Fake-Fat Sunny

I generally agree with those who point out the fact that Christie was getting older, that he had come here with a significant contract because we paid a bit for him to attract him from away from Tampa Bay, that our team never got things together with using hm directionally on KOs because he no longer had the leg to kick it long with the KO moving backward, and that he could not be a sure ting to hit the long kick. However, it is merely convenient menmory on our part not to see this as one of the areas which had been most problematic for TD in terms of his management decisions. TD got a bit of grief from the local media and football gurus when he cut Christie as part of our purge of big contracts as dealing with the leavings of Butler forced us into contract hell. Chrisite had become a true local and even still lives in the area (he is a Canadian citizen and owns a home in Niagara-On-the-Lake just across the river from the falls) despite having connections to FLA with his first NFL gig and working in a few towns since the Bills released him. TD responded with the quote which has proved false that good kickers are a dime a dozen in the NFL. His kicking excursions with the Bills have included an ill-fated investment in Jake Ariens who was so not ready for the NFL that he ended up cut by a 3-13 team. We then went with Shayne Graham whom we judged not good enough and cut him though he now seems to be a regular NFL kicker for the Bengals. TD signed Mike Hollis who proved to be good enough as a kicker to win a couple of games for us with long clutch kicks. but he and TD couldn't reach agreement on a deal (he wanted to be paid like a Vanderjagt and didn't command that in a maket where he was good but not great and he went elsewhere where he was hurt. The Lindell adventure I think has to go down as unproven for the Bills at best and is probably reasonably described as a disappointment. Many of the things which are true about Christie's failings (long kick questions, big contract) are also true of Lindall. TD was flat out wrong in his belief that good kickers are a dime a dozen. Lindell has performed well under April with directional kicks and he is younger than Christie, but the 5 for 5 performance by Christie is a simple indicator of how clutch he is and Lindell has never shown that. The Bills taking a flyer on an FA or draft choice kicker would be quite reasonable because Lindell simply needs to do better. If I needed a kicker to win the game for me, the longer the kick was the more I would fear depending on Christie, but if a game ever came down to that I would take Christie as my man to attempt that kick over Lindell at almost every distance. I doubt Christie would make a 47+ yarder if we needed it, but i doubt Lindell would either. I'd have greated belieft in Christie 40-45 yards. Abou equal 46 and 47, and I know Christie would probably not kick far enough at 47 or better, but i fear Lindell would simply miss.

There have been several post with folks theorizing (though many calim far more certainty about their choice than is warranted in the real world of the market where NO player is worth some absolute level of draft pick) as to what TH's worth is on the market. Well last night in Buffalo I stumbled upon a true real-life measure. My wife and I were at the Tops Friendly Market in North Buffalo getting some egg nog, Boca Italian Sausages, Entemanns danish's and stuff for multiple days of holiday festivities. She pointed to a table upfront as we wheeled our booty out of the store and lo and behold their were literally dozens of Travis Henry bobblehead dolls marked down for sale (it looked like a scene from the Hitchcock movies The Birds where the heros quietly shuffle through a bunch of silent birds sitting and watching as they try to get their car). In this world where everything must go and are priced according to demand, the TH Bobbleheads were marked as originally priced at $14.99, but were now marked down to a mere ninety-nine cents! How low the once revered have now fallen. From the Pro Bowl to the outhouse in one fell swoop. While he once commanded big bucks for a bobblehead he is now a paperweight at best.

Him breaking the 1000 yard rushing milestone this season was what I had in mind for unabashedly claiming this was one of the best football draft picks I had ever seen. Even if WM were injured and his career ended suddenly after that point obviously the result would not compare to results like TTs output for the Bills with is knee, but it would be irrational to fault TD for that bad luck. Has WM is so close, this really looks like TD and the Bills showing great skill, trust in their docs ande cojones in picking him.

Probably the more important injury story for the Bills will be whether Pitts has clinched homefield advantage through the playoffs and decides to rest their walking wounded in the last game. If this happens it will mean Pitts beat the Ravens this weekend which gives us the playoff advantage over the Ravens IF we win out. I suspect thr Broncos will likely lose one of their two last games giving us the advantage over them IF we win out. This leaves what I see as the biggest ? of our playoff fantasy which is that Jax must lose at home to either Houson or Oakland AND we must win out. Neither outcome for the two Jax games is likely, but as Miami showed on Monday night on any given day anything can happen. We also live in the world of any given day, but given that I think that the SF injuries make them a much worse team with just as bad if not worse injury issues, if Pitts is resting folks we just may win out.

