Rampant Buffalo

I have not seen you acknowledge that the Bills would have won playoff games against Mahomes, had McDermott's defense turned in an average performance. (Defined here as four defensive stops.) Nor have I seen you acknowledge that the Bills could well have won the most recent game, had their receivers caught the ball. (As opposed to having 160 yards of drops.) I'm not a mind reader, and I don't know what's going through your head. A post made carelessly or in a hurry may not always reflect the complete picture of how the poster sees things. That being said, your arguments and contributions to this thread, at least as perceived by me, boil down to Mahomes > Allen, ergo Chiefs > Bills in playoff games. If your argument is stronger or more intellectually credible than that, I strongly encourage you to express it more clearly than you've done thus far.

Okay. Below are some things you've written in this thread. Also The argument you've made in the quoted posts is that, after the inessential and trivial have been stripped away, the one factor determining the outcome of the Bills/Chiefs playoff games is that Mahomes is better than Allen. After you've assigned 100% of the blame for the playoff losses to Mahomes being better than Allen, you cannot then assign any blame to McDermott's postseason defensive collapses. 100% of the blame has already been assigned! There's 0% left over for you to assign to the defense. 0% left over for you to assign to the Bills' WRs, who had 160 yards of dropped passes in this most recent playoff loss.

Great post. I will add the following, from Wikipedia: "In Super Bowl XXXVI, Belichick's defense held the St. Louis Rams' offense, which had averaged 31 points during the season, to 17 points, and the Patriots won on a last second field goal by Adam Vinatieri." Belichick's defense came up big in the postseason, against a team with an elite QB and an elite passing offense. While I do not believe Belichick was the greatest head coach ever, he was significantly better than Sean McDermott.

The professor's experiment determined that the Patriots' footballs had the air pressure you'd expect from a team following the rules. Anything more than that would have been outside the scope of his experiment.

My thoughts about Belichick are somewhat different than yours. When he was with the Giants, he was a rock solid defensive coordinator. Brilliant and innovative. Then he became the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. He got off to a slow start, but gradually improved each year. By year 4, the team had a winning record, and I sort of remember them going to the playoffs. He started off year 5 with a winning record as well. Then, news of the Browns moving to Baltimore became public. The team lost every game after that, except for their very last game in Cleveland. He was fired at the end of the year. After spending more time as a defensive coordinator, he found his way to the New England Patriots. Early in his coaching career, he was building a defensively oriented team. The first Super Bowl that the Patriots won, the team had an elite defense, and a spunky offense with a 2nd year QB named Tom Brady. Brady's early career stats were reasonably good but not great. For his first three years as a starter, he never had more than 6.9 yards per pass attempt. If you want 6.9 yards per attempt, you could get that from a lot of QBs. In the middle of the Brady years, he went down with a season-ending injury. Belichick went 11-5 with Matt Cassell as his starting QB. During the post-Brady era, things were bad for Belichick. 1) Poor personnel decisions, to where the roster was depleted of talent. 2) Cupboard bare at QB. Mac Jones isn't going to lead very many teams to Lombardi Trophies. 3) Old age. Belichick in his 70s might not have had the oomph he'd had as a younger man. Aaron Rodgers has a QB rating of 103.6; compared to 97.2 for Tom Brady. Yards per attempt is 7.7 for Rodgers, 7.4 for Brady. TD / INT ratio is 4.5 for Rodgers, 3.0 for Brady. But . . . Tom Brady owns seven Super Bowl rings, just one for Aaron Rodgers. Brady has had better GMs than Rodgers, and better head coaches.

I believe this forum is a better place when people have differing opinions about things. Why? Because it results in robust discussion. It's not as though I'm right 100% of the time. I have things I can learn, both from those who agree with me and those who disagree. That said, it feels like you're being guarded by a protective shield. It doesn't matter what I say, or what any other critic of McDermott says. Not one word is going to penetrate that shield. No matter what gets said, you're going to ignore it, dismiss it, act as though it was never said . . . and then fall back on the argument quoted above. In the year of 13 seconds, Josh Allen had literally the best QB rating in NFL postseason history. But, the Bills defense was only 1/3 as effective against the Chiefs, as were the other two postseason defenses they had faced that year. (As measured by the number of defensive stops.) Do you think the performance of a defense is irrelevant to the outcome of a football game? Do you think there's some aspect of Josh Allen's game, that causes his own team's defense to be only 1/3 as effective as other teams' postseason defenses? How much worse does McDermott's playoff defense against the Chiefs need to be, for you to ascribe more than 0% of the blame to the defense?

