FanPost

This OLd House & The New Bills Workshop

Before the arrival of Coral in the days we will remember as BC (Before Coral), I had a back and forth with several of you about the value of the OL and whether the Bills had gone "all-in" with their supporting talent to help Josh. It was a good discussion. And there were good points on both sides. I was of the opinion that the Bills had definitely improved the OL and the support around Josh, but I would not say that the Bills went "all-in" on the support around Josh compared to other teams with young QBs. While several of you had thought that the Bills had gone "all-in" and there were "no more excuses" for Josh. Central to the discussion was the "value of the OL" to an offense and specifically to a young learning QB. Hal184 said something that has stuck in my head. He said that the OL is like a foundation of a house. I love that analogy. It is so true. Without a foundation, it doesn't matter how pretty the house looks, it will fall. And that got me thinking... of construction craftsmanship... which got me thinking about one of the original (and the best) home improvement Reality TV series... This Old House & The New Yankee Workshop.

I can't think of anything that represents the importance of the big uglies and the importance of sound craftsmanship when building something more than Norm Abram and his wicked-good New Yankee Workshop (pronounced Naaam Ayyybrum and his wicked-guud New Yankee Wuurkshaaaahhp). So, let's get out some tools and buzz through some data and drill down into the details.

The New Bills Workshop Project Definition:

Most detailed woodworking projects start with a plan or a design. Here's the goal...

  • Is there a correlation between investment in the OL and Offensive/QB success?
  • Did the Bills go "all-in" to help Josh compared to other teams with young QBs?
  • And did they do enough to "remove all excuses" for Josh?

If I can answer these questions, it will help me verify some of my many of my football mantras:

  • QB is the most important position, but it is also one of the most dependent positions on the field.
  • Individual offensive skill position stats are really team stats.
  • OL is the position that QBs depend on the most to succeed

NOTE: I am looking for the investment value of an Offensive Lineman. I would ideally like to assess performance value of an Offensive Lineman. However, a good measure of the performance value of an Offensive Lineman really doesn't exist. PFF is the best assessment out there, but even PFF says that their OL ratings are scheme and RB dependent. To come up with a "wicked good" performance value, I would have to watch every snap of every player and make a value assessment of their performance subtracting out scheme and supporting talent. I don't have that kind of time. Besides, I am ultimately trying to decide if it is worthwhile for a team to "go all-in" on the supporting talent around a QB. "Going all-in" is essentially about commitment to financial and draft capitol.

That's a big project. I will have to sharpen some of my tools before I get going.

NOTE: As per my usual, this is a bit lengthy. I like to share as much info as possible so that the data is well understood. I hate being misunderstood. If you don't want to see how the sausage is made feel free to skip down to the end for the summary.

Workshop Prep - OL Value:

Before we start, let's look around the workshop to see if we have everything that we will need for the project. After a quick scan of the toolbox and as I discussed above, it looks like we will have to create a metric for Investment Value for an Offensive Lineman.

That said, OL Value is more than just looking at the salary of a player. While salary is an OK measure for the market value of most veteran lineman, there are many very good offensive linemen that are still on their cheap rookie contracts. So, for players on their rookie contract I will use their draft round position.

In order to put these two factors together into a single "OL Value" metric, I decided to use a 0 to 4 scale that roughly maps to these expected performance tiers of players...

  • Top Tier
  • High-Level Tier
  • Mid-Level Tier
  • Low-Level Tier
  • Backup Tier

Here's what I came up with for Draft Position Value...

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Here's what I came up with for Market Contract Value...

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Combining these two mappings, I can calculate a 0 to 4 value for the investment value of an individual lineman. Which in turn I can use to find out the value of a team's starting offensive line group by multiplying each player by the % of games that they started and then summing them up. The result is an OL Value metric from 0.0 to 20.0. For example, a team with an OL Value of 20.0 would have 5 1st round draft picks and/or top tier OL. That is not really reasonable. As it turns out, the NFL average for OL Value was 6.49 in 2019. The top team in the NFL for 2019 was the Indianapolis Colts at 11.17. The worst team in the NFL was the Miami Dolphins at 2.08. That is really low. It is amazing that Ryan Fitzpatrick was able to stand up right. The Bills came in just below the NFL average at 5.48. That number seems to make sense. In 2019, they had 1 high-level OL free agent (Morse), two 2nd rounders on rookie contracts, and a bunch of "value free agents" that have over-achieved their FA contracts.

