Adam Shatz/FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS Almanac on the Bills (not good)

[VA Bills Fan]

"What a mess.

 

Already struggling in a market no longer big enough to support NFL football, the Buffalo Bills spent the last few months hiring executives who were past retirement age and coaches nobody else wanted who will install schemes for which they don’t have proper personnel.

 

In our last few books, we’ve made fun of the Bills as the league’s least interesting team, stuck on an endless hamster wheel of 7-9 seasons. That’s no longer the case, and not in a good way. The decisions

made by the Bills in the past few months would make them the laughingstock of the league if the Oakland

Raiders weren’t so reticent to give up the title. Interim head coach Perry Fewell showed some promise after the

Bills fired Dick Jauron at midseason. The team finished 3-4, and Buffalo’s overall DVOA in the second half of the

season was a respectable 1.3%. Despite Fewell splitting duties as both defensive coordinator and head coach, the Bills had

the sixth best defensive DVOA in the NFL over the final two months. Nonetheless, owner Ralph Wilson wanted to clean house after five straight losing seasons, and that meant jettisoning both Fewell (now the defensive coordinator for the Giants) and general manager Russ Brandon (a P.R. guy whose P.R. moves, like signing Terrell Owens, didn’t do much for the

Bills on the field).

 

Plenty of big names swirled around the Bills — Bill Cowher, Mike Shanahan, Marty Schottenheimer —

but none of them actually came to work for the Bills. (As one former league executive told me, “You really think Mike Shanahan wants to live in Buffalo?”) Instead, the Bills promoted from within, elevating 70-year-old director of college scouting Buddy Nix to be their new general manager. Nix established an excellent record as a scout in eight years serving

under A.J. Smith in San Diego, but this is his first time actually running an organization. After the big names that had been

bandied about, the Nix hiring was underwhelming, and it seemed to be no accident that the Bills made the announcement

on the afternoon of December 31. The prevailing opinion is that the Bills hired Nix because he came cheap.

ProFootballTalk.com ran some scathing comments from an unnamed source, who called the hire “a

joke and a slap in the face to all hard working people in the NFL… [Wilson] elevates a 70-year-old scout to a position that requires work and energy… The eight years he spent in San Diego he never lived in San Diego. He lived somewhere in Tennessee. Someone who lives in another city is away from the day-to-day operations.” Could the Bills possibly follow up this unpopular executive hire with a less popular coaching hire? Why yes, they could.

 

Three weeks later, the Bills announced the hire of former Dallas and Georgia Tech head coach Chan Gailey, last seen getting fired as Chiefs offensive coordinator before the 2009 season had even started. In an offseason with plenty of bigname, well-established head coaches on the market, the Bills ended up hiring a man no other team was even considering to be an NFL head coach.

Gailey’s hallmark as an offensive coordinator has always been his adaptability, like the move to install the Pistol formation when injuries left Tyler Thigpen as Kansas City’s starting quarterback in mid-2008. His adaptability better be on display in Buffalo this year, because there simply is not a lot of offensive talent to work with. Gailey seems to be giving mixed

signals about his plans on offense, because media reports have run the gamut from “expect a college-style

spread offense like he ran in Kansas City” to “expect a hard-nosed conservative running attack like he ran

at Georgia Tech.”

 

While Football Outsiders has generally put forward the notion that passing leads to more success than running, we’re also great believers that you tailor your scheme to your personnel, not the other way around.

There’s no question this team’s personnel leans heavily towards running the ball as much as possible. Running

back is the deepest position on the team (an issue we’ll get to in a bit). The offensive line was dead last

in Adjusted Sack Rate but did a good job on run-blocking (except in short-yardage situations). The team has

to pick a quarterback between Trent Edwards, whose ceiling is mediocrity; Ryan Fitzpatrick, whose ceiling

is career backup; and Brian Brohm, whose ceiling is higher based on what he did in college but whose NFL

performance so far has been in the sub-basement with no ceiling in sight.

 

 

Worst of all, this team has a grand total of one wide receiver who would be considered good enough to

rank at least fourth on an average NFL depth chart. There’s Lee Evans and then dead space. Terrell Owens

may have disappointed last year, but he’s a lot better than what he left behind. James Hardy is currently penciled in as the other starting receiver, but he barely got on the field as a rookie, tore his ACL late in the year, and missed most of his second year recovering from it. He showed up out of shape to June OTAs and could barely practice. Behind Hardy is veteran Roscoe Parrish, coming off a three-catch year; longshot sleeper hope Steve Johnson; former New England bust

Chad Jackson; and fourth-round pick Marcus Easley, a walk-on at UConn who never started until his senior

year and will need a lot of time to develop his instincts and route-running. Lee Evans has accomplished a lot in his career, even when double-covered and paired with a poor quarterback, but this is the worst wide receiver corps in the league from number two on down. The Bills are more definitive about their new defensive scheme, but the decision to go with that scheme is puzzling.

