BADOLBILZ

But your point is to draft and NOT PAY market rate when they hit free agency. Correct? Travis Kelce, Tyreek Hill, Mike Evans, George Kittle(or Deebo), AJ Brown & Devonta Smith........these guys have all played in SB's on second and/or 3rd contracts. More often than not at least one of those two "top 32" guys is on a big second deal. The new "top of the market" might be a higher % of the cap than it ever was but it was also a year when a WR tandem earning $32M and $25M aav, respectively, just won the SB. So that doesn't support the use em' up and draft a replacement model. That's not to say there is a lot of support for the Palmer/Samuel approach of trying to sign a potential lower end top 32. Smith-Schuster was that guy and it worked for the Chiefs but a lot of these teams have two studs that they drafted or traded for so they didn't need to venture into FA. Nobody is disputing that the best way to fill premium positions is thru the draft but it's the part about not paying them and just trying to draft a replacement that likely doesn't work. WR is one of the highest bust rate positions. It's not as easy as replacing RB's. When you get a very good WR you should endeavor to keep them.

I'm not a fan of the money given Samuel or Palmer either......but I also wouldn't say that they had "next to no chance" to be a top 32 receiving option when signed. The figure to aim for is 60 yards per game. That gets you inside that top 32. Samuel hit 57 ypg in 2020 playing for Joe Brady...........so while you and I might see him as a sunk cost now........you can see the logic in thinking he could be a little better with Josh Allen. Palmer had 58 ypg in 2023. As a precise route runner who gets separation he sorta fits the profile of Brown, Beasley and Diggs.......players who did get a bump playing with Allen. But those were their BEST seasons. I'm the guy who always reminds @JerseyBills that when you sign Trent Sherfield you tend to get something close to the average Sherfield season and not the single outlier. But in the end..........the cost of trying to back door your way to a very good 60 ypg option in free agency appears to be about 1/4 of the real cost of paying a 90-100 ypg WR1 (if you could get one). That really doesn't seem all that out-of-whack if you believe that individual passing game talent is much more important than individual running game talent. Which it is. JAG RB's can run for 1,000 yards with good blocking. WR is more of an island spot so that individual production means more. And as far as focusing on the draft over paying top dollar to retain or acquire WR talent..........I don't think there is a clear succeed/fail correlation there. Your argument needs that to be convincing.

WRT the value of receivers: The quality of your top receiving options has been a much greater indicator of whether you can reach a SB than your offensive or defensive rank over the last decade. This past season was the first time in Mahomes career as a starter that he didn't have TWO of the top 32 receiving yardage leaders in the NFL on his team. Josh Allen has only had that situation once.......in 2020 with Diggs and Beasley at the top of their games........and of course was beaten by a team with prime Hill/Kelce. Mahomes was subsequently beaten in the SB this season by a team with two of the top 32. Brown and Smith. It's usually the case that the two teams in the SB have two very impactful WR's or an elite WR/TE combo. What the Bills are trying to do with "everybody eats" is already an outlier. Chiefs, Bengals, Ravens have all thrown a lot of talent and/or money at the receiving positions.

Honestly, I think you've really overthought it. It's deep in the offseason. The logic reminds me of the year Levy took over as GM and he signed 15 scrub free agents because he said that the Patriots success with inexpensive role players was going to be the new standard of team building. The Patriots were an outlier. No level of injury prevented the Patriots from executing their plans. Because it turned out that knowing the opposing play calls before the snap really elevated the level of play. WR Troy Brown could even play CB when he knew exactly what route his opponent was running. They faked it til they made it and just before they got caught they loaded their roster. And Levy was left with a bunch of overpaid trash.

What you aren't accounting for is that James Cook is not an every down RB like Todd Gurley was. If he were an 825 snap RB like Gurley in 2018 instead of the 485 snap guy like Cook in 2024 then there *might* be an argument to be made. But in the same way that if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle sorta *might*. Because that's not who Cook can be at this point. Here are the numbers: Gurley had exactly 1.7x the usage. The cap has gone up 1.58x since 2018. So $14M would be worth $8.25M of 2018 cap dollars at the mere 48% of snaps that Cook played. The snaps matter. Being able to keep Gurley in on the most important down was a huge benefit to the offense. He caught a bunch of passes at about a 10 yard per clip rate and was a tremendous pass blocker. That $8.25M figure that Gurley's snap adjusted contract would equate to is $13M today. So basically.........at $15M you would be paying Cook considerably more than 1st team All-Pro Gurley was earning on a per snap/adjusted cap basis. And that deal turned out to be a big failure for the Rams. You can hope to keep getting a rookie and cheap vet to handle the other 50% of snaps but if you are going to do that........let "everybody eat" at RB instead of paying one 8-10x more than the other two.