NOTE: Just to be clear.... this metric isn't just OL value investment, but the OL investment that actually started for the team during a given year. I did this because I want to be able to compare the investment value to the performance on the field. I can't do a comparison if the team spent lots of draft capitol or free agent $ on a player and that player did not play due to injury or under-performance. This is not a perfect metric, but it think it is good enough for this kind of analysis.

Rough Cut - Offensive Line Value Compared to Offensive Stats:

Most projects start with the big cuts of wood to get the lumber down to a manageable size. I'll get the table saw out and use it to slice through some high-level data to see if there is a correlation to OL value and offensive success. To do this, I had to come up with some stats that represent offensive success.

So, I decided to look around in the tool shed to see what would be the best tool (metric) for the job...

WARNING: I think you all know my stance on stats. I love them, but I am also very skeptical of them. All stats are inherently flawed and not perfect, but some stats are better than others. If you take the approach that even the best stats are just roughly right, then you will be fine. For this analysis, roughly right is just fine.

NOTE: I also adjusted all of these metrics based on the strength of the opponent's defense. It is not a perfect adjustment, but I think it does a good 1st level of adjustment on the teams that really played weaker opponents. Skarekrow and I traded some good back and forth on this concept a while ago. We both concluded that it would be nearly impossible to determine the true strength of an opponent because there is a never-ending catch-22 of which came first? The bad offense or the good defense? That said, I do think there is some value in a 1st level adjustment based on the defense's performance over a 16-game schedule.

Combined Offensive Rating - Total Yards/Play & Points/Drive

There are lots of offensive metrics that I don't like (Total Points, Total Yards, etc..), but there are two metrics that I think are better than most at defining what a good offense is: Total Yards/Play and Points/Drive. I like Total Yards/Play because it points to some level of efficiency and consistency in moving the ball. I like Points/Drive because it is a good measure of efficiency and consistency in the ultimate goal of the game... scoring points. I think both are important, so I decided to combine them together into one metric. When I looked at these metrics separately, most teams were ranked similarly between the two metrics with a couple of outliers. But by combining them, I can smooth out the teams that were in general not good at moving the ball but connected on some big low-probability plays. It also smoothed out some of the teams that were good at moving the ball, but not good at scoring. I created the combined metric by scaling both of the individual metrics to a scale of 0%-100% where 0% is the worst team and 100% is the best team, then I averaged the two metrics. This resulted a rating (not a ranking) of teams and their offensive efficiency. This metric made sense to me, so I decided to use it for this analysis. Here is the Combined Offensive Rating plotted against the OL Value for each NFL team.

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I overlaid 4 quadrants of the graph to show where the dividing lines are between average values on each axis. Hopefully this helps you get a visual on the groupings of teams (e.g. Below Ave Value vs Below Ave Success, etc...). The trend line (dotted line) shows a 30% increase in offensive efficiency from worst OL investment to the highest OL Investment. I would say that 30% is pretty significant as an overall trend. But as you can clearly see, there definitely some outliers (more on that later).

Rush Yds/Att:

Rush Yds/Att is a reasonable metric for rushing offense.

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Like with the Combined Offensive Rating, there is definitely an overall trend. Consider that an NFL offense averages 400 running plays in a year. So, a 1 yd difference in Yds/Att equates to 400 more yards in a whole year. Rush Yds/Att is not a perfect metric. I would like to do more on this, but I ran out of time. I would love to adjust it for the types of defensive fronts that each team faced. Running against nickel packages is usually more successful than running against defenses with 8 men in the box. But I was fine with this metric for now, because the main focus of this post is how the OL helps a young QB. Also, in today's NFL, the passing game is the main component that really moves the needle for offenses. Passing plays have a higher Net Yards/Att (6.31 yds/att) than rushing plays (4.31 yds/att) and on the average NFL teams pass more (~60% of the time) compared to rushes (~40%). As a result, I won't dive too much into this metric for now. I will set this rough-cut piece of wood aside for another project. But it served its purpose to show that there is a general trend against OL Value like with the Combined Offensive Metric.

Net Pass Yds / Att:

For a passing metric, I really like Net Pass Yds/Att. It is basically Pass Yds/Att, but it subtracts out sack yards. I thought this was a decent passing efficiency statistic because it considered sacks. This is especially important considering that we are going to compare it against OL Value. This metric will suffice for a roughly right macro view of passing offense efficiency.

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Like with the others, there is definitely an overall trend. Consider that an NFL offense averages 600 passing plays in a year. So, a 1 yd difference in Yds/Att equates to 600 more yards in a whole year. This is the metric that I will use to dive into more detail.

