Cash

Shady seems to be coming into form. Plus there's a good chance he catches 7+ passes between screens, checkdowns, and extended handoffs (basically those quick swing passes we've used). I haven't paid any attention to AP this year, but I'd probably go with Shady.

Some surprises there. Ryan Lewis and Julian Stanford both healthy scratches in favor of seemingly lesser players. Special teams?

Love the idea! OP got us off to a great start, so I'll add to and comment on theirs: - Josh Allen's most memorable plays are with his arm, not his legs -Agreed. I'd like to see him throw for 200+ yards. - JA not hitting dudes in the ankles as he rolls out and throws -Agreed - JA being decisive and quick with his passes, not timid -Agreed - JA sacked no more than twice four times (I'm trying to be realistic about having a raw rookie behind our weak OL) - receivers make 2 catches on contested balls downfield -Would be nice, but more important to me is just to have actual WR downfield completions on regular plays. If the WR made such a great cut that he's wide open, great. But I'm looking for success due to our players, rather than a DB stumbling or a blown coverage or something. - running game goes for 120+ total yds -Agreed - offense ball security, no turnovers -I can live with a TO or two - again, rookie QB and all that. Just hopefully not repeating the same mistakes he's already made against GB. - Bills are + in the turnover ratio -Certainly wouldn't mind it, but in terms of feeling good going forward, not much would impress me more than winning a game where we LOSE the TO battle. The way our offense has looked to date, it's basically impossible for us to win or even score without multiple forced turnovers by the defense. Offense managing to score 20+ without the benefit of multiple short fields would really show me something.

To reinforce the point Hap made earlier, it's not really about being cheap, it's about bad judgment. Between Coleman & Kerley, the Bills are paying $4.5 million of real money (and cap space) to 2 guys who aren't on the team. We traded a 3rd rounder for Benjamin (a move I liked at the time), and it's been an absolute bust. We traded up in the 2nd round to draft Zay Jones (another move I liked at the time), and while there's still a shred of hope left for Zay, it certainly hasn't worked out to this point. Especially with Smith-Schuster and Golladay and Kupp drafted after Zay in the same round. Beane hasn't fully cheaped out on the WR position; it's just that basically every move he's made has failed. I think it's absolutely fair to criticize him for that.

The "cap space is our savior" folks are in for a rude awakening this offseason. And FWIW, I think the plan (process?) is to mostly roll over that cap space and eventually use it to re-sign guys like Tre White and Dion Dawkins. Obviously supplemented with external FAs both in 2019 and beyond.

I'd add in 2-3 O-linemen, but otherwise I agree. I'm not sold on Daboll yet, but I'm not convinced he sucks, either. To be fair - many, many professionals and amateurs called Allen as a bust long before the Bills drafted him. So it's way too late to be first. The pre-draft comparison that really scared me was Jake Locker. Both had a lot of the same excuses for their college stats. And it seemed crazy to me to draft a "project" QB in the top 10. So I'm not surprised Allen's not playing well this soon into his career. And with the offense around him, there's a limit to his upside this year at least. But I'd like to see him progress and improve as the season goes on (and take a huge leap next season), so I think it's worthwhile to evaluate him every step of the way. If he's consistently looking better in December than he did in September, I'll be a lot more optimistic heading into the offseason.

To be fair, you can't really have your backup QB be a guy who's had 3 practices with the team. Although I do think it's a fair question as to who would be worse: Anderson w/o knowing the playbook, or Peterman with full prep? I tend to think so too, but I won't count on it till it happens. McDermott seems to really love Peterman. I'm usually in favor of keeping 3 QBs unless you have a franchise guy, but when one of the 3 is Peterman, I think it's fine to go down to 2.

I think bad is an understatement for Peterman. He's been historically bad in 2 of his 3 starts, and regular bad the rest of the time. He doesn't look like he belongs on an NFL roster at all. Allen is at least at the level of a bad NFL QB, and there's real reasons to think/hope he'll get better, especially with more playing time. And he did at least have the one good game so far, and has shown that he can win if the D gives him several takeaways. That's miles ahead of Peterman, but miles behind what we hope he'll become.

Good article. Allen is straight-up bad right now. Will be interesting to see if he ends the season better than he is now.

Plus, there's not that many good free agents available next year. If we want to sign several of them, we'll probably have to overpay. Which creates bad contracts, which I'm told are bad. There's no quick fix coming via free agency, unless it's an unsustainable fix.

A quick look at pro football reference shows 550 regular season games in the last 10 years that were decided by 20 points or more. There are 32*16/2 = 256 games every year, so 2560 games from 2008-2017. 550/2560 = about 21%. So McD is off to an above-average start, although I don't have time to tell you how far above average. Looking at just the Bills over that span, McD's teams really do jump out compared to the last few years. We only lost by 20 or more twice in 64 games from 2013-2016, but it's already been 6 times in 21 games since 2017.

During the 4th quarter of the Packers game, I started calling Zay the king of garbage time. Looks like the stats back that up.

In this thread: Many true Billievers who think the path to success is overpaying lots of free agents.

This is the first I'm hearing of the AAF, so I voted no on that. Unfortunately for the XFL, I have already heard about it, including Vince McMahon's ad pitch for the reboot, so I voted no on that one as well.

