leh-nerd skin-erd

i'm thinking you call for the guy's head when you know that he has good-to-above-average talent and squanders the opportunity to have an impact-defense. or, perhaps, you call for his head when the defensive alignment is not suited for the players he has to work with, and he fails to make adjustments. i'm hard-pressed to call for a guy's head to roll when he starts the season with a defensive scheme that may include some mismatched players beyond his control, fails to adjust on the fly or learn on the job, or doesn't noticably squander talent and opportunity. it just seems to me that when you have a coaching carousel non-stop over time, you're constantly playing catch-up and always behind the 8 ball. That said--if dick lebeau becomes available, you probably grab him. i like the coaching style of chan gailey, i like his adaptability and have opted to trust his judgement here. it's good to know if the defense struggles again next year i'll have something to complain about.

changing a culture of losing by losing seems like a bad business model to me. there are of course franchise players that enter the league via the draft each year, but good teams have good systems and are run by good coaches with good front offices. i don't know for sure, of course, but it appears to me that Chan Gailey isn't all jacked up about the losing end of this season. let's hope he's the guy (and yes, i understand the front office problems of this franchise).

you bring up a good point, cyborg. the odds of basking in the afterglow of a world championship in my lifetime go up substantially in the event of a lockout. i say lock it down.

i was listening to the radio, sorting through Christmas tree lights on my front lawn getting ready to hang 'em on the trees. i was cool, hip, figuring we weren't going to win it. i like what i see from the coaches, and have hope for next year and beyond, so iw as waiting for the inevitable. anyways, murph says..."blah blah blah...TOUCH...HE DROPPED IT". i realize, looking back, i wasn't cool at all. i'm not hip, i live in the burbs, i'm hanging Christmas tree lights on pine trees. really, how cool can you be? i screamed literally at the top of my lungs something that might have sounded like 'snother snucker', but was actually something much, much worse. i calmed down quickly, and honestly, i may have been yelling as much because each successive string of lights had less lights actually lit up than the one just prior---and they all worked great last year. bills fans should be spared the Christmas light syndrome, don'cha think? we do our time.

You sir, are no doctor.

confusing as hell listening on the radio. when murph does the play-by-play, the short delay in announcing what has happened has always driven me crazy ("Rothlisberger under pressure....steps left...they're after him again...scrambles for 16 yards and a first down!...") but depending on where the game is, you get the crowd noise as a barometer of the play. today, several times in the first half, I was thinking the Bills made a stop or good play only to find the crowd noise was pro-pitt. Seeemed like it swung back in the second half when the Bills moved the ball, but it's an odd thing nonetheless.

i was rolling and made that part up (acknowledged at the end of the paragraph).

You think that's bad??? Last year, my roof was damaged by hail, my satelite dish removed from the roof during the course of repair in June. My roofer offered to put it back on after the repairs, but I was worried about it being on the roof and causing a leak so I said I'd handle it myself. I have no skills in this area and had no reasonable plan to replace it. I pocketed the $75 I was paid for the reinstallation and blew it at Chili's during off-peak, non-happy hour pricing. I planned on getting the dish back up on the house by August, buying the NFL season ticket and watching the gailey-lead bills begin their move back to respectability. Prior to the first game against the dolphins, a dolphin fan buddy of mine told me at a meeting that he had tickets in the Kelly section, and was taking his 11 year old son to the game and had two extra. In a flash, I decided to take him up on the offer and take my own 11 year old to the game. I hadn't considered the cost of the tickets, and when he told me I owed him several thousand dollars, I simply figured I had already accepted and paid him for them. We drove in from Albany, got off at the Depew exit to meet him at his buddy's house, and were on our way to the stadium and his buddy's "special ez in/ez out" parking lot. Turns out it was right behind the fieldhouse, and it took us an hour to get out of there after the bills inexplicably decided that the new way to win in the nfl was to leave your offense at home. After that debacle, I decided to hold off on installing the satelite dish and paying for direct tv and it still lays on it's side in my yard, causing me to miss the bengals game which was alot of things, not the least of whuich was exciting and fun to watch (I assume). So, while your story is tragic, in mine: I got screwed by hail. I got screwed by my roofer who didn't insist on reinstalling my satelite dish when he knew, or should have known the bills would mount a cool comeback this past weekend. I got screwed by Chili's due to their pricing policy. I got screwed by my dolphin fan buddy who soaked me for $2,500 for tickets in the Kelly section to see the bills lsoe to the fish on opening day. I got screwed by his buddy following bad parking advice. I got screwed by the local media for failing to show the hotest game of the week, bills-bengals. But mostly, I screwed myself for not having the roofer put the dish on the house when it made the most sense. Most wounds are self-inflicted. (Oh, and I made up the $2,500 for the tickets part to make the story better).

f-ing freefall in the heartland (if Minneapolis was actually in the heartland).

good stuff, though i'm on the let's see how lindell finishes out before we lose him. i also think winning remains important, as it's difficult to change a culture of losing by failing to win. i must have missed something on roscoe. my thought was that a gailey offense seems to like those playmaker types, and roscoe was becoming an integral part of the offense. great win, it wasn't on here, so i had the radio on. in figued it was just one of those days in the first half, but it was pretty exciting in the second!

if Moss puts asses in seats during this season, under this scenario, we're as pathetic as it gets.

