dave mcbride

Yikes. Dropping like flies.

Like I said, I never take road games against bad teams for granted. Just alerting folks that the Bears are losing one of their only difference-making defensive players for the season.

That may be, but he's an undrafted free agent rookie who has only played a majority of the snaps on D in the last four games. For the first seven, he didn't play at all. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/S/SanbJa00.htm. I'm not too worried about him.

I don't take any road games for granted, so I figured I'd post this. The Bears had three really good defensive players going into this season: Roquan Smith, Robert Quinn, and Eddie Jackson. The first two were traded and Jackson appears to have a lisfranc injury that will probably end his season: https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2022/11/29/bears-believe-eddie-jackson-has-significant-lisfranc-injury/. The Bills will be facing a Bears D that it is genuinely devoid of talent, starting a bunch of guys few here have ever heard of (if any, truth be told): https://www.chicagobears.com/team/depth-chart.

Not quite accurate. He did get injured on that play in 2016, but was off to his best start ever in 2018 through 8 games before suffering ANOTHER shoulder injury on a hit from TJ Watt while in the pocket and in the process of beginning his throw. That injury was worse than the earlier one and essentially ended his career as an NFL-caliber thrower. But your basic point stands.

These are great comments and match up with what I've been seeing.

I *KNOW* he had an injury in 2016. And yeah, it probably affected him to some extent. Yet midway through 2018 he was still playing at an elite level. The injury that really effed him up was the rotator cuff injury delivered by Watt while he was in the pocket. He was a shell of himself after that and never recovered.

https://www.si.com/nfl/panthers/gm-report/a-timeline-of-the-cam-newton-saga I tend to think it was the watt hit because up until that point in 2018, he was playing arguably the best football of his career and the panthers were 6-2. “November 2018 - Cam Newton suffers significant shoulder injury. This is where many people believe things took a turn for the worst in Cam Newton's career. The Panthers were off to a hot 6-2 start to open the 2018 season, and Newton was enjoying (arguably) the best season of his career so far. Then, week ten against the Pittsburgh Steelers happened. Linebacker T.J. Watt gave Newton a nasty illegal hit in the first quarter of the game. It was later determined that Newton suffered a shoulder injury that affected him for the rest of the year. He couldn't make the downfield throws that he used to make with ease, and opponents keyed in on this. Because "Super Cam" was weakened by his significant "Kryptonite" injury, the Panthers finished with a 7-9 record and missed the playoffs.”

No it didn’t. It happened in the pocket. https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/07/09/cam-newton-says-2016-shoulder-injury-affected-him-for-years/ The video: https://www.nfl.com/videos/t-j-watt-jars-ball-loose-with-big-hit-278841

His career was shortened because of hits he took in the pocket, specifically to his shoulder. He lost his ability to throw. He went from having a very strong arm to one of the weakest in the league after his rotator cuff injury.

Agree on KC. The only team that I think will give them trouble is the Raiders, a divisional opponent that has talent and the ability to score a lot of points. I don't see them losing to Cincy, and the rest of their schedule is an absolute cakewalk (Denver twice, Houston, Seattle at home). I have them as the AFC SB representative facing off against SF. A bye and home field is just too much of an advantage. In the NFC, I think Dallas and SF are the two best teams and basically equal overall, but I'm going with the superior coach (Shanahan over McCarthy). Barring catastrophic injuries, a KC-SF SB seems like the most likely scenario to me.

Mods, merge if you see fit:

Well, the Bills throw a lot and he is really hard to sack. And a lot of the near sacks result in 15 yard runs and 25-yard scramble throws. It seems to me that teams probably do more leaps to block passes against the Bills than against other teams. It stands to reason, and also the number of passes that are actually tipped is very, very low. With someone like Goff or Mac Jones or Stafford or Burrow or Garappolo or Cousins, it’s probably wiser to just tee off and go for the sack.

?? — the throw started out perfectly and was on a rope. If that isn’t tipped, it’s a TD. Tips happen and they are essentially random. I will grant that the d-line did seem to know what was coming, but that’s on the play caller, not the player. I don’t really fault Allen for that pick. There is randomness in the sport and that’s a classic example. Again, it was a bullet that was going to be a TD.

