dave mcbride

I am a little surprised that this piece hasn’t generated a thread, so here goes: https://buffalonews.com/sports/bills/inside-the-bills-a-remarkable-advanced-stat-shows-tremaine-edmunds-growth-this-season/article_817e855c-88ab-11ed-8c2e-77dd12191e72.html. Lots of interesting stuff in here.

Wilson had actually elite athletic traits coming out too: very live arm, good legs, good size. People *loved* him because of how the athletic traits he possessed projected in the pros. It’s basically as @BADOLBILZ says it was. Do you have a link to the coachability issues in college regarding Wilson? Because I ain’t finding them. The draft profiles of him were pretty sky high across the board, with the one cautionary factor being the one-year wonder track record. Otherwise, the scouting community loved him due to the extremely strong arm and accuracy.

Are you watching the games? He was a step slow on virtually every pass directed his way vs the Jets. He was slow on the deep completion in the Bears game, not getting into good double coverage position because he was chugging down the field at a 4.8 clip. He still anticipates well and has great instincts, but in man against better receivers — and Chase is as good as Hill — he is a liability. They have to mask him right now through zone coverage. They used to let him be their one man guy, but he’s not up to it at the moment. But don’t take it from me — White essentially said so himself. Yes. He held all game vs Miami and got away with it.

We are a matchup zone team (where zone morphs into man) that occasionally plays man. Elam showed vs George Pickens that he’s not ready to play man against top-end receivers (yet). The Bengals have very, very good receivers. The Bears currently have the worst receiving corps the league given the injuries. Keep in mind that zone results in a lot of easy completions, especially for highly accurate qbs with multiple good options. That’s Burrow for you. Lael Collins going down is huge given that it gives Rousseau an advantage.

It’s less about him being a starting-caliber player than about him being currently too slow to play man against the Jamar Chases of the world. He is not 100 percent. He has said so himself.

In a windstorm game against a bad throwing qb with no receivers. Watch his actual play: he is a step slower and it is OBVIOUS. He gave up a TD to Tyreek Hill!

Tre is s-l-o-w right now, and it’s visible. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s running a 4.7 40 at the moment. He definitely makes up for some of it with instinct and strong knowledge, but it’s a problem.

Davis is nearly broke, relatively speaking vis a via other owners. The money usually doesn’t matter for owners, but in the case of the Raiders, it does. Yup.

He is a decent starting qb and the jets have decent offensive talent. The D is elite, which is something the Raiders have never had.

He is obviously getting cut in the brief window after the Super Bowl, but I gotta say: he’s not great, but he’d be a big upgrade for the Jets.

This. If you're not running screens, you're going to be dead last in this category. Screens start out as negative passing yardage plays but are designed to get 15-20 positive yards. Do enough of them, and you're going to look good in the YAC rankings.

Wilson is effing good. Not sure what games you’re watching.

Doubt it’s that given that they’re fairly easy to detect. There’s a reason the NFL really doesn’t test for HGH, which I suspect is rampant among players.

Alvin Kamara’s rookie season was off the charts - 7.06 per target/carry. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/K/KamaAl00.htm I wrote earlier that 7 yards per target / carry should be a goal, but that’s too high. It hardly ever happens. Strangely enough, CJ Spiller had one of the best RB seasons in the NFL in this century — 6.45 yards per carry/target and 1703 total yards in 2012.

The issue with moving on from Jones is, what’s the alternative? He’s at least ok and still has upside potential (not saying he’ll reach it), but the alternatives are so bad. You can’t drop him and assume tanking will result in you (gm and coach) keeping your job either.

I sorta see your point, but the numerical goal seems like the wrong metric. Rather, I’d want a guy averaging 7 yards per play (meaning rushes and targeted passes, inclusive of incompletions), which is a solid yards per passing play number in and of itself. Top receiving RBs catch about 80 percent of the balls thrown their way at best, btw. Obviously, you want that player to get a lot of touches, but you also want multiple guys racking up solid numbers, from slot receivers to TEs to the other running back to the wideouts.

See below:

Discuss. (Point is, there aren’t any 80-yard runs padding his stats.)