i appreciate the offer to meet halfway, if indeed halfway to arrogance is stupid. Dan. no hard feelings, but I'm going to have to pass (get it?). I've been thoroughly disgusted with the bills this year. I went to the Miami game, the Jags game, and i'm at the point in my life where losing doesn't hurt the way it used to, but incompetence feels like an errant dart shot to the testes. i'm not a football guy from an x's and o's perspective, have a decent feel for the flow of the games---and i actually felt better after these last two weeks. don't get me wrong, false starts killing drives are irritating, the fitz int was horrible, and nelson fumbling blew too. but, it seems to me they are improving from where we were earlier in the season. i figure a bad team is going to get bad breaks and make bad mistakes---but i think we have a real football coach leading the team. so, i'm going to assume that he saw something he didn't like on the run (defensive schemes problems with the line etc) and went with what he thought was the higher statistical probability play (in his opinion). still seems to me if they were a better team, they win those games, but they blow up at unfortunate times in little ways. 0-7 is 0-7 and always will be.

You really think Chan Gailey was operating from a position of arrogance? 0-6, cut his choice for starting qb 2 weeks into the season, on record as saying we lack talent in on the line, trying to tinker with the offense week in, week out----arrogance? I'd bet he made choices based on what he thought would win us the game, taking into consideration the likelihood our running game would be succesful at that point in the game. Looked to me that with all the warts on this team he's running, both the Raven's loss and the Chief's loss came down to execution. Fumble by Nelson (and unsportsmanlike conduct call) v. the Ravens, bad int by Fitzy and missed kick by Lindell against the Chiefs, Fitz missing Spiller in OT. Now, obviously, there are other issues---the Chief's playcalling and execution, defense v. offense and so on, and I ry not to oversimplify, but arrogance? You could make as strong an argument that he was right as that he was wrong.

it's a defensive wildcats b*tches. the league is about to change before our very eyes...

you call this guy a linebacker? tedy bruski would have hit these guy harder and then healed them instantly. and let's be honest, by the time this radio interview was over, guest host judy mcdonald would have been pregnant with twins.

you know, they could probably pick this year's bill's team up for a couple blankets and a box full o' beads. the ultimate irony? build the stadium on grand island.

well, like many who defer to the lowest common denominator in a sports or political discussion, you've made a compelling argument that the only possible answer is racism.

i honestly think it's presumptuous of you to assume that everyone who likes kyle williams likes him because he's a white guy. i honestly think it's presumptuous of you to assume other people are not honest because they have an opinion that might conflict with yours. i honestly think it's a mistake to try and sound like you're the voice of reason when you toss in a self-serving and unverifiable statement like "there is less than a 10% chance...". i honestly think the poster who pointed out that Wang wasn't born in China was honestly correct. and i honestly am not sure if the girl scale you're using is based on a 5 or a 10 and honestly that makes a big difference. oh, and i honestly think you make some decent points otherwise.

I had pretty good seats for the Miami game and the line looked bad throughout the game. When they weren't blitzing and molesting Trent, they were pushing the line back into his face. Whether Fitzie might have brought enough to the table to make a difference in that regard, tough to say. One can assume he would have made a difference, I suppose. Maybe he turns that from an L to a W.

obviously i'm hoping for the best, but that's a reasonable question. the jets are on fire tonight.

thank you. now--i know it's probably been beaten to death in other posts---and I acknowledge not seeing the penalty for excessive celebration, but how it the minuteman thing an excessive celebration and a player doing the lambeau leap not? i have no beef with the leap, but i'm struggling here.

i've been hanging around waiting for CG to get Edwards one more shot at being decent. Obviously, I was like the last passenger standing on the Titanic, wondering why my mai tai kept sliding off the table to the left. Now, had CG announced the Fitz or Brohm was the guy at the start of the season, so be it. Anyways....all that said... Team defensive stats showed Miami and Green Bay in the top 5, and New England behind Buffalo at 26. Recognizing that maybe Trent helped get 'em in the top 5, there's till a whole lotta real estate between 3 and 26. Fitz is our guy, that's ok with me, and it would appear he has much better pocket presence.

the man is entitled to his opinion, and certainly parts of what he has written can be debated. where he lost me was his assertion that there was no open competition for the qb spot. gailey, like every other coach, has a thought process for how he wants to run his team. he's looking for the right mix of players to get it done, and pretty clearly figured TE had the most upside for his offensive scheme. there is little doubt two weeks into the season that the offense isn't working. on the other side of the coin is his desire to win some football games. more than anything, it's the personal attacks on the guy that turn me off to his style of writing. but, i suppose, he pimps what he pimps and gets people talking.

you're on it. what's the trade-off for avoiding the ridicule, btw? charlie rangle? alan hevesi? eliot spitzer? i think paladino is unelectable, and i think andrew cuomo ascends from prince to king of new york. more of the same is on the way---expand the infrastructure of government, more taxation, less benefit to working new yorkers, escalation of the class warfare rhetoric. paladino has some things to explain to potential voters and he'll be savaged by the media (in some cases rightly so for some stupid things done by a man who wants to be governor)---but he's 100% correct in stating that our infrastructure needs a baseball bat taken to it.

yeah, that was odd. i'm a conspiracy buff, kinda sorta, but that was just idiotic. time out! no time out! no one called a time out! meanwhile, seems like 2 minutes went by.