FireChans

brother, you are 0fer on the big off-season predictions this year. If you start arguing across multiple threads that there’s no way the Bills trade for a WR, it’s only gonna increase the odds, no matter how sound your reasoning is lol

Yes the Chiefs. They have drafted way more WR’s. Niners too. And Eagles. Cooper Kupp would’ve been the highest drafted WR in Beane’s tenure. No. What I would say is, “we need to rebuild the WR room, Diggs was a cancer and we finally have a couple of young cheap WR’s that may be worth $30M per season that we don’t have to decide to pay or not for YEARS, while Josh has an enormous cap hit.” I have been really really really consistent on this. I wanted the Steelers model on this. And guess what, maybe one of those guys turns into an elite threat? Or maybe even both! Do you know how you ensure you never land on an elite receiving threat? You don’t draft them. MVS will never be elite. Mack Hollins will never be elite. Samuel will never be elite. CLAYPOOL will never be elite. Hamler will never be elite. Ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever. The reason the complaints would cease is because it would be proof that Beane understands having good pass catchers is important. Something he has not proved to know outside of the fever dream of 2019-2020

then we don’t have an elite receiving threat on the roster? I don’t understand. You can’t say we’re forgetting Kincaid is on the team when we’re talking about elite weapons and then say Kincaid is not elite. If he’s elite, then we have one. If he isn’t, then we don’t. Right?

So you are saying today that Kincaid is elite? If that’s your take and you think Kincaid is already elite, and you’re right, then hey, we’ll be alright.

2023: Jayden Reed 2nd round - 64 for 793 and 8 TDs (Better as a rookie than second year Shakir). Dontayvion Wicks 5th round - 39 for 581 and 4 TD’s (Better than rookie year Shakir) 2022: Christian Watson 2nd round - 41 for 611 and 7 TD’s. (Better as a rookie than second year Shakir) Romeo Doubs 4th round - 42 for 425 and 3 TD’s. (Better than rookie year Shakir). I mean, there can be lots of reasons the Bills don’t win a Super Bowl. The defense can get rolled by the Chiefs again. Josh could miss the season. The question is, “what is the best strategy to win the Super Bowl?” If you think Samuel by himself is better than Harty and Sherfield, I COMPLETELY agree. Again, the question is: is Coleman/Samuel/MVS/Claypool better than Diggs/Davis/Sherfield/Harty? Did our offensive weapons get better or worse since last year? IMO, again, the answer is CLEARLY WORSE. Even if Diggs lost a step. And you know what, I wouldn’t really care if the weapons took a little step back this year to set us up for the future. Prior to the Diggs trade, I said it was a guarantee he was gone in 25. Beane ripped the bandaid off a year early. That’s fine by me to sell high and get a cancer outta here. But again, you could have 2 rookies learning and growing with Josh from a historic draft class that has had us talking WR’s for the last 8 months! Or they could’ve drafted another rookie last year or the year prior. Instead, Claypool and MVS will be gone in 25, regardless of how they perform. And we will NEED to get another WR because we have painted ourselves into a corner where everyone and their mother knows we are going WR in our first two picks. AGAIN. Beane’s strategy for WR seems to be “only draft them when you absolutely have to.” IMO, that’s a really bad strategy that the best teams in the NFL DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO.

Just FYI, we have -6M in space next year

Even if Coleman has a good rookie season this year, we enter 2025 with our biggest need STILL being WR. That's the real rub. The position group hasn't been fixed. And it feels like a really big missed opportunity with a historic WR draft. And sure, there's some risk in rolling out two rookie WR's to get significant snaps, but when the entire justification for the 2024 year is not going "all-in" but instead having a re-tooling, what better time to let the rookies make some mistakes and prove they can be better players than JAGs like Hollins or MVS? To me, it made total sense to come out of the 2024 offseason with 2 young WR's AND set the team up to be back to an upper echelon contender in 2025. Then you have two second year WR's with different skillsets with a year experience in the offense under their belt, a third year Kincaid who should be blossoming, and a contract year Shakir. That could've been special. Instead, we're hoping that Claypool and MVS can stave off their careers ending for one more year to end up back where we started.

