Utah John

I think this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for Cody Ford at tackle. It's looked all along he was better suited to play guard anyway. There's gonna be a problem with roster spots for O and D linemen. Beane wanted to draft guys who could mostly watch for a year, but how many roster spots can e set aside for watchers?

Keep in mind that 37.7% of statistics are just made up on the spot. As for the UDFAs, if that's the situation you were in, would you sign with the Bills? Trying to break into a deep, strong roster -- that's not playing the odds. They would have much better odds signing with a poor team where the depth chart isn't so intimidating. It's the opposite with veteran FAs, who are likely to want to sign with the Bills if the Bills come calling. These veterans figure the Bills are going places, plus the Bills know what they're doing, and if the Bills think the guy can probably help the team, it's worth the shot.

Honestly I was thinking the same thing. Well, not the DE in the second round part. But it would all depend on his quickness and agility, to see whether he could run good routes. OTOH the coaches keep praising up Dawson Knox's skill set. Maybe this is the year Knox gets it all figured out.

Smaller, quicker (except for Star) is fine until it's not. We need more beef.

I've been saying for a month that the Bills are drafting for the future. That's what Beane said in an interview just now. He's figured out what holes he'll have to address in 2022 and 2023, not in 2021 when he's got starters he likes all across the board already. My personal choice, one that I see no one else mentioning, is a safety, to learn from Hyde and Poyer and to be prepared to step in when either of them loses the step that we all know they will lose eventually.

Thanks for adding Tomlin to the list. I think that with him, the list is complete. The thing is those guys are all much more experienced. McDermott sometimes fails at game management, but much less now that he used to. If he can keep improving himself, that will get sorted. The overlooked factor in our McBeane love is the contributions of veteran players like Lorax and Kyle Williams. Once the cancers had been removed, these guys really stepped up and taught the younger guys how to win. They both deserve to be on the Bills' Wall for what they did at the end of their careers

That was their thinking a year ago. Maybe after a year watching Love, they realized he isn't what they hoped. And so, with a team last year that almost made it to the SB, the Packers have to decide whether to ride Rodgers another season and hope for the best, or step back a bit and let the future come to them. It's a tough choice, but the key factor is the Packers understanding what they've got with Love.

He knew where McKenzie was and where McKenzie was going, but before he threw the pass he looked away for long enough that he fooled the DB completely. And he did not look back at McKenzie before throwing. That counts as a no-look pass. Also an I-can't-believe-he's-our-QB pass.

Beane isn't just managing the salary cap. He's also managing the roster not only for this year but for the future. As I've been saying for weeks, I think Beane is drafting the BPA in one of the positions where he expects to have a need in 2-3 years. There won't be a lot of roster spots for many rookies, and there are very few spots in the starting lineup where a rookie will be better than the veteran incumbent. Maybe EDGE is the exception. So if he can't get an EDGE rusher he thinks is worth the pick, my personal best guess is that Beane will draft a safety who will be ready to go when either Hyde or Poyer loses a step in a couple of years. It went without much notice, but the Bills let Dean Marlowe, a good reserve safety, leave during the offseason. I think Marlowe's roster spot goes to a rookie.

I have no idea how good Chuck Bednarik was so I have no opinion on ranking him there. But Bradshaw ahead of Simpson? NO WAY. As the article mentions, it was the tremendous Steelers defense that won all those championships. Bradshaw (the original TB12) was a good QB, but there is NO WAY he surpassed what Simpson did. There's far too much emphasis on winning championships in ranking individual players. You can make the case that OJ was the first victim of cancel culture. His football achievements were conspicuously ignored due to the fact that he was a vicious, brutal knife murderer. There is even talk that his name should come off the Bills' ring of honor. Not recognizing his achievements -- the only RB to get 2000 yards in a 14 game season, dominating the league for three or four years as the obvious MVP -- can only be due to people not wanting to honor a killer that way. But that's not what this list was about.

Beane did the same thing a couple of years ago. He loaded up on good O line players, then winnowed down by trading some of them during training camp to teams desperate for help at the position. He used a lot of that draft capital quite well. Unfortunately one of the guys he traded away was Wyatt Teller, who's become an all-pro with the Browns. It would sure be nice to have him back. I think the odds are that Cody Ford gets traded away this summer. He just isn't dominating the way he was expected to.

Hey, why not. Everyone on this board has the chance to win the lottery. Well, they do if they buy at least one ticket. It's just not likely. The league is built to let teams rise up and then struggle to maintain their edge, and finally slip back into the pack. A team that uses a year or two to learn how to win, after years of struggles, will find it has only a few years left before key players depart to get more money or a better chance to start, or retire, or get injured. It's just a very rare occurrence.

That's not how he's been approaching things. He wants to establish a long-term winning situation, not a quick win followed by a collapse.