Drilling Down:

But I was not satisfied with this rough-cut level of analysis. I needed more tools to poke some holes in the high-level data. So, I went back into the New Yankee Bills Workshop and pulled out the drill press to drill down one level deeper. While there are overall trends in this data, there are definitely exceptions all over the chart. Specifically, I did not feel comfortable with the upper left-hand quadrant and the lower right-hand quadrant. There was a decent number of teams with above average Net Passing Yds/Atts with below average OLs and a decent number of teams with below average Net Passing Yds/Atts with above average OLs. So, I thought that the next logical step was to bring in other elements that could impact the overall offense to see if they could paint a more complete picture. The OL is not the only thing that can impact an offense. Here are the other elements that I thought could have an impact...

  • The impact of investments in other offensive positions: RB Value for the rushing offense and Receiver (WR, TE, RB) Value for passing offense
  • The impact of QB and Scheme Impacts

RB and Receiver Values:

This was fairly easy. I used the same methodology with RBs, TEs, and WRs as I did with the OL and I was able to create a Receiver Value (for the passing offense) and a RB Value (for the rushing offense). Like with OL Value, the Team RB value or Team Receiver Value is weighted heavier for player(s) that are used more in the offense (e.g. rush attempts for RBs and targets for Receivers).

QB and Scheme Impact Categories

After some thought, I came up with these QB and Scheme Impacts in this order of priority...

  • Elite Dual-Threat QB - If the QB is an exceptional athlete on top of being a good passer, then it reduces the need for a topflight OL. Defenses cannot blitz as much. They have to respect the speed of the QB, so the job of the OL is easier. I looked at the athletic profiles (speed and agility) of all of the starting QBs and there were 4 that stood out as superior athletes: Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, Russell Wilson, and Patrick Mahomes.
  • Learning QB - If an offense has a learning QB, then it will likely have trouble with passing efficiency even if the OL is very good. I decided that a 1st or 2nd year QB was still "learning".
  • Quick, short-pass Offensive Scheme: It is also seems reasonable that if your team has a veteran QB and the scheme is focused on quick short passes, then the need for a top OL is lessened.

NOTE: Some QBs/Teams are in multiple categories, so I had a hard time choosing which category to put them in. I decided that I would choose the category that was most dominant for the player. There were a bunch that I had to think hard about...

  • Kyler Murray could have been in both the "learning QB" and "Elite Dual-Threat QB" categories. And while he is not a vet, he also ran a very short passing scheme. I chose to keep him in the "Elite Dual-Threat QB" because that is his dominant trait. He has such crazy athleticism (4.31 40 yd dash). Defenses have to account for that all of the time.
  • Lamar Jackson could have been in both the "learning QB" and "Elite Dual-Threat QB" categories. Like Kyler Murray I could have put him in both, but he is easily the most athletic QB in the whole league. Defenses have to commit 1 or 2 defenders to account for him at all times.
  • I considered putting Josh Allen in the "Elite Dual-Threat QB" group, but even though the Bills use him a lot as a dual-threat QB, he is not even close to the athletic profile of Murray or Jackson. There are about a dozen QBs in the league that have similar athleticism to Josh. Sure, teams have to account for Josh running the ball, but there aren't many defenses that are truly scared of Josh running the ball. All DBs, most LBs and many DEs are faster than Josh. Sure, they have to account for him running, but they are not scared of him running. The fact that Josh is still "Learning" is definitely his dominant trait. He has not learned how to use his athleticism as a game-changing weapon... yet. He is good, but not elite. As a result, I left him in the "Learning QB" category.
  • I could have left Patrick Mahomes out of the "Elite Dual-Threat QB" category, but I decided to leave him in. Patrick has very good but not great speed (like Josh), but Patrick has superior agility (97th percentile) which is much more important to escape a pass rush. The difference between he and Josh is that Patrick has learned how to use his athleticism outside of structure as a dominant weapon.

Drill Down on Net Passing Yds / Att

So, let's see how all of these new QB/Scheme categories impact the Net Passing Yds/Att chart. I will show 3 different views of the data. In each view I will change the X-axis to show how the Net Passing Yds/Att against just the OL Value, just the Receiver Value, and then the Combined OL & Receiver Value...

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I know that these charts are a bit messy, but there are lots of interesting tidbits that we can carve out with a chisel to bring out some detail in the data.

Are the OL or Receivers More Important?

