Some thoughts on why we can't get over the hump

[Kelly to Allen]

Just now, Buffalo03 said:

Only issue with this is, as this year showed. We won 13 games. We could have easily won 14 if we wanted to actually play starters and try against the Patriots the last game of the season. Even with that 14 wins, we still wouldn't have gotten a first round bye because the Chiefs won 15. We have won 13 games 3 times the last 5 seasons and all 3 times we missed out on the number 1 seed because the other teams had 14. It's not simple. Asking a team to win 14 or 15 games a year just to get the 1 seed is too difficult. Even the Chiefs only won 11 games last year in the regular season

 

The Patriots would get bye weeks with 11 wins lol. 

 

This system punishes winning in the regular season 

[Buffalo03]

Just now, uticaclub said:

Top 4 with no chance of winning isn’t good enough 

Who said we had no chance of winning. We were in the championship game. We scored 29 points. We only lost by 3. We made some mistakes that if we don't win, we probably would have won. We are good enough to beat any team I. The league when we are on. Unfortunately, yesterday we weren't 

6 minutes ago, Kelly to Allen said:

 

This regime will never get to a super bowl. 

 

Maybe if they held on in 13 seconds they win the super bowl and things would be different. It didn't go that way for a reason....

 

 

 

Nothing pisses me off more than the NFL getting rid of the 2 seed bye week. 

 

I mean seriously??!!!

 

What a cosmic joke 

You can make that argument for the 2 seed bye week but again, you didn't answer my question of had we had gotten to the Super Bowl this year which was entirely possible, would you make the same argument because we were one win away. And we lost by 3 points

[Kelly to Allen]

9 minutes ago, Buffalo03 said:

Who said we had no chance of winning. We were in the championship game. We scored 29 points. We only lost by 3. We made some mistakes that if we don't win, we probably would have won. We are good enough to beat any team I. The league when we are on. Unfortunately, yesterday we weren't 

You can make that argument for the 2 seed bye week but again, you didn't answer my question of had we had gotten to the Super Bowl this year which was entirely possible, would you make the same argument because we were one win away. And we lost by 3 points

 

I respect your opinion brother but they didn't. And if you want my honest hardcore opinion, I didn't think they were ever winning this game. I didn't think they were winning last years game or against Cincinnati.

 

13 seconds was their best team. I truly believed we were winning the Superbowl that year....It was electric and Allen was incredible. It didn't happen 

Edited Tuesday at 05:15 AM by Kelly to Allen

[uticaclub]

6 minutes ago, Buffalo03 said:

Who said we had no chance of winning. We were in the championship game. We scored 29 points. We only lost by 3. We made some mistakes that if we don't win, we probably would have won. We are good enough to beat any team I. The league when we are on. Unfortunately, yesterday we weren't 

You can make that argument for the 2 seed bye week but again, you didn't answer my question of had we had gotten to the Super Bowl this year which was entirely possible, would you make the same argument because we were one win away. And we lost by 3 points

We didn’t win, and we haven’t succeeded in these important games. Lamar Jackson is the only quarterback of significant merit that we’ve defeated in the playoffs. Do you think Year 9 will be any different? The sample size is large enough now; Beane will likely miss on the first three rounds of the draft. We’ll win enough games against weaker teams to make the playoffs, but then we’ll find ourselves in the same situation next year. Nothing changes unless something changes. With the Patriots hiring Vrabel and Maye showing promise, the division is no longer guaranteed for us.

[HappyDays]

It's still mainly coaching IMO.

 

Did we call any offensive plays we hadn't put on tape this year? No, we ran the same set of plays we always run including on that final 4th down. Way too easy for a coach as good as Spags.

 

I'm not sure this coaching staff understands what is needed to overcome this era's dynasty. You can't just "do what got you here." You need to shock and awe them and put them on their heels. Bring the fight to them. We went conservative/safe and suffered the consequences.

 

Edited Tuesday at 05:18 AM by HappyDays

[Mikie2times]

1 minute ago, Kelly to Allen said:

 

I respect your opinion brother but they didn't. And if you want my honest hardcore opinion, I didn't think they were ever winning this game. I didn't think they were winning last years game or against Cincinnati.

 

13 seconds was their best team. I truly believed we were winning the Superbowl that year....It was electric and Allen was incredible. It didn't happen 

I had that youthful shot of excitement when we had the ball up 22-21. The Cook TD was just so amazing. Then we get the ball back. But when we got stopped I knew it was game. Even after the TD on 4th down. We cant play the “if we score last” with this team. You need to be up 8 or more, force them to tie. Thats the only way we get this done. 

