Dr. K

+1 I've also wondered about the Cowher worship. Cowher's Steelers lost a lot of playoff games they were supposed to win. I think Bills fandom just likes the idea of a coach with a pugnacious jaw who yells a lot. To a Western New Yorker it's like having your Dad back.

You said earlier you are willing to give Nix and Gailey "the benefit of the doubt." I don't see much of that in any of your posts. Your posts are nothing BUT doubt. Not that ther's anything wrong with that--you can be as doubtful as you like. Just sayin'.

+1. Really smart comment, seems irrefutable.

I'd like to see one of the QBs established by the end of the season as a credible long-term solution, with a real upside, at that position.

In fact, I remember the draft commentators criticizing the Bills heavily at the time for not drafting Quinn when they could have had this "future franchise QB."

I will guarantee that, from the perspective of five years from now, the Bills made at least one "major mistake" in the 2010 draft. Some player they drafted will be out of football while a different player that was on the board when the Bills drafted that useless player will have turned into a star pro bowler. That is why discussions like this, though at times entertaining, are fundamentally idiotic. EVERY team's draft can be replayed, in retrospect, to show the team made a huge blunder in drafting X when Y was available. Hindsight is always 20-20.

I'm not.

Is there a point you're making here besides the obvious one that the draft is a crap shoot and teams choose who they choose for various reasons based on their best judgment (which may be wrong) of the abilities of the players available and what best suits their needs? You think they should have picked Clausen instead of Troup (and maybe Spiller?). And if Clausen turns out to be a franchise QB four years from now while none of the current Bills's QBs do, and whatever hypothetical QB the Bills draft next year also doesn't, then the Bills would have turned out to have made a mistake. Well, duh. What a waste of pixels.

This is just plain butt-stupid bigotry. Ugly, small-minded, and ignorant.

They'll rank 15-20 on defense. Possibly better if a couple of young players take off, worse if they suffer too many injuries and the offense doesn't stay on the field very long. The pass D won't rank as high, but won't fall drastically. The run D has to be better, probably much better. To those who say the Bills don't have any linebackers who were drafted high, there's Poz, and I think Maybin would qualify as a highly drafted player more suited to linebacker. I hope can can make the transition. I expect he will look more natural there than Shobel would have, much as I liked Shobel as a player. Ellis it seems to me is like Maybin as being a guy who should have been slotted for linebacker when he was drafted. I don't know if he'll pan out there, but he has a better chance at LB than he had at DE.

So this well researched data shows that 10 out of twelve teams that switched form the 4-3 to the 3-4 in the last ten years gave up fewer points per game in the first year of the switch. One of the teams did the same, while only one did worse. From this you conclude that the Bills will be like the one team that did worse. Got it. I guess we'll see.

+100

Not to make an issue of it, since I think we agree that overall DF was the better QB, but Flutie did not show "heroics" all season long to get the Bills to the playoffs. He showed adequate QB play, and in the second half of the season, completely mediocre offensive performance. 19 points per game average, two 31 point performances as highs out of 15 games started (and in one of them the Bills got to 31 points because of a kickoff return for a touchdown. I don't deny that since then we have had less than adequate QB performance for a decade (with some exceptions for brief periods), and that mediocre offensive performance would be a breath of fresh air in the current situation. I happened to look back at the Bills' only winning season in the last decade, under Mike Mularkey whom so many here were eager to run out of town. In the last part of that season, leading up to the ignominious loss to the Steelers in the finale (where the Bills still scored 24 points), these were the scores of the previous six games, all Bills wins: 37-17, 38-9, 42-32, 37-7, 33-17, and 41-7. Four of those were road games. This is they head coach and offensive strategist that everyone denigrated as the "meathead."

You're right, I'm wrong. The Bills would have played Indianpolis in Indy. If they got past the Colts, then they would have played Jacksonville. My bad. I wonder if the Jags would have had an extra incentive to tee off on Rob J. if he were quarterbacking against them, since he came to the Bills from the Jags. That would have been the media story line for the game, if it ever came to that.