The answer is ... it depends. The analysis shows that all passing offenses benefited on the average from a better OL. However, if the team had a veteran QB that ran a more traditional offense, the investment in receivers (WRs, TEs & RBs) had slightly more impact on passing offensive success than the OL. The opposite was true for teams with a Learning QB or teams that ran a short passing game. These teams seemed to benefit the most from a good OL. For teams with an Elite Dual-Threat QB, both OL and Receiver Value only kind of mattered. Their athleticism was the dominant factor in offensive efficiency. All of this makes sense when you think about it. Learning QBs need that foundation of an OL. If not, it doesn't matter how good the receivers are around them.

Learning QBs are .... Well, Learning

Being patient with Learning QBs is a real thing. And it is fairly glaring from this data. They are all sitting at the bottom of the chart. 11 of the 16 teams with below average passing success have a "learning QB".

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It certainly seems obvious from this chart that it really takes 2 years to really learn how to be a QB in this league. And as I mentioned above, it seems that the OL Value impacts the success of a Learning QB's passing offense the most. This makes sense to me. It is the building block for their career. If they don't have this solid foundation, then many of them don't make it to year 3. That is the hidden benefit of supporting talent that is not shown on these charts. If they can't make it to year 3, then it doesn't matter how much potential a QB has. To illustrate this, in 2019 there were 7 rookie QBs, 4 second year QBs, 3 third year QBs, and 2 fourth year QBs. I think you can see the trend. Learning and the value of supporting talent is real, especially for QBs with non-traditional paths to the NFL (like Josh).

Shorter is Better?

Based on this analysis it appears that passing offenses can succeed quite well if they have a veteran QB and the average air yards is below 8 yds/att. The trendline for this group (the light blue dashed line) is a ½ a yard per attempt higher than the average trendline for deeper offensive schemes (the light green dashed line).

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This one took me a while to get my head around. How could throwing the ball shorter result in an increased Net Passing Yds/Att? Here's a chart that may help...

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It appears that the chart is smiling back at us to say... "look at this little gem of insight"... . But what it is really saying is that it helps to either have a very short passing game or a very deep passing game to increase your team's offensive success. When you think of it, it kind of makes sense. Short Passing = Less sacks & higher completion rate & getting the ball to playmakers in space = lower risk and higher efficiency = more Net Passing Yards. This is the hallmark of the Saints offensive scheme. Get the ball to Michael Thomas or Alvin Kamara quickly (and in space) and let them make a play.

On the other end of the Air Yards spectrum, a team's Net Passing Yds/Att will go up if you are successful getting behind the DBs. You can get huge chunk plays in a scheme like this. However, this is a higher risk scheme because it relies on lots of stars aligning to make it successful. This scheme relies on really fast and really skilled WRs and on a very good OL to hold their blocks. There is also a higher chance of sacks and the completion rate really goes down as the distance increases. The NFL average completion rate for deep balls is 36%. That is a high-risk offense. That said, if you can create an offense like this, then it can really pay off. This was shown by the Tampa Bay Bucs and the Dallas Cowboys in 2019. They both had high OL Values (8.26 and 8.34 respectively), high Air Yds/Att (10.45 and 9.4 respectively) and fast deep threat receivers (Michael Gallup, Amari Cooper, Randall Cobb, Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and Brashad Perriman). It resulted in high Net Passing Yds/Att (7.7 and 7.2 respectively). That was good for 1st and 4th in Net Passing Yds/Att.

It also makes sense that the offenses that live in the middle distances (8-9 Air Yds) would be disadvantaged. This is the range where DBs would be sitting in off-man or zone coverage which would translate into more contested catches. This is the no-fly zone for offenses and the data seems to support that notion.

This was a tidbit of knowledge that I just stumbled on, but it may be the most important metric in this whole project. It really opened my eyes to the potential of the short passing game. I really think more offenses should try the shorter passing scheme. It just really makes a lot of sense and is a lot higher probability of success. You don't have to invest in lots of great O-lineman or try very low percentage throws that are difficult for receivers and for QBs.

Dual Threat = Dual Advantages

I know that this is pretty obvious. We have all known the advantage of dual-threat QBs since Michael Vick took the league by storm years ago. If you can put pressure on a defense in multiple ways, then you have a significant advantage. The analysis above shows that advantage. But the impact is twofold.

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No surprises. The Dual-Threat QB has a significant impact on both the rushing offense and the passing offense irrespective of the talent level around them. This helps explain why there are some very successful passing and rushing offenses in the upper left-hand corner with below average supporting talent. All of these QBs had below average OL Talent and all but 1 had successful offenses.

