Buffalo Bills 2025 Thread

[shrader]

2 hours ago, EM88 said:

I do not like the WGR guys all that much. I can tolerate the morning show, but JW seems to 'pick his point' and then never gets off it. The afternoon WGR show is awful. But as far and Brandon Beane, I didn't like how he came off during this interview.  He can make his point without sounding like he did, and I think he came across today as somewhat of a jerk.

I was very curious to see what you’d say when you disagreed with my post about WGR being low quality radio. I wasn’t expecting this. 

[Night Train]

In the pre-draft presser, Beane stated he would turn to post draft FA if needs were't filled. Just an FYI, if you Google the current vet FA list, it's still quite long at most positions. Many have done things before. 

The post draft presser had more than a few questions to him concerning WR.  He used this venue to take a general dig at the press as a whole, including the morning dopes on WGR.  Brought up the Wrong Josh chant in 2018, which was very real. I was at that 2018 Bills draft party at the fieldhouse when booing and chanting in response to the Allen pick was somewhat loud. The locals kept that alive for a while. 

Moore of Cleveland was here today... had 61 catches last year.  I don't want another rookie. Coleman is still basically new. 

Samuel was hurt the whole year until December. Then showed a bit.

 Palmer just signed. Shakir gets deserving slot $.  

Bills were 29th in getting off the field on 3rd down. Horrid.

So Philly D wins the SB and Beane drafts in accordance with being sober. 

[That Aud Smell]

Beane’s tone and approach with WGR leaves me to infer that he most likely has a personalized “Big Baller Beane” gift somewhere among his office tchotchkes.

Easy, boss. If Allen hadn’t defied the odds to become a future HOF’er, you’d have been out of a job years ago.

[tom webster]

12 hours ago, JujuFish said:

It is actually true. It's one of the reasons Dan Orlovsky voted for Allen over Jackson for MVP. He explicitly stated that Buffalo had a bottom 5 team at separation. I don't have access to PFF grades anymore, but their data also agrees.

No one really believes PFF grades

[LGR4GM]

9 hours ago, That Aud Smell said:

Easy, boss. If Allen hadn’t defied the odds to become a future HOF’er, you’d have been out of a job years ago.

I see ppl didn't like this. It's true though.

[JohnC]

54 minutes ago, LGR4GM said:

I see ppl didn't like this. It's true though.

If KC didn't have Mahomes they wouldn't be multiple SB winners. The Bills are very fortunate to have Allen as their qb in this era. (As you indicated.) Both elite qbs have elevated their teams to the top tier of the league. And without a doubt as @That Aud Smell stated Allen will be a future HOFer. 

[triumph_communes]

1 hour ago, LGR4GM said:

I see ppl didn't like this. It's true though.

We have an entire capitalist society that champions those who gamble and win. Because the ones who gamble and win get ahead of those who are calm and steady. At least the top winners are the gamblers, there is a huge cabal of strong and steady behind them, but they don’t win the championships. And at the end of the day, the goal in sports is about winning the big game. 
 

So yeah, you got to gamble to win to some extent and he is going to be defensive about that. If you use it as a knock against him you are promoting results that aren’t championship winning. 
 

 

how one chooses to live their own life is a different story. But this is sports, it’s fantasyland. Go big or go home 

 

 

meanwhile we’ve got a GM for the Sabres who is listening to an owner who held on to losing tickets and got lucky. The shale he owned was deemed literally useless until those in Texas figured out a way to make something out of it. And he was in the right place at the right time holding onto slow and steady cards that should’ve lost out. And that’s what the owner knows and wants his favorite Sabres to be doing. Where he controls the strings. For football where his wife did the work football was left to football people to figure out. And they did. For the Sabres though, there isn’t some new technology that’s going to rise from the depths that will suddenly make them all stars. The closest you get is a philosophy change like moneyball did, and why some of you like stats so much, but you have to let a GM do his thing to let that idea come to be. That isn’t happening with Terry signing checks. If he can’t delegate the Sabres they’ll never go anywhere. They’re too conservative. Too insecure. No identity of confidence for others to latch onto. 
 

Turning Lindy into a POHO who can act entirely as a layer of separation I think is our best hope. Lindy needs to be signing the checks, not Terry tho 

 

last time he did this we had Murray as GM. That guy was a totally emotionally absent and all of his mistakes reflected that. Terry tried to moneyball us by relying completely on stats and letting someone chase the stats win the day. 
 

difference is, baseball is not a hyper complex team sport like hockey. It really can be reduced to a great extent to just getting on base. Hockey requires constant movement and calculation and positioning and flow and unity. Things baseball can have, but it’s barely the difference maker. Even then, Oakland didn’t have the human factors needed to win it all or keep it going. Once other teams caught on they took their winning atmosphere and adopted the right strategy and poof. Murray never understood that. Neither did Terry. And still today we’re paying for the sins of Tim Murray killing any chance that Terry would hand over the reins of the hockey team again before he dies 

Edited 8 hours ago by triumph_communes

[JohnC]

2 minutes ago, triumph_communes said:

We have an entire capitalist society that champions those who gamble and win. Because the ones who gamble and win get ahead of those who are calm and steady. At least the top winners are the gamblers, there is a huge cabal of strong and steady behind them, but they don’t win the championships. And at the end of the day, the goal in sports is about winning the big game. 
 