This whole thread is silly, IMHO. The idea that the Bills would have beaten the Jaguars (whom they would have played the next week had there been no Home-run throwback) is dumb. Because the Bills lost, the Jags played the Dolphins--and hung 62 points on them. Even if Flutie, who couldn't put up more than 13 points on the lousy Pats of 1999, and more than 7 on the even lousier Jets, was playing QB, they would have been stomped. And yes, Rob Johnson would have gotten them blown out, too. I don't think the Bills would have gotten to the Super Bowl that year regardless. But this is all speculation that I ma not interested in. All I am interested in doing is correcting several errors of FACT that various posters have made, and perhaps to puncture just a little the Flutie Magic myth by pointing out what he really was and was not accomplishing in the fall of 1999. By reference to the facts, not to people's opinions.

Look, Flutie was a better QB overall than Rob Johnson. But that doesn't mean Johnson had zero good performances. Why do you have to insist that? This is what I mean by mythology. In that final game of the season against the Colts, who were 13-2 at that time, and fighting Jacksonville for home field in the playoffs, in a game that the Colts played their first stringers including Peyton Manning until they were hopelessly behind in the second half, Johnson went 24/32 for 287 yards passing, 2 TDs, no ints, and ran 7 times for 36 yards. 323 yards of total offense. The Bills won 31-7. Flutie did not put up numbers like that in the entire season. The Bills had averaged 19 points a game under Flutie all season, 13 points per game over the previous five games. Maybe it was a mistake, but was it incomprehensible that Phillips should start Johnson in the playoffs under those circumstances?

Not true. The Colts in that final game were playing for home field advantage throughout the playoffs. They needed to win in order to assure that.

I agree with this. He did mask the troubles of the o-line, much more than Johnson ever could. We just don't know what might have been, and to speculate is useless. But I will point out that Flutie did not win us the playoff game against Miami the previous season. Not that it was entirely up to him, But that's the point--whenever he won, all credit went to him, When he lost, it was somebody else's fault. And I want to point out that I never said I hated Flutie--I hate the MYTHOLOGY that surrounds him. He was a good quarterback, and certainly watching him play was different that watching anybody else in the game at that time. But the "Flutie Magic" thing always left me cold. Was it Flutie Magic when the Bills eked out a win 13-10 over a bad Patriots team that season the week before he was benched? When they lost 17-19 to the Giants two weeks before that, and 7-17 to the dog-ass Jets two weeks before that? When they barely beat the same bad Pats team 17-7 at home in between? When the Bills went 3-2 in the last five games he started despite the defense holding their opponents to 14 points per game over that period? I know the team feel apart after 2000. I'd pin that collapse on a lot more than the end of the Flutie era. And from the perspective of the last ten years, the Flutie era was a golden age. I'd be glad to watch those Wade Phillips teams again. But that's not the issue here. Peace.

I am so tired of all the Flutie worship. Flutie played like crap the second half of that season. The Bills offense under him was struggling to score. That's why Johnson was put in for Flutie in the last game of the season (against the Colts), a game in which he TORE THEM APART. I don't want to get into the Flutie/Johnson thing again. But I really can't stand the Flutie mythology. Flutie was a good player, made some amazing plays, but the decision to bench him was not based on nothing. The defense was carrying the team in the second half of the season, not Flutie and the sputtering offense.

As of right now, 8-8. Probably 3rd in the division. I may change my mind after pre-season.

It would be more fun if they ranked the Bills at 32. But 31 is good enough. No sense in getting outraged about it, and the pleasure of them doing better than expected once the season starts will be that much greater. When the team wins some games, then the analysts can act surprised and the conventional wisdom will change. If they end up 31st in the league at the end of the season (which I do not think they will), well, we ought to be used to failure by now.

The guy who said that in that movie was a fanatic lunatic who condoned a murder that resulted from his orders, then tried to cover it up. I'm just saying.....

This is the pattern that made Wes Welker a star.

Thanks for filling us in on this. And of course, this proves unequivocally that the situation will be eternally as it has been no matter what changes are made. As of 1980 the Bills had lost 20 in a row to the Dolphins. And as we all know, they never have beaten them from that day to this.

We should not be surprised. They'll be ranked low until they show differently. That goes for the team as a whole. I would expect the line and the team right now to be working to learn the new system and get coordinated. It will help when Wood and Bell are back practicing. Time enough to prove the prognosticators wrong when the season starts, if they can.