For his experiment, the professor inflated a number of footballs. The footballs representing the Patriots were inflated to the minimum pressure allowed by the NFL. Then he left them outside, in weather conditions similar to the Patriots / Colts game. He waited the appropriate amount of time. (I.e., an amount of time roughly corresponding with the duration of the first half of the game.) He then measured the air pressure in the balls. The air pressure measurements he got for the ball representing the Patriots were consistent with the air pressure for the balls in the Colts / Patriots game. But, the balls representing the Colts had lower air pressure than did the Colts' balls in the actual game. The professor noted that his air pressure measurements were dependent on where the balls were measured. Measure them outside, in the cold conditions, and you get a lower air pressure. Move the balls inside to the warm locker room, give them time to sit there and heat up, and you'll get increased air pressure readings. He also observed that the NFL did not appear to have awareness of this, nor did it have procedures to standardize the conditions under which balls' air pressure was measured. He hypothesized that the Colts' balls in the actual game may have been sitting in the warm locker room for a while before being measured, resulting in higher air pressure readings than might otherwise have been the case.

For me it's Keon Coleman. I watched a video of every pass attempt for him, for the 2023 season. By the end of the video I felt sad. He seemed like a guy who was okay but not great as a college WR, with no future in the NFL. I'd absolutely, 100% love to be wrong about that. Patrick Mahomes has consistently had a much better supporting cast than Josh Allen. For a change, it would be nice for Allen's supporting cast to be as good as Mahomes'. If Coleman proves me wrong, that's the good X receiver this offense so desperately needs.

They tried various OL at that OG spot. Late in the season they put in Ryan Bates. While Bates didn't provide the quality of play you'd want from a long-term starter, he was an upgrade over the previous players at that position. He took a major weakness of the OL, and turned it into something which was okay but not great. Upgrading the line's weak spot elevated the unit as a whole. Also I will add this: during that late season and postseason stretch, that OL didn't really face many (if any?) top level DLs. That made the OL look better than it would have, had it been going up against top flight competition. With the line we're taking into the upcoming season, I have two concerns. 1) The Bills lost a starting-caliber OL in the form of Mitch Morse. Did they add one in the form of Edwards or van Pran? 2) Will Torrence improve? If those two questions are answered favorably, then yeah, this could easily be a better OL than what we had during the postseason of 13 seconds. As for Brady: he significantly reduced our percentage of passing plays. Was that because of his general philosophy, or was he temporarily adapting to specific circumstances? The Dallas defense was selling out against the pass while daring us to beat them against the run. You run the ball all day against a defense like that. You could also justify going run happy in other games, by pointing out that Josh Allen was playing hurt, and Diggs was not the same guy late season that he'd been in September and October. Maybe Brady will get the Bills back to a pass-oriented offense this upcoming season. Or, maybe he just wants to run the ball a lot, while de-emphasizing the passing game. By far our best player on offense is Josh Allen. Also, a typical passing play averages around 7.5 yards or so, compared to, say, 4 or 4.5 yards for a rushing attempt. If he's going to a more run-oriented offense, then he's de-emphasizing our best offensive player, while moving towards lower yardage plays. That's not the direction I'd like to see for the offense. For now I'm suspending judgement on Brady, until we learn more.

I'd bet my house . . . my house that Raiders fans are thrilled to have drafted this guy. If you use the first overall pick on a QB, and you get the next Jamarcus Russell, you're doing cartwheels in the streets. His ability to make the headlines once again is the finishing touch to a first rate NFL career.

Look at the year of 13 seconds. Josh Allen had the highest QB rating for any QB in NFL postseason history, ever. But, McDermott's defense generated two defensive stops against the Chiefs, vs. 6 defensive stops each for the other two postseason defenses the Chiefs had faced. For the Bills to win the Super Bowl they need to do two things. 1) Generate a minimum of four defensive stops in each of their postseason games. That's halfway between the usual 2 stop McDermott defensive collapse, and the 6 - 7 stops that good defenses generate against the Chiefs. 2) Get their offense closer to what it was in 13 seconds. In the year of 13 seconds, the Bills' offense had 3.5 things going for it, that might not have been true in subsequent years. 1) A good OC, in the form of Daboll. 2) A very good WR corps. Diggs was in his prime, John Brown was the deep burner, Cole Beasley was the slot, and Gabe Davis was the number four WR. 3) The OL wasn't good at run blocking, but at least it was okay at pass protection. 3.5) Josh Allen was at the top of his game. So, yeah, I 100% think winning a Super Bowl with Josh Allen is possible. In fact, it's highly probable, as long as the rest of the team gets its act together. That means both our coordinators need to be good. Also, we probably need to add a #1 WR and a good pass rusher.

