Beck Water

Can't argue with that.

By other reports, Murray laid the lumber on his next carry.

Awesome write up, thanks for sharing! Could you tell anything about what happened on the Josh throw to Kincaid that missed him short? Was it some kind of communication error or is Josh having some technique issues?

On the Bengals drive before the incident, I didn't think any of the Bills D was playing well. We can all tell Hamlin was in position to make the tackle when he got the hit that stopped his heart. Isn't it just amazing how Hamlin started 13 games and was 3rd on the Bills in combined tackles, 4th in solo tackles - while taking poor angles and being bad in coverage all year? And Wow - a Safety who takes poor angles and is bad in coverage, playing with another Safety who had multiple injuries or with a STer 3rd string safety, and yet somehow the defense was #2 in Points Against. Seems very odd - almost miraculous

So let's look at this from a football perspective. The Bills currently have 7 safeties on the roster: Dr Poyer (incumbent starter, age 32) Mr Hyde (incumbent starter, age 32) Damar Hamlin (age 25, primary backup last season, played after Hyde injury) Taylor Rapp (age 25, FA acquisition, former 2nd round pick, 4 years with Rams, won Superbowl with them) Dean Marlowe (age 31, 7 year vet, backup on Bills last season) Jared Mayden (age 25, 2020 UDFA, has bounced around SF, Eagles, Bills, Jets PS - was on Bills PS when Hyde was injured) Zayne Anderson (age 26, PS player signed from KC) I believe the Bills usually keep 4 safeties on the 53 man roster. Looking at it purely from the viewpoint of demonstrated talent level and counting Poyer and Hyde "in", Hamlin and Rapp would probably be the next two in terms of demonstrated playing ability. Dean Marlowe looked old and slow last season, I don't think he looks faster and younger this season. So if Hamlin plays at anything close to last year's level, it seems likely that he's still "next man up" along with Rapp. There's a possibility that Mayden or Anderson outplay Hamlin and Rapp, but I haven't heard any noise from them yet. There's also the possibility that Hamlin gets hit on a tackle a few times, suffers mental effects, and decides to pursue philanthropy full time. If the Bills cut Hamlin, it will be for football reasons that will be clear, and will be a 48 yr wonder - no more.

Well, Brown did start 14 regular season and 2 playoff games for the Bills last season after post-season back surgery. I think they're similar just in having had a back injury, which isn't that uncommon for OLman

https://www.audacy.com/wgr550/sports/bills/stefon-diggs-has-been-unguardable-at-training-camp?utm_campaign=sharebutton&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_term=WGRAM Sal C's take

I can't claim to know the intricacies of the Cowboys OL, but I thought Tyler Biadasz was their C and started every game but Week 18 I hope Dion gets it together. I have trouble assessing how he played last season because it's true that when an OLman is playing next to a guy who is struggling, he struggles. More true for IOL but still true at OT.

McGovern is a depth piece who started 15 games for the Cowboys last season. He started 6 and 8 games the previous year. In other words, in his 3 years in the league, he's started 57% of possible games and 64% of the games he's been active for. When teams have a "depth piece" with that much starting experience, he's typically hard to keep because he will have a significant FA market. In other words, another way to put it is "teams with good olines often have to let a UFA like that walk, because they can't match his market".

Miller, Phillips, and Matakevich aren't day to day, they're on the active/PUP list. Did not know about Tim Settle - hope it doesn't linger for him.

I will give Singletary props on that. He didn't start out that way, but he improved a lot in year 2 and by year 3 I think you could confidently say he was a strong pass blocking RB. Slenderness doesn't matter. Fred Jackson famously leveled JJ Watt. Lil' Dirty McKenzie laid some licks down when called upon to pass protect. It's a matter of 1) knowing the scheme - it isn't simple, the RB has to decode very quickly who his blocking assignment might be pre-snap and then understand the impact of any defensive adjustments post-snap on that assignment 2) having quick feet to maintain a position of leverage 3) being fearless to get in the way

I don't think they see Bates as a tackle except for "Break Glass In Emergency". I guess in his cameos at tackle, he looked better than Bobby Hart did, but that's kind of a low bar. If Brown continues to struggle, I think we'll see Brandon Shell, the 8 year vet we signed as a FA. I would expect him to be servicable or a bit better.