[Buffalo03]

2 minutes ago, Kelly to Allen said:

 

I respect your opinion brother but they didn't. And if you want my honest hardcore opinion, I didn't think they were ever winning this game. I didn't think they were winning last years game or against Cincinnati.

 

13 seconds was their best team. I truly believed we were winning the Superbowl that year....It was electric and Allen was incredible. It didn't happen 

Right. It didn't happen. But that doesn't mean they don't have the talent to make it happen. Again, they were one win away. If they score one more TD yesterday that is all it would have took and then all you have to do is beat the Eagles. We were definitely good enough. We just made the mistakes that the Chiefs didn't 

[Kelly to Allen]

Just now, Mikie2times said:

I had that youthful shot of excitement when we had the ball up 22-21. The Cook TD was just so amazing. Then we get the ball back. But when we got stopped I knew it was game. Even after the TD on 4th down. We cant play the “if we score last” with this team. You need to be up 8 or more, force them to tie. Thats the only way we get this done. 

 

Yup. If we would've scored and gone up 28-21 I personally would've gone for 2...

 

But it's just whatever. 

 

We have hope with Allen. So we've that 

[Buffalo03]

3 minutes ago, uticaclub said:

We didn’t win, and we haven’t succeeded in these important games. Lamar Jackson is the only quarterback of significant merit that we’ve defeated in the playoffs. Do you think Year 9 will be any different? The sample size is large enough now; Beane will likely miss on the first three rounds of the draft. We’ll win enough games against weaker teams to make the playoffs, but then we’ll find ourselves in the same situation next year. Nothing changes unless something changes. With the Patriots hiring Vrabel and Maye showing promise, the division is no longer guaranteed for us.

I understand we didn't win but that doesn't mean we weren't talented enough to win. You can be just as talented or more talented than a team and lose when you have a bad day. This team is good enough the way it is to beat any team when we play the way we are supposed to. If we would have scored one more TD yesterday, we would be on our way to the Super Bowl next week. 

[uticaclub]

2 minutes ago, Buffalo03 said:

I understand we didn't win but that doesn't mean we weren't talented enough to win. You can be just as talented or more talented than a team and lose when you have a bad day. This team is good enough the way it is to beat any team when we play the way we are supposed to. If we would have scored one more TD yesterday, we would be on our way to the Super Bowl next week. 

We don’t have players like Karlaftis, Chris Jones, McDuffie, or Tranquill on our defense. While anything can happen on any given Sunday, the lack of elite difference-makers makes that task harder.

[DaVinci]

44 minutes ago, Kelly to Allen said:

They kept marking it short all game... It was odd

Gotta have the swiftys at the Super Bowl_its just business 

Edited Tuesday at 05:29 AM by DaVinci

[Buffalo03]

1 minute ago, uticaclub said:

We don’t have players like Karlaftis, Chris Jones, McDuffie, or Tranquill on our defense. While anything can happen on any given Sunday, the lack of elite difference-makers makes that task harder.

Yes, but we have players like Milano, Bernard, Benford when healthy. We got guys. Again, we lost by 3 points a TD beats them by 4. That's all it took to go the Super Bowl. We can beat anyone we play when we are on our game. Yesterday we weren't 

[LABILLBACKER]

1 hour ago, Big Blitz said:

 

This is real.  My biggest concern - and I said this after 13 seconds.  
 

My immediate reaction that night was you have to fire everyone bc this is a loss you don’t overcome.  
 

Now, they have.  The team has been great since.  
 

But it keeps losing to the Chiefs.  

The owner (where it all starts) has accepted losing to the Chiefs every year. He has a successful regular season team that has an amazing fan base that generates revenue. He's halfway to his new stadium.  And he's dealing with running everything without Kim's help. I'm sure he doesn't want to rock the boat. So basically Terry is sticking with McD & BB no matter what.  That's our now...that's our future. 

 

Many fans have accepted this narrative.  And many have not.  How many more KC playoff loses can an owner and fan base tolerate?  How long can Josh play good soldier and tolerate such an obvious lack of support.  The Superman narrative is getting tired.

[Kelly to Allen]

36 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

It's still mainly coaching IMO.

 

Did we call any offensive plays we hadn't put on tape this year? No, we ran the same set of plays we always run including on that final 4th down. Way too easy for a coach as good as Spags.

 

I'm not sure this coaching staff understands what is needed to overcome this era's dynasty. You can't just "do what got you here." You need to shock and awe them and put them on their heels. Bring the fight to them. We went conservative/safe and suffered the consequences.

 

 

There is a difference between a person who studied to be a good chess player and a genius chess player who can just through his natural intelligence see things others don't. 