Fine Sanding - Let's see Who's Who

Now that the project is nearly complete, I just need to do some final sanding to bring out the grain. Underneath all of this data are some teams and QBs. Let's look and see who's who. Here are some notables...

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And here is the full list...

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Finish Coat - Some Interesting Tidbits from the Data

Like with most projects, you can set out to solve one problem, but inevitably you discover some unexpected interesting facts that we found along the way...

  • Josh Allen, Kyler Murray, Lamar Jackson, and Baker Mayfield are the only "learning" QBs above the trendline for "learning" QBs.
  • Tom Brady and Phillip Rivers will like their new teams. They both had below average OL Value around them last year. And Brady had below average receivers. The Bucs and Colts have very above average OLs. And the Bucs have excellent WRs. Of all of the veteran QBs, Brady and Rivers both need at least a good OL to keep them upright. I think the demise of both of these QBs was way over-blown last year. The demise was more about the team around them.
  • Poor Sam Darnold, Kyler Murray, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Phillip Rivers, and Dwayne Haskins. In 2019, they had the worst OL talent in front of them.
  • Ryan Tannehill goes from one of the worst supporting talent teams to one of the best and he has a career year... coincidence? I think not!

"Measure twice, cut once" - Summary

Let's look again at the overall bigger picture and see if we found out anything to answer the questions that we set out to answer. You know what they say... "measure twice, cut once"...

Is there a correlation between investment in the OL and Offensive/QB success?

I think the data definitely shows that there is a general correlation. OL seems to be as important as the more-celebrated "Skill position" Talent for the passing offense, especially for a "Learning QB". If you add in the fact that investment in the OL impacts both the passing game and the running game, then it appears that the OL is more important to overall offensive success than either the Receivers or the RBs. Remember though, this is just a generalization. I am only talking about investment in OL. There are definitely O-lineman that are under-achievers or over-achievers compared to their investment value in the NFL, so each individual team has its own story. It is still up to the GM to choose the right O-lineman for the investment value. Even so, there seems to be a correlation.

That said, this analysis also showed that there are other factors that appear to be more important than either investment in OL talent or Receiver Talent.

  • Whether the QB is an Elite Dual-Threat QB
  • Whether the QB is a Learning QB
  • Whether the offensive scheme focuses on short passes

It is a complex team sport. It is never just one thing.

Did the Bills go "all-in" to help Josh compared to other teams with young QBs?

If you believe in the Value calculations that I put together, then this says that in 2019 Josh had slightly below average "market-value" talent around him. I could just stop right there and declare "no" they have not. But let's take a closer look. It is more complex than that.

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Of the young QBs that are Josh's peers, Kyler Murray and Sam Darnold had less talent around them last year. Baker Mayfield had the most overall talent around him (although his OL talent was below average). And Lamar Jackson's supporting talent was squarely in the middle. I think that is about right. That said, I think that some of the supporting talent around Josh has over-achieved their investment value. The good news is that even though Josh's OL and Receiving talent from last year was 8th out of 11 "Learning QBs", he had the 4th most efficient passing offense from that group. That is a good sign.

Looking forward to 2020, I did some projections of OL & Receiver Investment Value. The only significant offensive changes that the Bills have made this offseason were adding Stefon Diggs, adding Zack Moss, and re-signing Dion Dawkins. My projections based on these additions show that Josh's OL & Receiver Investment Value should be about ~6.0 to 6.5 in 2020. That would put the Bills about average compared to the rest of the league investment (6.17). That seems about right. This also points to Beane's strategy. He is trying to build a team that is balanced and where the overall talent is higher than the investment. He is like a Mutual Fund manager. He is trying to diversify and find high value in lower cost.

This brings us back to the "all-in" question. The answer to this question depends on what your definition of "all-in" is. Which means that this question will never be answerable for many of us. At this point, we are just down to word games. Which can be interesting debates, but I want to get a bit more specific.

The most typical context used for the phrase "all-in" is in relation to something like... "The Bills went all-in this year with talent around Josh. There are no more excuses".

What does that mean?? "all-in" and "no more excuses"

What is "all-in"?

I think that going "all-in" is when the team puts as much talent as possible around a young QB to ensure that he will succeed. "all-in" is what Cleveland has done for Baker Mayfield. They already had one of the highest investment values in the league around him in 2019, but the OL was a weak link and they had some injuries. As we learned in this analysis, "Learning QBs" depend on OL investment more than receiver investment. For 2020, they have addressed this issue. This year they added Jedrick Wills and Jack Conklin to the OL. They also added TE Austin Hooper. They will easily have the highest OL & Receiver investment value in the whole league for 2020. The only obstacle to Baker's success this year will be himself or injuries. He truly has "no more excuses".

