How is Brandon doing and what will happen to him with new owner ?

[stony]

It embarrasses me... but more of an indictment on our society and where it is going. Everyone sues everybody. Cant even fire an employee anymore without buying him/her out.

 

Exactly. Some moron thought he'd make some money and he sued the team. How is this Brandon's fault. I actually thought the Bill's payout response was genius (probably Brandon's idea BTW) to offer money to be used in the team store.

[Lurker]

grade: D.

What I give myself for taking you off 'ignore' to read this post.

 

That mistake is easily correctable, however...

[stony]

Neither are a big deal to me. But, at some point, I'm trying to figure out what RB is accountable for, it seems to me that he isn't being held accountable for anything. Those are small issues, having $20M in dead money isn't. W/L isn't. Toronto series isn't.

 

Fair enough. I agree those are very nit-picky. As for the dead-money issues, we really don't know who's responsible for that. The name that always gets thrown out there for contracts is Overdorf. The Toronto series sucked, but made us some money. At least he realized the screw-up and got out.

 

Can't argue about the win-loss thing. Facts are facts. It's just difficult to place the blame squarely on his shoulders IMO.

[GA BILLS FAN]

 

 

By the same token, you're holding him to the fire for EVERYTHING that has gone wrong. He has not been the end all be all final say on everything guy, so to hold him accountable for it all is baseless.

I wouldn't fire him because of the Jills suit or the text message crap. From my POV, I see a lot more negatives than positives and I look at him as a common denominator to what's been wrong the past 15 years. I have same feeling about Littman and Overdorf. I find it hard, if not impossible, to change the culture of losing, if you leave these common denominators in place. I get that RB, wants to rebrand the Bills and in turn rebrand himself. I think, unfortunately, that he taints Whaley and Marrone in the process. I would also be SHOCKED if a new owner kept him in the same position, because of the need to start new, and clean house. Again, sometimes an organization needs a culture change to shock it out of the perpetual losing.

 

 

What I give myself for taking you off 'ignore' to read this post.

 

That mistake is easily correctable, however...

I respect your POV. I'm sorry you don't respect mine.

[BillnutinHouston]

Worst thread of the year.

 

Your attempt to pose as objective is pretty weak. Your real intent was clear when you described Brandon as a "self-proclaimed 'marketing genius.'" Sure, others have described him in that way, but when did he ever make that proclamation?

[GA BILLS FAN]

Worst thread of the year.

 

Your attempt to pose as objective is pretty weak. Your real intent was clear when you described Brandon as a "self-proclaimed 'marketing genius.'" Sure, others have described him in that way, but when did he ever make that proclamation?

I NEVER said I was objective, NEVER. In fact, if you took the time to read my posts, I said I was being SUBJECTIVE, just like EVERYONE on this board is subjective. So, spare me the ill-informed lecture.

[thebandit27]

I NEVER said I was objective, NEVER. In fact, if you took the time to read my posts, I said I was being SUBJECTIVE, just like EVERYONE on this board is subjective. So, spare me the ill-informed lecture.

 

Agreed here...let's not make this an ad hominem disagreement.

[NoSaint]

 

 

Do you really hold the cheer-leading fiasco and text-message lawsuit against him? Have these episodes really embarrassed you?

 

given their direct impact on our wins and losses, i dont know how you couldnt! i mean, we have people here pointing towards trivial things like revenue instead.

[Max997]

The reality is that if a new owner puts his own guy in charge it will take RB very little time to be named the president of a new team (Clippers maybe). His reputation in professional sports is impeccable. RB is widely respected as one of the best. He has managed to generate revenues in Buffalo in line with much larger, wealthier markets.

 

Its not hard and almost impossible IMO not to generate revenue with an NFL team so I dont agree with this at all

[GA BILLS FAN]

 

 

Agreed here...let's not make this an ad hominem disagreement.

Thanks Bandit. I know my original post was very one sided and I intended it that way to draw out the pro RB crowd, because I do want to know the logic and thinking on that side of the argument. I am also interested in what ya'll think will happen to RB once the new owner is in place.

