Cash

That’s who goes out for coin tosses - opening and OT. I’m not aware of any other official stipulations around being a captain.

I’m with @GunnerBill on this one. My guess is that they like Doyle’s potential at OT but don’t think he’s ready yet. I think they’re happy enough with their top 3 at OT, but if any of those top 3 had to miss a game, they’d want to call up a veteran OT to be the swing tackle.

Totally agreed on that for his rookie year, but I thought he looked quicker and smoother this preseason. Granted, it was an ultra-small sample size, but it still beats looking the same or worse. I was pretty high on him his rookie year, but maybe just because he looked like an old-school Metzelaars style TE. I’m hoping that the Hollister cut means that Sweeney has developed and will be able to help the team for real this year. If he’s somehow improved his athleticism, that would be amazing. But even if not, maybe his blocking is now good enough to fill the Lee Smith role - and he was always a better athlete than Smith.

Gronk played like a star down the stretch of the regular season, and combined with his history of star play, I think it’s a fair call. And I agree with the rest of your post. A star TE definitely isn’t necessary or required to win it all. And star TEs seem to have shorter shelf lives on average than star WRs, so there’s at least some advantage to putting resources into WRs. So when the Bills seemingly neglected TE from 2020 to 2021, I’m not necessarily happy about it, but I get it. If Ertz had gotten cut, I would’ve loved to see the Bills sign him to a 1 year deal. But I didn’t think it was worth both draft capital and $8mil to bring him in. Likewise, I liked that we tried to sign Greg Olsen before the 2020 season. Would’ve been a great mentor to Knox, and could’ve contributed in 2-TE sets. But when he said no, the Bills didn’t think anyone else on the market was worth the $$, and I respect that. Ultimately I’m sure the Bills would love to have the personnel to run an effective 2-TE set at least some of the time in every game. But I trust this FO’s evaluations of players. If they don’t think Hollister will help the team more than Speedy or whoever, then I’m fine with that.

Well one of us misunderstands, because it sounded like you were saying TEs don’t matter to NFL success. And that’s demonstrably false. It’s not pure coincidence that 10 of the last 14 Super Bowl participants have had “star” TEs. And there’s been a lot of analysis over the years of the tactical advantage of a 2-TE set where both TEs are receiving threats. Plus, TEs are important in short yardage situations, and no matter how WR focused your offense is, you’ll find yourself in those situations on a regular basis. But I agree with you that our top 2 TEs being Knox/Hollister vs Knox/Sweeney is probably not going to move the needle. Maybe you just meant that these particular TEs on the 2021 Bills are the 20%, in which case I misunderstood you, and you can pretty much ignore everything above.

I was also very surprised by this. But ultimately this FO has earned my trust. This is essentially saying that Hollister would’ve been 3rd string behind Sweeney, and the dropoff from Hollister to the PS guys is minimal. That doesn’t really align with what I saw, but 1.) I didn't look at TE blocking at all during preseason, and 2.) The Bills have access to a lot more info than I do. Me reading practice reports is not the same as actually seeing the guys practice. So I’m surprised but not upset. The problem with that logic is that “the 20%” might be what separates a Good team from a Championship team. There are strong benefits of having a real pass-catching threat at TE (who also blocks effectively in the run game). Having said that, I think Hollister has very little to do with this conversation. He looked good catching the ball to me, but still didn’t look like he’d be a difference maker. If anything, I’m glad that this FO is willing to adapt their positional requirements to match their personnel. I remember multiple coaching staffs keeping 3-4 TEs on the roster who were really just practice squad level players. And a lot of talk about TE-centric offenses despite our best TE being someone like MarQueis Gray. Logan Thomas was with us for 2 years and Detroit for another year and did nothing. Great for him that he earned a huge role with WFT last year at age 29, but I don’t think that would’ve happened on a halfway decent team. (And yes, I’m aware they won their division. I stand by what I wrote.) And unless he really improved himself in the last 2 years, I still don’t think he’s a difference maker - just a guy making the most of his opportunity. The guy we had in 2017-2018 definitely wasn’t a difference maker from what I saw.

I hear ya, but the problem with putting him IR is that he can't practice at any point all year. Hard for him to improve much without being able to practice. He can still work on the mental aspects of the game, but I don't know how much that'll help him improve just on its own.

I would consider Cam Lewis a PS candidate as well.

First thing I thought as well. I think Joe B called it!

That’s great news!

I’m not sure he has a second NFL skill, but he sure has speed. And you famously can’t coach speed. Agreed with most here that he’s just signed to play in the last preseason game at a high-injury-risk position, and that there’s no chance he makes the roster. And I also think that the Bills are always evaluating, and that even a cannon fodder signing will have a chance to make the PS. If the coaching staff can teach him some useful NFL skills, maybe he can eventually grow into a good player. Even if they can’t teach him to be better, I still think the Bills’ coaches are good enough to take advantage of his elite speed just with scheme. Kind of how McKenzie was immediately effective for us as a jet sweep guy when we first signed him. If he was out on the PS, it wouldn’t shock me if he made a big play or two in a call up game at some point.

