BobChalmers

You seemingly haven't been reading - it's true the individual results for mone player don't depend much on what round he was drafted - but the total resutls for the TEAM depend greatly on how smart they are about what round they use to select each player!!! The draft is NOT about picking one guy!! "Reaching" means taking a guy before you have to to get him, and it hurts your team, period. --- So the proof that good front offices really DO think in terms of when to take a player relative to their "reachednesss" was on one of NFLN's "Top 10" shows that re-ran this morning. The NFL's top draft class (for a team) was rated as the Steelers' '74 draft. Central in the dynamic of that amazing draft that netted the Steelers 4 HoF's in a single rookie group, was the scouts talking Art Rooney out of taking John Stallworth in the first round. Incredibly, they took a different player at the same position - WR Lynn Swann over Stallworth - NOT because they thought Swann was better, but because they knew they had better intel on Stallworth than any other team in the league, and they knew he wouldn't go early. They actually believed Stallworth was the better prospect - but they took Swann in the 1st and Stallworth in the 4th round because they knew Swann from USC would go earlier than Stallworth from Savannah State. It's the perfect example, and folks, it's not hypothetical, it really happened and it's really the difference between the Steelers drafting 2 HoF WR's instead of "only" 1 HoF WR. Steelers' '74: QED

I'd be pretty surprised if the Bills don't take two tackles.

Hehe - yes, I admit I had that very picture in my head when I was typing this morning - the whole run of Back to the Future movies has been running a lot on cable this past month. Thank you oh so much for that mental image. Right - as I said - your knowledge is never really that perfect. But here's the thing - you don't need perfect predictive knowledge of a specific event to have perfect knowledge of what decision to make! Easiest game-theory case example ever: I tell you I'm going to give you $1,000,000 every time you call my coin toss correctly. You get 7 flips. You also have researched my coin and know that it's ever so slightly rigged and comes up "heads" %55 of the time. Now, we don't know if it will come up "heads" the next time I flip it. In fact, there's even close to a 4/1000 chance it will come up "tails" all 7 times I flip it. However, you are a complete idiot if you don't call "heads" every single time, right? Same thing here: if you think your scouts are good, and you think you can guess what your 31 competitors are likely thinking, then it is worth applying that knowledge as part of your decision process for your own pick and your own choice to move up or down. Even in 2000, w/o Gray's Almanac 2015, picking Brady in the first would have been stupid - there was no way anyone would take him THAT high. It doesn't matter that your one nutty scout tells you he's the next great QB (which you also can't know with perfect knowledge) - you don't take a guy you are 99% certain noone else is about to take. Were the Bills not smarter for not taking Jason Peters in the 3rd (or any) round? You get a guy when you have to - it's risky - but you have to push the edge to get efficient results out of your limited resources - if you refuse to take those chances you are probably headed for mediocrity at best.

OMG this whole anti-intellectual argument is tiresome and foolish, and this has further lowered my regard for Trent Edwards' talent scout. Please all try to follow this: 1. The draft is not about making one pick. If it was, then all this idiotic blather about "just take the top guy when it's your turn" would make sense. 2. If you don't want to suck, you need to think about the whole of your draft as you go. 3. Taking someone BEFORE YOU HAVE TO is STUPID - even he turns out to be a Hall of Famer. 4. BECAUSE you were wasting opportunities to ALSO take someone else who would help your team. Assume your draft board is researched and prepared thoroughly and you believe in your scouts - if you don't, rewind to this step and improve your scouting until you get it right. Suppose you are the Chicago Bears and it's the year 2000. You believe Tom Brady might be a HoF player, but you know noone else will take him before New England in round 6: Taking Tom Brady in the first round would have been a stupid move. Sure, you got a hall of fame QB, but you just missed out on a hall of fame middle linebacker in Brian Urlacher. Taking Tom Brady in the sixth round ahead of New Englend would have been brilliant. Now you've got Urlacher AND Brady, although you have cost yourself Kicker Paul Edinger. That's the trick to it that makes Walsh's argument stupid: each pick is not just a choice of who to take - it's also a choice (cost) to not take someone else. History shows that the higher round picks generally do better, so using a higher pick to get someone when you didn't have to is to foolishly pay a self-inflicted cost of not taking someone else who could have also helped you. Obviously, your knowledge is never that perfect - but operating without the basic sense that the draft is a game within the game, where you are trying to improve your whole team by getting the most total value from all your picks (including trading them up or down to line up with where you see the better players) is idiocy that leads to failure. Advocating that behavior for one's team or others is to expose one's mental laziness.