 

The Bills brought in Miami linebackers coach George Edwards to be defensive coordinator

and will jump onto the NFL’s very heavy 3-4 bandwagon. For some of Buffalo’s current defensive talent, this is a good thing. 2009 first-round pick Aaron Maybin will fit in perfectly as the pass-rushing weakside linebacker. Paul Posluszny would be good in either the 4-3 or the 3-4. But for the most part, Buffalo’s existing roster was completely wrong for the

3-4. The change hastened the retirement of Buffalo’s best pass rusher, Aaron Schobel. The second-best pass

rusher, Chris Kelsay, is too small to play end in the 3-4 and doesn’t have the pass coverage ability to play

linebacker. A pass-rushing tackle like Kyle Williams doesn’t fit the 3-4. Marcus Stroud will need to move from 3-technique tackle to 5-technique end in the new scheme. Kawika Mitchell should be able to shift inside, but Keith Ellison and all the bench linebackers are far better fits for the 4-3. Worst of all, the only players on the roster in February who fit the role of

nose tackle were two practice squad scrubs signed to future contracts. The Bills were active in the free

agent market, signing veterans with 3-4 experience like end Dwan Edwards and linebacker Andra Davis,

but the massive increase in teams using the 3-4 over the past couple years means that 3-4 teams are no longer

getting more bang for their free-agent buck. The demand for 3-4 players has caught up to, and possibly

exceeded, the supply. The confusing decisions continued on draft day. The Bills had a desperate need for wide receivers, an

offensive line filled with question marks, and a 3-4 defense with a massive hole in the middle. Dan Williams, the draft’s best 3-4 nose tackle prospect, was available when the Bills selected ninth.

 

Every wide receiver was still on the board. So were outstanding offensive line prospects like Anthony Davis, Mike Iupati, and Bryan Bulaga. The Bills also could have traded down to grab a lineman and a quarterback of the future. Instead, the Bills adamantly chucked the concept of “drafting for need” out the window and took running back C.J. Spiller. (Somewhat in their defense, they did take a nose tackle in the second round, Torell Troup.) As with Denver’s pick of Knowshon Moreno in the first round of last year’s draft, the problem is not Spiller himself. It’s hard to find a scout who didn’t see Spiller

as one of the top two or three running backs in this year’s draft, and you’ll get no disagreement from the

numbers (his Speed Score is 107.5).

 

However, running back was the strongest position on the Buffalo roster. The Bills averaged 4.4 yards per carry, eighth in the NFL, despite numerous injuries on their offensive line. And this is a position the team has tried to upgrade over and over, spending four high draft picks on starting running backs over the past decade. Travis Henry fell out of favor after the Bills took him in the second round of the 2001 draft, so the team used its first-round pick in 2003 on Willis McGahee. He fell out of favor within a couple years, so Buffalo used its first-round pick in 2007 on Marshawn Lynch, but he fell out of

favor within a couple years, which led to the drafting of Spiller. Meanwhile, during all this time the most efficient

running back on the Buffalo roster has been an undrafted free agent, Fred Jackson. You would think

someone in Buffalo might get the hint. The only upside to the Spiller pick is that he might be Bills’ second-best

receiver by season’s end, but that itself says a lot about Buffalo’s depth chart at the position.

 

If you can fight your way through the smoky haze of question marks surrounding this franchise, you can

find a few reasons for optimism. The biggest, by far, is the team’s health, which was lousy in 2009. The Bills

had more Adjusted Games Lost from starters and important role players than any other NFL team last year,

ranking in the top three on both offense and defense. The 2009 Bills have the fifth-highest AGL total of any

team in our injury records, going back to 1998. They went through three quarterbacks. Three starters on the

opening day offensive line missed most of the year. Every member of the opening day secondary missed

at least five games during the season.

 

Unless the Bills have been cursed by whatever ghost haunts the St. Louis Rams, there’s just no way they are going to suffer this many injuries again. Often, a team that improves significantly in health will improve significantly on the field. That’s a big part of what happened with last year’s Bengals. It helped the 1999 Redskins and 2007 Browns each follow a losing season with a 10-6 record. Not every team, however, has ridden this injury trend to a strong season, because sometimes the talent that’s been injured wasn’t very good in the first place. The 2009 Lions didn’t suddenly get a lot better. Neither did the 2004 Raiders, the 2005 Titans, or the aforementioned Rams of recent years. The 2000 Carolina Panthers went 7-9 with one of the 25 highest AGL totals in histor; the next year, with above-average health, they went 1-15. So, which category did the Bills injuries fall under: talented enough to be missed, or replacement-level players replaced by other replacement-level players? Trying to answer that question is a bit confusing because the unit that suffered the most injuries was also the unit where the Bills got the best performance in 2009: the secondary.