I had the same thought!

Taron Johnson hasn’t missed a start. He’s a starter.

For an in-game throw with pads on, bodies swirling around you, and a hurt elbow to boot, 59 mph is utterly blazing. Especially after you’ve already thrown it 41 times already and otherwise taken a physical beating. Mahomes really ain’t that close although to be sure he has a GREAT arm and can make all of the throws. He is great. No on in league history was able to match Allen in velocity until Malik Willis came along. Allen shattered the Senior bowl record for velocity with 66.1 mph and has been measured at 74 mph in a different setting also. Malik Willis truly has a cannon, though: https://theathletic.com/3116058/2022/02/08/high-upside-traits-is-atlanta-native-malik-willis-the-perfect-pick-for-the-falcons-or-too-risky/

Definitely a pitch count: https://buffalonews.com/sports/bills/he-lifts-everybody-else-up-tredavious-white-returns-to-bills-lineup-in-limited-fashion/article_5429d08e-6c5e-11ed-ba92-3fa5124dcd3d.html

https://buffalonews.com/sports/bills/he-lifts-everybody-else-up-tredavious-white-returns-to-bills-lineup-in-limited-fashion/article_5429d08e-6c5e-11ed-ba92-3fa5124dcd3d.html

He is just too small. He loses all the physical contests,

And Jim McMahon. He was 67-30 as a starter and above league average in qb rating in 7 out of the 10 seasons he had enough passes to register. And in one of those seasons, his rating-plus was 99 (100 is league average). https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/McMaJi00.htm He had a pretty good career, all things considered. Lasted 15 seasons. He actually has 2 rings too — he was Favre’s backup in 1996 and handled end-of-game kneel down duties vs the Pats in the SB.

I honestly think the coaching staff deliberately ramped him down so he could ramp back up again the right way -- that is, not to the point of playing like a reckless one-man band. I see last game as a reset. He's not gonna change from being Josh Allen.

Agree with all of this. But still, know what the rules are about hands! Christ. Regarding the Hamlin call, I said this elsewhere, but man, he didn't need to do that. So why did he do it? I chalk it up to fear. He doesn't know at first if that ball is going over his head or not, and he's thinking that if I don't grab him and it gets over my head, that's a touchdown. Hence he grabs around the waist and the ref makes the fairly easy call. It only looks like a bad call because he did everything else right and the throw was short enough for him to make the play on the ball. Fear got him in the end. Overall, I completely agree about the reffing. There was a blatant push off by Amari Cooper on his last TD that was certainly equal to Diggs' push-off, but he got away with it. The Bills definitely got screwed on calls overall. Regarding the non-calls on holds against Oliver, they may well have been called if the blocker took him down with his arm around him. Those refs have a lot to watch and I think they miss a ton mid-play in the scrum due to information overload. But they DO see linemen fall to the ground, and if an arm's around the defender when he goes down, they're going to call it even if the material effect on the play is negligible. I chalk this up to a mix of coaching and players deciding not to learn. Apropos of nothing, my favorite comment from an announcer in a LONG time came from Lofton. They were talking near the end of the first half about calling two plays in the huddle to preserve a few seconds between plays, and Lofton asked an excellent question: do you have players you can trust to remember two plays in a row? Because if you don't, you really can't do it. For a lot of guys, I have to think the answer is "no." I had never thought about that!

I honestly thought that was a blatant hold because while he started off well, he did what Dawkins did: got his arm around the defender's waist while taking him down. Easy call. Stupid on his part because he didn't need to. Same with Dawkins vs the Jets. Keep your damn hands in when you know you're taking a guy down! It's not that hard if you know the rules. And it's the sort of thing that's SO clearly visible to refs.

My assumption is that these injuries last a long time. We don't know what the injury actually was. Remember when Robert Woods played over half of a season with a torn groin, when Hogan played with a torn ligament in his wrist (his last season in Buffalo), and when Jerry Hughes played with torn ligament in his own wrist? All had surgery after the season but were OK enough to play in pain throughout it. We didn't know about the severity of the injuries until after the season That's basically what you're seeing here. He's definitely been limping at times.