Just like me! 👍👍

I've acknowledged that the pro-McDermott people have made intelligent arguments. The above is not one of them. Other postseason defenses are 3x or even 3.5 x as effective against Mahomes, as is the Bills postseason defense. In an earlier post, you wrote, "I don’t particularly care about [Mahomes'] numbers vs Buffalo." If you choose to ignore an inconvenient fact, you can pretend that your argument hasn't been discredited. It has. Allen has faced Mahomes in the playoffs three times. Of those three games, he's come close to beating Mahomes twice. Never in those games has Allen's defense generated more than two stops. If you pair Allen with a decent defense (defined here as one which gets at least four stops), Allen is 2-1 against the Chiefs in the playoffs. This last time around, Allen's receivers had 160 yards of drops. Give Allen a defense which generates four stops, and give him receivers who don't drop 160 yards worth of passes? Yeah, Allen is winning that one easily. You seem like a smart guy. But the argument you've made above is intellectually lazy. You can do a lot better than this.

He "stole" the donation? Well, okay, that's one way of looking at it, I guess. But that's not now I see it. I feel he earned the donation! How? Clearly, he was vastly underpaid by the Raiders, in exchange for the value he provided. Surely, the person who had donated the money in the first place, would wish to help right this wrong.

I acknowledge that the Bengals and Chiefs have had a better pass rush than the Bills. Maybe you put the blame for that on Beane, for having failed to gain better pass rushers with all the resources he'd invested. Maybe some of the blame goes to bad luck, due to the von Miller injury. I'd also put some of the blame on Leslie Frazier, whose scheme has the DL focus at least as much on containing the QB, as it does on rushing him. All that being said, I disagree with your premise. I do not believe that a good pass rush was the primary reason why the Bengals were able to generate those six defensive stops in their playoff win over the Chiefs, while McDermott has always been limited to two. The Bengals' stops came mostly in the second half or in overtime, when presumably their pass rushers were more tired than they'd been in the first half. Also they were rushing three and dropping eight back into coverage, much like the Giants had done in their Super Bowl wins over Brady and the Patriots. The biggest difference the two defenses was that against the Bills, Mahomes was gifted easy throws, over and over again. Whereas against the Bengals, their coverage blanketed the Chiefs' receivers, smothering their offense like a lead blanket smothers a fire.

Always nice to see a Bills player learning to catch passes from the Jets QB.

Three times you trolled this thread with the comment "fire everybody." Now you follow that up with this. Intelligent arguments have been advanced on both sides of this discussion. You've simply ignored and dismissed those arguments you didn't like.

Look. I get that the Bills didn't have the players to be an elite defense. They weren't going to be the Steel Curtain Steelers, or the '85 Bears. I'm not asking for that. But, I am asking for them to accomplish something, in their playoff games against the Chiefs and Bengals. The Bengals didn't have the talent to be an elite defense either, and they achieved six stops. McDermott has never achieved more than two stops, in a playoff game against the Chiefs or Bengals. Was our defense really that much less talented than theirs, that they should be accomplishing 3x as much as we did?

Dude. I mean, dude. Patrick Mahomes has a career average of 7.9 yards per pass attempt. Normally you'd expect a RB to average 4 or 4.5 yards per rushing attempt. Somewhere in that neighborhood. Mix some passing plays together with some running plays, and you're looking at an average yards per offensive play that's better than 4, worse than 7.9. Or at least that's how it should be. When a team is averaging 8.5 yards per play, it's as though they said, "You know what? These running plays are dragging down our average. Let's eliminate them. For that matter, 7.9 isn't good enough for our QB. Let's do 8.5." McDermott is a good defensive coordinator, at least most of the time, in the regular season. But he's been terrible as a defensive coordinator in postseason games against the Chiefs and Bengals.

