RuntheDamnBall

He tried to fit it up but he wasn't in his gap.

I'm curious to see what the board sentiment is here. There are good reasons for continuity, for Wade, for young blood, for other experienced voices in the room. Obviously we don't have a lot of names outside of retreads and a few of our own assistants. I'm also interested in John Chavis at LSU, but I don't feel like I know enough. Could merge this with the DC candidates thread, and I'll add anyone that makes sense to this poll, but cast your votes!

Well, to be fair, Wannstedt was lost even while he was here.

Again - Henderson is under contract with the Bills. I suppose if he is Pettine's DC choice he could weigh the offer or get promoted by us. I think it'd be a bad idea - and most certainly unlikely - for front office to flat out ask players how they feel about a coach. Bad precedent as far as establishing authority. Asking Kyle Williams - maybe, as a captain. But then you're still inviting locker room politics into the situation.

That was also 14+ years ago. I'm not saying the NFL has passed Wade by but his best successes have come with defenses that took some time to build and assemble the talent for. That worries me. If we look outside the org, I would like to see someone bright and innovative picked up - basically a Pettine with a little less pedigree.

Well, happy trails to him. Hope we move fast on someone good for the new DC job.

Fixed.

I'm for any measure of continuity unless there is a bona fide upgrade. Four different DCs in four years is already way too much to take.

His brother Brian will also be back.

That's all a very nice story and some funny conjecture at the end, but I still submit that no one thinks they are getting their QB of the future, much less a Hall of Famer, much less a top-5 all-time QB in the sixth round. He was a great low-risk, high-reward acquisition in R6. If they believed he was any of the above on draft day, he would have gone higher.

I still say that it's a shot at the dart-board. A good shot, but a shot nonetheless. The road to the NFL is littered with the wrecks of great college QBs, most of them with resumes better than Brady's. There were few predictors of the kind of success he had. There's no way even the Pats thought they had a great one on their hands with a sixth round pick. They passed on the guy at least five times. What they did smartly was identify a guy with that kind of resume available late in the draft and take a flyer on him. It's a good policy, but generally those guys are no longer going in the sixth.

That's all well and good. He also is 20-30 days behind the competition in assembling a staff and may find that the Bills are reluctant to let any of the ones he's been closest to all year leave the team to join him at this late date. In theory, yes, you take the job. In reality, he is not as set up for success as you suggest.

We're talking about two different things. You're talking about how Pettine should get more QB talent this year. That's fine. I'm referring to their quickness to ditch the HC when it was clear that he DIDN'T have enough talent to work with.

Despite the lack of talent at the QB position? I disagree.

Sure! I mean, the same front office did a sterling job turning its former #3 overall pick into a late-first-rounder two years later. What could go wrong?

Something to add here: the "you take the job if it's there" mentality might have landed Jim Harbaugh here with the Bills. He declined to even interview around the time of Gailey's hiring from what I understand. Has anyone seen enough from our players to indicate that he would have had everything he needed to duplicate his success in SF? I do not. He was right to pass on the opportunity. Sometimes you have to have enough pride to put yourself in the driver's seat. I don't think that the Browns at present constitute such an opportunity that a good person won't find something better, soon.

The Patriots have also selected Rohan Davey, Michael Bishop, Ryan Mallet and Matt Cassell - the last of them found money that they sold high on. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't. If your argument is to try more often as a philosophy, then that's terrific. Is that the argument? It seems like you're saying that the Patriots are smarter at identifying players. It seems to me they are, to some extent, but they're also smarter to take more shots at the dartboard at impact positions. TE is one, QB is another.

Why wouldn't they? Everyone is paying attention to what happened on Fox. Attention feeds Ratings and Impressions = $$$. The better question is why Erin Andrews gave such a look of surprise. She is a friggin' sideline reporter on the game for four hours plus per week. She knows what these guys are like and what's coursing through their veins during the game.

I'm not going to be one to talk up a team that hasn't really achieved anything. But it seems to me in examining this scenario with the Browns and how it might play out should they have another losing season, that the Bills at least have a front office where the roles are pretty clearly defined and people are on the same page. I'm hoping, based on the way Russ presented things last year, that he is letting football people make football decisions and that Whaley is providing a roster that works in concert with Marrone's approach to running a team. So far after a year, the results haven't been dynamite, but what we're not hearing is of any internal discord or disagreements on approach, or dissatisfaction with the players provided - except for maybe on special teams. I imagine that the internal rumbling from the players about needed changes will be something that the front office finds pretty universal agreement on. Clearly, we have to hope that this is all true and that this continues, so they have something to build upon. But it's nice to not hear, yet, of any fundamental disagreements of the sort that lead to the cycle of a new coach, new systems installed, need for new players to fit those systems, and on and on. Despite the regular call for blood that follows a losing season, I'm glad we're not where the Browns are right now. The hinge pins for 2014 are EJ Manuel and Marrone. If Manuel succeeds, everybody looks good. If he doesn't, the question of what to do with him could be a potential wrestling match among Marrone-Brandon-Whaley. Here's hoping it's the former.

Sounds like a great gig. "There are only 32 of these! Sign me up for the dysfunction!"

Absolutely. It seems, if he takes the gig, that Pettine must be more willing than Gase or Quinn to enter a higher-risk/reward scenario. Confidence in one's own self is not a bad thing, but he'll need a lot of luck in a place that hasn't had much. Chud was basically sabotaged by injuries and an already-shaky QB situation. It's hard to say he did a bad job there all things considered. Yet he is now a retread HC in the NFL on the outside looking in. Does Pettine want that risk? The Lions job would have been the one to get this winter. So many good pieces in place already up there and an underachieving team that needed a new culture. The Browns have a lot more work to do despite the high picks.

Then so are Gase, Quinn and McDaniels. I'm dead serious.

If I were him, I'd be very wary of my own arrogance and ask myself if this team gives me the best chance to succeed, or if the best were yet to come in Buffalo. If it's the latter, he could be passing up a chance to enter next offseason in the driver's seat. If they fail with a great defense, he's got just as good of a shot, because it'll be even clearer that what successes the Bills had were in large part due to Pettine's contributions.

You act as though the objective is for the coaching gig to be some kind of golden parachute wherein the guy who gets the job makes a lot of money, and he should just be satisfied with that. The reality is that these are hyper-competitive people who want to win in the NFL. Do you think Chud would rather prove he can win with the Browns and taste the playoffs and continue to build his rep, or sit on the sidelines and hope that he can work up the ranks again? The likelihood is that he is not going to be a head coach again for at least two more years. I think given what we know about why people wouldn't take the Bills job circa the Gailey hiring, that there is a palpable stink around the Browns franchise right now, and that's why guys like Gase, potentially Quinn and even a guy like McDaniels who has a couple strikes against him will keep coordinator positions with winning franchises and pass on the Browns job.

Bottom line, he could get fired next season by this fickle bunch when the guy they "really want" comes available, or if they get a new GM who wants his own guy, or if he faces hard luck due to injury as Chud did this season when Hoyer went down. Pettine would be right to beware of this situation.