[Kirby Jackson]

I know he wasn't responsible for personnel for most of the 17 years he's been here. But, he was for a couple of years and performed miserably, right ? Whether he left the decisions during that time to Modrak or Guy, he was the guy with the GM title, wasn't he, and should be held accountable ? You seem anxious to dismiss that in your assessment. I only point out the other smaller issues (Jills, website leak) to try and view him in totality and if you don't hold him accountable for the performance on the field, do you hold him for PR issues, or do we blame Berchtold ? Do we hold him accountable for dead money, or is that Littman ? --- it just seems that as much as you pro-RB folks think Im only pointing out the negatives, you guys, to me, seem like you are taking him off the hook on everything, whether it's personnel, W/L, PR, finances etc.

I will try to take this piece by piece:

-While he was the "GM" they added some good players and some bad (but no worse than they were previously). This is likely a result of the same people had been making the actual decisions over previous regimes. They added Byrd, Wood, Stevie (I believe), etc... It was actually probably one or the best periods of drafting in a while (outside of Maybin). I would say that they were okay in that period.

 

-He shares some responsibility for these things (Jills, email, etc...) but that is much more on the people that are directly over it. If I ever worked for a president that came to talk to our emarketing coordinator about the # of emails that she sent out in a week it would be a problem. There are MUCH bigger issues that their time needs to be spent on. There are probably 5 layers on the org chart between that coordinator and RB (& 4 layers to Berchtold). That's just ridiculous IMO.

 

-Dead money from contracts prior to January of 2013 is Littman. Anything since then RB. That would be who authorized the contracts that were negotiated by Overdorf.

 

-I lastly wanted to address something from a previous post about being profitable. The reason that the non shared revenues are important because they drive the cap but are not split. It is not about getting an owner rich. We are approaching a time soon where the salary cap will exceed the shared portion of revenues. If you think that it is not important to be in position to still be able to compete in FA then I don't know what to say.

 

This whole post is clearly a witch hunt with select half truths. It is really tough to judge the performance of a job if there is not a complete understanding of what the job entails. If I was on a flight and we hit turbulence I may think that I had a bad pilot. The reality is that maybe that pilot was doing a great job to keep that turbulence to the level that it was at? The point being is that on the surface I can say that guy was a bad pilot because the flight was rough. That is a naive and ignorant opinion because I really don't know what a pilot does outside of did he get me there and was it smooth. There is so much more to the position than you can see on the surface. You can take that and multiply it by about 5,000 for the president of a team. The things pointed out in the original post kind of show that there isn't much of an understanding of RB's job.

Edited May 15, 2014 by Kirby Jackson

[PromoTheRobot]

You know the same witch trial is going on at SabreSpace over Terry Pegula. What is it about Buffalo sports fans that they feel the need to turn on people who are trying to do good?

[Kirby Jackson]

 

 

Its not hard and almost impossible IMO not to generate revenue with an NFL team so I dont agree with this at all

I am referring to sponsorship revenues and non shared revenues. The Bills have been VERY successful in these areas with the market and stadium that they have to work with. I am not referring to the TV contract or the shared money.

[NoSaint]

I know he wasn't responsible for personnel for most of the 17 years he's been here. But, he was for a couple of years and performed miserably, right ? Whether he left the decisions during that time to Modrak or Guy, he was the guy with the GM title, wasn't he, and should be held accountable ? You seem anxious to dismiss that in your assessment. I only point out the other smaller issues (Jills, website leak) to try and view him in totality and if you don't hold him accountable for the performance on the field, do you hold him for PR issues, or do we blame Berchtold ? Do we hold him accountable for dead money, or is that Littman ? --- it just seems that as much as you pro-RB folks think Im only pointing out the negatives, you guys, to me, seem like you are taking him off the hook on everything, whether it's personnel, W/L, PR, finances etc.

 

if he was given the job title GM but was unqualified to make personnel choices and not allowed to hire someone to do so and he in turn delegated those choices to the best option in the company.... is it really his fault? what was he supposed to do?

[Dorkington]

You know the same witch trial is going on at SabreSpace over Terry Pegula. What is it about Buffalo sports fans that they feel the need to turn on people who are trying to do good?