I think Beane is asking himself, what are my needs going to be in 2023? Which players are getting old or too expensive, who will need to be replaced after a year or two? I think those are the "future holes" that Beane is going to try to fill. Just like Epenesa, who didn't do badly but also didn't impress much in his rookie year, while we still had a list of decent D linemen, so we didn't need Epenesa to be great last year. By 2022, he should be a very good, important player on the D. I think, if there's a good safety available, that will be the pick. Hyde and Poyer are till playing well but are starting to get up there. Letting Dean Marlowe walk was the clue for me. Marlowe was a good substitute, but I think that slot is going to go to a high draft pick rookie, who can spend a year or so learning from Hyde and Poyer, and eventually take over for one of them.

... and the Patriots are awarded a compensatory draft pick...

Genius at work.

No way. A competent RB on his cheap rookie contract is not getting cut or traded. Motor could stand to be better in pass blocking, which is the area where Moss is clearly better. But as far as rushing the ball goes, they're both fine. In a different offense not built around the passing game, either of them would be 1000 yard backs.

What most other teams have to do is like a gambler putting his house, all his money, and his car on the line for a bet, and he won't find out if that bet paid off for two or three years. In the meantime he might see some new attractive wagers, but he can't put anything down on them because he needs whatever cash he has left to pay rent and buy groceries. The Bills did this, and won big. Did Miami, when it picked Tua? No one seems sure. The Jets picked a very good prospect in Sam Darnold, and ruined him. The Cardinals picked a very good prospect in Josh Rosen, and ruined him. Most young QBs get ruined this way, so it's a gamble for them too, one they really have no control over. If Josh Allen didn't work out, Beane would have set the franchise back by at least five years. We'd be back looking for cast-offs or limited-talent guys or lower first round picks, spinning our wheels. Beane would be working somewhere else, and so would McDermott. It's almost impossible to overstate how important and significant it was that Allen works so hard in the offseasons to improve his game.

James Harris had a rocket launcher for an arm. Maybe as strong as Josh Allen, I'm not sure. But the problem was that Harris threw rockets when he needed to throw touch passes, and that seemed hard for him. Also the team around Harris just wasn't very good, and the Bills traded their good receivers. Also I'm sure he had to deal with racism that we would find hard to believe today. He had a middling career after he left Buffalo, another promising player whom we couldn't develop. Hmmm. My Boy Scout troops never did ANYTHING with Girl Scouts.

It always seems to me that the teams with the best records get the most reasonable schedules. The teams trying to get going are the ones who face a murderers' row in the first month or so, like the Bills did a couple of years ago. What I'd like to see is an easy start, putting the tough games into the middle, and then letting the Bills play easier games down the stretch. I'd like to see the Bills play Miami in Miami early, and in Buffalo late in the year. In fact all the warm-weather city teams should be in Buffalo in December. Miami and NE are going to be a lot better this year, but the Jets are still going to suck, so I would prefer to see the Bills open against Miami and/or NE to get wins there before those teams figure things out. Buffalo can play the Jets later on, with a good shot at winning both games. We actually almost lost to Bill Belichick last year. The Patriots almost won despite Cam Newton, not because of him.

Looking at that old tape, I had to shake my head at the talent on that team. A lot of the holdover guys simply weren't as good as they'd been, but they had been so good before that no one wanted to see them go. Unfortunately some of the wrong guys were let go. Ron McDole was deemed too old by Rauch, who traded him to Washington, and he played great there for several more years. Haven Moses, they said, wouldn't block, so they traded him to Denver where he was really good. Marlin Briscoe led the league in receptions, or nearly did, but he was traded to the Dolphins. But the core of the team, the culture of the team, from the championship years, was gone. The Bills of 68-72 were losers and they couldn't get it turned around. They had good players but still made such terrible mistakes. A lot of NFL teams, including the Bills in most years, had lineups studded with good players but no team culture of winning. Younger fans might not appreciate the miracle of McBeane, not just getting good players, but establishing a culture of winning.

The rules were different back then. What we see as fouls, people cheered as tough hits. Back then, players were smaller and slower, and collisions not as deadly. The rules changed as the players developed the capacity to hurt or kill each other. The Raiders deserved their reputation for dirty, aggressive play, with Jack Tatum deliberately trying to cripple receivers who came across the middle (and he did just that with Darryl Stingley, a Patriot). People look back at those days in the NFL as a man's league, with toughness and courage more important than today. I think that's nuts. Players are human beings, and they deserve to walk away from the game when their time is over. His coach, Rauch or maybe someone who replaced him, said he was going to use OJ as a decoy. Seriously. So Simpson wasn't very productive or dominant at first, and as I recall a halfback (as they were called then) named Calvin Hill, for Dallas, stole OJ's thunder. It wasn't until Lou Saban came in, the Bills rebuilt their O line, and they decided to focus on running OJ, that things turned around. The lousy years from 68-72 made 73, with OJ getting 2004 yards and the Bills getting Rich Stadium, all the sweeter.

Playoff game wins and losses don't affect the order of draft picks.

Thanks for posting those. Brightened my day.

Ford was in front of the guy, so how this is considered "blind side" is a mystery.