I think your reaction is a little bit recency bias, especially given the nature of last night's game. Yeah, the numbers have slowly been trending towards passing basically forever, but it's a gradual change. I'll put the 1992 Bills-49ers game with no punts up against any shootout from the last few years. Those kinds of games are definitely more common now, but it's not like they never happened back in the day. A lot of it has always been hyper-conservative coaching. I also took a look at pro football reference, to compare net yards/pass (penalizes sacks) vs. yards/run over the years. I don't have all day, so I just picked a few years here and there. I also put PFR's adjusted net yards/attempt (ANY/A) in parentheses. This accounts for sacks and interceptions, so it's a more fair comparison to account for the higher risk of a turnover when passing. 2017: 4.1 rush, 6.1 pass (5.9 adjusted) 2012: 4.3 rush, 6.2 pass (5.9) 2007: 4.1 rush, 6.0 pass (5.5) 2002: 4.2 rush, 5.9 pass (5.3) 1997: 4.0 rush, 5.7 pass (5.2) 1992: 4.0 rush, 5.8 pass (4.9) 1982: 3.8 rush, 5.8 pass (4.8) 1972: 4.1 rush, 5.7 pass (4.3) The pass efficiency has gone up while running has stayed roughly flat, but you have to go back to the 70s to find a time when they were about equally efficient. Even in 1982 (before Kelly/Marino/Elway came in), it was a full yard per play better to pass than run! Teams should've been passing like 60% of the time back then instead of 50%. Unfortunately for you, the pass/run ratio is likely to only go up as more coaches realize that you get better overall results that way. If there's any consolation, I can point to the CFL. There you only have 3 downs instead of 4 (still 10 yards to gain), and receivers are allowed to be moving forward at the snap, so it's always been extremely pass-heavy. But teams still run, and not just at the goal line. Granted, it's like 20% of the time, but the run game is still a real part of the game.

Passing has been, on average, far more efficient than running for at least 20-30 years. Some coaches are finally starting to realize that.

What would he apologize for? Allen played bad in week 2. Allen playing much better in week 3 doesn't mean he's owed an apology for saying he was bad in week 2. Or is Ledyard meant to be apologizing to Bills fans for hurting our feelings? Personally, my feelings weren't hurt by people calling the Bills bad on twitter, they were hurt by the Bills playing bad on the field. I don't think I'll be getting an apology from Sean McDermott, though. And Ledyard's review of Allen's week 3 performance was much more positive, both on twitter and on his podcast. If he had continued saying Allen was terrible, even though Allen obviously played at least pretty well, he would've lost all credibility with me. For now, he retains some amount of credibility.

Some guys just seem to find their way to big plays. Jairus Byrd was a big one for us, and I think Ed Reed's the all-time champ. Milano looks to be one as well!

I'm pretty interested to see what Ledyard says about Allen's performance this game.

For the record, with 6 minutes to go in the first half of the Vikings game, Allen has played really well. Only one bad pass that I noticed - the underthrow to Foster.

To some extent, yes. Both were arguably bad passes (I'll argue that below) that were still catchable. FB DiMarco made a nice adjustment to catch the ball, WR Jones didn't. The passes themselves are hard for armchair QBs like us to evaluate. Here's my highly amateur take. I was at that Panthers game with a great view behind the play in question. The safety had completely vacated the area, and it looked to me like Tyrod recognized that and intentionally threw the pass more upfield, figuring Zay would recognize that as well. Zay didn't, and ran his route "as called" towards the sideline. If both are on the same page, that's a TD. With Allen's, I just saw on TV, so I have less of an opinion. The good is that it was ultimately still a catchable ball. The bad is that even if DiMarco ran the route wrong as Hap says, Allen was looking at him when he threw the ball, and threw it to his outside shoulder - not ideal. This wasn't a timing route where Allen lofted it up before DiMarco turned upfield - check the end zone cam. Bad throw even if the route was also bad. Or maybe good throw but too slow to realize where DiMarco actually was, which is also bad. To wrap up this novel, the bigger point is that Allen wasn't drafted #7 (but costing more like #1 in draft capital) to just be as good as Tyrod. Even Tyrod supporters like me only thought he was about the 15th best QB in the league. That's good enough to take you to the playoffs with a lot of help, and maybe win it all with like an all-time great defense or something. If the best we can say about Allen is that he's on Tyrod's level, he'll be a massive bust. Way too soon to make that call, and I'm keeping an open mind. Allen was always supposed to be a project, so it's no surprise that he's a bad QB right now. Hopefully he improves.

Now that Allen is in, only injury can/should take him out. I'm not an Allen fan, but you can't bench him no matter how bad he is. He either gets better (great!) or doesn't. If he doesn't, better to find out ASAP.

I don't believe in a fait accompli for something as complex and major as this. I can't tell you who was ruined and who would've failed anyway, but I'm sure it's happened.

Jury's still out for me on Daboll. Whoever the best OC in the world is probably couldn't get this team into the top half of NFL offenses. Talent is definitively worse than last year, and much worse when Peterman is in at QB. But there's still (IMO) ways to tell if the OC knows what he's doing - play design, play calling, etc. Daboll talks a very good game, which is better than a lot of the duds we've had - including Dennison last year. And when the game was still relatively close, he didn't just run-run-pass-punt. But obviously there weren't much in the way of positives on offense, so I think it's tough for anyone to endorse Daboll after week 1.

I'd still take McDermott over Marrone. Once he described more than one job as his "dream job", I started seeing through his BS.