As I pointed out a few posts ago, under McDermott the Bills defense has never generated more than two stops in a postseason game against the Chiefs or Bengals. That type of defensive collapse is atypical of other defenses the Chiefs face in the postseason. In the year of 13 seconds, the Steelers defense got six stops in their postseason game against the Chiefs. Ditto the Bengals defense. This past Super Bowl, the 49ers defense got seven stops. That's 3.5 times better than anything McDermott has ever done in a postseason game against the Chiefs. When your defense gets six or even seven defensive stops, that gives your team a good chance to win the game. When your defense gets just two stops, the outcome of the game has pretty much been determined.

In our postseason games against them, our defensive strategy has been, "Take away the big play. Let them have the short to intermediate stuff." That strategy has failed nearly completely, at least in the postseason. Why have we had some regular season success against the Chiefs? I remember one year when the Chiefs went through a period of offensive disorganization. Biemeny and Reid were not on the same page. The Bills benefited from that, in our regular season game against them. They got their act together by the time the postseason came around. There were times when Patrick Mahomes hadn't yet learned to take the underneath stuff, even when that's what we were giving him. If he's looking for the big play, even when that's the one thing our defense is actually taking away, that's going to make our defensive strategy look maybe better than it deserves to. Let's say we continue using the same defensive strategy we've used in the past. Our future postseason results are likely to resemble our previous postseason results, rather than anything that's happened in the regular season.

I did not say the Bengals had played "more man." I said they had played tighter coverage with their CBs. If you're dropping 8, your intention is typically not going to be, "Let 'em have the underneath stuff."

Look at the AFC Championship game between the Chiefs and Bengals. In the first half, the Chiefs offense was eating the Bengals defense alive. In fact, that Bengals defense was looking a lot like McDermott's playoff defense against the Chiefs. But then in the second half something changed. The Bengals began playing tighter coverage with their CBs. That's when they generated the vast majority of their six defensive stops. McDermott and Frazier relentlessly used soft zone/prevent in their playoff games against the Chiefs, with complete disregard for whether that tactic was or wasn't working. Unlike the Bengals defensive coordinator, they weren't willing to go to tight CB coverage, even after soft zone had failed again and again. There's a reason Andy Reid fired Sean McDermott as a defensive coordinator. Unlike you, I do not give McDermott a mulligan for the defensive collapse in the Bengals playoff game. It's worth looking at that season as a whole. In the season opener, the Bills looked very good against the Rams. I liked the coaching effort on both sides of the ball. But as the season went on things changed. The Bills were barely squeaking by teams they should have been dominating. The coaching staff had gotten away from the things they had done well against the Rams. The Bills did not look remotely like a team which deserved to be in any kind of Super Bowl conversation. That pattern of disappointing performances began long before the Hamlin injury. That under-performance continued into the Bengals game, for which McDermott deserves no mulligan. It was the usual soft zone, prevent defense. The usual two defensive stops. The usual defensive collapse in the playoffs. Everything about that game was completely normal for McDermott and Frazier, at least in postseason games against elite QBs.

The original title was something along the lines of, "Tom Brady QB coach." The wording made it sound like a news item, rather than an idea the OP had proposed. Why did you want to click on it more than on most other titles? Because people are attracted to mystery.

You and I see this differently. Under McDermott, the Bills are 0-4 in postseason games against the Chiefs and Bengals. In those four postseason losses, the Bills defense has generated seven defensive stops. Total. Never more than two defensive stops in a postseason game against the Chiefs or Bengals. In the year of 13 seconds, the Steelers defense generated six defensive stops in their postseason game against Tyreek Hill and the Chiefs. Ditto for the Bengals defense. In the most recent Super Bowl, the 49ers defense generated seven defensive stops against the Chiefs. To generate just two defensive stops is incontrovertibly a defensive collapse. But is it a defensive coaching failure? In this most recent postseason loss to the Chiefs, the defense was devastated by injuries. It's reasonable to give McDermott a mulligan for that. In the other three postseason defensive collapses, however, the Bills defense had the horses to accomplish something on defense. But they didn't have the coaching. McDermott and Frazier elected a soft zone/prevent defense. It's hard for the players to generate stops, when you're not putting them in position to make plays. If McDermott keeps doing what he's been doing, the next time we face the Chiefs in the playoffs, we'll again use a soft zone/prevent defense. We'll get our usual two defensive stops. After the inevitable loss, we'll hear a song and dance about how Josh Allen can never beat Mahomes in the playoffs, because Mahomes is the better QB. Not one word will be said about how Josh Allen's defense is only one third as effective as the other postseason defenses Mahomes faces.