Hmm, during practices, at least, we would have situations where Levitre helps Wood block Cox...

Is it conceivable Glenn makes it to the 2nd round - given that Adams, Reiff, Martin are all kind of ho-hum OLTs? Interesting commentary on NFLN last night - some of the brighter minds were admitting they aren't even all that hot on Kalil - he's just the best of a mediocre bunch. That's a change from what I'd heard earlier - I assume they're getting feedback from various GM's and scouts who are really digging into the tape now and coming away a little disappointed. That may have been discussed, but it's poorly framed logic. You get more than 1 pick per year. You need to maximize the value of all your picks - it make no difference if the guy you take is a Hall of Famer - if you took him a round before you had to, it's still a reach because you screwed up an opportunity to ALSO take someone else with the earlier pick.

That's all fine and I agree - doesn't mean he's an effective starter anymore. EVANS WAS NO LONGER THE BILLS #2 WR. That's why they moved him - he had fallen to #4 on the coaches' depth chart and they liked a 4th round pick more than their #4 or 5 WR. Roscoe, Nelson, Jones had all passed Evans in the Bills' mind by camp last year.

Thank you! Spiller was the polar opposite of a reach - he was a BPA at a position the Bills didn't seem to need at all. ALL the questions about the Spiller pick were about why the Bills were drafting any RB - not that he wasn't worthy of the #9 slot. Some national sources had him as THE top offensive player available in the entire draft. He had 50 TD's for a major program - he was projected as the next Chris Johnson.

+1 (or in Evans' case, +8! )

Yikes - because Evans solves their WR problems?? Yikes!! As said before - Carter and Rice were definitely NOT speed guys. Freddy is a RB who has relatively few "miles on the tread" since he's started so few NFL games for his age/produciton. No way does anyone worry about signing a 31-year-old RB who's been playing steadily since college. Even a probable hall-of-famer like LT can't find a team right now at age 32. I'll give you that - but I think even 800 yards is probably far out of reach in this situation. Only way Evans would get that kind of number now would be playing for a Brady/Manning/Manning type. Reality is more like 600 even if stays healthy and Gabbert does fairly well. He's lost his speed. ^ It says it right here! He was going to be the Bills #4 WR 2 years ago. That's why they dumped him. He is NOT as fast as he used to be.

Filled the team's biggest need as best as it could possibly be filled with what was available in FA + draft. "Overpaid" for what he had and likely will produce, but that's what it took to get him, so the price is what it is. Additionally his signing immediately and fully changed any negative perceptions about the Bills as a franchise for other potential FA's going forward.

Bluntly, you've disqualified yourself in this conversation with that ridiculous statement. According to you, if the team loses, no player could have played a good game, huh? It's hard to describe how absurd that is. ...The Chiefs lost the game Derrick Thomas when posted 7 sacks, btw. Another guy who had a bad game according to you, apparently (while setting an NFL record).

Your logic doesn't hold here at all. What they showed is that they wouldn't pay more than that for ROBERT MEACHEM, which seems pretty darned reasonable - whould you want them to pay more than 7M for Meachem?? Unless your point is that they only brought in a "Robert Meachem type" because they weren't interested in someone more expensive. I will say that if Garcon is really worth $8M/year, Wallace even at $10M is a steal. Mind you, I don't think Garcon really rates the $8M.

Corrected. He was responsible for Barnett and Sheppard.

