The Big Cat

I don't think so either. I think the rest of the team is built to win. And I think competent QB play allows RR to run his game plan, whether you agree with it or not. Right now it's tough to criticize the HC when his QB obliterates his chances of running the kind of balanced approach he's looking for while also being utterly incapable of the inverse: daring your opponents to try and outscore you.

I mean, this all could be entirely accurate. The drunken table talk at a Bills tailgate is definitely a way to get information. Honestly, I'm not surprised to hear any of it. But it doesn't appear as though he's going anywhere. And that was my point. Fans could be completely up and down justified for wanting him gone. I'm not suggesting they are not. I'm saying they shouldn't hold their breath. Or so it seems.

Right, that's what spawned the heat maps. I will gladly remake those for 2016. And it was 85% of the season average excluding the game against the Bills. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that giving up a quick TD against Oakland was either: bad or acceptable. It was neither of those things. And if you can't begin to understand why or at least let your brain consider the area in between, then this conversation is meaningless. Scoring quickly is what the Raiders do. We held them in check. They scored quickly. We should have done more to prevent that from happening. That STARTS with not letting them have the ball right back again. And then again.

I haven't heard a single person make anything that even remotely resembles this point. The only thing that's being ignored here my repeated critiques of the defense.

They were well above average (for a game against Oakland). Until the offense hung them out to dry in the second half. Remind me what the metrics were. I do believe this conversation is what prompted the heat maps, which clearly showed that neither the offense nor the defense stuck out as particularly bad, but that the defense was more often good than the offense in 2015. If you're going to allude to something, please help refresh my memory. Anything else would be vapid.

Go ahead and lookup Carr's sack percentage heading into Sunday then tell me your expectation is anything approaching reasonable. Spoiler alert: it's not. He doesn't get sacked.

Best way to keep your opponent from scoring is to not let them have the ball. We did the opposite of that. What you've posted above is some circular logic that really can't be discussed because it takes basic assumptions right off the board in order to serve your own repetitive and vapid thesis that the coaching is to blame. You got one thing right: I'm being condescending as hell.

A clear and present admission that our only hope was to take the ball out of Tyrod's hands...on the road, against a 9-2 team whose QB is an MVP candidate. The state of our QB position, ladies and gentlemen. It's 2016, and this is what we have to do to try and win ball games. What more evidence to fans need that TT is single handedly taking wins off the sheet?

Being down 26-9 with 9 minutes to go in the third quarter should be a death sentence for any team, with any quarterback if your opponent sustains drives and keeps the ball out of your hands. Period. At that point, you're really only asking for two more stops from your defense to be in the driver's seat.

This false equivalent is a mark of intellectual vacancy that pervades a certain element of Bills fans. Whether or not it's willful is still up for debate. But I'm beginning to wonder.

I don't have any issue with "ground and pound." I think you can win that way and I think we have 95% of the pieces necessary to do so. But we effectively eliminate the "pound" aspect when we can't effectively sustain drives. And when that happens the whole game plan falls apart. We don't have the quarterback to get into a track meet and we don't have any elite players on the backside of the defense to make game changing plays. The league and its rules are not structured to benefit defenses, so we keep the margin for error as slim as we possibly can. This relies entirely on our ability to possess the ball. When we don't, we lose. It's not that hard. It's been plainly obvious for two seasons now. And again, I don't fault the plan. We are not built to win otherwise.

And some can't stop with this brainless inference. Acknowledging two very very obvious things--that the defense has lousy talent in the secondary and the offense leaves the defense out to dry by stringing together short drives--does not praise of the HC make.

If you think Russ is a problem then just bail. This organization is full of surprises so I can't say for sure that RR, TT or DW are coming back. But there is no doubt whatsoever that RB is here to stay. If you can't cope with that, you're outta luck.

I won't argue that. But let's even eliminate fatigue as an obvious explanation. Let's also eliminate the undeniable dearth of talent we have in the secondary right now. Let's also eliminate the fact that Oakland is !@#$ing good. Even if none of these things were a factor: If the offense sustains two drives. TWO. They dont' even need to score points, if they sustain TWO drives, Oakland has a much harder time flipping the game the way they did.

Nonsense. The offense was playing with a lead too. All they had to do was sustain a drive or two to keep it. That's how you beat teams like the Raiders...when you dn't have a quarterback. It's how we built the lead in the first place. I can't honestly fathom why people thought that shutting out the Raiders offense...in the second half specifically...was ever feasible. If you thought that, you don't pay a lick of attention to what's going on in the league right now. And if that's the case, just sit back and listen to the growing majority of Bills fans screaming at you: IT'S THE QUARTERBACK.

There's a select few of you that need to pull your heads out of the sand and acknowledge that many, many people are saying the same thing, and have been for a long time now. Framing the argument as if it's coming from me and from me alone, as if I'm some naked idiot shouting into the rain is--mostly--inaccurate.

I'm sorry but this thinking is tantamount to ordering a diet coke with a super sized big mac.

Agreed. But you can only go with what's available. Fortunately for Buffalo, it can't get much worse at quarterback. It really can't. The only thing worse than TT is a guy whose production is as low and a guy who turns the ball over. But if turnovers are the trade off for throwing the ball in rhythm, having pocket presence, letting your receivers make a play and forcing opposing defenses to respect the passing game just a little bit, it's a net gain for the Bills.

Best way to shut down an opposing offense? KEEP THEM OFF THE FIELD TT and the gang did, you know, the opposite of that. Against a 9-2 team playing at home with an MVP candidate QB. What did you think was going to happen?

Not by a mile.

Tyrod's running ability most certainly bolsters the rush attach. Know what else would? A competent passing game. I'll happily swap the two.

Yep

May be you can link to a single post of me defending Rex's scheme. Just one.

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May be we should get some DBs that belong in the NFL