So yeah, you got to gamble to win to some extent and he is going to be defensive about that. If you use it as a knock against him you are promoting results that aren’t championship winning. 
 

 

how one chooses to live their own life is a different story. But this is sports, it’s fantasyland. Go big or go home 

I understand what you are saying but strongly disagree agree with it. Successful franchises in all sports succeed because they have strong and stable organizations with high quality staffing. Both the Bills and KC ended up with future HOF qbs because their staffs did their research and identified the players that they wanted. It wasn't happenstance that resulted in these franchise altering players. 

Under McDermott and Beane, the Bills have been successful for an extended period of time. It wasn't due to taking big gambles on players. It was a result of due diligence by a quality staff. Compare the Bills stability to the Sabres instability? There should be no surprise where the Bills are and have been and where the Sabres are and have been. It's not due to luck and gambling; it's due to competency exhibited over a long period of time. 

[triumph_communes]

2 minutes ago, JohnC said:

I understand what you are saying but strongly disagree agree with it. Successful franchises in all sports succeed because they have strong and stable organizations with high quality staffing. Both the Bills and KC ended up with future HOF qbs because their staffs did their research and identified the players that they wanted. It wasn't happenstance that resulted in these franchise altering players. 

Under McDermott and Beane, the Bills have been successful for an extended period of time. It wasn't due to taking big gambles on players. It was a result of due diligence by a quality staff. Compare the Bills stability to the Sabres instability? There should be no surprise where the Bills are and have been and where the Sabres are and have been. It's not due to luck and gambling; it's due to competency exhibited over a long period of time. 

The long argument on the bills side is the conservative coaching is what’s holding them back from ever winning the big game. They got lucky with some draft picks. The culture got them out of the basement. But the prize will forever elude them 

 

now, you could’ve said the same thing for KC’s coaching, who had the championship dog their whole career until they finally had the players to do it. But then they win and they are the right thing. 
 

 

I do believe coaching consistency and winning culture matters. A lot of significantly so. But it’s not enough on its own. McDermott took that same gamble on Peterman and look how hilariously bad that experiment worked out. You do need to swing to win. And you do need to drop something that’s not working immediately. What Boston is doing now is dropping and mixing fast. They aren’t stopping if they see issues they keep mixing. They will rebound fast because of this

 

relying on kids to just grow up is the opposite of that. You’ll just ruin them and set them back individually in the process. And that’s what we’ve seen 

[shrader]

12 hours ago, That Aud Smell said:

Beane’s tone and approach with WGR leaves me to infer that he most likely has a personalized “Big Baller Beane” gift somewhere among his office tchotchkes.

Easy, boss. If Allen hadn’t defied the odds to become a future HOF’er, you’d have been out of a job years ago.

I hate the “what if” game. I prefer “what is”. We could reduce pretty much every single situation down to a game like this if we wanted to. The fact of the matter is that he did draft Josh Allen and he has been one of the most successful GMs in the league over that time. 
 

But anyway, I finally listened to that last night. I get the feeling that something other than football got to Beane in the last few days. 

[SwampD]

13 hours ago, That Aud Smell said:

Beane’s tone and approach with WGR leaves me to infer that he most likely has a personalized “Big Baller Beane” gift somewhere among his office tchotchkes.

Easy, boss. If Allen hadn’t defied the odds to become a future HOF’er, you’d have been out of a job years ago.

But he did. Odds tell you exactly how often they are wrong.

[JohnC]

4 hours ago, triumph_communes said:

The long argument on the bills side is the conservative coaching is what’s holding them back from ever winning the big game. They got lucky with some draft picks. The culture got them out of the basement. But the prize will forever elude them 

 

now, you could’ve said the same thing for KC’s coaching, who had the championship dog their whole career until they finally had the players to do it. But then they win and they are the right thing. 
 