I certainly claim no glory in having dead lock certainty who the right choice for HC was as there are a variety of essential factors in buidling a winning framework starting with our football braintrust which I and no outsider can truly know (such as how the personalities will get along and since I don't know TD, etc. personally its only a guess). However, though I could not say with the certainty of an ICE who is the right choice I certainly had my uncertain guesses of who the correct choices might be and actually had a clearer idea of whom the wrong choices were. The great confirmation I see of my views so far is that it seemed to me that Tom Coughlin was the wrong choice for the Bills, I'm glad they didn't go that way and actually I think the true confessions of note in this thread are from the folks willing to admit they were all wrong advocating Coughlin rather than the admission they were wrong about MM. Coughlin did bring the advantage that he had won before, but if that was the key criterion than hiring Fassel or bringing back Marv made more sense to me since they had taken a team farther than Coughlin and they did not have his obvious negatives. Coughlin's big fault as best as I can tell (a key to the Jax players giving up on him when the going got tough) is that he has a my way or the highway approach that some seem to love because he is disciplining the paid too well NFL player. However, there are so many stories about him which simply border on the bizarre (like him ordering his assistants not to wear sunglasses at practice) that he struck me as someoe who would bring his random insecurity with him as he strove to establish his authority through fear. This might be fine while the team was winning, but when the rough spots occur as they do for all teams, I suspected he would fin few defenders and it would all fall apart. As it happens, this litany seemed to start early in NYC as this despot got into some brouhaha over who was handling the press. Even worse for him unlike Jax, he neither has the power that an HC has over an expansion team, the honeymoon is short (or non-existent) with the NYC press, and his moves to win right now failed and though Eli will develop like any young QB this will take time. I will not be surprised if he is gone if the team does not win next year even though he will have several years left on his contract. This story is important for considering the MM experience here, because I think the key is that MM is not simply a bright guy (there are tons around as football ain't brain surgery) but he came in as TD's boy and part of the team. The fact he was a rookie actually showed right away as it took this team 4 games to find its footing. Even worse, bad luck (which a team makes for itself) with a series of bizarre plays against Jax and some bad ref calls against Oak made this team 0-4. The key thing for this team is that MM/Clements/Gray/April had the confidence in themselves to stay the course when the world around them was collapsing and the team had the belief to trust it the braintrust and themselves to weather the storm. Most important, TD who didn't even have a honeymooner advanatage because he had 3 years of failure to build upon retained the confidence in MM not to panic and stayed the course when there was huge pressure (even from the owner who began to making disparaging noises to the press) to do something different. I think that clearly things could have been very different under different HCs if TD had gone a different way. It likely would have been a bigger and ongoing disaster under Coughlin. A talent such as GW (if we had found his type to replace him) as HC does not produce winning results either.

My sense of Micheal Vick is that if he stays healthy to me he is clearly one of the best WBs in the league and thus is paid the salary of one of the best QBs in the league in our capitalistic society. Pay and contribution to winning are far from directly equivalent in this league as QBs are drastically overpaid because of how they are promoted and because this enetertainment vehicle is about creating heros as much as it is about winning (unfortunately from my perspective) Further this salary is kicked up in our market economy because he is one of the most exciting players to watch play the game (From my standpoint fuggdabout those who want a pocket passer, the TD he scored on a 4th and goal from the 12 was an insane play which few if any other QBs in the league could pull off). If you think Vick is overpaid as a player I think that you need to complain not about Vick's play but about out capitalistic system. As far as winning which is what is most important in my mind, i would not pay this amount to Vick because as a guy who runs a lot he is far too likely to be injured. Further, like Peyton Manning, i think ultimately his salary is going to weigh down the team's cap to such an extent they will not be able to buy the balanced team they need to build a winner.

Look, if your main hope is that the Bills win the SB in 2004 then you should in no way lose hope this will happen with Bledsoe being named the 2004 starter. Thinking about real life, Bledsoe was absolutely no doubt lock as starter for the 2001 season Pats and lo an behold this team won an SN this year. There is no doubt that a team can win the SB with Bledsoe named the starting QB for that team as the season begins. Ironically, for those who are so dead set certain that Losman has the talent to be the man, I'm pretty sure that he will actually start 2005 with as much time as an NFL player and in fact more playing time and success (since he has led this squad to TDs) that Tom Brady had when he led NE to the title that year. I don't see Bledsoe starting at QB in 2005 as a problem which makes an SB win impossible.

Lets not go to far with the broad statements and declarations. I'm certainly as a big a critic of GW's work and output as anyone as I was calling for the team to make a change at HC as early as the end of the 2002 season because despite the meteroric improvement in the team's W'L from 3-13 to 8-8 it was clear to me that GW was a great DC but not ready for primetime as an HC. However, with actions ranging from calling for the untested rookie Coy Wire to start at SS even though he had zero experience at this position at any level or organized ball, to the demolition of MW's development by putting the even less experienced Pacillo next to him, GW has a clear record of making assessment mistakes with the undeserving vets which he has had to patch up by his using untested rookies in their place. I fault GW for not developing players approrpriately specifically because he and the team were forced to throw rookies into positions they were not ready for because of some bad vet assessment.

