Bills QB Ryan Fitzpatrick Played Hurt, Per David Nelson

I don’t think you can really call Edwards a scapegoat. He was on the wrong side of the median whether Fitzpatrick fell off or not.

Werewolves of London destroyed him…

But we ended up giving Shany his first shutout EVER!!!!

GO BILLS

Yes, so he was probably hurt. Even if he was in pain the rest of the season, you’d think A) he’s smart enough to know that an injury would affect his throwing motion/velocity, B) he’d need to make adjustments and not try to take huge risks that he would take if he was 100% healthy, and C) he’d tell the staff so they could game plan accordingly.

Although, D) or, 1A) being the awful defense pretty much put the game on his arm as we seemed to be quickly down 14-0 in a few games after he got hurt.

who admits they were wrong after the fact. I doubted he had an injury, and if this news is true, he indeed did. I find it odd that after the season was over, the team didn’t come out and say this. You have a large number of fans saying: “He sucked after he signed his contract…they wasted their money and set the team back” and “See, I told you he’s not a franchise guy”. It strikes me as odd they wouldn’t have come out and mentioned this. Also, when your QB is bailing out on passes and has cracked ribs RUN THE BALL MORE WITH YOUR FIRST ROUND DRAFT PICK!!!!!

Romo is tough, Fitz is tougher!

Although I don’t discount that Nelson may in fact be telling the truth. I do not understand the motivation for Gailey to keep this under wraps the entire season and after. He is always struck me as very candid in his approach to the media. Why not shed some light on his QB’s status when the fan base and media are at his throat performance wise post contract and at the height of the losing streak. I really can make no sense out of this. He was willing to talk about many aspects of this team and injuries that even he himself would describe as excuses but not a word on Fitz’s ribs. I’m at a loss for logical motive or explanation

Way to expose the team to fines, Nelson. If Fitz was hurt and the team knew it but didn’t have him on the injury report the team can be fined. If Fitz was hurt and the team didnt know, well, in a way that’s even worse.

this is good news in a way. Up until that Redskins game he had played pretty great. and then he had some good games some terrible games and mostly okay games. This makes a lot of sense considering his accuracy significantly got worse after the Redskins game, especially deep passes.

This makes be think that he can be the guy for the next couple years and lead us to the Playoffs and then who knows. Before this my confidence in him was becoming less. We don’t need a QB this year we can draft one next year. Get some weapons around him and get some pass rushers. He is very accurate as the new QB coach said.

Fitzy’s numbers lbroken down by weeks 4 through 8, and weeks 9 – through 16.

I am positive they would be way closer to each other.

The fact is he had three amazing weeks and then the fizzle came.

Of course, the injury would have made his chances of turning his game around an impossibility.

But what I said was true too…..

Fitz being injured doesn’t change the fact that the defense got rolled over in every game the 2nd half of the year (aside from Denver). In order for him to be a scapegoat he wold have to be innocent and I don’t think we can really say he was with the terrible defensive performance. Plus if Fitz was healthy, would the D really have improved that much?

If the Bills go out and get us some real talent for the D this offseason (hey, I can hope!)
Wannsstedt is going to be called a genius when the D improves. That happens in the NFL all the time.
Although, I believe Wade Phillips really knows how to run a defense……he brought Ted Washington with him when he turned it around in buffalo and Ted was a fantastic player and he is one of my favorite all-time bills, but was he talented enough to turn around the D all by himself?
Answer: I don’t know! I don’t remember how it all took place, but I do believe Wade himself made a big difference.

To me, this screams that we need a better QB situation under Fitz. Seriously, cracked ribs? And they left him in to play three terrible games in a row? Thigpen could have played equally terribly while Fitz healed. I don’t understand at all…

Please, get a real backup QB.

Better than Thigpen plays healthy.

Interesting to see that Fitz had 229 pass attempts until the Washington game (32,71 per game). After the injury he had 340 pass attempts (37,77 per game). Maybe the problem was the defense giving up too many points and forcing offense to throw. Maybe the offense failed to trust or produce more on ground, running the ball more effectively.

the thing that i want to add/question, is what is the advantage to not admitting to the injury? as others point out, it gave Tony Romo and excuse to suck. Others may feel that it creates a target, but if the QB isn’t the biggest target for hits on the field, I don’t know who is. Plus, the ‘smartest’ coach in football (maybe ever) does the exact opposite of this. He would rather list 30 guys as injured, so that we can’t gameplan, and we don’t truly know how well someone can play, or we underestimate them. In addition, as i believe at least one other person notes, and was the first thing that came to mind: that is a fine-able offense for the organization to keep injured players of the injury list. So, this to me says one of two things: The staff somehow didn’t know (yeah right.) or the staff was covering this up, for basically no real reason. (again- QB is going to be pressured anyway)

This creates even more doubt in the capabilities of this “regime”. as walter sobchak would say: these guys are a "buncha bleeping amateurs. "

For those of you wondering why Gailey didn’t tell the media, I think he didn’t want opposing teams to know his QB had cracked ribs. Look what happen once the Cowboys let the world Know Romo (trying to show he is tough and leader) had a broken rib, San Fran said they were gonna target his ribs.

Some Denver fans asked on the “Ask a Bills Fan” thread on Mile High Report about why the Bills dropped.

It didn’t make sense that he went from very good to very average that fast, without a tremendous degradation in the talent around him.

Fitzpatrick is a tremendous leader and a good QB. Doesn’t change my draft thoughts, but I’m glad he’s on the Bills.

Sounds like a tough guy, just not sure why they let him play hurt? Explains throwing issues ie ints.