 

This regime is a good chess player 

 

The chiefs are Bobby Fischer. 

 

I'll keep saying that until ppl get it. 

 

It actually speaks to how great Allen is. He's entering the chess match without a queen and he's still almost winning. It's pretty incredible...

 

In fact in 13 seconds he check mated mahomes and Sean McDermott spilled milk all over the board game 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 05:55 AM by Kelly to Allen

[HappyDays]

Just now, Kelly to Allen said:

 

There is a difference between a person who studied to be a good chess player and a genius chess player who can just through his natural intelligence see things others don't. 

 

This regime is a good chess player 

 

The chiefs are Bobby Fischer. 

 

I'll keep saying that until ppl get it. 

 

 

 

See I don't think coming up with a few new creative plays is mastermind stuff. That's standard fare for winning a championship. But every year we just go out there and run our plays. What was our surprise play, a telegraphed fake screen on the final drive? It's laughable.

[Kelly to Allen]

4 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

 

See I don't think coming up with a few new creative plays is mastermind stuff. That's standard fare for winning a championship. But every year we just go out there and run our plays. What was our surprise play, a telegraphed fake screen on the final drive? It's laughable.

 

The difference goes beyond a game plan and just a few plays. I'm not saying you don't realize that. 

 

It's the whole order of operations and there's just a big gap imo between the two organizations. 

 

It's a lot of things that Together tell me this regime isn't it

 

Allen absolutely is that guy tho. He really is. So there's hope 

 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:02 AM by Kelly to Allen

[LABILLBACKER]

33 minutes ago, DaVinci said:

Gotta have the swiftys at the Super Bowl_its just business 

Over a 100 million extra eyes on a SB advertising was always the objective.  Mission accomplished!

[HappyDays]

Just now, Kelly to Allen said:

The difference goes beyond a game plan and just a few plays.

 

I'm actually not sure that it does. All of these games are coming down to one possession. A few plays scattered across the entire game IS the difference. Their coaches compared to ours in those moments is by far the biggest gap between us IMO. I mean the whole game yesterday could be flipped just on the short yardage plays. That's how close it is.

[BillsShredder83]

6 hours ago, Mikie2times said:

This is a bit of my own therapy.....

 

Regardless of how you break down the game, for two straight years, we’ve had the ball down by three with our number-one-rated offense, our Superman quarterback, and a chance to tie or win the game. In both years, we failed to do so. It’s difficult to place a lot of blame on a guy who’s literally one of the only reasons we even made it to this point. But the question that we have been asking, and that we all want to know, is: why can’t we get past a certain point in the playoffs? To me, the type of quarterback Josh Allen is is at least part of that story—certainly not all of it—and clearly we wouldn’t even be here in the first place without him. Josh is the most talented quarterback in the NFL. He is the most valuable quarterback in the NFL, but he’s more of a sandlot-style player. His greatest strengths aren’t reading defenses, making pre-snap reads, delivering the hot ball quickly, or running a systematic offense. He’s not like Brady, Montana, or Burrow. And when you’re in moments where you have one drive and it needs to be executed perfectly, his style of quarterback play, in my view, is not optimal. In both years he very well could have overcome it as both of these drives we had a wide receiver or tight end drop a critical ball that could’ve changed the outcome of the game. So we this isn’t on Josh so don’t twist my position that way. Not the optimal style of play for those moments from my view. That is all, we lost as a team.

 

Speaking on which……

 

We’ve missed on several first-round draft choices for multiple years—Elam, Kincaid—and while I wouldn’t say Coleman's is a straight-up miss, when the opportunity was there to potentially draft Worthy or trade up for Thomas, we chose to go with the most risky option: a player that many people were staying away from because of separation issues. We SHOULD be asking questions about our draft strategy. We’ve done a good job in the mid-to-late rounds finding starting-level talent, but we’ve failed to find elite players, elite difference-makers. Further the roster construction at times has been a bit of a head scratcher. We made a great selection in Shakir. He’s shown to be a great YAC guy and a valuable slot receiver. Then we draft Kincaid, who is not a full-time, run-blocking, pass-catching tight end—he’s a receiving tight end. And guess what? You’re not going to be splitting him out wide very often. He’s almost always going to occupy one of your slot roles. Then what do we do in the offseason? We sign Curtis Samuel, who’s another slot-type guy. If that wasn’t enough, if you review Coleman’s tape and some of his advanced stats from MSU and Florida State, you'd see he performed best out of the big slot role, which negated some of his issues, like trouble getting off the ball and separation issues. There was no cohesion in these decisions. There were no complementary wide receivers. It almost felt like when Dorsey called plays, he was calling each one individually, as if the play before had no impact on the next. It felt like we just decided to take players we thought were good and figured we’d make it work later.

