Dick Jauron may not be a good enough in-game coach to consistently make a team a playoff, let alone Super Bowl, contender, but his players love him and consistently play hard for him and he does a good job of developing young players early on in their careers. It may be that this will turn out to be nothing more than another run to a gut-wrenching 7-9 season filled with “what might have beens”, but, truth-be-told, with the young, inexperienced offensive line that the Bills and the problems at the QB position this team really isn’t good enough to be a 7-9 team. Nor was the team that Jauron coached to a 7-9 finish his first season.

Ultimately, however, head coaches aren’t judged on their ability to make bad or young teams competitive enough to finish 7-9. They are judged on their ability to take them to that point and then get them over the hump that separates the perennial Super Bowl contenders from the occasional one-year playoff contenders and the mediocre hopefuls that never are really good enough to make it to a Super Bowl.

Jauron has yet to show that he has what it takes as a head coach to get a team over that hump. And, all that a run to a 7, 8 or even 9 win season may serve to do is give Ralph Wilson sufficient reason to decide to give Jauron another chance to prove that he does, regardless of what Bills fans think about that.

I will give credit to Perry Fewell for the defense playing out of their minds and Byrd is going to be a standard bearer for the defense for years…unless we decide to not spend money on him like Nate Clements and Antoine Winfield.