 

I do believe coaching consistency and winning culture matters. A lot of significantly so. But it’s not enough on its own. McDermott took that same gamble on Peterman and look how hilariously bad that experiment worked out. You do need to swing to win. And you do need to drop something that’s not working immediately. What Boston is doing now is dropping and mixing fast. They aren’t stopping if they see issues they keep mixing. They will rebound fast because of this

 

relying on kids to just grow up is the opposite of that. You’ll just ruin them and set them back individually in the process. And that’s what we’ve seen 

No franchise/staff in any sport is going to make the right decision on every transaction. It's an impossibility. You can tell which franchises are better run than overs. You determine that by those franchises that have sustained success. By any measure, the Bills fall in that top shelf category. And I attribute it mostly to having good quality staff that usually make smart decisions. I'm not looking at any specific period of time as I'm looking at the body of work. By any measure, the McDermott/Beane regime has been superb. And on the opposite side of the spectrum is the KA tenure. It has been an unmitigated failure. That's not an unmoored opinion. It's what the record clearly indicates. 

You are making a mistake by looking at specific decisions. I'm not doing that. If you take an overview evaluation about the body of work, you should come to the same obvious conclusion about the Bills operation and the Sabres operation. One is positive and the other is stinks! 

[K-9]

While every HOF QB was not projected to be a future HOFer upon entry into pro football, others were certainly blue chip prospects predicted to have successful careers.

Josh Allen was considered a blue chip prospect upon entry into the league and this was confirmed to me by three NFL GMs and several scouts that I’ve known over the years. Indeed, some even had him as a high first round pick had he come out a year earlier.

His success is not a surprise to anyone connected to the game except those pundits and talking heads who created a false narrative about him in order to generate clicks. And it still rankles me to this day that so many fans ate it up like they did. 

For what it’s worth, which ain’t much, I was never concerned about his physical gifts. The only concern I ever had was his sheer inexperience as a QB throughput his career, from pop warner to HS to junior college to Wyoming. When it was confirmed to me that he aced his Senior Bowl sessions with the coaches and how much he impressed Dabol et al at the combine interviews, I was convinced he possessed the necessary mental abilities as well. 

The only remaining question for me was his heart and he showed that to me against the Chargers in his first start as a pro on a play that he actually threw an interception on. He was rolling to his right waiting for a receiver to uncover in the endzone, while dragging Melvin Ingram who was hanging on to him, and he let it rip. Ill-advised? Yes. A learning moment? Definitely. But that kind of heart is a rare trait and I was sold then and there. 
 

 

[JujuFish]

Speaking of Allen, you don't see many QBs do this:

Threw a pick, made the tackle, forced the fumble through the endzone to get it back for a 1st down, further down the field than he started. Never give up on a play. I also like how he immediately signaled the touchback.

[EM88]

20 hours ago, shrader said:

I was very curious to see what you’d say when you disagreed with my post about WGR being low quality radio. I wasn’t expecting this. 

I somewhat like the morning show. As I mentioned previously, it is annoying when Jeremy White gets stuck on his opinion.  I have always enjoyed talk shows where the hosts facilitated conversation. Where they would take calls on all different points of view and respond to them.  Not when they have their opinion and they argue with callers who disagree with them. 

So why do I not think it is low quality radio?  First, most talk shows about sports seem to be more and more like that.  But the morning guys I can deal with, I find the show entertaining and somewhat informative.  It is 'middle ground' for what sports talk should be.

The 1 hour of hockey talk, I do not listen to it that much but I enjoy that also most of the time.  The 10-12 show, not perfect, but I can get something out of it also.

The afternoon show, Shopp and Bulldog, that is the only show that I can no longer tolerate.  When you say low quality radio, to me that comment does not do justice to just how bad the afternoon show can be.

But overall, WGR is decent-to-good for me for general listening.

[shrader]

14 minutes ago, EM88 said:

I somewhat like the morning show. As I mentioned previously, it is annoying when Jeremy White gets stuck on his opinion.  I have always enjoyed talk shows where the hosts facilitated conversation. Where they would take calls on all different points of view and respond to them.  Not when they have their opinion and they argue with callers who disagree with them. 

So why do I not think it is low quality radio?  First, most talk shows about sports seem to be more and more like that.  But the morning guys I can deal with, I find the show entertaining and somewhat informative.  It is 'middle ground' for what sports talk should be.

The 1 hour of hockey talk, I do not listen to it that much but I enjoy that also most of the time.  The 10-12 show, not perfect, but I can get something out of it also.

The afternoon show, Shopp and Bulldog, that is the only show that I can no longer tolerate.  When you say low quality radio, to me that comment does not do justice to just how bad the afternoon show can be.

But overall, WGR is decent-to-good for me for general listening.

When I decide to turn on the station, I tend to get there right around 10am.  I pretty much never catch the morning show, so I can't really speak to them.  Most of the rest is either state run radio or amateur hour.  Unfortunately, if you want to hear Buffalo stuff, you really don't have many options.

 

As for the bolded?  That's probably my favorite comment of the day.