That's a great question. I went looking for mentions of him, and the ones I've found were in drills. Which is not to say there aren't any in team work, just I couldn't find them.

Shakir got 275 snaps on offense last season (close to 30% of the offensive snaps). In those snaps, he had 20 targets and 10 receptions - a 50% catch rate. I don't dis him for that, since we don't know if he was scored as "targeted" on throw-aways, but he did have 2 scored drops (10% drops). For the record, that's higher than Davis and McKenzie, the TBD Drop Whipping Boys. I'm not sure why you mention Crowder. He had no scored drops last season.

That's a really great question. As I recall, he was participating in minicamp. I can't find anything about him being placed on PUP or the like. I haven't heard anything about him, good or bad.

So it's worth noting that Creed Humphrey was regarded as a top-tier C in the 2021 draft, but drafted late in the 2nd round (63rd) However, Trey Smith was a 6th round pick for a reason. The Chiefs got the "steal of the draft" there. The Chiefs totally rebuilt their OL that off-season, including signing Joe Thuney who had 2 Superbowl rings with the Pats and is still the #5 paid guard on AAV, and trading a 1st round pick for Orlando Brown on a 2 year rental. The only player they kept was Andrew Wylie, who had played guard for them the previous year, and Lucas Niang, a 3rd round 2020 pick. The point that I tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to make elsewhere, is that investing "enough" resources in OL is in part, a judgement made in hindsight, after it is shown to work. If it hadn't worked, it would have been "what a stupid move to trade a 1st 3rd 4th and 2022 5th for Orlando Brown who is really a RT, and it just was a bad idea to be choosing between a 6th round rookie and a 8 yr former 6th round pick coming back off a year's sabbatical at RG. And did we really want to bet the season on a rookie at C?" Fortunately for the Chiefs, it all worked out. Now maybe that's great scouting on their part, but remember they had to rebuild the line because their FO judgement in previous years was that what they had was "enough". So if we're looking at the Chiefs 6th round rookie RG as a "top tier OL", it is worth noting that the Bills have regularly taken late round and UDFA shots at OL. Last year it was Luke Tenuta, who is now playing for the Packers. This year it was Nick Broeker (who, per NFL Draft Profile, sounds like a poor match for us but we saw something). 2021 was Tommy Doyle and Jack Anderson. The only year we didn't draft an OLman was 2020. Anyway: have the Bills done "enough" on OL? Well, they didn't trade half their draft for a LT, but theoretically Dawkins is a good quality LT. They didn't draft a C, but Morse has been reliable. They added two guards in FA, with Connor McGovern as the bigger FA signing and David Edwards, who played 3 years for the Rams including on their superbowl winning team as the dark horse "is he back from concussions?" add. Drafted a guard. To me, the questionmarks are: 1) is Spencer Brown "enough" at RT? Brown looked OK and flashed as a rookie struggling with a back injury, did not look as good this season, and has had some bad outings in pre-season. If Brown can't get it done, behind him we have -Brandon Shell, Jets 5th round pick in 2016, who has started 72 games for 3 teams in 7 seasons. He was with the Jets for 4 seasons before signing in Seattle, played out his 2 year contract there but ended on IR, then signed to Miami's PS after not drawing FA interest (likely due to the injury). He started 11 games last season. He's shown he can play ok if he's healthy, he's struggled a bit with injuries I believe. -David Quessenberry. He was not an improvement on Brown last season from what I saw. -Alec Anderson, 2022 UDFA signing from UCLA, PS last season - so he's had a year to learn Kromer's system -Richard Gouraige, 2023 UDFA. He keeps drawing mentions from the guys watching practice. 2) is Connor McGovern (or failing him, David Edwards or Ike Boettger (1.5+ years off Achilles) or Kevin Jarvis (coming off IR as a 22 UDFA) a significant upgrade on Rodger Saffold, who was a huge disappointment to me as last year's FA signing?

