In Defense of McD: are the claims McDermott is building the roster actually substantiated?

[Thurman#1]

17 hours ago, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

You're post is just ridiculous from the get go. Players are motivated because they're pros? Good grief, hire Gregg Schiano if that is the case; look at how Randy Moss was ultra motivated in his Raiders years when nobody of the team gave a flying ****. 

 

Beane can't be judged? Jeez he's only made more horrible trades from day in his short tenure than most GMs do in their span with a team. Again, Beane has only had a little over a year and he's already made a plethora of moves like when he gave up a 3rd for Kelvin and drafted Phillip Gaines for his first confirmed bust with a chance for more, other than trading up for both his first round picks (which should be 100% hits in a tradeup)

 

As for knowing by 2022, thinking you can judge the opportunity cost vs reward over a 5 year period from first time GMs and coaches is pretty sad stuff.

 

Ludicrous that you just reversed a subjective opinion post to your own subjective opinions and regard your strategy as gospel while dismissing any other opinion on regime strategy.

Let's revisit in 2022.. until then give me any precedent for a team that's been in our situation in the last 10 years that really crushed it.

 

//pats self on back "touche PT5P you reworded his completely subjective opinions against him" "yeah I agree PT5P"

 

 

Fine, if you believe as he said that a coach's #1 need is to motivate, then as I said, hire a cheerleader and loft the Lombardi.

 

And yes, players are motivated because they're pros. But maybe you're different. Maybe if you had a job that paid $3 or $4 mill a year and your alternative was an office job that - maybe - paid $40K, you'd be really really unmotivated. Probably you'd just screw around and do nothing even knowing that your performance was video'd and made available to all 32 possible employers. Knowing that the average career in this highly paid field was less than three years, yeah, that would make sense.

 

And sure, Beane can be judged. But only in a preliminary way. Judge him only on the moves he's made and understand that there's never been a complete rebuild that didn't suck in the second year. Every time I say that people run to give me tons of examples, but their examples are all either reloads or rebuilds that are three or four or five years old. Second years of rebuilds suck and anyone who thinks he can come up with a conclusive judgment of a GM based on the first and second year of a rebuild just doesn't get it.

 

I did notice that the rest of your post was in English. So it has that going for it. But is not understandable to any real degree, IMHO.

Edited November 1, 2018 by Thurman#1

[Thurman#1]

7 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

I'm assuming the rebuild is supposed to come from the Draft Class.  This past year's draft included:

 

Allen...hurt and not originally intended to start

Edmunds...hurt but was at least starting

Phillips...sometimes on the field, but subbing for a guy in the twilight of his career

Johnson...he's been in and out

Neal...has he been playing?

Teller...witness protection program

Rey Rey...not so much

Proehl...who?

 

I'm sorry, but I don't see a whole ton of rebuilding going on.

 

 

Yeah, and it totally makes sense to judge a draft class and how well a rebuild is going in eight games. Take the 1989 Cowboys draft of Troy Aikman, Mark Stepnoski, Daryl Johnston and Tony Tolbert. Most people consider that a terrific draft and crucial to Dallas' rebuild. But your excellent method here reveals it to be a terrible draft for a rebuild.

 

In their first eight games:

 

Aikman ... hurt and out and in the first four games had gone 37 for of 85 for 515 yards, 1 TD and 6 INTs, for a YPA of 6.05 and a passer rating of 38.1.

Steve Wisniewski ... not a single snap for the Cowboys ... sure, 8 Pro Bowls and he made the 1990s all-decade team but not a single snap for the Cowboys in the first eight games

Stepnoski ... zero starts

Daryl Johnston ... zero starts, 7 carries for 9 yards, and 53 yards in receptions.

Rhondy Weston ... who?

Tony Tolbert ... zero starts, zero sacks, or forced or recovered fumbles or INTs or really anything particular

Keith Jennings ... zero starts

Willis Crockett ... zero starts

Jeff Roth ... who?

Kevin Peterson ... who

Charvez Foger ... hunh?

Tim Jackson ... nope

Rod Carter ... unh uh

Randy Shannon ... no starts

Scott Ankrom ... no starts, and who?

 

Not only that, but they lost all eight of those games.

 

Clearly, using your method we've proved that that was a bad draft and that the Cowboys rebuild was doomed to fail.

 

Without a doubt, you've unearthed a terrific useful tool here.

 

 

Edited November 1, 2018 by Thurman#1

[Thurman#1]

 

 

 

 

 

9 hours ago, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

Yeah.. I really didn't like the Clay signing.

 

Almost positive Cogs and Wood left partially because Tyrod was getting the door. Old dudes had their fun in a run happy offense and weren't ending there careers like this 2018 season. Plus they were crazy/banged up.. but whatever. 