The AFC East on November 13: Miami: 7-3 Jets: 6-3 Bills: 6-3 NE: 5-4 The AFC East on Christmas: Bills: 12-3 Miami: 8-7 NE: 7-8 Jets: 7-8

I think James Cook looks like he might turn out to be an extremely good player.

Don’t look now, but this year for Carolina, Sam Darnold has a 104.3 rating, is averaging 8.6 yards per attempt, and has 4/0 TD/INT ratio.

I saw that comment, which I thought was classic CYA. He was literally pushed back 3 yards! The whistle is always blown when that happens regardless of whether a guy’s legs are still churning.

Yeah, the weather was WAY worse than a lot of people realize. The conditions were brutal.

The weather conditions were worse than a lot of people think and it really affected play. From Allen regarding the second interception (the Bears players all said that the weather was impossible too because of really strong and constantly shifting winds; see below): “It's not so much the cold as it was the wind,” he said. “It just gusts you don't know really where it's coming from. Sometimes the flags are blowing one way and the next year they're blowing the opposite way. So again, just trying to find actually some of the shorter completions and being able to drive it obviously down the field, deep you're not going to have much success. “Just got to be better again, decision wise, obviously that first interception wasn't a great decision. The second one, the wind just kind of was right in the face and I didn't get the nose of the ball down, it just kind of sailed on our back there. I can live with the second one, the first one just a bad decision. I’ve got to find a way to get it to a check down there and move on and live to fight another day.” https://buffalonews.com/sports/bills/observations-bills-overcome-some-sloppy-play-to-clinch-third-straight-afc-east-title/article_14638368-83cf-11ed-831e-63bd16655ad6.html From the Bears: “Freezing,” tight end Cole Kmet said. “That was the coldest game I’ve ever played in.” The 26-mph winds with gusts up to 35 mph made everything a little more difficult too. “It was crazy,” quarterback Justin Fields said. “It really impacted the whole game. From snaps to even tosses. … (Those) were flying everywhere. The snaps were going everywhere. It definitely impacts the passing game and figuring out which way you want to throw the ball.” Added receiver Dante Pettis: “Man, it was cold. And extremely windy. Even on the short routes, that ball would be moving and become a little difficult to track at times because of some of the bigger gusts. It was moving like a knuckleball at times.” https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/bears/ct-chicago-bears-buffalo-bills-josh-allen-justin-fields-20221224-izkhrz3pr5cvnaulyqcamqfe7m-story.html From the Bills kickers in that same Buffalo News piece linked to above: “Some of the worst conditions I’ve played in in my 10 years,” Martin said. “Obviously, the temperature is already awful and then we were sitting at constant winds of 25 miles per hour and gusts up to 40. It was tough out there. It was a strange wind. You would feel it constantly in one direction and then all of a sudden, there would be a gust from the opposite direction. It was a real-time type of adjustment. Whatever I felt when I got ready to punt, that’s what I was going with. The gusts are what made it difficult because you didn’t know when they were coming and they were blowing on the drops, blowing on the snaps. It was one of the tougher games I’ve been a part of.” Martin got off a beauty of a 62-yard punt in the fourth quarter. “It was a hard left-to-right (wind) and when it comes to punting, it’s not the wind when the ball actually gets up there, it’s the drop to kick,” he said. “When it’s a strong crosswind, your drop is moving. Even in warm-up, there were a couple that I dropped and it ended up on the left side of my body and I hit 10 yards to the 10th row. You really have to hold on to the ball longer and really hope those gusts don’t come along right when you drop the ball.” Bass said the wind simply carried his missed extra point wide right. “I hit it good and hit it to my point, but once it got up into the wind, it just took it and pushed it right,” he said. “Kickoffs were pretty good. The wind was pretty hard in my face on a couple of them but once I got the ball up and through the wind, it would carry a little bit. It was really about getting good contact.”

Totally. His forward progress was OBVIOUSLY stopped. They didn’t address whether it was reviewable or not either. It’s one of the worst calls I’ve seen this year, and there have been some bad ones.