Just a little note that in the game Bernard started, he was not playing MLB. He was playing for Milano, with Edmunds at MLB Playing for Milano in "next man up" fashion, is apparently a very tough ask. I can remember when we brought Klein in, in 2020, the first game he played for Milano vs KC a number of people called him "the worst linebacker they'd ever seen" (you might have been one?). Yet a few weeks later against Seattle, he looked All World and won AFC Defensive Player of the Week. Part of that is Klein adjusting to the defense, but a big part of that was the Bills pulling the plug on Milano and saying "I don't care if you want to play, you can't lift your arm and tackle, so you're out, and you're going on IR", then actually adjusting their defensive scheme to play to Klein's skill set. Anyway, I'm not trying to excuse Bernard or say he looked good, because he didn't - just to point out that it's a possibility he might do better at MLB in a defensive role that is tailored to his skillset (same true of Dodson of course).

I reluctantly agree with you, which is kind of a scary thought; if the plan is to start either Dodson or Bernard, I fear that's a Bad Plan. Again, vs Detroit, both Milano and Klein started and played 100% of the snaps and Dodson only shows as a 'starter' because the Bills started out in base, with Dodson getting the nod. Dodson only played 10 defensive snaps vs. Detroit (14%) To be fair, against Cleveland, that was the week the Bills practice schedule was severely disrupted due to weather, thus in a week where the LB needed more coaching and more prep, they got less. The most concerning game to me is Minnesota. he played about 2/3 of that game for Edmunds, and looked bad. Of course, he was straight subbing in for the Edmunds-based game plan vs. having a game plan tailored to his skills.

I agree that from what we've seen so far, Dodson struggles in coverage. I wonder if you've got your games mixed a bit, though. Pittsburgh was one of Dodson's starts. The other two were Cleveland and Detroit, true - but I think vs. Detroit, the team started in base, because Klein and Milano played 100% of the LB snaps vs. Detroit. Dodson played most of the game vs. Minnesota, though. Edmunds started, but left due to injury and Dodson played 2/3 of the snaps. And I think that's where he looked very bad in coverage - but to be fair, Minnesota was a top passing team for both attempts and yards so it was a strong test.

So in some ways the RB room is upgraded. Harris/Murray the more physical RBs we were told Moss would become. Cook can hit the holes that Singletary couldn't. But Singletary had become an excellent pass blocking RB. And there's some concern whether Cook will "get it".

Huh?

That (tying together threads) is the real achilles heel of Beane's OL builds. It's not that he doesn't put resources into the line. He has - maybe not as many high picks as folks would like, but OL is hard to scout these days so there's an argument to be made for picking up guys who have put down some NFL tape. But there are two errors with a draft pick. One is giving up too early (analogous to Type I error in statistics. rejection of actually true null hypothesis) The other is giving them too many chances and too much time (analogous to Type II error, accepting an actually false null hypothesis). When it comes to Cody Ford and now maybe Spencer Brown, Beane has been a Type II guy.

I'm not done with him. But I no longer view him as a roster lock. He's got to figure out how to hang on to some of those contested balls, because he doesn't have the arm length or speed to hold defenders off and separate cleanly.

To me it usually falls into place, like "OK, Torrence was in with the 1s pre-stretching then it was Bates with the 1s in the first 11-on-11 team session then..... But it can seem like different practice, for example, Ajay Cybulski sees Khalil Shakir as dropping a pass he should have caught. A different perspective: Or, maybe it was a very good play by Cam Lewis, who has played 234 defensive snaps in the NFL; he can make a play. Davis has by all accounts had a good couple of days, and Kincaid so far is having a good camp as is Cook.