colin

oh dear, are we mash unit again for KC? that would be just a horrible let down.

i legit thought it was a horrible check, i didn't see the replay because i was texting to other fans and whining in the game thread (not sure what the replay showed). iirc, is that the one allen was flipping out at someone about? im thinking now he was screaming and knox for not picking up the free 10 and potentially more yards in front of him.

good find. holy crap knox was just awful on that, the angle on the camera shows how awful his move was. he had room on the right and if he breaks a tackle it is a big one.

man, i really hope we aren't a mash unit at nickel, safety, and lb again facing KC. our smaller defenders always get crunched late in the year. even tho I'm a big fan of milano, and he and von actually had some really good plays, some of the contracts are why we have to these guys are why we have rapp and hamlin as our starting safeties and shakir is our offensive number 1 on a late round rookie contract.

our d, especially the dl, was just flat out gassed. the two horrible drives to start the second by the O and the trucking by the ravens run game on the one long td drive to henry took what they had left out of them. im still not a big fan of the mcd scheme on d, but the full picture here is that our starters are just about average or slightly better, and the back ups just aren't good enough. one thing i liked to do when i was handicapping games is look at the lineups and ask which players on team a would start on team b and vice versa. for these teams i think maybe groot (maybe not), one or in a stretch 2 of our OL, and benford would be their cb2. i think josh is better than lamar, but they wouldn't start him over lamar, particularly with their scheme. such a massive disparity in talent.

if allen had at least one free arm he woulda flipped it and it woulda been a cook TD. he didn't flip it because he couldn't (without a horrible risk reward ratio) but half a second earlier or whatever if he had his arm free he woulda and i think it would be 6.

im 50/50 on that. the punch out was a low % but high leverage play, and bernard has done it before. he's really good at launching a fist into the ball. conversely von gave the back a golden shot at the strip from behind, the hardest to stop, and his strong azz grip prevented it. on the damar fumble, it was a poor snap and a press play by lamar, but that's what lamar does, he makes plays buying time, so he's not going to stop. at least half the air yards they got were from lamar just moving around and buying time before the pass. now, i do hear you on the bad snap and such, but tbh, our DTs actually showed up and were impacting the raven's C in the first half. dq did his job and ploughed the c into lamar on the "sack" we got by touching lamar down. plays like that impact the C and make them rush and goof up snaps. i really really want our d to make guys punt, and they made the ravens punt in the first game somewhat decently, but got just dogged and trucked on every other drive it seemed like. im happy we are the best at making turnovers happen, and i also think it's not reliable. kinda reminds me of the daboll years of big play only on O. the difference is, we have the talent to win on O with other kinds of plays, vs a team like the ravens, we pretty much have to go for the turnovers.

i credit the bills for the plays they made, but we forced zero punts and got absolutely trucked on the ravens late possessions. in spite of bad conservative play calling way too early (3rd quarter), the bills won because of turnovers.

if they converted, they'd kick it deep (they'd rather have their d on the field to force overtime than rely on their kick coverage) and we'd have the ball at the 30 w 93 seconds and two TOs. we'd need to get to the 34, 56 yards. I say we'd have put Ty Johnson on the field, he's who we go with on these high leverage downs, and he can run it, block and make great catches (he was criminally underused, cook is great but we just lined him up and ran and they crush that). Allen would buy time, run the ball and Ty would find space on broken plays. i think we'd have gotten to the 20s with a quickness, rumbled allen for a first down, and kick it from the 10 or so with no time on the clock. i honestly think more Ty (baltimore is just bad vs rb passes) in the 3rd quarter we run an extra 4 minutes off the clock in the first two drives and score between 7 and 14 extra points. the game would have been won after the ravens 2nd 2nd half possession with some time burned and a FG. just like vs detroit, the coaches actually came out with some solid game plans (way more on d than o last night) but got way too conservative way too quickly. the ease we made those first downs to win those games with plays to the outside tells me it was always there and we coulda taken it early.

i sort of touched on it in my above blabbing post, but we play nickel D or dime about 90% of the time and we have two players in total back there who would start for other teams in the playoffs (taron and christian), and they wouldn't be top 3 (maybe taron could edge in, but he'd be 3rd at best).

johnson isn't as good as he used to be, he's older and has been hurt a few times, and his size works against him as he gets banged up over and over. he's tough as nails tho, a gamer, and has shown in the past at least a nose for huge plays. he's still a quality player. the frustrating thing for me w mcd and his d is that they really rely on everyone reading and communicating and being in the right place and making plays. it creates a lot of vulnerabilities and we've seen that basically every play. the plus side is it has guys playing fast and hard and if they aren't gassed they have a chance to hunt for negative plays and turnovers. i love the bills and their will to win and all that, but when josh was talking about people saying that we were too small, too slow, and not talented enough there is a lot of truth to that. our best play makers are two undersized LBs, one who is over 30 and coming off 2 really bad injuries, a small nickel corner and whoever shows up out of our way undersized 3 tech, a big and long but not sudden DE. allen and the OL and cook are real ballers, and a couple of our guys on D are at least solid, but this team could really use some of the freaks that teams like baltimore have an embarrassment of. if you throw a higgins on this o, a crosby on the D, and just not have so many jags or cast offs in a couple other areas, this team would be an all timer.