Folks have asked those who spoke in support of TD during the difficult times to come back to say I told you so folks who ragged on him to step up and admit they were wrong rather than simply turning tale and running as another notable Bills critic on TSW has done when many of the football knowledge assertions he made as stonce cold certainties have simply been shown to be wrong game after game after game after game after game so far. Well, I rise to say that I would actually stand up to say that I was one of those who certainly found great fault with TD's work early in the season (and before) and that clearly the TEAM and he have produced tremendous results these last five games in a row, and probably for two more games in a row (even with the any given Sunday proviso, we are facing the worst team in the league and are likely to get the best team in the league at home with them having already clinched homefield througout the playoffs). However, I would also say that along with finding great fault in some of TDs work, I also have been vocal in pointing to some great work he has done in my view and also defending him against some accusations such as that he has had problems running the draft side of the operation which I think this conclusion didn't stand up to numeric scrutiny. My views of TD remain the same as they have been since virtually the start. He has clear failing in my view as a GM and I would attribute our poor record in the first three years of the TD era to his failing primarily. However, one should not let these problems alter a recognition that there are some very strong parts of his work. I think the real problem with TSW and most of us fans (and I use the word "problem" loosely here because in the end, this is just a game of entertainment and problems in the world of football do not stack up to a hill of beans in relation to the real problems of the world) is that folks seem to want to claim that TD (or any player) is a total stiff who cannot do anything right OR that he is a total god and my guy and thus cannot do anything wrong. This total hot or total cold view is your right as a fan to have, but this non nuanced view simply has nothing to do with reality in that the truth of judging TD or any NFL actors actions is not going to be found in some declaration of black and white, but in the nuances of the gray. Folks have offered that my posts are often so long (either saying they are too long too read or in thanking me for the perspective), but I often make them long because I am using them to walk through my own thinking on the issue as I do my own search for what is most true about this trivial world of football. Overall in my view TD's performance remains the same: The plus side: 1. He looks tremendous on the business side which ultimately is where he will be judged by Ralph. The Bills had what seemed to be a mid-20th century level of doing business as it was not too long ago that when you went to pick up ticket as the will call they were sorted into shoe boxes. TD has moved the business side not simply into the late 20th century in terms of basic business, but has actually been quite cutting edge in fashinoning partnership deals like the move to St. John's Fisher and regional marketing of the team, partnerships for ticket distribution with local grocery store chains and moving beyond getting local stations to buy out single seats and small numbers of remaining tickets to create sellouts to getting folks like the local MacDonald's owner to do this and get not only the publicity but the tax write off of donating the tickets to the troops. From all I can tell from outside the business side is humming and this is a big part of TDs job. Ultimately, it helps the team and you and I as games are on TV and the regional approach helps keep the team here and makes us more attractive to FAs. 2. He has proved a cagey and innovative negotiator which not only helps the business side, but yields direct benefits on the field because the cap level determines so much about the quality of the players. Basically all agree that he led the charge in getting us out of cap hell a full year or so earlier than expected. From "doing the favor" of extending Travis Henry's contract for what was chump change in the NFL to give him more money than he had ever see, to negotiating extemely Bills friendly contracts to folks like Morman and Adams that the football side correctly judged as major talents, to taking the risky move of signing WM which produced a cap friendly contract for production which we still hope we have not seen the end of, to recognizing that 1st round draft picks are simply a commodity whih can be traded with those who overvalue this asset to get return up front future picks TD has been nothing short of masterful. 3. He has maintained and used personal connections to attract assets like Modrak and ick leBeau here who clearly have benefitted the team. 4. He recognizes that the draft is relly a crapshoot and his work has been very good at using this resource to meet the Bills needs. Negative side 1. As extraordinary as TD has been we have suffered big time from what I see as a very human and primary failing on his part that he was understandably bruised by getting fired by Cowher a guy he hired in Pitts who essentially ran him out of town. The GW hiring simply proved to be one of an HC who was a great DC but who was not ready for primetime. By waiting so the Bills were the last hirer of an HC that year, he had tremendous negotating power as the only option available. In retrospect, the option of GW clearly did not compare to the results produced by John Fox or even those produced by Marvin Lewis who has not yet won, but has turned around a franchise with a history of far worse management than the Bills. He may have been impressed with GW's planning and lists, but this might have made him a good administrative assistant as it turned out he did not have the personal leadership ability or the security to hire guys who had been there before to build a TEAM to reach our goals. 2. Not only did he hire the wrong guy, but in terms of management he seemed to adopt a passive-aggressive style which felt fine about GW not doing well enough as long as it was clearly GW's call so that he got the blame. TD simply needed to be even more assertive in convincing/forcing GW to hire some folks who had been there before as GW's teams were hurt by having an OC not up to the job Sheppard), a DC who was learning well but still learning on the job (Gray) and an STC whose main talent seemed to be that he was a buddy of GW's (Smith). Even worse, OL was claerly a troubled area on this team in need of a major retooling and rather than hiring an OL coach with a track record of performance he was allowed to hire Vinky (no OL coaching experience) and Ruel (1 year previous OL experience) to do this job. TD did use his connections and skills to put in place resources for GW to use but did not assert himself to force the hiring of his choice as a replacement for Sheppard (Clements) and instead apparently took GW's choice (Kevin Killdrive). He did finally assert himself after 2 years of defensive failure and brought his buddy LeBeau in and the run-blitz not only quickly made the team effective but also apparently allowed Gray to leave GW's shadow (depending upon Jenkins and Robinson was a big part of the 2002 failure and who should have known better than their DC that they were done). Again even worse that that it was clear that the O wasn't producing under Killdrive and TD apparently brought in his buddy Les Steckel (former OC) as RB coach, but still GW failed to force Killdrive to change or even to fire him as OC as was done by NYG with Sean Payto. So overall, I feel the same about TD as I always have. He is a tremendous GM on the business side and his business acumen has great on the field outcomes for the team. However, his lack of assertiveness which I think is embedded in how he looks at the job after his Pitts experience really cost us three years of bad production as a team. Here's hoping that with the new team on board we finally got it right!