Yeah I've long used Lofton as an example of the hand-eye coordination frequently going before the speed for all-time athletes like Lofton. He could still get open late in his career he just couldn't catch the ball. The Bills had to dump him because of it. Same thing happened at the end with the aforementioned Terrell Owens. He couldn't catch wet if he fell out of a boat by the end of his playing career. Owens did have an ACL tear but he didn't make a career of tackling people. And one of the reasons defensive success is much less predictable than offensive success is that the back 7 tend to get a lot more real miles than their "skill position" counterparts on offense. Starting LB's and DB's are expected to play virtually 100% of the defensive snaps(and often special teams as well) and tackle players at RB/TE/WR who are rotating in and out of the game. It's unsurprising when a player who has put up 3250 snaps in his first 3 years like Tre White did starts getting injured. By contrast, James Cook has played just 1389 snaps in his first 3 seasons.

There are exceptions. Green and Lofton could still run late in their NFL careers. Nature favors the lithe track-build. Flutie and Owens claims are conjecture. Some Tik-tok 35 yard dash with a laser pointer on a tripod being sold as a measuring device doesn't convince me that Owens runs a 4.4 at age 50. That's why I referenced the infamous NFL veteran combine. Legit times. Finding an NFL veteran without your stipulations is not the norm. There is a reason that Marquise Goodwin refused to play with any minor injury while with the Bills when he was training for the Olympics. All of those inevitable "minor" muscle and joint injuries you get in the NFL compound and add ticks to those track times. And of course, Usain Bolt is an irrelevant comp because he didn't play a contact sport. And 4.22 would have been a couple lost steps for him. By 2020 Tre White had already lost a step in coverage. And that was prior to the injuries. Go back and watch him trying to run with the Rams last year. Brutal.

Yeah Shakir takes a beating. It's his style of play. He tries to break every tackle and that has really endeared him to us as a fanbase. Along with Allen's athleticism those things sustain a ton of drives that would otherwise be lifeless because of a lack of gamebreaking difference-making talent in the pass game. They will have to pace Shakir like a RB because of it though. And it only takes a fraction of the hits a RB takes to take a toll on a receiver. One of those 360 spins where he ends up blindly taking a helmet to the chin on the other side is a kind of hit RB's rarely ever take because they can see the defense in front of them when they get the ball. There isn't any blocking to protect you out there and you don't have a step to give like most RB's do. Beasley went from excellent to impediment when he lost a half step.

Overall, maybe so. But I think with regard to production in games against better teams they need to threaten more on the boundary to open up the field for the slot/TE routes. We found that out in Baltimore last season. Shakir missed the Houston game but it was a similar situation........the Texans took away the Shakir/Kincaid area of the field and Allen failed to connect with Hollins and the result was disastrous offense. They needed and got better play on the boundary to beat KC at home and to produce like they did on the road at LAR and Detroit. They got it but it didn't come easy. Wasn't the walk-in TD days of Diggs/Brown/Davis. Even on paper it's not a surety that they are better outside. We hope Coleman is better than Hollins(because that's likely his role) and that Palmer threatens defense's more than Cooper........but teams were legitimately concerned about Cooper because he'd been one of the most explosive outside WR of this era.

Yeah @Alphadawg7 is simply so dug in on Shakir being great that he has to keep floating out "I'm just sayyyyyying" faux projections. Von Miller had 6 sacks on 279 snaps last year. That projects to 20 sacks over the course of a 930 snaps-played season like he had early in his career. Who thinks Von Miller would have been the NFLDPOY if they just played him 85% of the snaps? Everybody eats only works if everybody is used efficiently. To your point.........less of Shakir was more in 2023 and would probably be so again in 2025 if they can develop or find some boundary talent worthy of targeting instead.