 

I know nothing about the Sabres, but I don't care what Russ's intentions are... we haven't made the playoffs in 14 years. He's had his hand in that, imo.

[BigBuff423]

I thought it time to reassess our self-proclaimed "marketing genius" and GRADE his performance as a key executive with the Buffalo Bills and what we think will happen to him once there is a new owner ?

 

My first issue with Brandon is this, he joined the Bills in 1997, approximately 17 years ago and has been with the franchise for the entire 15 year playoff drought. He has been a high level executive the past 8+ years (since 2006), yet, in the last couple of press conferences he seems hell bent on pointing out to people that he has been in charge since January 2013, implying no culpability for the franchise's poor performance for the decade prior, it's an old marketing trick to try and rebrand a failing product, in this case, the failing product is Russ himself. Nice try Russ, but I'm not buying it, grade: D.

 

2- The Toronto series was his idea and it has failed miserably and the games themselves have been an embarrassment. I don't buy the notion that the series enabled the Bills to expand into the Southern Ontario market, they could have done that with effective marketing and promotion without sending a game north of the border, grade: D.

 

3- Cap management. This might be the worst area of performance. First, under spending the cap over the past few years and signing contracts that have been colossal failures. Second, how can a team that hasn't made the playoffs in 15 years have the MOST DEAD MONEY of any NFL team in 2014 ? Bad financial management, grade: F.

 

4- Stadium. While I love the fact that the lease prevents the team from moving for 10 years, why wasn't there any foresight 5 years ago that this franchise needed a new stadium ? We should be in the process of building a new stadium as we search for a new owner instead of scrambling to get our ducks in a row to prove that we'll be able to do it to ensure a new owner keeps the team, an A for short term an F for long term.

 

5- Performance on the field, grade: D-.

 

6- PR (Jills lawsuit, website leak and text message lawsuit), I know they are all trivial, but all blemishes nonetheless, grade: D.

 

Well, now I know why you live in Texas...thank you for taking what should be a week of perpetual hope and sh*tting all over it...nicely done. Now, IMHO, you are grossly inaccurate with your conclusions and factually inaccurate in some cases...but thanks for coming to the "Welcome to the Buffalo BILLS Rookies" party......I'm sure they all feel welcomed by your warm and kind gesture of confidence and enthusiasm.

[NoSaint]

 

 

I know nothing about the Sabres, but I don't care what Russ's intentions are... we haven't made the playoffs in 14 years. He's had his hand in that, imo.

 

but what "hes had his hand in that" amounts to is a pretty wide range of possibility

[thebandit27]

I know nothing about the Sabres, but I don't care what Russ's intentions are... we haven't made the playoffs in 14 years. He's had his hand in that, imo.

 

Make no mistake...Russ' fingerprints are now on the franchise. Whaley is his guy, and Marrone is Whaley's guy, so everything from last season up until now is on Russ.

 

As I said, the clock is ticking...he needs to produce a winner in short order.

[May Day 10]

I know nothing about the Sabres, but I don't care what Russ's intentions are... we haven't made the playoffs in 14 years. He's had his hand in that, imo.

 

100% Williams' fault, Mularkey's fault, Donahoe's fault, and Marv's fault, and Modrak's, fault, and Guy's fault, Jauron's fault, Gailey's fault, Ralph's fault, Nix's fault, Littman's fault pre-demotion. Definitely nothing to do with Brandon.

 

Then after the next few last place finishes we can add Whaley and Marrone to the wall of fame there and try to give Brandon a larger promotion to make sure he can finally get this team to succeed.

[Dorkington]

Make no mistake...Russ' fingerprints are now on the franchise. Whaley is his guy, and Marrone is Whaley's guy, so everything from last season up until now is on Russ.

 

As I said, the clock is ticking...he needs to produce a winner in short order.

 

Hey, I'm giving Whaley/Marrone a chance, but to me, we haven't had a playoff caliber roster in a long time, and Russ (I think?) has had a major hand in building the rosters we do have.

 

If he doesn't succeed with Whaley/Marrone, he should be let go, along with the two of them.