 

“How did the Bills have such a good pass defense in 2009?” will go down as one of the great unanswered questions in recent human history, along with “What made a bunch of Palm Beach Jews vote for Pat Buchanan in 2000?” and “Seriously, Gary Cherone in Van Halen?” The Bills put up the third-best pass defense DVOA in the league even though the cornerback who started the most games was Drayton Florence, a complete free-agent bust in Jacksonville the year before. Their rising cornerback star of the future, Leodis McKelvin, broke his leg in the third game of the year.

 

Their original starting free safety, Bryan Scott, ended up playing half the season at linebacker because of all

the injuries there. (Actually, this is probably a good way to help the pass defense, although it won’t do

wonders for stopping the run.) Buffalo’s mystery pass defense was steady throughout the year, as the pass defense DVOA in the first eight games was within one percentage point of the pass defense DVOA for the final eight games. It was

steady across the field, as the Bills ranked in the top ten against all five “receiver types” that we track. It wasn’t

the product of unrepeatable good play in specifically important situations — the Bills’ pass defense DVOA

was best on second down, not third down, and it was no better in the red zone than it was elsewhere. The

Bills stopped opposing quarterbacks without a great pass rush — they only hurried opponents on 13.3 percent

of pass plays, the lowest rate in the league, and had a league-average 34 sacks. However, when the

Bills did hurry a quarterback, they made it count, with the best defensive DVOA in the league on plays with

a quarterback hurry.

 

A heavy opponent adjustment was part of the reason for Buffalo’s strong metrics; facing offenses like New England and New Orleans, the Bills’ average sack total translated into a top ten Adjusted Sack Rate, and

the Bills’ pass defense DVOA would go from -21.3% to -13.9% without opponent adjustments. But that still

would have ranked third in the league, indicating that Buffalo’s high rank is not an issue of opponent adjustments

being too strong. No one specific player stands out either, except perhaps for Rookie of the Year (Clean Drug Test Division)

Jairus Byrd. That means that the best explanation for Buffalo’s success was scheme — the scheme

the new Bills administration promptly chucked out the window, designed by the interim head coach who

is now plying his trade downstate. And while strong pass defense is a reason for optimism, the pass defense

is also likely to regress a bit, considering that the Bills ranked just 22nd in pass defense DVOA in 2008

— you know, when their defense was populated by all those guys whose return from injury is supposed to

make fans optimistic about 2010. As for the long term, we have yet to broach this team’s massive business problems. Buffalo is the 52nd-largest television market in the U.S. and the second-smallest in the NFL (and let’s be honest, the

real television market for the Packers is 35th-ranked Milwaukee).

 

The team still sells out all home games, but those tickets are among the lowest-priced in the league. The Toronto experiment has been a flop: “A sports marketing disaster of epic proportions,” according to Globe and Mail columnist Stephen Brunt. The once-a-year game was so darn popular in 2008 that the Bills cut Toronto ticket prices by an average of 17 percent before this year’s game against the Jets. And the Bills are right in the middle of the large market- vs.-small market infighting over revenue sharing that could help lead to a player lockout in 2011.

 

These issues do a good job of explaining why the head coach in Buffalo is someone no other team was considering. Ralph Wilson simply doesn’t have the money to bring a big-name coach to his team. The Buffalo Bills have now gone ten seasons without making the playoffs. Unless the rest of the AFC East completely collapses, 2010 will extend that streak to 11. Usually that’s one louder, but when a team falls in

Buffalo, it doesn’t make a sound. "

 

Aaron Schatz

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

Not only long, unreadable. But thanks for the effort.

[joejoebills]

Not only long, unreadable. But thanks for the effort.

If he got you upset thats exactly what he wanted. Let the Bills define how good they are not some blow hard .

Go Bills

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

If he got you upset thats exactly what he wanted. Let the Bills define how good they are not some blow hard .

Go Bills

 

 

Not what I meant, but who's counting.

 

I refuse to read a post without paragraphs.

[notwoz]

Not only long, unreadable. But thanks for the effort.

Ditto on that -- plus he sounds like 99.9% of the naysayers on TBD

[sweatpantsjoe]

Theres no way I'm reading through all of that.

[notwoz]

Not what I meant, but who's counting.

 

I refuse to read a post without paragraphs.

For a second there, I thought I was reading a book by Jack Kerouac.

[wardigital]

I trudged through it, though a lot of his reasons for negativism are based on false premises or out-and-out erroneous.

 

It would be nice to know when this was written and if it was edited at all, exactly? The piece claims James Hardy as the #2 receiver, which hasn't been the case (or even reasonable to presume as the case) in quite a while - maybe even since last year.