I think the thought with Antonio Brown was based on the old cliche which despite what Don Beeb does to make bucks of you can't teach speed. Brown was apparently quite easily the fastest Bill and he actually had translated that into TDs returning kicks in the CFL and won a job here by returning a couple of kicks for TDs in his first pre-season here. Given the Bills obvious shortcomings in the kick return game and given that he did score on kick returns in the pre-season keeping with him and trying to teach him was a reasonable course or action in my book. Brown's problem as best as I could tell was that if you hit him at all he went down and though he had great track speed, he never proved elusive enough and instinctive enough to avoid hits. Evem this would not be as big of a problem if the ST blocking as a whole was good enough that few tacklers got a clean shot at Brown, but under Smith/GW our ST unit and the kick return game was adequate at best. In the end, the team stuck with Brown for so long because he did show some demonstrated talent in the CFL and on the track, and the fact that he could never turn that talent into regular season NFL performance didn't stop the Bills from trying to make it work as our other options were Jake Reed and Sammy Morris.

As MileHigh pointed out in his post (but it is worth repeating and expanding upon this point because the same fiction has been recited so often). Bledsoe does have an SB ring and deserves one for playing QB for the majority of a must win game for NE in their first SB winning season, This is no endorsement of DB being a total stud or even him being the right choice for the Bills as I certainly would not have resigned DB after his sucky season last year. However, both folks who insist that DB is a football god or that he has never won the big game are simplu wrong. Bledsoe can and has led a team to the SB as he did under Parcells doing an extraordinary HC job (which included constantly telling DB to throw the damn ball when he would go into his trademark wait and pat maeuver). He also thew a big TD for the lead coming in for an injured Brady and played QB in a must win game for them. Brady has liabilities and also some great things about him and the question about Bledsoe are not the false diatribes about his play but whether Clements/MM are good enough coaches to replicate the results of two of the best ever HCs in Parcells and BB utilizing what Bledsoe can do well and minimizing his deficits for the cap hits we can afford to pay. I had real doubts whether a rookie HC/OC could pull this off this year, but MM/TC have developed quickly and nicely in demonstrating that with continued improvement they should be up to the task quite soon. Of great note to Bills fans is how fast Losman will be developed and if he does whether the Bills will be willing to make the switch or whether it will take the type of injury which forced BB/Weis to turn to Brady as their QB. My sense is that Losman clearly isn't ready, but I disagree with ICE that the only way to achieve him being ready is to make him start now. His unfortunate injury may turn out to be the best thing for his development if he used the time away from the time attentioned needed to be prepared to play to instead give his time attention to learning how a vet understands NFL offenses and defenses by studying film, the playbook, and most important absorbing Wyche's wisdom in the booth on Sundays. This activity does not replace the benefits of seeing the game over Treague's back that only playing would give him. However, my sense is that he will learn those lessons in a better and more effective way if he builds on off field stuff he could still get. Insisting that Bledsoe is either a god or that he sucks completely has nothing to do with the reality of winning football.

The analysis makes sense to me in describing reality particularly when combined with our head to head and tiebreakers against other teams. They beat us in the games we played against them, but given the any give Sunday nature of the NFL, the fact is a long season, and that teams produce in streaks based on a zillion factors (injuries and momentum as they suddenly or don't become a TEAM) there is more to making judgments about a season than simple head-to-head match-ups. Head-to-head does count a lot, but even losses here can be overcome if a team does so well against other teams and in particular common opponents that they can get by that head-to-head loss. If Jax turns out to be bad enough that it loses at home to either Houston or Oakland and the Bills turn out to be good enough to win 7 in a row then it strikes me as more than reasonable that the Bills are more deserving of a playoff spot than this hapless Jax team which actually beat us head-to-head based on a series of unlikely plays we never should have given them. The amazing thing about the Bills is that if they should somehow make the playoffs, they will have pulled off this trick with not only Jax, but likely Denver and Baltimore. It will be true if this happens that the Bills pulled off their part with a series of wins against teams with losing records, but so what as the teams that they would have beaten out deserve post-season glory even less. For folks who want to focus on the records of our opponents and claim that this team beat a series of bad team (and ultimately it will probably also have to happen that they happened to face a good team Pitts taking the week off) are going to have to ignore the fact that Jax, Balt and Denver deserve the playoffs even less than this Bills teams if the three pull the el foldo the next two weeks (as I fully expect Denver and Baltimore to do and Jax shouldn't but might do).