You don’t have to go far back. Happened for the Packers last year. if you’d like to go back a little bit more, you can go to 2022 for the Packers as well.

They last 4 SB’s have featured Kelce, Hill, Evans, Godwin, AJ Brown, Devonta Smith, Jamar Chase, Tee Higgins, Cooper Kupp, OBJ, Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk. Bills fans - “we just need 3 Curtis Samuel’s!”

They didn’t have those same receivers in 21. Beasley got old. Brown had one foot out of the league and was cut. See, I don’t don’t believe you. I can’t believe that you think having prime Diggs, Davis, Beasley and half a season of prime John Brown wasn’t a big reason why Josh was so incredible in 2020. Just like why Mahomes was incredible when he had Hill, Kelce, Watkins etc etc. And yes, Mahomes counting stats particularly dropped when they traded Hill. But you know what they did? They signed JuJu. They traded for Toney. They drafted Moore, they drafted Rice, they drafted Worthy, they signed Hollywood Brown. They signed MVS when he was still young. This is so obvious. The team that won the SB twice with a much weaker receiving group after trading Hill have tried DESPERATELY to get their group to back that level. They haven’t had the success they were probably hoping for, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. And of course, retaining Kelce helps A LOT. The Bills saw that 2020 group get worse and worse and worse and did very little, with hilariously failed experiments like bringing back the corpses of retired Brown and Beasley, bringing in JAGs like Harty and Sherfield and culminating with the last of that 2020 group leaving, where our two early FA WR targets were Samuel and Hollins lol. This is all obvious. It was obvious then, which I was I have consistently hammered this point for the last 3 years. It’s even more obvious now.

do you think the “luxury” of 2020 had ANYTHING to do with the number of high quality receiving targets Allen had?

I’d like to win games and not have the passing game be bad. Do you think that’s possible or do you think we are always doomed to have Allen rushing 9 times a game in November/December while his passing numbers fall off a cliff? serious question. Because there were lots of folks upset with Daboll during his tenure, and were very much looking forward to seeing what Dorsey could do. Some folks don’t want Josh to be forced to run through linebackers for the last 7 weeks of the season. And Dorsey didn’t want Josh used that way starting week 1, (probably to protect him and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was a directive from the top). Brady probably didn’t care about running Josh because the season was lost if we lost another game AND he was in the drivers’ seat for the job the next year as the interim. Well, we are like 24 months removed from giving Diggs a top 5 WR contract so that’s quite a switch in philosophy. Maybe you’re right. I think much like the Chiefs getting rid of Hill, the Bills don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze. It’s less a philosophical switch as a pragmatic switch imo. FWIW, from a “floor is going to be pretty high,” an 85-86 passer rating is right around Justin Fields, Gardner Minshew and Will Levis. So I’m not sure that’s really that high. Josh’s legs are the reason he can be a one man offense. Which he has pretty much HAD to be since 2020. Which is the problem to me. You don’t see it as a problem. I guess this regime doesn’t see it as a problem as much as I do. We’ll see. I’m hoping we don’t see history repeat itself with Cam.

Are you sure that’s what they want or is that just what they are doing? There is a difference. Because the passing offense was bad when we did so.

It’s not rational? How so?

The biggest problem for most fans who won’t stop complaining about this is that in a super deep WR draft that was filled with need picks by the Bills, the Bills didn’t feel like they needed a 2nd WR over a 2nd RB or a safety or a 2nd 3T.

Adding a star WR? Yeah, it probably does make it more likely. Adding a second rookie with promise vs career JAGS and camp bodies? Maybe or maybe not. There’s been lots of young WR’s that have made major impacts as rookies. Of course, there’s lots who suck too. The thing about basically ignoring the WR position for 3 years is you don’t get to then retroactively justify a reset year with a low talent group relative to the rest of the league. That’s the real problem. It’s the exact same thing as not drafting a QB for years and then trotting out Fitzpatrick and telling the fans, “well what are we supposed to do?”