Well, at the same press conferences where Nix was saying they would be aggressive in FA this year, he also said they were going to draft at least one Tackle. Given that Bell is gone, is there any queston really that they need one somewhere early in the draft? That doesn't mean 1st round necessarily, but early for sure. Trading up for Kalil probably hinges on who the Vikings want - if they let him past, trading up for him becomes feasible.

true QB: 7 (agree we still want to try to upgrade here - and who's the backup we believe in?) RB: 4 (1 awesome all-purpose guy in Freddy who didn't finish the year, and CJ who started to come on but isn't a proven every down guy) WR: 5 (depends how Easely does, and starting Nelson, Aiken, Rooselvelt, etc. isn't the end of the world) TE: 5 (Chandler is certainly "good enough" - but they could do better) T: 10 (with Bell gone, this is a must-add - doesn't mean it has to be round 1 but they have to get someone who _could_ play if needed) G/C: 4 (Will Wood be ready?) DE: 1 (I'm assuming we're keeping Merriman (and at DE), Kelsay, and Carrington loses his weight back to his college DE level) DT: 4 (starting 2 are awesome, depth is iffy - Spencer Johnson? and ...Troup? ...Heard?) LB: 7 (what does a Wannstedt system LB look like? - Barnett - Shepppard - Morrison are OK, no clue who can play behind them) CB: 5 (I'm not that worried about Florence/Williams/Rodgers/McKelvin if we give them a decent pass rush) S: 4 (how many years does George Wilson have left? Searcy still unproven.) P/K: 5 (both are good but getting old - Lindell hurt cost them points and maybe one game, Moorman not what he used to be)

No - we've had a few that looked bad going in. Going in to last year the schedule looked tough, and the Bengals improved. The only complaint I'd have about the timing of this one is the bye coming too early. I'll say this much - it's a good year to catch the AFC South (you wouldn't trade them for the North or West, would you?), and the Browns look like a good 4th place team to get - they are way behind the other 3 teams in the North. The NFC West has improved some but it's still pretty bad. Put another way - if you had to pick two divisions to match up with, NFC West and AFC South would probably be the two. (NFC South is probably the 3rd choice?) Or for those of you who think it's all about the QB - Fitz is just an average QB, but how many teams on this schedule have better ones? Brady we're stuck with obviously - but who's the second best? Schaub? Cassell? a rookie Andrew Luck? Alex Smith? Locker/Hasselbeck? Gabbert? Kolb? Flynn/Jackson? Sam Bradford? Sanchez/Tebow? Matt Moore (or Tannehill)? Almost every team on this list has QB issues: Rookies or unproven 2nd year guys, QB's coming back from injuries, and/or actual questions about who the starters will even be.

this Did Williams have ANY playing career? His bio's I've found online make no mention of playing anywhere at any level. They all start with him as a HS coach. He certainly came off as a guy who was compensating for lack of background with a lot of bluster and flase bravado - pretty much your stereotypical bully.

This part I will have to disagree with - on a relative basis, he's better than most of the front people NFL Network hires. Mind you, that's a REALLY LOW BAR.

And because if you decide Fitz' arm is holding you back, when you add a better QB next year, at least you already have the WR to throw to. There's not a set order to building up a team. Your team needs a deep threat - you get one. Is Brian any relation to Mike?

Sorry - On this I think you are completely and utterly wrong. The draft is a game within the game. The draft "game" is about getting the maximum TOTAL value with the picks you are allotted. Taking someone before you have to is wasting picks you could have gotten additional value with. It doesn't matter if the guy you take is a Hall of Famer. Football teams are not one player, and if you take your HoF to be guy too early, when you could have traded down, still gotten the guy, and added additional picks to your team, you screwed up. Now - it's not always possible to find a trade partner, and you don't always know who other teams will take, so it's not an exact science. But to say there is no such thing as reaching is to dismiss all alternatives which is illogical at a minimum.

Wow - this thread leads the league in bad facts. Baltimore was all set to take Whitner at 13. He was not going to get anywhere near the 2nd round.

Jonas Jennings was actually a 3rd rounder, btw - which only reinforces your point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Jennings

I'm thinking I don't like the new collar because it's just going to blend into the helmet and it reminds me too much of the Colts.

He was a dominant punt returner. You can't take that away from him - although our coaches did.