 

Damn you for making me do research, Beane made a jigsaw puzzle out of this: we got Allen moving to 12 with a 1st (that we always had) and Glenn, then 12 to 7 with basically that 12th overall, a 2nd from the Sammy trade, and another 2nd (that we always had).

 

So.. Glenn, Sammy, and a playoff bottom feeder round 1 and 2 packaged for Allen. Not bad for a #7 overall QB, 3rd Qb taken. No /s there. But that didn't blow up the roster.

 

We got jack for Ronald Darby: #6 Eagles depth chart player Matthews and a 3rd. And then traded a better third for our bud KB, who's going to end his career here as a pretty useless receiver in an offense. Tyrod netted a 3rd helping get Tremaine Edmunds. 

 

Dumped Dareus who's useless, Ragland who didn't fit. And the rest is just a jumbled mess of late round draft picks getting exchanged around, with 2nd round Dawkins and 2nd round Zay trade ups happening.

 

Are we drafting well? Yeah reasonably. Let's say we keep Woods (he's ABSOLUTELY worth $7M a year especially knowing we're about to invest heavily in a QB). Get Zay, get Ridley, (no Edmunds), no Star for some interior linemen.. vets were available, 2 for the price of one without Star. Keep Darby cause why the heck not?? Oh we play a zone coverage? I wonder what josh Norman did with McDermott..

 

See what we have now.. offensive talent and more importantly VETERANS. Those dudes are important.. because they've proved they can stick around in the league. Point is we didn't gut the roster for Allen, we gutted it for him but mostly a beefed up defense. Don't give a **** now but that team kicks our version's ass, and is still in a position to get cap and draft and whatnot. We'll be better next year, we could have been much better this year, and be in the exact same position and maybe people wouldn't be calling for McDermott's head because his job is pretty damn impossible. I don't want a losing culture. And that's exactly what happens when our defense KNOWS they are going to lose no matter how well they play. That kills competitors until they collect their paychecks and say well **** it i guess this is what playing for the Bills is like.

 

 

 

Yes, that's how much it turned out to cost to get Allen.

 

But obviously they didn't know how much it would cost before it happened. It might easily have cost more. They brought in a ton of draft capital and a lot of the reason must have been that they felt they desperately needed to come out of this draft with one of the top three or four QBs. Yeah, they didn't have to spend too too much. But they might have.

 

If they ended up with extra capital left over, no problem. But if they didn't have enough, that would have been a huge problem.

 

Veterans aren't more important than rookies just because they're veterans. Plenty of veterans don't work out or retire suddenly ala Boldin, or don't fit the system ala Darby (and yeah, you can say McDermott could've made him fit, but I think McDermott is a much better judge of that than you). And Darby isn't playing well for the Eagles this year, but could easily pull it together.

 

Two DLs instead of Lotulelei ... isn't what McDermott wanted. He probably could've worked with it but Lotulelei is what the system called for. There's plenty of reason to say that McDermott may not know how to build an offense. He's still got a ton to prove there. But as for a defense, he's a lot better at that than you are, and he's shown it. If he wanted Star at $10 mill a year, it's probably because Star made his defense better by a pretty fair amount.

 

Do your version of that rebuild and we have more offensive talent and a lot less defensive talent. No Star, no Edmunds and a CB in Darby who might be expensive next year when our current CBs are doing a great job and are cheap for another two or three years. Where's the advantage in having a bit better offense and a worse defense? The net gain is about zero and it costs more now and especially in the future.

 

And it's just not true that losing cultures happen when you lose a lot. If that were true, Bill Walsh's teams would have developed a losing culture in his first two years when they won two and then six games. And the great Barry Switzer having inherited a Cowboys team that had won two Super Bowls in a row and himself winning one two years down the line since they won so much would have kept a winning culture. And they were pretty awful pretty quick after that If cultures worked like that, losing teams would never ever turn it around and winning teams would never ever start to lose. Cultures are much more complex than that, and many of football's greatest dynasties came from rebuilds where they were absolutely awful for a couple of years or more.

Edited November 1, 2018 by Thurman#1

[Thurman#1]

On 10/31/2018 at 11:49 AM, ganesh said:

I think Beane and McDermott have equal power and report to the President of the team (Kim).  McDermott drafted Peterman before Beane came on board.  The biggest mistake Beane made was in his hurry to hoard draft picks decided to ship McAaron to the Raiders when he could have kept all the three QBs on the roster.  This would given both Allen and Nate to learn the game more.  Everyone talks about Allen sitting for a year but no one is talking about why  Nate shouldn't do the same...After all he was a 5th round draft pick from last year.   If McAaron had been retained, this mess could have been avoided.   The HC and GM overthought themselves and saw what Nate did in pre-season and annoited him the starter only to pull him out in the 4th quarter of game 1....What is troubling me is that LACK of Faith in your starting QB especially after you shipped his competition the previous week and then threw the rookie to the wolves.   For this Beane and McDermott need to be held accountable.  They have clearly made a gross mistake at the most critical position on the team.