Over the course of the winning streak, while there has certainly been a difference in QB productivity from game to game, I actually don't think there has been an extraordinary difference in what I see of his play. He still throws some extraordinarily beautiful long balls as he did when he hit Evans virtually in stride on the flea flicker this past weekend or when he hit him for a TD on a bomb on the far sideline in the game (or two before that). He muscles the ball thru traffic on many throws like few others can do. However, in addition to muscling the ball into a tight spot he throws some godawful passes into the dirt as he tries to use what passes for touch. He has also continued to make more bad throws to the wrong side of receivers bodies than I remember him making in the past. Yet, I think his play has improved in several areas which I would attribute mostly to good play calling and work by Clements/MM 1. The simplification of the offense by limiting the number or types of audibles he can call seems to have reduced a tendency toward pass happiness in our offense and him being forced to make too many judgments. 2. He seems to have used this unused mental space to instead concentrate on showing some nifty fakes and movement as he faked a QB sneak and instead turned and flipped a lateral to WM for a TD, he has received a couple of laterals after handing off and hit a streaking receiver, heck he has even run a few QB draw plays. 3. The team has played extraordinarily well as a team and ST and D play has delivered him short fields or leads where he has not had to press. 4. He seems to have learned from the alarm clock which fills in for Parcells constantly yelling throw the damn ball at him practice after 4 seconds by not locking onto a receiver for a long time and thus missing other receivers or getting picked off. Some games he has gotten lucky and opposing defenders missed INTs and some games he has gotten unlucky and been picked off a few times, but the D is playing well enough they can make the stop or ST is scoring and we're way ahead. Overall, I haven't seen much change in Bledsoe's basic QB play, but the team correctly relies on him less to win the game for us and doesn't force things. When his efforts work (as they have on several flea flickers) we wn going away and the good news is that even when his efforts don't work the rest of the team is playing well enough we win going away anyway. Bledsoe's efforts and production are fine with me as this gives JP the time to develop ino our QB of the future through some practice work he obviously needs and through some gametime in blowouts which gives him some playing time he must have as well.

I think the problem here is that folks seem to have only two temperatures. A player either is a complete god and we are lost without him, or a player is total trash and we are completely loss because of him. The two virtually completing diverging views do share one thing in common, they are both wrong. Willis has been exceptional. A rookie RB a hair away from the 1000 yard mark when he didn't even start the first quarter of the season and didn't even play in a couple of games is exceptional. His play clearly coincided with a tremendous uptick in the Bills play and actually is a major reason for that improvement. However, despite the fact that his is exceptional as a player, there are limitations to his game and to him as a player as there is with any human being. His production sucked along with the entire running package and most of the offensive play even prior to his injury Sunday. No one is going to mistake his reaction to the cold weather for being that of a T-shirted Tim Krumrie in terms of dealing with the cold. We are certainly much weaker without WM, but NE demonstrated in both their championships that despite grievous injuries in both years, playoff teams and champions step up. Can the Bills step up without WM? The answer is the same as a general response to the question raised in this thread. With WM, the Bills even if they did everything right would still need a good chunk of breaks and luck to make the playoffs. Without WM, it will be harder, but still with a big chunk of breaks and luck the Bills can make the playoffs. The biggest piece of luck we need is possible but pretty doubtful which is Jax being beaten by a weak Houston team or and even weaker Oakland team in Jacksonville. Whether WM plays or doesn't play has no effect on the outcome of this piece of luck. As far as the Bills, even without WM we can win out. Last nights Mia/NE game shows what can happen on any given Sunday or Monday so we could lose to SF on the road Sunday. However, we should still be able to beat them because our defense is producing at a level at the top of the league and the same is true for our ST. The Pitts game was and is a question mark, but given that it is at home for us and would likely be for a playoff shot if the other luck issues break correctly the biggest factor will probably be whether Pitts needs a win for homefield advantage throughout the playoffs. Its why last nights NE loss is so huge. Plaxico Buress, Pitts stellar WR has already announced he is sitting until the playoffs to rest his hammy. A Steeler win against the Ravens would not only put us in the win out drivers seat against the Ravens, but would likely lead to other Steelers mailing in the last game. We need a lot of luck with WM and we still need a lot of luck without him.

Injuries like this are why I found it flat out laugable when folks were demanding that we trade Henry. Even without moving him with and injury to him and Willis's episode this weekend we are short at RB. The Pats twicw turmed grievous injuries into a building block for them building a team which proved capable of winning the SB. Philly now faces that challenge.

