BarleyNY

No, it’s set. The Bills are getting a 3rd for Edmunds but that’s it. https://overthecap.com/compensatory-picks

Sure. Anything can happen. But that is ignoring the actual odds of success. This is not a typical draft. The players staying in college for NIL money has gutted this class. Pick 143 in 2024 is not the same as pick 143 in 2020 or 2028. That’s my point.

Having the pick certainly doesn’t hurt. Getting it is better than releasing g Bates for nothing. But it really has very little value in this particular draft.

Pick 143. It’s actually very little value in this draft. It’s very shallow due to the impact of NIL (and Covid to a lesser extent). My semi-educated guess is that the team didn’t see him as an answer at C and they had their long term answers at the OG spots so they got something for him rather than spend another $4M on him this season. This wasn’t a bad move. Matching Chicago’s offer a couple seasons ago was.

I used to be, but he hasn’t had those issues in some time. It’s just age and salary now. He will be 32 next month and he said he wants to come back for 2024, but it didn’t seem like he was thinking beyond that. Having him here this season is all well and good, but I wouldn’t want to see the Bills drop more money on him and count on him beyond that. We can draft a guy in the mid to later rounds and groom him this year. If that works out, great. If not, then back to the FA market.

No on the injury settlement. Completely unnecessary and will not happen due to contract structure. This is literally why teams insist on including roster bonuses like the one in his contract. Absolutely yes on RB. Adding another quality RB is a very big need. Last season Cooks had 10 games of relatively light usage under Dorsey followed by very heavy usage for 9 games (including the 2 playoff games) under Brady. He broke down before the end of the season. No way can he handle that kind of workload for a whole season. They have to have another RB who can share the load if they’re going to be as run heavy as they were under Brady last season.

$1.4M in cap space savings realized this season (due to cap hit from signing bonus). But overall we do save $4M in salary and cap space.

He has a $500k roster bonus due on 3/18/24. One of the big reasons these are included in so many contracts are cases like this. The team can pay it or not at their discretion (unless it is contractually guaranteed), so injury doesn’t prevent them from waiving the player.

Brutal. Glad it happened to an AFC team tho. Denver will have to designate it a post 6/1 cut to make it work. They’ll have dead cap hits of $35.4M this season and $49.6M in 2025. OUCH!

Awesome! Thank you for the review.

I literally noticed chartreuse liquor at the store a couple weeks ago when I was looking for cointreau. I was wondering what it tasted like and what it’s used in. Flowers makes sense.

I disagree. Switching to a 3-4 is way “sillier” than just getting rid of Milano. We would have to revamp the whole defense. We just paid Oliver and he doesn’t fit. Rousseau doesn’t fit a 3-4 at all. He can’t be a stand up OLB. Miller does (and obviously has), but who knows if he will return to form. And he’s probably only around one more season anyway. Also Bernard probably doesn’t fit either. So moving to a 3-4 would mean getting rid of pretty much everyone on the first two levels of the defense - including Milano. So that way, way, way worse.

I haven’t watched enough of the WRs that are legit targets to have an opinion. But that list tells me to look at the tape for these guys. Elite traits are always desirable, but the tape has to justify the pick.

Something to think about for those who do put a lot stock in Combine 40 times:

He seems like a guy you only want to bring in if you have nothing vested in him. Who knows how he’s recovered from his accident? You can’t have guaranteed money or real cap space allocated to a player in that situation.

I am very interested in the roster decisions the Bills have in front of them. Obvious, simple restructures are going to happen for some players like Allen. No suspense there. But they’ve got a lot of decisions to be made on players. That’s the interesting stuff.

I think this mock shows why the Bills are going to want to trade up or back. 28 is just not a good place to sit.

I linked an article on it in another post, but I can’t find anything about how it was ever resolved. This happened under Gase. The Jets fined him for missing practices with the injury and then cut him after he elected to have surgery they did not approve. They claim that the wrong MRI they sent to their doctors was a mistake. His agent said that they were going to file grievances to have the fines refunded and his salary paid. I don’t see anything about how it got resolved though.

Honestly, Cousins or Fields plus Evans and MHJ would be a pretty damn good start to turning things around there. Gotta bring back some players like Brown and Onwenu too.

I just must be missing that. And the other question?

They do? I’ve certainly heard it before but do t remember hearing it from HCs much. Certainly not as much as I’m hearing it from McDermott this off-season. Do those HCs also accept “bad luck” as an excuse from their players or assistants when they fail?

You can’t be serious. Every other team’s HC says the same thing - and I don’t see any of them laying the fault of their failures to improve toward that end at the feet of bad luck. Again, is that an excuse he’d ever accept from a player or coordinator? Let’s be clear on the point. McDermott has not improved. His playoff record against 5-7 seeds is 5-0 but against 1-4 seeds it’s 0-6. All but one of those games (a loss against Jax) was with Josh Allen at QB. Allen wasn’t a top 3 QB his second season, but he has been since. Yet the Bills haven’t beat a single team capable of winning a championship in the playoffs. That’s not bad luck and I cringe at people when the parrot that load of BS and give McDermott yet another pass.

It’s sad that you think that’s the alternative. Blaming “bad luck” is a loser’s mentality. How many of his players get to use bad luck as an excuse for their failures? If the answer isn’t zero, then that’s a problem. Using it himself is ridiculous. A good leader has to focus his team on what they can control. In general Id expect someone in his position to give a general indication of where he and the team need to improve and what he was going to do to make that happen.