 

On the defensive side, I’ve been one of the most vocal critics of McDermott, but I’m tired of it. He’s our coach, and it seems likely he’s not going anywhere for a very long time, right or wrong. I’m tired of 80% of my posts crapping on him. We made some stops in yesterday’s game, and we adjusted pretty effectively in the second half. I trust him as a coach who can stabilize a team, even though I don’t like his system. Crap on him or not, at the end of the day, Kansas City has had incredible success against his system—more so than any other team they’ve faced in the playoffs. Those are facts. Kansas City performs exceptionally well against our defense, especially in the playoffs.

 

We’ve been at this for eight years, and we just don’t have the horses on defense. We lost both of our starting safeties and replaced them with virtually nobody. We have no depth at corner. We had Milano, who we knew wasn’t going to be ready for most of the season, and Bernard, who was a good mid-round pick. We don’t have any players who are top 8 at their positions, outside of Taron Johnson. Maybe Benford, but we just don’t have the horses. So regardless of whether you want to call McDermott’s scheme trash, and it certainly looks that way against Kansas City, he won’t be able to execute it with this talent level.

 

Then there’s the play-calling on offense. We’ve become so dependent on the tush push that we didn’t develop any other short-yardage plays. The only other short-yardage play we had was basically a speed option with Josh and Cook, which worked for a touchdown, one of the most amazing runs I’ve seen from a Bills player in years. But that’s about it. Look at how Kansas City schemed their bootlegs and short-yardage plays against us. When you’re dealing with a heavily compacted defense, if the end is not disciplined (and ours wasn’t), it’s game over. We had no short-yardage plays outside of the one we saw. When you’re going to scheme plays offensively to essentially put yourself in short-yardage situations, you should have a full arsenal of 1- to 2-yard plays at your disposal. But we just said, "Well, screw it, because we’re good at this." Some could argue that Philadelphia is similar, but I’ve never seen Jalen Hurts get stuffed on his own 1-yard line, fumble the ball, and nearly cost his team the game. The second Josh got stuffed on the first sneak for the 2-point conversion, that should’ve been a wake-up call. The push from Kansas City, in addition to Josh’s tentativeness, showed it was a mistake to keep running that play. I don’t care if he got the first down or not—time has told us that you cannot leave it in the hands of the refs.

 

We have a long season ahead and a lot of thinking to do. It sucks, and I don’t know what the answer is. We have some good players, but part of the issue when you re-sign a player whose good but not great is that they occupy that role for a significant time, and you don’t get the chance to get another great player in that spot because you think you’re good enough. It really feels like this team needs a reset, and I don’t know if that’s McDermott or not. As I said, I’m not going to continue talking about him after this post. It’s too much negativity. But this team is starting to feel like it needs the plug pulled. Not because it hasn't been very successful or McD sucks or bla bla, but more because it needs a violent shake-up to go further than it has. If that costs us a year to rebuild, I don’t care. This regime and these players have failed to get it done. Eventually, we need to figure out how to stop that from happening. You can’t just keep saying, "Well, Kansas City is the best, and we lost to the best, so that’s how it is." No. We were inches away from beating the best multiple times. A little better scheme, a little better execution, and a little better roster would’ve made the difference. It was that close, but we failed again. Perhaps we just keep running it back, I just don't know how that is the answer. But when I say blow it up it's not out of hate for these guys. I just don't know what the path forward can be.

 

Love you all and I wish we didn’t have to go thru this.

Not coming at you. But I wish Josh would see this and pin it up to his mirror this offseason. 

 

I know what you're getting to and you're not totally wrong. But we have somehow seen his ceiling go up every year. Pat is a baller, but he's at his ceiling playing awesome.

 

If there's one person on the planet that can will this into existence. It's our guy. This is the logical next step. QBs age well in this NFL.

 

Their physical prime is over and they still keep ascending, despite it. It's a cerebral game and we saw a HHHUUUUGEEE leap mentally and maturity wise this year. He just cracked that NAS tank this year. There's a lot left.

 

Grab a nasty WR. build through the draft, spend wisely in FA. And let's go take a damn ring 

[GoBills808]

45 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

 

See I don't think coming up with a few new creative plays is mastermind stuff. That's standard fare for winning a championship. But every year we just go out there and run our plays. What was our surprise play, a telegraphed fake screen on the final drive? It's laughable.

We ran EZ fade to Coleman vs McDuffie

 

that was an actual play that was called