HappyDays

Good for Cody. I hope that he plays a key role for Cincinnati this year, specifically on Sunday November 5.

I just looked at the final practice squad for the first time today and I'm shocked to see AJ Klein isn't there. Unless I'm missing it? He was taking 1st team reps for us just two weeks ago, and now just like that he is completely gone. I thought for sure they would keep him on the PS if for nothing else than an emergency option that knows the system.

I hate to say this but my biggest concern right now is McDermott. I think the right coach could take all the adversity that transpired last year, and comments from a lot of pundits this offseason on how we missed our window and have been passed over in the division, and use all of that to fuel a hyper focused and hungry team that never takes its foot off the gas. I'm not convinced McDermott is the one to do that though. There just hasn't been a lot of good energy emanating from the team since they walked off the field for the last time in January. I worry that the malaise from last season is still lingering and McDermott doesn't know how to snuff it out. Would love for him to prove me wrong though.

This gives us a replacement level player at MLB. I'll take it. It is still a position of weakness but at least now it isn't a gaping hole. I'm not sure Dodson and Bernard are even 2nd string caliber players.

You're not comprehending my point at all so I'm going to exit this discussion.

Basham was not a case of reaching for need. Elam, maybe. With Basham they just flat out misevaluated the player. Beane said after that draft they planned on trading back but had Basham higher on their board than where they picked so they stood pat and took him. It was not an intentional strategy to draft two DEs in a row, it's just how their board fell. The board was wrong, the strategy was not. And it shows how unfamiliar you are with roster building strategy to say that "edge rusher" was a specific immediate need for the Bills that year. Edge rusher is a need for EVERY team EVERY year. Keeping that pipeline young is critically important. You would think that since your team has spent 2 of its last 3 1st round picks on an edge rusher you would understand this, but like I said earlier you seemingly don't understand why your own team has been so successful. It has nothing to do with "drafting BPA over need" like you indicate. Needs change quickly in the NFL. If you have a franchise QB and a punter and a kicker and a long snapper you have exactly 4 positions filled. The rest are almost always fluid and needing to be changed out constantly.

No, he actually is THAT bad. It was a bad pick from the jump. A 24 year old with no athletic traits that jumped off the tape. Players like that need to show who they are by the end of their rookie season. When his 2nd season came and went with no improvements, the book was written on his career. He's a DE4 or worse with no upside. That's why we got the proverbial bag of footballs for him. Personally I believed Boogie would make the team because I thought he had shown more than Epenesa in preseason. But I'm guessing in the team's mind, it came down to the fact that even though Epenesa is hopeless at setting the edge which makes his snap count inherently limited, at least there is one thing he does decently well which helped him collect 6.5 sacks last year. When you're talking about DE4, that skill set is probably worth more than Boogie who did nothing at even an average level. So they wisely moved on from him while he still had any sort of value. The pick was bad in 2021. It doesn't become worse now because we traded him away for nothing.

Yeah everyone crying about Beane's 2nd round record should look at Howie Roseman's 1st round record. It's littered with underwhelming players and outright busts. Yet Roseman is perceived (correctly) as the best GM in football. Beane has 3 major issues in my estimation: 1) In two offseasons now he has failed to find a legitimate #2 WR for a Super Bowl offense. 2) He has not adequately addressed OT. 3) He has spent a fortune on depth caliber, or worse, defensive linemen. I'll take back Jon Feliciano at center if each of those three mistakes had been handled differently.

Yes he could have. Did you read my post? What does this even mean? You're saying that drafting Basham instead of Humphrey somehow also led to us drafting Elam? You're all over the place.

This is further proof that you don't pay attention to the Bills. Morse's contract is at the bottom of the list of reasons for why we've failed to get over the hump. Morse has in fact been our most consistent OL since we signed him in 2019. Of course there is always some perfect hindsight hypothetical you could find to replace any medium sized contract with a good player on a rookie contract that the team in question didn't draft... I'm sure your team would much prefer to have Tee Higgins on a rookie deal over MVS's contract, while CEH languishes in 3rd place on the depth chart. But identifying individual draft failures is a pointless exercise. Much worse than Beane's draft record is his free agency record. To use your team as an example, getting JuJu Smith-Schuster with a $3.7 million cap hit compared to us getting Jamsion Crowder for a $2 million cap hit was MUCH MUCH more impactful than the difference between Humphrey and Morse even accounting for Humphrey being quite a bit cheaper. You got a 77% catch percentage reliable 2nd option, we got an IR participant, for the difference of $1.7 million. I'd replace Humphrey AND Morse with our backup center Ryan Bates if it meant I could swap those WRs instead. Beane has given wasteful contracts to the likes of Vernon Butler, Star Lotulelei, and Trent Murphy, while other contenders have gotten value from the likes of Trey Hendrickson, DJ Reader, and Hasson Reddick. If you want to point to a major draft blunder, it was that the last time we had a top 10 pick we took Ed Oliver and then 4 pass rushers drafted after him all ended up being better players (Burns, Wilkins, Lawrence, Simmons). That was our last shot at a top 10 pick possibly ever in the Josh Allen era and we hit a single. All of these errors I've outlined, and more, are far beyond failing to draft a good center when we already had a good center locked up. Humphrey doesn't move the needle for us at all. I have no clue why he has become the rallying cry for Bills fans looking to complain about Beane's record.

PFF isn't inherently trustworthy in the best of circumstances, but like you said his 2022 grade is based on just 8 total snaps which makes that grade meaningless. And every one of those snaps was a run block. He's a better pass blocker. Here are his pass block/run block grades from 2020 and 2021 when he had 1,115 and 412 snaps respectively: 2020: Pass block - 65.6 Run block - 62.2 2021: Pass block - 70.7 Run block - 58.6 Those pass block numbers put him in a mid-backup to low end starter tier by PFF's metrics. I'm satisfied with Van Demark and Ifedi as the LT/RT backups. They're both better than Quessenberry at this stage of his career IMO, the only advantage he had over them is that he takes up one roster spot instead of two.

Yeah ideally Van Demark would be backup LT, Ifedi would be backup RT. In a perfect world we'd have a single swing tackle but it's better than nothing.

He is a possible candidate for backup RT. Only allowed 1 pressure throughout preseason. There's more clips in that Twitter thread from Erik Turner. EDIT: Now signed.

This is interesting. Although it's possible he's a wait in the parking lot candidate.

Oh no, a sudden hamstring injury that popped up right on roster cut down day!

For the first time in his career, including college? That was one of the question marks on him coming out of Oklahoma. Everyone knew he would likely be a solid center, but that's all he projected to be. He doesn't move the needle for me at all as far as identifying mistakes in Beane's tenure.

For a rookie QB, sure. For an established QB like Josh Allen the only thing that matters is snapping the ball and holding up decently well. I am pretty confident based on things I've heard that Morse will be gone next year and Bates will slip into his spot without any measurable drop off. Morse is the better player. It just isn't the type of position where top quality matters as much.

The Creed Humphrey obsession is so tired. I'll criticize Beane when it's warranted. But if we drafted Humphrey instead of Basham we would have the exact same number of Super Bowl wins right now. We're not talking about the league MVP here. It's just a center, the easiest position in football other than RB to find quality talent. Failed day 2 and 3 draft picks is not why our team has floundered in January. The main reason is our free agency spending relative to the rest of the league has been mostly awful. Missing on a late 2nd round pass rusher is acceptable. Wasting money on the likes of Vernon Butler and Rodger Saffold is not.