 

 

It really did turn out to be a bad sequence of events.

 

But looking at McCarron's work in Cincy, you wouldn't figure he'd be the #3 guy in this competition. #1 or #2, surely. But that's not the way it turned out.

 

And they still might have kept him but Carucci wrote that they were concerned that McCarron was discontented and might have caused problems in the locker room. When I heard this, it made a ton more sense to me. They didn't expect to trade McCarron, but felt they had to. If that's true the whole thing makes a lot more sense.

 

They did leave themselves in a bad position and Anderson is a stopgap who'd have made a ton more sense if he'd been brought in during the offseason. I'm not sure how you anticipate McCarron being trouble in the locker room, though. I don't think he ever caused any problems in Cincy.

[mjt328]

12 hours ago, PetermanThrew5Picks said:

Yeah.. I really didn't like the Clay signing.

 

Almost positive Cogs and Wood left partially because Tyrod was getting the door. Old dudes had their fun in a run happy offense and weren't ending there careers like this 2018 season. Plus they were crazy/banged up.. but whatever. 

 

Damn you for making me do research, Beane made a jigsaw puzzle out of this: we got Allen moving to 12 with a 1st (that we always had) and Glenn, then 12 to 7 with basically that 12th overall, a 2nd from the Sammy trade, and another 2nd (that we always had).

 

So.. Glenn, Sammy, and a playoff bottom feeder round 1 and 2 packaged for Allen. Not bad for a #7 overall QB, 3rd Qb taken. No /s there. But that didn't blow up the roster.

 

We got jack for Ronald Darby: #6 Eagles depth chart player Matthews and a 3rd. And then traded a better third for our bud KB, who's going to end his career here as a pretty useless receiver in an offense. Tyrod netted a 3rd helping get Tremaine Edmunds. 

 

Dumped Dareus who's useless, Ragland who didn't fit. And the rest is just a jumbled mess of late round draft picks getting exchanged around, with 2nd round Dawkins and 2nd round Zay trade ups happening.

 

Are we drafting well? Yeah reasonably. Let's say we keep Woods (he's ABSOLUTELY worth $7M a year especially knowing we're about to invest heavily in a QB). Get Zay, get Ridley, (no Edmunds), no Star for some interior linemen.. vets were available, 2 for the price of one without Star. Keep Darby cause why the heck not?? Oh we play a zone coverage? I wonder what josh Norman did with McDermott..

 

See what we have now.. offensive talent and more importantly VETERANS. Those dudes are important.. because they've proved they can stick around in the league. Point is we didn't gut the roster for Allen, we gutted it for him but mostly a beefed up defense. Don't give a **** now but that team kicks our version's ass, and is still in a position to get cap and draft and whatnot. We'll be better next year, we could have been much better this year, and be in the exact same position and maybe people wouldn't be calling for McDermott's head because his job is pretty damn impossible. I don't want a losing culture. And that's exactly what happens when our defense KNOWS they are going to lose no matter how well they play. That kills competitors until they collect their paychecks and say well **** it i guess this is what playing for the Bills is like.

 

Eric Wood retired because of a neck injury, two months before the trade.  It had absolutely nothing to do with Tyrod Taylor.

Ritchie Incognito is mentally unstable, so who really knows what the guy is thinking.  But he never remotely suggested that Taylor was the reason.

 

It's easy to look back now and see what Beane's individual trades ended up netting.  But he didn't have the benefit of hindsight at the time.

Up until draft night, we  had no idea how far we needed to move up or how much draft capitol would be needed.

When all the chips had fallen, maybe we could have kept Ronald Darby.  But you really can't blame Beane for jumping at the chance to get another 3rd Round Pick, in addition to a veteran receiver (in Jordan Matthews) who was a pretty solid player on the Eagles.

 

 

I understand the frustrations of watching the Bills look awful.  But most of this is just nitpicking.

"We should have signed players on the O-Line instead of Star."  "We should have drafted Calvin Ridley instead of Tremaine Edmunds."

 

WHY? 

 

Going into the offseason, we knew the Bills needed upgrades all over the roster.  QB, WR, OL, DL, LB, CB. 

