HappyDays

Now that I know a 1st gets it done, I'm going to be mad if this doesn't happen. Nobody we could draft with our 1st rounder is going to make as big a difference as Jeudy would. We would now have two legit outside WRs, one with great route running one with great speed; an explosive slot in Deonte Harty; and Davis and Shakir as outside/slot depth options with complementary skill sets. Draft some OL and watch this offense explode. I can't find any downside.

From a source that knows Poyer - He was looking for $9-$10 million per year. Yesterday the Bills offered 2 years $12 million total and Poyer laughed at it. Now we'll see what the final numbers look like. My guess is 2 years $14 million.

I would do this in a second.

My main concern is just his injury history. If he stays healthy he looks like a big upgrade on McKenzie with only a small increase in the cap hit.

Considering most deals we sign end up having smaller cap hits in year one, I think that's enough to add a decent LB, a decent RB, and a better than decent WR, plus our draft class. Which is what I expect.

They really didn't though. We just had a long series of unforced errors that put them back in the game. They lived and died on zero blitzes to compensate for the talent discrepancy and the gamble almost worked. But the talent discrepancy was still there.

Tomorrow at 4PM EST.

Yeah, fans of untalented teams tend to fall in love with mediocre players that they believe to be attainable. Mediocrity is an oasis when you watch your team struggle to field remotely competitive teams for years on end. Bills fans suffered from that complex for 20 years. A related but different complex is fans falling in love with mediocre players on their own team, as demonstrated by this thread.

Never trust a man who hangs an extra pair of sleeves over his groin.

I wouldn't call the Raiders trading Waller a "laughingstock" move. He's injury prone, he's on the wrong side of 30, he plays a non-premium position. The Raiders are basically starting over. They need assets to rebuild for the future, plus this draft has a very good TE class. The Giants on the other hand badly need pass catchers. Good deal for both sides IMO.

I'm starting to think Poyer coming back is a real possibility.

That's quite a bit lower than expected. Some thought he would be the Christian Kirk of this FA period.

A 2 year rental because he still has his 5th year option in 2024. And then you get first dibs on his extension.

I don't know why they're reportedly willing to trade him. Why did the Texans trade DeAndre Hopkins? Why did the Titans trade AJ Brown? Why did the Vikings trade Stefon Diggs? Dumb teams do dumb things all the time. My best guess is that they are trying to collect draft capital to hedge on Russell Wilson in case what they saw last year is just who he is now. Sean Payton might come in thinking he needs to allocate more resources to the OL and the run game to try and create a functional offense around an overpaid bad QB. I don't have the exact answer but you can't just say "his team is trading him away, therefore he isn't worth trading for." Isn't it a little disingenuous to say he "averages 700 yards" when he missed 7 games in 2021? In 2022 with laughably bad QB play and offensive play calling he collected 972 receiving yards despite missing 2 games. If anything scares me about him it's the injury concerns. That is a legitimate question. But the talent is obvious and we don't have his skill set on the roster. I look at it this way - if this version of Jerry Jeudy was coming into the draft this year he would be far and away the #1 WR prospect. You have to factor in the downside that you're losing 3 years of his rookie contract, but the talent level is several tiers above any WR we could draft this year. He'll be 24 next month, the same age as some rookies that will be drafted. We have a low 1st round pick so we are likely to get at best the 4th best WR prospect in this weak class. Why not just use it on a guy where we know we are getting an immediate #2 WR with #1 upside? It's the lower floor/higher ceiling version of when we traded for Diggs. And there were legitimate questions about that trade when we made it. But talent usually wins out in the end.

I know this is a highlight video... but how can anyone watch this and not get excited about the prospect of Jeudy's skill set being added to our offense? There are some plays in this reel that nobody on our roster right now could replicate. The speed is real. The catch radius is real. The ability to uncover quickly on 3rd down is real. What am I missing? Why isn't this high-upside player that fills a need and is still on his rookie contract worth our 1st round pick?

They appeared to be one of the best DLs in the league before Miller, Rousseau, and Oliver all suffered serious injuries. Beane clearly has overinvested in the DL and it took him too long to get it right. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Von Miller contract was a no brainer to improve what was clearly the biggest weakness on the roster after the 2021 season. I suspect Miller will return to his early 2022 level of play by the middle of this coming season and the DL will be a strength of the team IF they aren't snakebitten by injuries again which is always an unpredictable wildcard. It really is the case, though. The $13 million roster bonus due this year was an obvious mechanism that they planned to cash out. It's why pretty much every single person that evaluated the Bills cap situation knew Allen and Miller were going to have these restructures executed. Such glaring obvious moves that were clearly designed ahead of time. If they hadn't done it they literally wouldn't have enough money to operate in free agency in any kind of meaningful way.

LB is a position like RB or safety, it's hard to imagine truly "regretting" the loss. What's the worst case scenario? If Edmunds goes on to be a superstar MLB for the Bears, we only lost out on a non-premium position player and opened up cap space to fill in other needs on the offense. If his replacement doesn't perform well I still won't regret losing him. I may regret that we didn't properly scout his replacement but that's not the same thing. The far more likely outcome is that the team giving a non-premium position player a massive deal after his best season came in a contract year will come to regret it.

They aren't going to try to replace his length and athleticism. They're going to have to tweak the scheme to account for a different skill set in the middle of the defense. Personally I take this as a positive.

Miller's contract was specifically designed to allow for this restrcuture. His roster bonus this year was about $10 million higher than his signing bonus last year, which is almost unheard of. It was a telltale sign of a restructure. There was never a scenario where they weren't going to execute this. I'm not remotely worried about our cap situation in 2025. The league wide salary cap will be accelerating rapidly at that point. There is really nothing stopping us from perpetually kicking the can down the road until the day Allen retires. We will never feel the pain until we have to go into a full on rebuild from scratch and at that point no one will care.

Correct. The current salary cap doesn't account for the new streaming deal with Google and new TV deals with the major networks. Legalized gambling money only recently entered the equation - that profitability for the NFL is only going to grow. Starting in 2025 the salary cap is going to explode. We could easily make one big splash signing this offseason and structure it to where the biggest cap hit comes in 2025 and not have to sacrifice anything in the long term.

There are a lot of options in the WR market this offseason. It would be malpractice if we don't add one of the available upgrades.

Makes sense as a stopgap.