We can win a Super Bowl if Josh Allen gets hurt week 11 and another failed QB plays great like Nick Foles did 2017. That doesn’t make it a good plan. It doesn’t make it likely.

FWIW, @White Linen also accused me of swearing I would never come back to TBD if something happened. (Which I would never have done because who takes a message board that seriously lol) I think he has a faulty memory.

The dynasties skew everything. I’m old enough to remember when folks on TBD would swear up and down the Bills didn’t need to waste a first round pick on a QB because Brady was a sixth lol. it’s tunnel vision

there’s no consistent analysis here. The same folks that thought the Bills didn’t need an elite #1 in 2019 were super pumped about trading for the Diggs the next year. The same folks who thought the Bills had a great WR group last year and it was awesome now think WR group doesn’t matter when it’s hot garbage. It’s just, “did the Bills do it? Then it must be right.”

Hey now, we have the second best TE from the 2023 NFL draft class. He’s basically Tony Gonzalez 2.0 already, we just need him to be the next Gronk or Kelce. These are reasonable expectations by year 2.

We can talk about everything, that’s the beauty of the off-season! the Chiefs receiving group as a whole last year was kinda stinky. They led the league in drops. They contributed to one the worst statistical season of Mahomes’ career. This was because the Chiefs had whiffed on Toney, Moore, etc. Their only saving grace at WR was Rashee Rice. But Kelce was still great enough, particularly in the postseason and their defense was great, particularly in the postseason, and they had enough to win the title. I disagree with Brandon Beane’s investment of the WR position for a multitude of reasons. I don’t think his strategy is the way for the Bills to win a Super Bowl. I also think that copying the 2023 Chiefs model with an inferior version of good TE and crummy WR’s is not the way to win the Super Bowl. Having Kincaid try to be a worse version of the arguable greatest TE of all time does not work when you ignore the elite playoff defense the Chiefs proved to have last year and the Bills haven’t proved to have, well, ever. So yeah. Trying to be the 2023 Chiefs with less HoF players and a worse defense and a worse coaching staff and a worse QB sounds like WC champs again. Sue me. It’s not McBeane. It’s Beane. He doesn’t value WR’s. He values DL much much much higher. He wants his physical specimen QB to carry garbage WR’s to the promised land. It’s the Carolina way.

They had Kelce lol. And their receiver group still kinda sucked. Luckily, they had an elite defense that showed up in the regular season and the postseason. Good thing the Bills highly paid defenders have a history of carrying this team to victory in the postseason. Lmao. If you want, I can go point by point why the 2024 Bills are not the 2023 Chiefs, but you’ll just cry about how it’s not fair that the 3x SB championship team is better than the 3x reigning divisional round participant Bills.

You’re missing a step. 6. Josh Allen plays at or near the best level of his career in the postseason while the rest of his teammates no show, and we wonder why we can’t beat the Chiefs when we have Trent Sherfield alligator-arming passes.

Samuel was 33 in 2020. But yes Claypool was 31 and sneaks in. You are right. They aren’t proven yet is a very nice way of saying they’ve proven nothing so far. The Chiefs had a top 32 receiving target last year. They had Travis Kelce, who was 29th in 2023, 8th in 2022, 14th in 2021 etc etc. A no question first ballot HoF target. The Bills do not have this, right? Rice was unproven and ended up 32nd, which is better than anything any current Bills receiver has done except for Claypool 4 years and 3 teams ago. The year before that, they had JuJu in 2022 who was 24th (and of course had that top 5 season many years prior.) If you are a believer in the “hey Kincaid, I know it’s your second year in the league, but we need you to be a top 2 all-time HoF TE next year for our offense to work” plan, more power to you.