4.46 is not good speed for a 5'11" NFL boundary CB though. He was never quick/fast for the type of player he was. And Tre White probably couldn't break 4.7 with a 40 mph wind at his back these days. I've told the story about the time the NFL hilariously tried a veteran combine........those 4.6's turned into 4.9's by age 26. The track numbers usually erode quickly and Tre's legs are hamburger at this point. Also, the difference between 4.46 and 4.42 is 4 hundreds of a second. That's what you were thinking of. A millisecond is a thousandth of a second. Not that it's relevant because Cook doesn't play on the boundary where the NFL's fastest players live. Apples and oranges.

I'm not too intrigued. Even if Tre White had stayed healthy for his entire career he would be aging out at CB. He could get healthier and worse at the same time.

Tre White was horrendous in 2024 and Dane Jackson was worse........arguably the worst CB in the entire NFL last year. He had a 33.9 pff grade. I had to laugh when I perused the Sammy Watkins trade thread a while back and you chimed in about how good Jordan Matthews was. Have you ever thought that a player the Bills have wasn't better than one they no longer had? 😂

I am very thankful that the Bengals are still like this. They failed upwardly into superstars like Burrow and Chase and if they were competent they would have been cashing in every year on having 4 legit difference makers at key positions. The mercurial Ralph Wilson won in the 1980's and 1990's because the AFC was loaded with owners who made Ralph look decent by comparison. Colts, Patriots, Oilers/Titans, Bengals, Chargers........a real bunch of dumpster fires at the top. You can trace the Bills organizational decline to the influx of more progressive new owners. It didn't put them in the drought but it kept them there.

Hopefully getting a practice squad vet type like Shaq Thompson allows them to run with less real LB's on the 53. They could really use that 6th LB spot to carry either a veteran or developmental type at DL or secondary. When Hoecht is activated hopefully he will be the 6th LB.

Yeah that was what I saw at Florida State. We've discussed it before. If you've played or just watched a lot of hoops you see it. It's not all bad. One of the reasons he's so great with YAC is because that close proximity and his feel for the contact prevents DB's from being able to break down to tackle him. That definitely, naturally plays better from the slot. By contrast, Davante Adams mixes up his game by threatening DB's using close proximity for those embarrassing back shoulder and late hands catches........the fear of those allows him to set them up and create separation on others. Coleman was a long way away from doing anything like that at the end of the season though. There is a horrible offensive series in second quarter of the AFCCG where Allen throws a tick behind Kincaid and he can't make the semi-contested catch, then Allen throws an ankle ball to a wide open Samuel who is less than 10 air yards away.............and then on 3rd and long Coleman runs a just terrible, brain-dead go route down the sideline right into McDuffie and the drive is over. All the Bills problems in the passing game exposed in one sequence. That was probably my lowest point in the Coleman experience last year. My hope is he comes back a greatly changed player. A full, healthy offseason to focus on football leaves little excuse for him to not make huge strides.

Yeah it's definitely the potential I am referencing and not what Coleman has entered the league as. Adams was a very high volume target at Fresno State. I remember being surprised he went in round 2 because I didn't think he could get open in the NFL. And he couldn't. He basically had to re-learn how to play the position at the pro level. So he didn't reach his potential until year 5. He really opened my eyes to that type of unusual skillset. My biggest issue with the Coleman selection was that he looked to be a LONG way from where he needed to be. The Bills needed help right away. They needed what BTJ became. Coleman performed better than I expected statistically but a lot of that was literally Josh Allen buying time that should get any receiver open. The Seattle TD. The big play in Detroit. Putting him in the slot would definitely be a short cut. I believe you are spot on about that. I generally think most receivers would be better in slot conditions. The Jags are even trying to get BTJ a lot more slot reps this year. But putting Josh Allen in a simpler offensive system in 2018 would have been a short cut too. That's what I wanted. I don't know that he could have evolved into quite the same quality of player without the challenge of mastering the EP system though. I guess I would take my chances with keeping Coleman outside and challenging him. Because I feel the ceiling is higher than you. Josh Allen is probably going to continue to throw a top 5 amount of deep balls and they need to stop getting bottom 5 results from those throws.