Personally, I would not say that the Bills went "all-in" and the data seems to support that notion. The Bills have definitely helped Josh and the offense out with the addition of Diggs. I would say that they did a nice job bringing up the talent level around Josh so that he has a good chance to be average to above average. I would not say that they are putting enough talent to ensure that he will succeed and be great. That is the main difference for me.

What is "no excuses"?

This is where it gets interesting. I am at peace with the Bills just going only sort of "all-in". I like how Beane is building this team. He is approaching it from a wholistic team perspective. Going "all-in" many times has a component of desperation assigned to it. That is not Beane's style and going "all-in" usually messes up the long-term picture of a team. However, the "no more excuses" expectations need to line up with the reality. I have a hard time when the "going all-in" debate is tied to "no more excuses for Josh". I'm fine with having expectations and accountability for Josh. This is not a cop out, but the expectations of a player need to line up with things that are in their control. This is where the rub is for me.

My Take

First off, my expectations for Josh this year have nothing to do with the amount of yards, wins, TDs, etc... All of these things are TEAM stats. Yes. He has an impact on all of those things, but I really don't understand the idea where the QB is given all of the credit and all of the blame for these stats. In a sport that is one of the most quintessential team sports, that logic just escapes me. I understand why we historically tied these stats to QBs. All we had was wins and aggregate stats, so we needed to use something to "determine who is the greatest". But that is not the case anymore. I think the analysis in this post proves that the support and scheme have a noteworthy impact on the success of a traditional offense.

For me, my expectations for Josh are things that cannot be easily measured and have nothing to do with Josh's supporting talent. I will expect the following of Josh in 2020...

  • Better choices (not perfect choices) when he is outside of structure. When he scrambles, I want him to more consistently look for the best receiver option instead of just the farthest receiver option. In conjunction with this, I would like to see him make this decision before the defense is on top of him. These two things will drastically improve Josh's success rate and the effectiveness of his athleticism. If he can solve this one issue, then the sky is the limit for him in this league.
  • Come up with tactics to handle the blitz better. He and Daboll need to just practice this and have some tools to handle it. This needs to improve. If not, it doesn't matter who is around Josh.
  • Improve his technique on the deep throws. I use the word technique, because completing these passes is a team effort (block, pass, catch). He was not good at it last year, but neither are the other QBs in the NFL. The average success rate above 20 yds is only 36%.
  • Improve ball security when he runs

That is pretty much it for me. If this is the definition of expectations for Josh, then I agree that there are "no more excuses". However, none of those things should be related to going "all-in" and I don't think that is the general opinion of what "no more excuses" means.

If your definition of expectations for Josh are TDs, Yards, and Wins, then you may be sorely disappointed. My approach on all this is summed up in one of my favorite quotes...

"There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others."

I think it is entirely possible that Josh and this offense improve their decision making, improve at catching the ball more consistently, and improve at protecting the ball, but they may not improve with respect to traditional statistics. McD does not coach to create stats. I don't think any QB under McD will ever be great statistically. The Bills' schedule is arguably much tougher this year. It will be a tough road to just repeat the success of last year.

If you pinned me down and made me predict TEAM wins, yards, TDs, etc... for the Bills, then I will lean back on my analysis and say that my expectations of this offense and Josh will be somewhere around the NFL average to slightly above average. While I am hoping for much more, I think that average is a reasonable expectation given the current level of investment.

I know that this may sound negative to many of you. Don't get me wrong. I have tons of HOPE for this team. However, the EXPECTATIONS hype around this team has reached a fevered pitch. But as many of you know I am hopelessly realistic. I like my EXPECTATIONS to be realistic and my HOPE to be unbounded. That is just how I roll. To that point, while I like the pieces that the Bills have put around Josh, I don't think the Bills have gone "all-in" to ensure that Josh will succeed. And my expectations for this offense and Josh are in line with that investment. That said, I really like what Beane and McD are building here. They embody the craftsmanship and excellence of Norm Abrams and The New Yankee Workshop. True craftsmanship takes time. As long as McBeane and the team keep hanging out in the New Bills Workshop, striving for excellence their craft, and creating results that are greater than the sum of their parts, then there is hope for a wicked-good season this year.

Just another great fan opinion shared on the pages of BuffaloRumblings.com.