2020 Our Year For Sure

:pirate: There's no way I'm reading 5 more pages of this crap to catch up, but I thought I'd pay tribute anyway.

:unsure: No! Fix it, Voice!

Yeah same interview. The Bills question came a bit after that, I believe. Something I forgot to mention before, he also said he doesn't like the Patsterisks without Brady*. He said that playing the dink and dunk game with Cassel against NYJ showed that they don't have the confidence in him to let him run the normal offense, and once teams see that on film and adjust accordingly, teams will cheat up to take that away, and he'll be unable to make plays downfield. Said that unlike Brady* when he first came in, Cassel's "head will be swimming," and he'll falter. We'll see. Lets hope Jon Ritchie is a genius.

ESPN First Take had former Eagles and Raiders FB Jon Ritchie on just now. They asked him who out of the surprise 2-0 teams we should really look out for. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the guy got positively giddy, and he almost cut off the anchor and said, "I. Love. The Bills." In addition to whats in the title, he also said he thinks Lynch will have a monster year even though his stats are nothing special so far, and that Peters being back in the fold should help him. Said the big guys up front love blocking for Lynch. Ritchie said he loves the defense and that they'll create plenty of turnovers. Said this is a team that has "everything going on right now." WRT Edwards, he joked he may be a bit biased being a Stanford guy, but that Edwards diagnoses defenses "like nobody's business." The anchor was surprised when he said Edwards will be the next Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, but Ritchie nodded and repeated himself with conviction. Think I remembered most of it...just thought I'd pass it along. No matter what some of you say, I think its nice to hear stuff like this about your team once in awhile. Go Bills!

So he's right. We're 1 for 3 converting short yardage on the ground. Thats been a problem for us for awhile now. We're seemingly more likely to pick up a 3rd and 1 or 2 by throwing than we are by running.

I believe Fargas is out, and McFadden is expected to play. They'll use Bush quite a bit between the tackles.

You can NOT bench Tony Romo.

Its not worth it to play the whole, "we're not contenders, because we haven't beaten anyone good yet" game. There just aren't enough legitimate "good" teams to make it worthwhile. How many AFC teams are there where you can say, "Okay, we beat them, so now I know we're good." Pittsburgh, Indy, New England, Tennessee? Maybe not even those four? You can't take a team's record away from them because they haven't played one of the very few top teams. Just take our record at face value.

Classic example of "playing not to lose."

I'll buy that. Good post.

Coach of the Year as well? Thats ridiculous. The award may as well not exist.

His deal is only 5 years, $8.6 million. Outside of the top 10-12, rookie contracts will hardly break the bank.

If they're as good as we hope, it'll happen eventually, yeah. But if they're THAT good, we'll have a few chances to win before it does. Mike Mularkey spent three years as Pittsburgh's offensive coordinator, and coached two top-5 offenses in those three years. Also, we all know his connection with Donahoe helped him get the job. Tomlin spent 5 years as Tampa's DBs coach under Dungy, and in those 5 seasons their defense never ranked worse than 6th overall. That includes two 1st overall rankings. Then he went to Minnesota, installed the Tampa 2 scheme he had learned from Dungy and Kiffin, and took the Vikes' D from 21st to 8th. That same year, his mentor, Dungy, won a Super Bowl, and another of Dungy's disciples, Lovie Smith, went 13-3. That coaching tree was hot at the time. Mangini had a similar resume to Tomlin. He spent 5 seasons as a positional coach under a percieved genius (this time Belichick rather than Dungy), contributing to multiple high-ranking units in that time, and had a year as a coordinator under his belt. And like Tomlin (and unlike the Bills' coordinators), Mangini was working as part of a high-profile 'coaching tree,' that had already produced a couple of branches. These are credentials that our guys just can't match at this time. Could other teams eventually become interested in Fewell and Schonert? Absolutely. But there is certainly no 'Dick Jauron coaching tree' to help generate that interest. They're starting from scratch: its going to take a few years of these guys putting high-ranking units on the field to get people talking. Or they could go the short way, and win a championship...and regardless of the chances that our coordinators would leave afterwards, I don't think you or I would be worrying about ANYTHING if that happened.

The idea would be to keep these guys here, no? I find it kinda strange that as soon as we win two games, people here think the whole league will come and poach our coordinators in the offseason. Its going to take some time for these guys to build the kind of reputation needed to get a head coaching job somewhere else, or even for other teams to think them worthy of the raise associated with the Asst. Head Coach title. The only guy who has a reputation right now is April, but another team would need to make him the head coach to steal him while he's under contract here. So as long as Ralph doesn't get cheap, there's no reason why we can't keep all three of these guys for awhile.

Lynch.

Link

Personally, what I'd love to see is we keep the current home unis, and bring back the Kelly/Thomas/Bruce/Reed away uniforms...cause those rags we wear on the road right now just don't cut it. The throwbacks are definitely great, but I like seeing them a couple times a year. It makes it seem special.

No way. I like the all-blue and all-white looks. Don't get me wrong, the road unis are horrendous regardless, but the all-white is better than white-on-blue. The latter belongs in the arena league. You can't tell me that uniform Evans is wearing looks better than Lynch's.

The Redskins? I agree with you re: the Bengals. Those helmets are great. Would've put KC higher, always thought those were cool. Interesting thread, I agree with alot of it. Thanks for posting.

I don't think a team as hungry as this one is really susceptible to trap games. To my knowledge, there's only one Bill with a Super Bowl ring. Other than he, most of the players on this team have experienced a very moderate amount of success, and in many cases altogether too much failure. For every Marshawn Lynch or Trent Edwards who could get overexcited, there's a Josh Reed or an Aaron Schobel to remind them how difficult it is to find success in this league. The head coach of the team is a steadying voice, who keeps himself on an even keel. A team that wants to win as badly as this one does will be able to keep their focus week in and week out. JMO, of course.

Yep. You're one of the two or three who don't see the progress the rest of us see from year 1 to year 3 of this regime. We're good again. Some of you may have some trouble coping with that reality. Just don't do anything stupid, Sis.

The idea is that they wouldn't see him. Only Bobby April. Gotta love the creativity.

Well they both lit it up (Warner had 361 and 3 TDs, Cutler had 350 with 4 TDs, a pick and a 2pt conversion). Unfortunately I still lost by 7...but at least the 5 extra points I would've had from starting Cutler wouldn't have made a difference. Good to know I can leave Cutler in the lineup almost regardless of who he's playing. I think I'll test the trade market for Warner.

Larry and Chad Johnson, and Shockey, thanks for those 5 combined points.

I like it! Good post, PG. I think its safe to say you won't get admissions of error from the likes of Sisyphean or Bills Vet this early in the game. Tony Dungy went 51-20 (.718 winning percentage) and had 4 playoff berths in his first 4 years with the Colts, yet he still had his naysayers until he won a SuperBowl. Some people get so wrapped up in their opinion, everything they see only reinforces that opinion. Jauron going to the playoffs won't change anything: he'll still be overly conservative, playing not to lose, a lousy gameday coach, too nice of a guy, etc. Screw 'em. The rest of us know how far this team has come since Jauron took over.