They couldn't possibly do it all at once.  We weren't going to be a playoff team in 2018.  So why does it matter WHICH position they addressed first?  Some GMs would do a little bit  on both sides of the ball every year.  Beane decided to go mostly defense this year and mostly offense next year.  I don't understand why this makes him incompetent at his job (like so many are saying).  Your above scenario doesn't give us a better record OR make us a better team.  It just makes the offense a little better, at the expense of the defense.

 

In my opinion, the only thing Beane could have done differently to make us better THIS YEAR would have been keeping Taylor for another season.  Maybe we compete for a wild card spot again.  But what does that do for us long-term?  We don't get the 3rd Round Pick that helped get us Edmunds.  And we end up with higher draft picks in 2019.

 

 

 

[Bing Bong]

7 hours ago, mjt328 said:

 

Eric Wood retired because of a neck injury, two months before the trade.  It had absolutely nothing to do with Tyrod Taylor.

Ritchie Incognito is mentally unstable, so who really knows what the guy is thinking.  But he never remotely suggested that Taylor was the reason.

 

It's easy to look back now and see what Beane's individual trades ended up netting.  But he didn't have the benefit of hindsight at the time.

Up until draft night, we  had no idea how far we needed to move up or how much draft capitol would be needed.

When all the chips had fallen, maybe we could have kept Ronald Darby.  But you really can't blame Beane for jumping at the chance to get another 3rd Round Pick, in addition to a veteran receiver (in Jordan Matthews) who was a pretty solid player on the Eagles.

 

 

I understand the frustrations of watching the Bills look awful.  But most of this is just nitpicking.

"We should have signed players on the O-Line instead of Star."  "We should have drafted Calvin Ridley instead of Tremaine Edmunds."

 

WHY? 

 

Going into the offseason, we knew the Bills needed upgrades all over the roster.  QB, WR, OL, DL, LB, CB. 

They couldn't possibly do it all at once.  We weren't going to be a playoff team in 2018.  So why does it matter WHICH position they addressed first?  Some GMs would do a little bit  on both sides of the ball every year.  Beane decided to go mostly defense this year and mostly offense next year.  I don't understand why this makes him incompetent at his job (like so many are saying).  Your above scenario doesn't give us a better record OR make us a better team.  It just makes the offense a little better, at the expense of the defense.

 

In my opinion, the only thing Beane could have done differently to make us better THIS YEAR would have been keeping Taylor for another season.  Maybe we compete for a wild card spot again.  But what does that do for us long-term?  We don't get the 3rd Round Pick that helped get us Edmunds.  And we end up with higher draft picks in 2019.

 

 

 

I don't like playing what if GM man, neither you or I know exactly what they are and are not forced to do without details.. all I know is the roster is pretty crappy and I'm praying it's good and the roster I proposed to you would kick our roster's butt and be in no worse position to rebuild.

 

Just sign a few vets. They're infinitely better than starting the kids we have every Sunday, not that I don't want youguns starting at the moment. I don't want crappy younguns that aren't going to be on the roster if we improve the way we are supposed to in 1 to 2 years man.

 

I'm glad you brought up a point I disagree with but can understand. I'd rather have 9-7 teams in the playoffs at the cost of a worse overall pick in any scenario. It's a winning culture vs a losing culture. Teams that lose 1st round every year in playoffs (really just the Chiefs and Bengals I guess) aren't failures, especially in an era in the AFC where they have the greatest dynasty ever making it incredibly hard to go far. But ***** those players are pumped the next off season. They know they're good. They know if they work harder they can hit the hurdle. They have a winning culture. I see our defenders getting disillusioned.. these are ultimate competitors playing high caliber NFL football that might start be thinking "we still can't win.. I guess the NFL is about getting your paycheck and having no control over the situation I am in".

 

I can see where you disagree with that , and I disagree that the margin for 1st round talent is a lot smaller than we think, and that #10-#32 Don hold much difference in value (other than trading down/for players to thirsty teams). I hope you can understand my opinion that playoffs are better than high(ish) picks. Agree to disagree and end this convo?

8 hours ago, mjt328 said:

Going into the offseason, we knew the Bills needed upgrades all over the roster.  QB, WR, OL, DL, LB, CB. 

They couldn't possibly do it all at once.  We weren't going to be a playoff team in 2018.  So why does it matter WHICH position they addressed first?

WAIT HOLD ON I'M STILL ARGUING NOW.

 

We were a playoff team with those DL, LB, and CBs. So we could have addressed it with Ridley, OL and QB. And could have been a playoff team (provided JA plays like those rookies that actually do very well rookie year and stay healthy).. like Russell Wilson, Derek Carr, Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, Carson Wentz.