Fitz: C’mon then.
Gailey: WHAT!?!
Fitz: Have at them!
Gailey: You are indeed brave, Sir Amish Rifle, but the fight is theirs.
Fitz: Oh, had enough ay?
Gailey: Look you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left!
Fitz: Yes I have.
Gailey: LOOK!!!
Fitz: Just a flesh wound.
Gailey: Fine, I’ll leave Thiggy on the sideline.

I mentioned in a previous post awhile back that I thought that Fitz was hurt in one of the games in the middle of the season (I couldn’t remember what game it was but new it was against an NFC opponent…I thought it was the NY Giants) and said that I thought that had a big impact on his play afterwards, but that part of my post was essentially ignored.

To be sure, the fact that Fitz was indeed injured goes a long way towards explaining his poor performance in the games immediately after the injury. But, there’s another factor that hurt Fitz’s performance and contributed a lot to the increase in interceptions that many are also ignoring.

While most Bills fans may see Donald Jones as little more than a complimentary figure in the overall scheme of the Bills’ offense, the loss of Donald Jones—and earlier Marcus Easley—had a huge negative impact on the Bills’ offense that directly impacted Fitz’s interception percentage. After the trade of Lee Evans, Jones and Easley were the only two receivers on the Bills with the speed to stretch defenses—and Jones was the only one to make it through to opening day.

Even if we fans may question Jones’ hands and ability to get separation, nevertheless, opposing defenses had to respect his deep speed when he was on the field. This opened up more space for Stevie Johnson, David Nelson and Scott Chandler to operate in underneath in the middle of the field. Without that deep threat, the windows for Fitz to throw the ball through to these receivers and to the RBs got appreciably smaller. The fact that Stevie and Chandler both were then hobbled and Fred Jackson went down further increased the difficulty for Fitzpatrick. The effect of this on Nelson’s production was noticeable.

The shift of Smith to WR was a disaster. For all of his supposed speed, he never posed a sufficient deep threat for opposing defenses to have to consistently respect him. It wasn’t until Derek Hagen settled in with the Bills enough to get decent playing time that things opened up for Fitz and the Bills’ offense again—which was reflected in Fitz’s somewhat better play towards the end of the season. But, by then, the Bills had lost too many of their other weapons for the offense to play up to the standards it had set in the first half of the season and it was too late…they had already lost too many games.

Considering his injury and all of the other injuries that the Bills suffered on the offensive side of the ball, Fitz had a pretty decent year. While I don’t think he will ever be an elite level franchise QB, if the Bills can keep their primary weapons and keep them healthy, I do believe that Chan and Fitz are good enough to produce enough points per game to make the Bills a playoff team, IF—and this is a huge IF—they can field a good defense and solid special teams. The problem is that, at present, they still need too many quality players on defense and don’t have sufficient quality depth on both sides of the ball yet. And, it may be too difficult to acquire all of the types of players that they need in just this one offseason. Which means that they are going to have to keep all of their best players (Stevie and Freddy in particular) and somehow get them to stay healthy for the whole season if they are going to compete for a playoff spot.

Finally, as to why Chan and the Bills may have lied about Fitz’s injury: they do not have to reveal an injury if the player practices fully and virtually every coach in the NFL tries, in one way or the other, to keep opponents from knowing the true state of the injuries to his team.

Belichick has said that he would list every player on his roster as questionable if he could (he actually tried to do that once) because, in his view, there’s a question about whether any player will actually play in a game until he does. Even though the NFL has tried to take steps to keep him from doing that, he still lists every player that he possibly can on his weekly injury report in order to hide those that are serious from his opponents. That’s the way that he does it. Other teams either flat out lie to the press or refuse to talk about injuries. When Sanchez hurt his hand this season, Rex Ryan lied to the press about the severity of it. There is a long tradition of coaches minimizing the seriousness of the injuries to their players. On the other hand, there have even been coaches in the past who have overstated the seriousness of injuries in order to gain what they perceived to be an edge.

For those who question why a head coach would lie to the press and fans about the seriousness of a player’s injury, let me just say that periodically Mike Golic of ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” has talked about the mentality of defensive players in the NFL and the approach that they would take in a game if they knew that an opposing player had a certain type of injury: they would make a special effort to try to hit that player where he is injured in order to get him out of the game.

As someone who has been watching and closely following pro football for over 50 years I would tell any fan, in defense of Chan Gailley and Buddy Nix, "Don’t ever expect a head coach or General Manager of a professional sports team to tell you “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” about their team or what they are thinking or planning. They are not in the “truth” business; they are in the business of trying to win games in their sport; and if it suits their purposes not to tell you the whole truth or everything you may want to know about their team, they will not tell you, even if it means flat out lying. If you want to know what they are thinking or planning you have to become very good at observing and reading between the lines to even get a semblance of a clue of what the real truth is. And, that applies to each and every one of them, no matter how “open” they may appear to be in talking to the media and fans.

What Chan and Fitz did is no different than what a lot of coaches and players have done and continue to do in every sport.

throwing a football with cracked ribs is no joke. He was probably receiving injections to alleviate the pain, it’s a lot harder to stand tough back there when you don’t want to hit in the ribs again. The injuries around him coupled with his own injury, it’s almost impossible to accurately assess how good or bad Fitzpatrick really is. I have a hunch that going into his 3rd year under Gailey and with his health and a healthy receiving corps we’ll see more “Good Fitz” than “Bad Fitz.”

Wouldnt the team be required to put him on the injury report if he was hurt?

Wouldnt the team be required to put him on the injury report if he was hurt?

Fitz is a gamer. He takes his shots from the defense, then he takes his own shots down the field. He doesn’t whine, he doesn’t make lame excuses. He’s smart, and while not an elite-level QB, is good enough when healthy and with enough talent around him to take this team far. Yes, even win a Super Bowl. We’re lucky to have him. Rock on, Fitz.