 

There seems to be little evidence that Ralph Wilson can't "afford" to pay for a quality coach or front office (wasn't there a recent Forbes posting that said that the Bills were amongst the top 75 most lucrative sports organizations in the world, or something of this sort?) Regardless, Wilson reportedly heaved cash at coaches who didn't want to come here for other reasons, and thats not his fault.

 

We could go through it line-by-line, because there are lots of other inaccuracies, but it is not worth the time.

 

Nevertheless, it's sort of distressing that a publication with the sort of reputation that they have would release this, and makes me wonder about the accuracy of their other team reports.

 

Regardless, it doesn't mean I think the Bills will be any good, I don't really know, but this piece was kind of shameful.

[PromoTheRobot]

I trudged through it, though a lot of his reasons for negativism are based on false premises or out-and-out erroneous.

 

It would be nice to know when this was written and if it was edited at all, exactly? The piece claims James Hardy as the #2 receiver, which hasn't been the case (or even reasonable to presume as the case) in quite a while - maybe even since last year.

 

There seems to be little evidence that Ralph Wilson can't "afford" to pay for a quality coach or front office (wasn't there a recent Forbes posting that said that the Bills were amongst the top 75 most lucrative sports organizations in the world, or something of this sort?) Regardless, Wilson reportedly heaved cash at coaches who didn't want to come here for other reasons, and thats not his fault.

 

We could go through it line-by-line, because there are lots of other inaccuracies, but it is not worth the time.

 

Nevertheless, it's sort of distressing that a publication with the sort of reputation that they have would release this, and makes me wonder about the accuracy of their other team reports.

 

Regardless, it doesn't mean I think the Bills will be any good, I don't really know, but this piece was kind of shameful.

Written by someone who couldn't be bothered to actually look at the team. Just regurgitating the standard lines from the media.

 

PTR

[Doc]

I wonder how long it took for Aaron to Schatz that out?

[BLZFAN4LIFE]

3 words to summarize that article:

 

Sad but true.

 

Anyone willing to read it without their rose-colored homer glasses pinned to their ears knows it.

[DonInBuffalo]

Interesting article. I don't think it's quite as "doom and gloom" as he tries to paint it, but it's a reminder that the Bills still have a long, long, ways to go before they're a seriously competitive team again.

[PromoTheRobot]

3 words to summarize that article:

 

Sad but true.

 

Anyone willing to read it without their rose-colored homer glasses pinned to their ears knows it.

What part is true? That Hardy is the #2 receiver?

 

PTR

[Mike in Syracuse]

Well, I guess that's it then. No point playing the 2010-2011 season if Adam Schatzhispants said bad stuff.

[Coach Tuesday]

Schatz is an Ivy League graduate and a professional football statistical analyst, not a journalist. So I wouldn't dismiss what he has to say, it's supported by hours of analysis and evidence.

 

That said, he's an unabashed Patriots fan, so fug him and his stats.

[BLZFAN4LIFE]

What part is true? That Hardy is the #2 receiver?

 

PTR

 

I could highlight that for you but since the article was removed, I'll give you a few from memory.

 

The Buddy Nix promotion was a joke and another example of Ralph being cheap.

Chan Gailey was dumped as the Chiefs OC and not on the radar of any other NFL club as a HC candidate. Another hire on the cheap by Ralph.

George Edwards is a downgrade from Perry Fewell and almost all of our guys will be out of position in the 3-4.

Our WR corps does suck. LE is really a #2 but our #1 and there is RICHARD behind him.

How can you argue with any of that?

[Fixxxer]

What part is true? That Hardy is the #2 receiver?

 

PTR

 

Don't be silly, it was the part that said Bryan Scott, the starting FS, had to move to LB because of injuries.

 

I read all of it and it has a little flare for the dramatic and judges every move to this day as negative, you know, wrong GM, wrong coach, wrong systems, even though he praises Gailey for being adaptable, he is you know, Chan Gialey, unatractive name.

 

 

Mana from heaven if you're negative about this team.

[notwoz]

Schatz is an Ivy League graduate and a professional football statistical analyst, not a journalist. So I wouldn't dismiss what he has to say, it's supported by hours of analysis and evidence.

George Bush Jr. was an Ivy league graduate. So was Dick Jauron.

[VA Bills Fan]

Sorry about low-quality post. I added some paragraph separation. It's from their 2010 Almanac. Save your money -- and your right, 2 of my Pats fans buddies sent that to me, and they worship the guy.

[SDS]

Sorry about low-quality post. I added some paragraph separation. It's from their 2010 Almanac. Save your money -- and your right, 2 of my Pats fans buddies sent that to me, and they worship the guy.

 

Was there something about the copyright violation warning that was ambiguous?