like that?

Dan Henning

Chandler, you may be confusing this with the game in 1988, when Bruce ended the day by sacking Flutie... Bills won 23-20

Very good point. It may turn out to be a good move in the long run, but there is an awful lot of arrogance involved in doing this. BB has built up enough "genius credit" to avoid being second-guessed here, but it remains to be seen whether the P*ts will be able to stay at the top as their major players age.

Awesome... you have graduated from simply spraying idiotic opinions to responding to the wrong messages in writing your idiotic opinions, thus taking idiocy to a higher level.

Simple and predictable need not mean the same thing. Simple can mean keeping the same personnel in only a few formations, yet running a variety of possible plays. A complex system with lots of personnel and formation shifts can actually be more predictable, when it is obvious which plays will be run when certain people are on the field in certain spots.

Dude, you are probably a bit too mellow... how exactly is a kid who played his first college game in September 2009 going to be an NFL-caliber starter by 2010? It would appear that the appropriate color for you is not orange, but maroon.

Could very well be. This is the further breakdown of the old unspoken agreement between fans and sports leagues: Fans are encouraged to feel emotional ties, and the leagues try not to rub the fans' noses into what idiots they are for having an emotional connection to a bunch of millionaire genetic freaks in Halloween costumes. Of course anyone who spends two seconds really thinking about what it means to follow sports knew that already, but the more the leagues depart from that unspoken bit of mutual deception, the greater the risk they run of killing the golden goose. That is what some people call progress. By the way, ICE, welcome back. Sorry to hear about Sam Bradford tonight.

Yes I do remember Enron---a Texas-based corporation that argued that "the new rules" entitled them to do whatever they wanted and made them so super smart until reality crashed in. I wonder if Jerry Jones remembers them? You describe the mind-set very accurately. I have no problem recognizing Jones' motives. I do think that his motives are based on exactly the kind of dangerously short-sighted thinking that produces real estate bubbles and Enrons. That is why they are bad for the NFL. Speaking of cutting through everything to get what you want, let me finish with a quote, from "A Man for All Seasons," by Robert Bolt: More: What would you do? Cut a road through the law to get to the Devil? Roper: I would cut down every law in England to do that!” More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil himself turned on you—where would you hide…the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws…and if you cut them down… do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Exactly! Think of this difference: Ralph Wilson sees the Raiders and the Pats floundering in the 1960s, and arranges cash infusions to save the AFL so that everyone benefits, while Jerry Jones is looking for any way he can to crush smaller franchises. Which one contributes more to the future of the NFL?

You are entitled to your opinion, but your numbers are absurd... I would think that Jerry J gets to keep a good bit of those profits, wouldn't you? Sure he wants to make more money, but if he wanted to maximize profits as a sole mission, he should have gone into a business where it actually makes sense to drive your competitors into bankruptcy, not a cartel of organizations built around a common goal in which competition within agreed upon rules (both on the field and off) are the basis of its success. To make the point, let me use an admittedly extreme example: If you become the only supplier of propane and propane accessories in the country, you are a success. If you become the owner of the only professional football team in the country, you have an expensive, worthless toy. You need other teams to play against to demonstrate your value, and you need a competitive league to maintain the level of interest that guarantees any profits at all. The rest of your arrogant dismissal of the need to understand how things have operate (what you insist on calling "reading history books," as if reading and/or history are worthless...) could be taken from the latest transcript of the "Golden Goose Killing Society." I know that Jerry Jones is a member, he has been trying to pry the Cowboys out of the NFL's various structures for years, I know. He believes that he can tear down enough of the league in order to get all the positives with no long-term danger, and is playing chicken. If he thinks that the Cowboys have some independent value outside of the value of the league, he is delusional. People who feel they need to defend him in the name of capitalism or "how things are today" are, to my mind, misguided.

I am sorry, jimmy, but this Ayn Rand vision of sports misses a very significant point. All leagues are and have to be cartels of some kind, otherwise we are just talking about individual teams barnstorming the country playing pickup games. That being the case, it should be in the interest of all members to keep the league as a whole healthy as well as their individual teams. That is more than possible, and indeed the NFL has been a model of such success since 1970. For these newer owners to come in and assume they can keep making all this money without a healthy league is short-sighted and idiotic, betraying an utter lack of historical understanding. This has nothing to do with dreams of milk and honey, it is about survival of the sport.

No one seems to get that points... but I am glad you brought it up!

I like the statistics here, since they do tell us something, though they also tell me that there is far less parity in the AFC over the last five seasons. You say that only four teams have not made the playoffs in that period, but your stats also show that three more have only been once in the past five years. The implication that in the free agency era it is a simple matter to rebuild appears to be undermined by such stats, don't you think? To coin a phrase, it is hard to make the playoffs in the AFC....