I'm curious why you think his ceiling is so low? Is it because he seems so intellectually unsophisticated that you doubt he can overcome his lack of elite speed/quickness and become a technician? To me, Davante Adams and Coleman are very similar athletes and their strengths(aside from the leaping ability) are physical aspects that are not really easily gleaned from athletic testing. Despite a ton of action in college it took Adams a relatively long time to learn how to use his subtle gifts to beat the NFL CB's who were basically all much faster than him. I think physically Coleman has the potential to develop a very nuanced game that the elite track numbers guys that are in his size range.....like DK Metcalf, Xavier Legette, Nyck Harbor......really don't/won't. But I DEFINTELY question whether he's got the combination of intelligence, awareness and desire to turn his G league athleticism into what Adams has.

Yeah every so often GM's have to re-learn not to pay RB's. I don't think Beane is an exception. If anything he's worse than most with cap management and that's why the Bills were in cap stress early in Allen's rookie deal and are among the biggest users of void years in the league now etc.. The Niners are getting burned for giving McCaffrey the deal. Saquon is due to blow another ACL so I doubt that deal comes anywhere close to ending well after all those miles he accumulated last year. Henry is the one aberration because he's an Adrian Peterson level of beast but the next 7-8 or so guys on the highest paid RB list looks like a whole lot of regret. RB's aren't suddenly going to stop getting hurt and flaming out young.

Everyone but you thinks 2020 and 2021 playoffs matter in the history of Josh Allen and McBeane. 13 seconds doesn't hold any meaning anymore? That's a hot take if ever there was one "Master Strategist".😂

I'm not too worried about it. The Bills have never passed on a RB in the draft or let one go in free agency and lived to regret it. It's the nature of the position. Replaceable. You can find talented one's all over the draft and at different levels of free agency. If Cook tore his ACL on the first day of camp I'd expect Johnson, Davis and whoever else they had to be plenty good enough to win a SB with. And the fact that Cook has had to come off the field on passing downs diminishes his value to me further until he can prove more worthy of being on the field on those downs. Those are the downs that ended their season the past two years.

Why presume the numbers won't be better? He has tons of room to improve in the passing game in particular. You are giving him LeVeon Bell first-team-All-Pro cred like he has been catching 75-85 passes per year and stoning blitzers. And even then with Bell teams saw that the one RB that pulled that and got paid ended up returning rusty and unmotivated and was subsequently a mega-bust of a signing. Cook's best bet is to prove he is a team player and is improving so teams feel comfortable giving him more guarantees in free agency. Saquon did that and got paid in free agency despite a down year statistically in 2023. I'd be surprised if Cook thinks he's going to be worse this season like some of you just presume he will.

Why did he get less touches in the passing game last year? Because his mistakes in the passing game in 2023 were deemed not worth the risk in 2024. If he improves in those areas he can increase his value and be considered among the elite. Get back to 10 yards per catch(like 2023) but with less drops(like 2024). Put some good pass pro on tape etc.. I'm not saying it wouldn't be better for a team to get him now and have him for age 26-28 than age 27-29...........but his contract leverage ain't good right now. Nobody wants to trade a draft pick AND pay him top of the market. Especially before they see what they get from this draft class.......which was one of the more vaunted groups in decades. On paper there isn't anybody who doesn't have a RB that they at least have hope for. It's a well stocked position around the league.

No you are thinking about next offseason. After he has his best season and answers the questions about his value on 3rd down. That's when Cook would have the leverage to actually earn a top-of-market value contract. The kind of leverage he has now is probably only capable of yielding about 60% of open market.

Since 2020 it's the same QB's and HC's that have been leading the 4 legit SB contenders in the AFC. Obviously. Drawing some arbitrary line 3 years ago.........as if anything has significantly changed in these rounds.......is simply illogical. But let's look at those last 3 seasons in the divisional and championship round where you claim "the bottom line is the offense is good enough" but the defense requires them to score "30+ points" to win. Offense: 22.5 points scored per game Defense 27.5 allowed..........including only 1 of 4 games over 30 points allowed. We all know why McBeane loaded up on defense. Not the first time Beane has thrown a surprising amount of money at a bunch of cold-product defensive free agents and fans have just assumed they would be better than they were when their prior team released them outright or let them walk. And if Bosa and Hoecht and Ogunjobi never play a down and Hairston, Sanders and Jackson make little-to-no impact as rookies......like Bishop and Carter the year prior.....the Bills will probably be RIGHT BACK in the divisional round against one of those other 3 stud QB's. And it's still anyone's guess which side of the ball will be called upon to make a key play close out that/those game(s).