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

[dollars 2 donuts]

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.

 

Yeah, believe me, he lost me in other parts of his rant, but that one stuck out like a sore thumb.

 

A silly argument when you consider the Forbes article had the Bills at, I believe, 907 million, with gross revenue of 222 million, oh, and by the way, Adam, they have absolutely no debt.

 

...And although I am not suggesting this, but if the Bills were to raise ticket prices by 10% I don't think you would see any drop-off in attendance. I would hope that a writer would find it hard to beat up on a Town that continues to sellout its stadium 10 years after its last playoff appearance.

[wardigital]

Is the bible flawed because it didn't say anything about nuclear reactors?

 

Neither is writing something early and therefore thinking Hardy would be the #2 on this team. He wasn't predicting the future. "James Hardy is currently penciled in as the other starting receiver," is not and was not wrong.

 

 

 

The Bible is tremendously flawed, seeing as it is mostly fiction. Why ask such a question or use it as an example? I'm an atheist.

 

And yes, it is flawed. When your job is to analyze, and what you are selling is marketed as hard-hitting, accurate analysis of football, it is a distinct indicator of poor analysis when you lazily and mistakenly proclaim that a guy who has never been more than the Fifth Receiver (and at times the Sixth) leap frogs two guys above him for no particular reason other than, I dunno, he was once-upon-a-time drafted high.

 

That's a ridiculous presumption. If you are a fan of the Bills and follow the team casually and you want to posit that James Hardy will be the #2 this year for whatever reason, okay. If you run a football analysis site and are selling $16 copies of a book proclaiming to contain that analysis, and you write a scathing review of a team, you are no longer allowed to make such illogical presumptions.

 

And no reader who knows the Bills should have read that sentence as meaning anything but that Russ had been jettisoned from the GM position. Only a person desperately searching for flaws would have misinterpreted it

 

As for "no reader knowing the Bills", well the idea here is that this isn't a football analysis book for Buffalo Bills fans only, and so fans of 31 other teams who pick up this book and read about the Bills are getting an incomplete, inaccurate picture of the team through false statements about Hardy and what happened with Russ Brandon.

 

And so that would naturally lead me to question the truth in the other 31 team reviews, because, believe it or not, I care about and read those too.

 

 

Neither of those was a problem with the article. I'm not arguing against my own point.

 

I get it: The idea behind a book like this is that they can't pull their punches. Football Outsiders *has* to come to some meaningful conclusions about every team in order to write the pieces that they do for their publications. But they release the thing in advance of training camp, they release the thing through the words of just a few writers who, by all accounts, rely almost entirely on statistical analysis for a bulk of the team's work, and so what happens is they create a bunch of lies.

 

This sort of thing happens in history writing all the time. Think about it. A historian does his research utilizing primary and secondary sources but, having not actually been there, can only create the best picture as he/she sees it for what they're writing about. And occasionally on historical topics, like WWII, or something, where there still exists living witnesses of said event, those witnesses can read the piece and say "That's not true".

 

Football Outsiders has the burden of trying to accomplish the same style of research and writing, except every fan of every team is a living witness who can discount the illegitimacies in the book. That's the nature of the beast.

 

It's fundamentally very hard to do what Football Outsiders does, which is to try to stake a claim on the outlook for each team, every year, well in advance of any actual football taking place. Like I've said multiple times, it doesn't mean what they've concluded was wrong. For my money, the Buffalo Bills *are* a mess, just like they said. The fact of the matter is simply that Football Outsiders cut corners, made mistakes, and got lazy in reaching that conclusion.

 

That's fine, but it's not worth defending by posters like you who think any negative press is attacked with a religious devotion by every poster here. I don't know how I can more clearly or explicitly state that I think that the overall theme of the piece is right, while the piece itself is very, very wrong.

[BillsVet]

Football Outsiders is self-published through Amazon's print-on-demand CreateSpace. It's not as if a publishing company was overwhelmed with their tremendous writing and analysis and felt no choice but to put the product into their print cycle. The decision to put together a paper copy of their Alamanac was entirely their own and not based on any merit whatsoever.

