Dr. K

Me too.

Why anybody thinks Beane is a good evaluator of talent it beyond me. Doug Whaley must be having a good laugh right about now.

Until now thought the Bills could maybe keep this game close. I'm not feeling that anymore. The Bills have too many weaknesses. And I think the Ravens will be motivated to beat up on the Bills in reaction to losing that playoff spot to them last year. They've got something to prove, and they have a better roster. I think it will be a beating in all phases, something like 34-10 Ravens over Bills.

I was pessimistic before pre-season. Right now I am still skeptical that they can win more than 6 or 7 games, tops, but also strangely optimistic about the team's chance to grow over the course of the season. The talent level overall seems low, with some big weaknesses, but I want to see how it plays out.

Blah blah blah

17 passes thrown, 142 completions for eleventy-seven yards. 14 interceptions, 16 touchdowns passing, three running in a close loss, 172-169. This could be the dumbest thread ever posted. Why not just ask, "How much do you like Nathan Peterman?"

You are tying yourself into knots for no reason whatsoever. Take a deep breath.

24-13 Ravens

And why, do you think, they will call an out pattern? Do you think they are idiots?

Got to give major props to BurpleBill. Congrats. I hope NP plays well and wins some games.

The glee of some of you on this board is ugly. He will end up on another NFL roster.

McDermott and Beane have made it completely their team. They have given away a lot of good players in favor of getting a potentially excellent QB. I don't see much talent on this roster; I suggested they would win 5-6 games before training camp and I'm still thinking that's the range. This is my take on the team, too. I really don't think Beane has shown himself to be much of an evaluator of talent.

Was there are game happening anytime during their kaffeeklatsch? Was there another team on the field besides the Bears? You would not have known it while they were asking each other, "Who on the Bears would you say has the most colorful underwear?" "Who was the greatest Bear ever at spelling?"

Very few people around here are willing to give Whaley credit for the talented players he acquired. All they want to talk about are EJ Manuel and Sammy Watkins. They act as if all the players Beane has gotten rid of were trash when two of them started on a Super Bowl winning defense and many others are starting and playing well on other teams right now. I saw an article that everybody praised on the board yesterday that crowed about how "only five players from the previoius regime" were still on the Bills. Well, I think the team's talent level now would be higher if players like Robert Woods and Nigel Bradham and Preston Brown and Marcel Dareus and Ron Darby and Cordy Glenn were still on the squad, to say nothing of the street free agents and players Whaley plucked from other teams' backups who proved to be quality players. You can argue and maybe the point should be made that Beane has cleaned up the cap situation and dumped all those players so that he could draft a long-time solution at QB, which the Bills have been looking for for two decades, and if he hits on that the losses are justified. You could argue that some of these players had attitude and consistency and injury issues. But you can't deny that a lot of starting-quality, even pro bowl level talent, went out the door since Beane came in it. I guess it's water under the bridge to talk about this stuff now. The Bills are committed to a plan and "The Process" (cue choir of heavenly angels) and for better or worse we will see what happens. Allen looks like he may pan out, and that will make a huge difference. Like it or not we're in the middle of a rebuild. It may pay off and I will be as happy and excited as anyone when it does. But I wish people could avoid the Whaley bashing, or at least acknowledge that he was a decent GM and might have been a better one if he had been able to choose his own head coaches. I expect this with be the beginning of a series of responses bashing Whaley. Whatever.

I still have not been convinced by Beane's personnel moves that he consistently knows what he is doing. I admit he has a plan and sticks to it but I'm not convinced it's a good plan. We've essentially switched out Dareus for Louteleli and Watkins for Benjamin, for instance. Did this improve the team? Was it smart to expect Murphy to be the answer at defensive end? Was letting Brown and Ragland go really the best way to improve the linebacking? As you say, how Allen pans out will be huge in determining whether Beane is a success.

This was the other point I was trying to make in the OP--that he was being urged to take risks and the coaches should have realized this was not the right situation. I will say that I never saw the Bills offense look worse than it did in the previous game, at home, against the Saints, when Tyrod was the definition of ineffectual--unless it was in the later playoff game against the Jags.

This is the basic point I was trying to make--I did not intend to start another endless debate about whether or not Peterman is a terrible QB, with people repeating opinions they have given a thousand times already.

Of course that's what he's doing. That's what he has to do. But you're naive if you think that anyone in the media or sports reporting or the vast majority of casual football fans who are not advocates for Peterman are going to let this go.

Easy Peasy

If he turns into Favre or Manning (unlikely) then they will start with it as an ironic comment on how great he later became.

The playcalls could be exactly the same. The knock against Tyrod was the he was afraid to pull the trigger for fear of turning the ball over. Peterman went into that Chargers game with the determination that he would not hesitate to throw, and he paid the price. He's much more discerning now. But because of that half, every time he throws a pick or a near-pick, the announcer will mention his 5-pick game. Other QBs will not have to face that; he always will.

. . . . no matter how long he plays in the league or what he does or does not accomplish. If he dies seventy years from now, the first line of his obituary will be , "Nathan Peterman, who threw five interceptions in his first half of football, died today at the age of ninety-three." He might as well make "Fivepicks" his middle name and get it tattooed on his forehead. This is just an observation, not a value judgment. That one half of football will hang around his neck unless and until he does something spectacular like win a Super Bowl, and even then it will be the first thing any story about him, even one praising him, will start with. Granted, it can't be denied that he did the deed; he was trying to be the anti-Tyrod and he erred in the other direction, disastrously. There have been QBs in the league who have less to offer but had decent careers--that's my opinion, not some universal truth. But it's kind of a drag to contemplate having a single afternoon characterize you for the rest of your career. Allen is suffering something similar, where the conventional wisdom of his abilities or non-abilities--completion percentage, for instance--is the story line that he will have to fight against for a long time. But in his case I don't think it's quite as large an albatross.

I questioned the wisdom of Beane throwing away a pro bowl left tackle. At the very least the tackles would be solid and they could concentrate on the interior. I also don't see how switching out Dareus for Louteleli was a good move. Beane CREATED those holes at DT and WR by getting rid of starters for chump change.

I really fear his play is going to fall off a cliff this season. 30-year-old running backs typically do. His YPC last season was the lowest of his career. Injuries tend to happen more often to older backs. I think Murphy is going to be carrying the load by mid-season. They need to have younger backups.

I'm with the man who knows what "apodictic" means.