the honest answer is no. the flip side to that is if you don't protect the ball, you will lose to lesser teams. the ravens are the 6th best nfl team of all time based on DVOA. they are also huge fast and physical, which is an advantage vs everyone and in any scheme, so they aren't as game script dependent as other all time nfl teams by DVOA. they lost because of turnovers way way more than we won based on anything we did. if we came out and scored 10 points on our two first 3rd quarter drives instead of a 3 and out and a 4 and out, then i'd argue we clearly played better and took advantage of mistakes and hammered the nails in when we needed to, but that didn't happen. we really just made fewer mistakes and held on to win.

some good points about the culture war issues w lamar in this thread. the thing for me (the football thing, there are culture war/race/whatever issues in sports media, but sports media is oddly politically charged and shockingly shockingly dumb so I'll ignore it here) is that the big rub for those of us who think josh was mvp over lamar, and that lamar was sort of gifted his prior MVPs is that lamar plays qb on easy mode, and josh plays qb on hard mode on the ice level of the game (those are always frustrating). lamar (for most of his career, but let's just focus on this season) has a silly level of talent around him on his team. their d fell off early but ended on a strong note. their secondary has a soft spot in it, but the rest of it is crazy (top guys in humphries, and a legit positional mutant in hamilton). their LBs are really really good, and smith in the middle is around the best in the nfl (they traded high value picks for him considering he's an off ball lb, and aj klien, LOL). their DL are a deep squad of monsters, and they got KVN to be an edge monster late in his career, oweh has not produced sacks like they wanted, but he's a size weight speed freak (i know those guys are "lbs", but they really are DL in my opinion) and really the mix of talent they have up front is a crazy match up for everyone. On O they get solid play from their OL (big strong and dirty but the refs barely ever seem to call them, how did they not get holding flags in that barn burner of a game?), have very solid TE talent, hall of fame RB with a back up RB who is a dangerous guy, and their mix of WRs (flowers being out hurt them this season) who have enough speed and shiftiness to scare you. Their kicker is literally the best of all time for his career, and they always seem to return and cover well. Their coach is a champion and while their DC is a rookie, they never seem to have too many unproven coordinators or position coaches. the ravens really are the monster team who are built to win tough physical games, the less stuff get called the better it should be for them. when you hear ex nfl players talk about who they played with, the crazy men who scared people with their strength of speed, the guys who were grown man size at 16 and always dominated, and the nasty rough confident guys are always the ones they talk about most. fan favorite plucky freddie jackson guys who went no where for school and just somehow got it done besides being maybe undertalented never get the good stories. that's not who always win championships, but that's who you'd instinctively see as the biggest threats. that's the ravens top to bottom, they draft based on size speed and temperament, their "process" is about getting as many scary monsters on the field as they can. Lamar is like that a little bit at QB. he's small and not a fast processer, and doesn't have the tightest fundamentals, but he's super confident, the fastest and most athletic guy to play qb since vick, and a heisman winner to boot. the ravens coaches have engineered a system where they have their team playing advantage football. the vicious hard hitting way they play (reminds me of the 2012 era seattle team, they foul on like every play but only get called sometimes), the speed and size they have all over the field (300 pound mutant fullback, fast guys outside and at qb, and rb, 6'4" and fast safety, no team looks like them!) is hard to deal with at all times. when you see the ravens line up, and you see the bills line up, you really think the ravens should beat the bills to a pulp and in every way except turnovers and the score just like they did last night. qb's get credit for the whole team, so it's natural the sports media lauds qbs based on great coaching and well built teams. lamar has what is almost certainly 3 mvps while only having 3 playoff wins and not one solid playoff campaign to hang his hat on (this one was his best ever, and his mistakes cost his much more talented team the win today). he's obviously much better than most nfl qb's, but if playoffs and championships is what matters, he's simply not had success in the post season and he doesn't have the allen narrative (itself being something that many in the media hate about allen, because their preferred narrative is that he's a disaster in waiting who will play basically how lamar played today) of balling out and being the best player in the playoffs despite his team losing. im pretty confident to say that if allen were on the ravens, and lamar was a bill, they'd both have success and playoff appearances and division wins, but allen would have some chips w baltimore and this board would talk about how we need a player more like josh allen who play better when the stakes are higher. that's why so many of us discount the lamar mvps and think josh should have some. in the end it's hard to really establish who the best or better or more clutch player is in a team sport, but narratives capture interest more than complex analysis, and the narratives on both lamar and josh are so overdone and charged up and interesting that mud is gonna get thrown no matter what happens.

I think we were good and also lucky to get trucked statistically like we did and still win. Our d is simply not staffed or coached to stop the ravens, few teams are. There was a bit of room to be better there (blitz edge guys not up the gut, we suck so bad at inside blitzes) but frankly not much. On O Brady lost his flipping mind in the second half. The ravens knew what we were going to do based on our personnel and formation nearly every time. We did almost nothing to stress the defense, we just let them bully us near the Los and played weak small ball. Brady simply does not have is do anything to outside wrs. What bothers me is if he's gonna not do that, then passes to RBs (we did like 4 and they were very effective) and play action or roll outs or something but not an obvious cool hand off on 1st was needed. Ty was covered and accounted for approximately zero times all game, Baltimore sucks covering backs, how Brady can't figure that vs his trash screens is baffling to me. A single TD on either of the first two 3rd quarter drives ice's the game for us, he has Allen but runs plays like he has Chicago's QB and ol Nearly the worst half of football I've seen from Brady, he better flip that script hard

When we blitz from the outside we get huge results. Milano forced the pick, Hamlin forced the fumble, and we messed up Detroit with some too. When we blitz inside we run into blocks, lose contain, and just kinda suck most of the time. It's crazy that we don't stunt more and use outside rushers more. Like, am I crazy? Does anyone else notice this?