 

It's an inside joke between myself and CB97, so relax.

 

Want a golf clap instead?

[wardigital]

Unlike most of the replies here I read the entire thing, and unfortunately I agree with a lot of whats going on there. It's the epic story of a small-market team with no money getting snuffed out. Let's go Capitalism.

How could you not agree with the RB draft flops. I'm still pissed that we took an fing running back in the first round for the exact reason stated, our running game was the only part of the team that needs no fixing. "He brings flash, and pizazz" WTF does that mean?!?!? Is this a '50s era burlesk show?! We don't need flash, we need linemen.

 

Well, I think that its lazy to attribute anything the organization is doing now to the drafting of Travis Henry, I don't think that Marshawn Lynch can necessarily be called a flop yet, since the majority of people who dislike him do not deny his talent, just his off-the-field/morality issues, and I don't know why its concluded that Fred Jackson already has a lot of wear and tear. He's had meaningful carries for roughly two seasons.

[wardigital]

It's an inside joke between myself and CB97, so relax.

 

Want a golf clap instead?

 

What exactly could possibly lead you to the conclusion that I'm not relaxed? This is a message board, my friend, not warfare.

 

I had enough golf claps in the Jauron era. Instead, head on over to CreateSpace and publish me an apology manifesto.

[JinWPB]

Adam Shitts ... another brainless media wanabee comparing our secondary to the Palm Beach Jewish communities voting record?????? or what ever... typical internet news/ non news crapppp.

Please, any prediction of how any team will do is just opinion,until the games are played.

So... go Bills , put a plug in these jokers .. keyboard diarrhea.

[Thurman#1]

Last time I checked jettison meant to throw overboard, not to name as CEO.

 

 

Yup. He was jettisoned as GM. That did happen.

 

He lost a lot of power.

[Thurman#1]

There is a place for strictly statistical analysis like what is provided by Football Outsiders. They actually do a very good job of it, IMO. But that entire article sounds like it was written by a guy who did not actually see one play by the team, let alone a few or most of the actual games. It was 100% based on stats. Jairus Byrd's interceptions, if you watched the games, were not at all based on scheme, they were based on Byrd breaking on the ball, knowing where to be with the ball in the air and remarkable ball skills. If it were scheme, other FS's would be making INTs and they simply weren't and haven't been. You can't judge a team or player solely on stats, it has to be complementary analysis.

 

 

 

Hunh? Where Byrd was at the time, the fact that he was in position to break on the ball on that play, at that time, was based on scheme. Scheme determines where you are, who you're on ... where you are and what you're doing on each play. Scheme can put one guy in position to make a play and not another. And if you put another guy in Byrd's position, he might not make the INT, no argument. But scheme still plays a huge part in how well a person, and how well the whole defense, performs.

 

Certainly his ball skills were huge. I think he caught every single ball he touched, with the exception of (was it two?) INTs he sort of shared with other Bills and gave up to them. And that's an unbelievably high percentage. But scheme was a huge part of it, as it is with virtually every play made by any defender.

 

I don't know what you mean when you say it seems like he didn't see a play. I didn't get that at all. Any specifics?

 

I won't be able to answer for quite a while, though. I'm off to bed.

[Rockinon]

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

I don't care what anyone says. That was funny.

[Doc]

Well done. But how in the world can anyone knock 9 ints from a rookie? Take stats from a geek who has never played a second of football in his life with a giant grain if salt.

 

Besides, how many players in the league have had 9 ints, much less as rookie? It was as simple as they made it out to be, the number would be way higher.

Not only was he a rookie, he missed a significant portion of the off-season and training camp, played in 14 games with 11 starts, and wasn't 100% healthy all season. Now I don't think he'll get 9 INT's again, but I think he'll be up there, and be a more well-rounded player.

[lets_go_bills]

I read the whole thing. It left me feeling depressed about my team. Not cool.

[buffalonian]

Who are you? Calvin Coolidge? Grover Cleveland? just trying to make out ur avatar. It's Gilded age time frame.

 

Good guess. Grover Cleveland.