I also agree with the MM approach. Certainly the customer is always right is a fine business approach and having good information is a key to good betting. However, I'm not a Bills fans for business reasons and I am not entertained by betting on things that I love, I only bet using cold dispassion to compete and occaisionally to make money if iI find a good middle. As far as the Bills go, if it gives the team an advantage over the enemy and he can get away with it within the rules, then I hope MM flat out lies to me to win the SB.

Your post is the second one with this suggestion I responded to and perhaps it was the first which seemed to put the idea forth as a solution to problems right now. I don't say this shouldn't be considered but it seems quite unlikely that this will plan out as a use for Peters, even if it did pan out would happen anytime soon, and would actually be passing by his potential as a receiver at TE where even if the Bills need help on the pass rush they could use a Ben Coates like anyone else could. I think all NFL positions need a lot of mental co-ordination in a league that has become too systematized for my tastes. This is true for the productive DL player as well as for the productive OL player. Peters has already shown that he is not the smartest bulb in the pack (fortunately being great in the NFL ain't brain surgery just look at Jim Kelly) but switching to D from O will be an even bigger jump for him than switching from one O position to another. I do try to cliffnote as folks have requested this and wil continue to try to take the time to do this on occaision, but as you can see there are no guranteed from this enfeebled mind.

What specifically has TH done which makes folks so certain that they cannot both be here next year until TH becomes an FA? Outside of one article last year which if true (if yiou hadn't noticed the media can be both factually accurate and untrue in their presentation of things) showed that Henry has godawful musical tastes, but hasn't said much that points to him as a cancer on the team or someone who has a hard time saying and doing the right thing to help the team particularly when it helps him make a dime. This year, there were a few early season media articles in which quotes from him were offered up in a way by the media as they clearly were trying to create a 2004 version of the next RJ/DF fight to nelp them selll ads. Both TH and WM seemed to do a good job as best as I could tell of avoiding this squabble which the media would love for them to have because it would both hurt the team and hurt their ability to make bigger bucks than they ever saw before. Right now, TH has three strikes against him in terms of cashing in right now. 1. His performance before was very good but this year it sucked. 2. His history of injury makes him an uncertain commodity to give him big bucks based on the assumption he will produce like he did in 2003 and 2002. 3. His big problem was that he mismanaged his money and had to sign a sweetheart deal with the Bills which put off his cashing in for a year in exchange for a relatively small amount (by NFL contract terms though it was certainly more money than he had ever seen) of upfront cash. Is there any logical reason for TH to add a fourth strike to these three realities by him suddenly adding being a cancer to his resume. If TH wants to undercut his ability to sign a big deal then he should feel free to fail to co-exist with WM. If TH has demonstrated anything in the past few years its that he will shut up and say the right thing when he is advised to do so and it is prettty clear from the party line he regularly spouts (with the excception of the occasional media article which he has a clear record of not taking the bait to create the next controversy that they will use to sell ads) that Henry will almost certainly do the right thing for the Bills and his career. There are certainly athletes who say what they want repeatedly like a Rickey Williams or will plant the needle but not get blamed for doing so (I supect this was Flutie's reaction to years of abuse as a short player no one though could play and who had an autistic kid dependent on him). However, I have not seen any tangible evidence of TH being the type of guy who will not do the right thing because it serves his and the team's interest. Travis is under contract next year, and him throwing a hissy fit will not only not change that, but will lower his market value at a time he actually needs to pump his value up after his injury and after WM took his job. Particularly after WM showed yesterday that he is one hit away from giving up the job to the #2 it seems obviously logical for Henry's best financial bet is to simply play out his contract wait for the game or two he will almost certainly get to raise his value and then sign a big deal. Posters might choose to be juvenile if they were in Travis' shoes and throw a hissy-fit but I think there are far more quotes from him that says he won't kill his chance for big bucks by pulling a Rickey than indicators that such juvenality says more about the poster than about Travis Henry.

I hope to gve it a watch and going over tonight (the holiday season may well intrude on my Billsdom(that darn family godblessem). I think one of the things I have found most fun about the OL the past few years is that like few other units in football the whole can really be much better than the sum of the individual parts. Seeing episodes like the Bills OL getting ravaged by injuries during a game against TN and seeing moderate players at best (and an actual stumblebum at tackle like one of our Gs whose name I forget fill in at tackle against Jevon Kearse and hold him down with a lot of help was an indicator of this. Seeing a player like Dusty Ziegler who I originally rolled my eyes when we plugged him in as our center and in fact have him do a good job which won him a big time contract at center and then to see JMac take a bunch of low taklent guys and turn them into an SB making OL has convinced me that a key to OL assessment is not judging individual players but judging how well they play together. It doesn't necessarily strike me as a non-starter that Tucker does not have the the athletic abilities to be the individual player we can afford to be our LG. The question is whether the advantages and disadvantages of Tucker, Jennings, Williams, Teague, Villarial and the back-ups and plan Bs we can put together can be the OL we want and deserve.. I think this perspective is the key to putting together no names like the NYG group which took them to the SB or the below weight guys that Denver used for years to open holes for Terrel Davis and other rushers. The key is not the individuals, the key is the unit.

