finn

Speaking as a fan, not as any kind of expert, I agree. McDermott has fielded high-EPA defenses, but allowing third and long completions appears to be a feature, not a bug, of his philosophy, a baked-in outcome of a philosophy that assumes, usually correctly, that the other team's offense will make a mistake at some point. So you keep the action in front of you, rushing four (ineffectually) and hoping for a dropped pass, penalty, or turnover. Playing not to lose. (Yes, yes, he's aggressive on offense.) To be fair, that approach can and does work in the regular season, at least if you have the best quarterback in NFL history on offense. But even Allen can't make up for the wheels falling off on defense year after year after year after year. I see no sign of change, either. Maybe Bosa will deliver what Miller did in those short eight weeks, but that won't be enough when the face KC in January. In short, it's Groundhog Day, again. Come January, we'll watch McDermott once again turning into a little boy in KC, clapping on his defense to another collapse. The only hope we have for our team is if Allen and the offense can in fact score more than the 33 points McDermott's defense surrenders to KC like clockwork every year. If The Bills succeed in the playoffs this year, it will be in spite of their head coach, not because of him.

I suspect it's not so much Cook wanting a premier salary as much as wanting respect. Shakir, Brown, Bernard, Benford, Rousseau...everyone is getting extensions in their last contract year except him. It's hard to be isolated, and his feelings are hurt. He seems like a good guy, but emotionally he strikes me more of an adolescent than a grown man, sweet but stupid, to be blunt, and he's probably particularly susceptible to his idiot brother and agent egging him on. They might see the Hard Knocks spotlight as leverage. The Kyren Williams contract, given that Beane is offering something similar, is perfectly fair and in fact is a better deal than Benford got, given that Benford truly is top-five at his position and Cook is simply not. But Cook might have rejected it while he was feeling raw, and now he's stuck. So Beane has the tricky task of not offending him further but not giving in, either, massaging his ego until he sees what is in his best interests. What he, Beane, needs is to come up with some means to let Cook save face so he can stand up to his ass-hat retinue. Big performance incentives this year, for instance, and maybe more guaranteed money than is on the table. Taking a hardline stance--fining him, for instance, or negotiating via the media would backfire badly. With this "hold-in," Cook has foolishly painted himself into a corner. Now he needs Beane to come up with a way to bail him out without his (Cook) looking like the complete ass he is.

Three superstars on the team in Allen, Milano, and Benford, and at least six red-chip players: Dawkins, Brown, Shakir, Cook*, Oliver, Bosa (maybe), along with a lot of very good players just below them and others with real potential; plenty of depth. Not a lot of weaknesses. Free safety, maybe. Receivers hardly a team strength, but not a weakness, either. My only concern at this point, besides Cook being even more stupid than I thought, is McDermott in the playoffs once again facing his mentor. I suspect he'll never overcome whatever is going on, but I have hope that the players know that by now and will carry him. (Or lock him in the locker room.)

I sent you a challenge. (I'm bikopuccinni.) I made it three days, but I usually move within a few hours. No worries if that's still too slow for you.

Who needs coffee, right?

A welcome thread on an off day, Ethan, thank you. Like Steve Billieve, I play a lot of chess, although, oddly, I now prefer online correspondence games (i.e., one day per move) to over the board games. They're more like a puzzle to solve at my leisure than a tense battle. (I like the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle, too.) Doubles tennis, squash when I can, pond hockey especially. I'm by far the oldest out there every year, but I can still hold my own, at least in my mind.

Did you see my TNG reference in the Training Camp 7/29 thread? "There are FOUR lights!" I'm always quoting TNG to blank faces, sigh.

Could be Milano.

Great news, but I hope it's not a Cole Bishop-type situation where he's not much use because he missed most of camp.

Who needs left tackles when you have a deep bench of referees?

"There are FOUR lights!"

It's not petty, it's interesting and clever. This board could use more of both qualities--and less carping.

I think people will look back at Allen and Mahomes being the superstars of this era, with Lamar, Stafford, and Burrows in the next tier down, much like how Cunningham, Moon, and Bledsoe in the 1990s are now considered a level below Kelly, Marino, Elway, and Favre.

Thought experiment: If Mahomes ended up statistically dead last in every relevant category but the Chiefs still won the Super Bowl (bear with me), would these people still rank him number one over a quarterback who is best in every quarterback but whose team sucks? You see my point. Where is the line drawn? How much credit do you give the QB on a SB-winning team, putting aside his contributions? And how much demerit do you assign the QB who performs at an arbitrary fantastic level but doesn't "take his team" to the ultimate victory? I think you can make an argument that greatness requires victory, but there is a lot of lazy thinking out there that reflexively dismisses great QBs on bad teams.

I don't recall anyone being on Johnson's side at any point. Besides Ralph, I mean.

Some of the calls here I don't necessarily disagree with, like the roughing the passer penalties against Mahomes. Also, with a full season to work with, you could persuasively cherry pick evidence of bias helping or hurting any team; unconscious bias is inevitable. Finally, anomalies do happen; getting pocket aced three times in a row doesn't necessarily mean the dealer is cheating. But I don't see why all this can be true AND that it's also true the refs are deliberately influencing some Chiefs game. In fact, it might be naïve to think otherwise, given the truly enormous amount of money at stake and how easy it would be to pull off. Bottom line (to me): With normal levels of ref bias, the Chiefs would have won maybe 12 games last year, would not have hosted the AFCC, and would not have gone to the Super Bowl. I'm not claiming there's a league-wide conspiracy, but I'm pretty sure someone has been putting a finger on the scale these past few years to make sure the Chiefs succeed. Why they would want a petulant, mincing whiner like Mahomes to be the poster child for the league is another question.

I like how the writer paraphrases Beane as saying, "Nothing is earned." That made me laugh.

But what makes you think he still can run a 4.46 after blowing out his ACL and Achilles? (He's also turned 30 in January.) He might be running a 4.56 for all we know.

That's a thought. Rather than bulk up a safety like Matt Milano or Lewis Cine, why not switch a DE with speed to LB, especially if his chief purpose is to rush the passer and defend the run? Not saying there isn't a reason (I don't know), but if you're thin at LB and rich at DE, the question comes up. Would be nice to see some beef at LB when Henry is running downhill on us.

Otherwise a slam-dunk signing, though, eh?

I didn't take offense myself, but the title is pretty clearly meant to be insulting to the team, or at least to emphasize not that they accomplished no other team ever has in getting to four straight SB but rather that they lost four in a row. Kinda dumb, in that the chief audience is presumably Bills fans, who don't want to see a narrative of how their beloved team was a pack of tragic losers, as the title implies. Not sure I follow you on that one, brother.

They might have chosen a more cheery title. Why not just "Four-Time Losers"?

Well, as with life in general, the hair-pulling and regrets do have the benefit of helping avoid similar mistakes in the future, at least supposedly. Maybe evolution selected for such a high-degree of guilt, bitterness and regret in our species because it takes that much to penetrate our thick skull to not make the same mistake twice. I assume Beane has an outcomes-assessment review in place where his staff considers why they made the mistakes they did, going back years. I'm sure it's more efficient than hundreds of pages of posts declaring how idiotic certain picks were. But, given the thick-skulls theory, maybe reading through the thorough roasting here is what it would take to persuade him not to draft players like Boogie Basham and Cody Ford. In any even, go Keon! I really, really do not want to spend the next ten years despairing how we could have had Ladd or Xavier.

I noticed the tackles. The interior seemed competent to me, but not stellar.