The DL role is one that Peters has little or no experience in playing and like everything in the NFL is a lot more complicated than it looks. Peters has done a great job using his unique demographic abilities (size, speed and athleticism) for ST, but there is a big difference in undetaking an inside rush job over the long-snapper (wind him up, make sure he is aware when situations might call for a short snap that he would run right by, and llet him go) and being a wedge buster (see the ball and casue mayhem by going for it and let Wire and other folks tackle) and him taking on the DL job. I agree that we do not have sufficient rush pressure from our DEs. Neither Kelsay or Denney has a first move which can't be matched without a double-team (even Kelsay who strikes most as the better of the two is more like Schobel as his strong suit is a constant and long-running motor rather than a gangbuster first move) but it would be incorrect to dismiss the DEs as worthless stiffs or easily replaced by a rookie who is great but has never played DE before. As, I see it, there are at least 3 important parts to the DE game: 1. Diagnosis: The DE needs to understand the down and distance and to make reads on the QB, RB motion and blocking patterns to make a pretty good read on whether the play will be a run or a pass and then he plays appropriately. Kelsay has now learned this adeqately and correctly was given the starting nod over Denney because of this. Denney applies more strength than Schobel on run defense and this is the strongest part of his game so that he remains better than Kelsay on run plays in my view. However, as Kelsay has improved this part of his game and has a stronger motor and sticktoitiveness than Denney he gets the nod givn Os are going to mix the pass and run pretty well. 2. Pass Coverage- Even moreso than most teams because of the run blitz sending the DE into the short zone, being able to pass cover is significant. Denney's big wingspan and athleticism gives him big advantages here as well. One if his pre-season INTs actually came in the medium zone 10 yards plus rather than in the short zone as he reached out and snagged a pass. Peters has good speed and agility, but mentally he will not only need to make correct reads on whether opponents are going to run or pass, but he will have to follow D scheme switches to determine whether he is rushing/run stopping or doing pass coverage. 3. Blitzing- It was really great that April descirbes him adjusting from a bull rush to employing an effective swim move to block the punt. However, the thing which separated BS from the rest was that he not only mastered two moves (and disguised them well), but in fact mastered multiple moves he could throw against opponents. Schobel is only now mastering multiple moves to link with his constant engine, but still lacks all strength we want at the point of attack. Kelsay has the constant engine and the athleticism he showed on his block/INT this Sunday, but it is actually the diagnosis part of his game where he has improved most. Denney has not yet seemed to have mastered a second go-to move though he has learned to apply his strength well after being so easily defeated as a rookie by many vets that he never even merited activation. The lesson from this is that even for these players it has taken multiple years and this aspect of their games still needs work. Maybe Peters is a better physical specimen but this likely means it will only take him 2 years to contribute rather than 3. Its still down the pike. In essence, one of the great things about the Bills (as aspect which NE and BB use to great effect) is to remind players they are football players and not mere specialists. NE has used this model effectively as part of their TEAM feeling and players like Troy Brown are throwbacks playing consistently on both sides of the ball. In particular with injuries this has been a great tool. The Bills do this too (evn prior to some groundbreaking success by NE) employing Bannan and Adams to solve redzone issues and uses Deney as a TE. However, make no mistake that there is a big difference this (unfortunately) oversystematized game between doing this for a few plays in spot duty as Bannan has done and making a full scale switch as you propose for Peters. Of course he should be tried at multiple positions for full time use there this off-season as the braintrust judges. Players do occaisionally make the switch to a new position and are productive there quickly. However, this is the exception rather than the rule and expecting Peters to be a contributor on a full time basis on our DL strikes me as a lonshot which would take 2 to 3 years to work if it ever did. I think he has a contribution which he can make right now on ST dut to some limite co-ordination which can be done here and to get him contributing asa TE if he gets his blocking act together.

Henry is not on IR which gived some possibility he can play, but more likely given the quick Bills reversal on saying he had a broken bone and then saying there was no break we never would put him on IR as this would hurt his trade value. Still Travis has played through pain productively before and if in fact he is not as badly damaged as was first feared, there are few better opportunities for him to create a big pay day for himself and to help the team get trade value for him than to step up to the plate now against a weak SF team. Even the folks on TSW who judge Henry to be a bad RB (a judgment which I think is contraindicated by his yardage production the past two years, by his having the toughness to play through a fracture, by 40+ receptions when we threw to him with more consistency in 2002, and by him being adequate at blitz pick-up the last two years as this was not hailed as a huge problem for us then) need to root for him to make an extraordinary comeback and produce this weekend. if you want him traded them root for him to tack 100+ on SF and he likely will be gone.

I think we will find during the off-season when the coaches can take a good long look at him and work with him that Peters is going to be tried out in multiple roles. However, at this point in the season while Peters can be moved around strategically on individual plays where co-ordination with his teammates is less of an issue Peters can go there an excel as he did on Sunday. Apparently he lined up to rush the punter on the scout team and our long snappers like Dorenbos and Banta could not handle him on an inside rush. However, there is a big difference between this duty where he was the gamebreaker on Sunday where you essentially wind him up and say go block the kick and DE duty where he has run stopping responsibility as well as a mission to sack the passer and given the zone blitz we use where the DE has pass coverage responsibility to free an LB to blitz. I think there is no way that Peters does consistent (if any duty) as a DE this year and even with an off-season of work this would be similar to our failed attempt to have Wire play safety for us because he had the demographics and had excelled at tackling in college but never played safety before at any level of organized ball. Peters starred in college as a TE. He has been slotted in as a tackle because his raw talent could not be denied, and it is TE blocking where he needs the most work anyway because he has incredible speed for his size and very soft hands. Putting him in at DE consistently simply removes the offensive threat his pass catching provides so I'd be reluctant to do this as well as the co-ordination issues. Mental co-ordination is actually probably the big issue for Peters who apparently is a physical specimen but is at least an enchilda short of a combination platter on the mental side of the game. There is alot going on and everybody (particularly rookies) make mistakes. but his failure to effectively annouce to the refs that he was in as a TE despite having a tackle's number cost us in an earlier game and may be a sign of this lacking. Fitting Peters in at DE this late in the season makes little sense to me (if you're going to experiement the SF game rather than the Pitts game seems to be the place to do it) and I think his pass catching skills, speed and hands are better used by installing him as a wedge buster and inside rusher on ST while we ake what may end up being a couple of years to teach him the TE game.

Some folks were also finding fault with Tucker for giving up the sacks as well as Bill's Daily's indictment of Villarial for the sacks which is in addition to MadBuffetc. finding fault with Williams. I plan when a free moment allows to take a look myself, but my guess is that this will probably be a case where the whole OL really must get indicted for a sack and pressure issue rather than one player simply getting beaten. We outsiders can never really know for sure what the line calls are on a particular sack and who had blocking responsibility for a player making a sack, or whether a particular blocker had double responsibility on a play if he has the order to provide a chip block and misses either his primary or secondary assignment. The center can easily be at fault for a particular sack if he made a stupid or impossible line call that the guy whom we can see whiffing and flailing on the sack is not actually the main problem here, My guess is that in many cases on Sunday, MW is actually the primary issue here but rather than an indictment of his capabilities as an athlete, he has practiced little and is coming off an injury which might have led to some odd blocking assignments if Teague was shifting things to help out an injured MW or not giving him full call to help out Villarial because of the injury. The problems which the OL had across the board opening holes against a Cincy D which has been vulnerable to the run is more of an indicator of a systemic problem rather than laying it all on the performance of one player. There are cases where the performance of a particular player is more clearly the issue. If we had run wonderfully when we went left but stunk up the joint when we went right I'd be more inclined to blame the RT but we couldn't run well on the left, right or up the middle. Against the Jets earlier this season Abraham got three sacks going up against Jennings and because Abraham is an edge rusher the two were often one on one so finding fault with Jennings play as an individual in this case is probably valid. However, in this case as Powell is used to doing business on the inside and as the loss of two TEs and the replacement with Neufeld, Peters and Trafford is probably significant for an RT I'd really want to look at this hard before drawing conclusions.

Moulds actually plays a role even when he seems to be disappearing, He draws double-teams that kave really allowed Evans to break out in one on one coverage. The amazing thing to me is that though i was feeling he was getting shut out today he ended up equalling Evans in number of catches though he had far fewer yards. Add to this the cliche which Evans is saying that he is learning a lot from MMoulds. Though this is generally the line that all future stars say about current stars they are goimg to supplant, I think it is almost certainly really true in this case as every rookie needs to learn the pro game and we have seen Evans dame improve over the year. I'm sure not being the go to guy in every regard is different for Moulds and probably frustrating but I hope he is taking solace in the way his team is now jkicking butt.

I took interesting note of the announcers saying that Bledsoe had told them one of the reasons for the team's better play was that the Bills braintrust has simplified the offense by stripping out a lot of the audibles which could be called. This certainly made sense to me as I have felt that one of our problems last year was that in addition to Kevin Killdrive being a bit too pass-happy in his play calling, there also seemed to be a number of plays where based on the time Bledsoe took to call the play and shifts in our set-up seemingly based on play changes which I assumed came on Bledsoe audibling we went to some unsucessful (many of them pass) plays. I think one of the primary benefits of limiting the audibles we can call is quite frankly that it has taken Bledsoe and his brain out of the playcalling. This team apparently called pass plays on some extraordinary number of third and short yardage down and distance last year. i think this may well be true because Killdrive called too many passes and then when he did call a run, Bledsoe himself would audible out of them. At any rate, the Bills play calling is much improved this year. We may be being a bit too clever by half as I think that a couple of times we have taken Lindell points off the board by calling late TOs on kicks that he made may be because our braintrust was setting up tendencies on future play calling. However, this is a small price to pay for our success the last few games.