Great write up as always, Virgil! My meaningless opinions: Announcers: I actually thought they did a great job. Keep in mind, NFL Network only uses the local (home) announcers in the preseason. Despite that, I thought this crew: 1. Sounded professional 2. Paid attention to the game on the field 3. Gave a very reasonable amount of attention to the “other” team 4. Seemed decently prepped on the roster of the “other” team Contrast all 4 of those with the Lions’ crew last week, and it’s not even close. I’d argue that they’d probably outscore Catalon/Tasker on about 3 of the above 4 as well. Basham: I’m kind of in the middle on this one. I think all these can be true: 1. He’s nowhere close to helping this team in the regular season. I saw the stats, but they were mostly against 3rd stringers. To help us this year, he needs to be able to beat 1st stringers. No one platoons their O-line. 2. He didn’t have that great of a game. IMO he was responsible for 2 big Fields scrambles on their TO on downs drive. Both times he went inside and lost contain. Technically goes in the books as a pressure, but Fields will run right around Basham for a first every time. Those kinds of plays would kill us against Mahomes or Lamar. 3. I’m not at all worried about him. I don’t care if he was supposed to be more NFL-ready than Rousseau. It’s hard enough to predict who’ll be good vs bad. It’s basically impossible to consistently predict who’ll be good AND WHEN. There’s no reason he can’t get better over the course of the year, or by next year, or etc. Who knows? Maybe he switches to DT full time next year and winds up being great there? Rookies are not finished products in August of their first preseason. 4. Even if he winds up a bust, it wasn’t really a bad pick. Okay, obviously it wouldn’t be a GREAT pick either. I just mean him busting doesn’t mean the Bills we’re dumb to draft him. See above re: drafting is hard. So if the Bills realize drafting is hard, they also realize they won’t be right 100% of the time. So with pass rush as a huge need, drafting 2 strong prospects gives us a better chance of landing at least 1 good pass rusher. It’s one of the hardest positions to find, so it’s worth spending the extra resources on. Even though it makes you less likely to be fully optimized, it might very well be worth it. Hard to say for sure. I’ll concede that there’s probably a CB or OG who we could’ve had that would help us more. But the Bills didn’t know how good Rousseau would look when they were drafting in the 2nd round. And they didn’t feel they could take the risk of Rousseau being unable to help this year.

Why would defenses play the run against us? The Chiefs showed everyone last year (twice) that your best bet is to dare us to run and try to shut down the run with just your front 4 + MLB. Now if our run game is better, we’ll be able to move the ball and score against those types of defenses. But even then we’d be scoring slower than via the pass. Maybe most of our opponents will be dumb! But I’m not gonna count on it.

Donkeys? You can do better than that. I think it’s very unlikely we score more points than last year. Road games will have crowd noise, plus it’s normal to expect regression to the mean. For example, if our D improves AND our run game improves, we’d be able to sit on 2-score leads instead of HAVING to keep the pressure on.

It was an NFC game, too - losing would've given us crucial hypothetical tiebreakers

I'm sure most reporters are just spouting cliches without thinking about it, but I personally think this cliche makes some sense. You'd typically expect players to show some rust and/or inexperience early in the season, and you'd also expect players to wear down some late in the season (whether due to injury or fatigue or whatever). So "mid-season form" is where you might reasonably expect the best balance of having enough game reps to improve performance, without being so beat up that performance starts to suffer. (Not that that always holds true of course!)

Presumably because the cap should've been even lower for 2021 based on revenue, but an artificial floor was agreed to by both parties. So the back half of that agreement is that even if revenue is higher than expected in 2021, they'll smooth out the gains in the cap. Think of it as 2021 borrowed against future gains, so 2022 will pay those back if it can. (Of course, if revenue is lower than expected in 2021, it'll be even lower than the ceiling...) The other factor might be both the NFL & NFLPA wanting to avoid what happened in the NBA when their cap spiked and the Warriors were able to sign Durant. That was after the NBA signed a huge new TV deal, and a lot of people expect a similar revenue bump from the NFL's new TV deal. Key difference is that the NBA owners' "cap smoothing" proposal just delayed plugging the full revenue gains into the cap, so there was no financial incentive for the players to say yes. But here, the NFL owners already showed some good faith with the 2021 cap floor, so it's not a shock that the players are more willing to bargain on the 2022 cap ceiling. Also, this is probably good news for the Bills on the whole. If we did have an NBA-style jump, I think big-market teams would be much more likely to take advantage of it/game it, even if just for short-term gains. Beane has been very consistent in saying that he's building for sustainability and doesn't want to do moves that mortgage the future, so that would probably put us at an overall disadvantage in a major cap spike situation.

“I called my boss a c*** and I got fired. Can I sue for discrimination?”

Prior to Johnson’s “did enough to win” drive, that was probably the worst NFL QB performance I had ever seen. I’m over it, but I will go to my grave thinking that we win that game with Flutie, and quite possibly make the Super Bowl.

I'll also cop to being on the Rosen > Allen train (thankfully most of us survived the derailment though). That's probably #1, when you consider just how wrong I was on both ends of it. But dishonorable mention goes to me thinking Rex Ryan was a good hire. I figured that our D had been really good under Pettine in 2013(?), so it could be just as good or better under Ryan, and I thought that under the showy exterior he was a good coach who consistently won football games. None of that was anywhere close to being right.

Re: your last point - to some extent, yes, but also not entirely. Yeah the Saints got under the cap, but they had to gut their team to do it. They were able to keep a couple foundational players (Thomas, Kamara, Cam Jordan), but many of their mid level and up veterans got cut. Even if Brees was still around and still really good, it’s hard to imagine they’d be a serious contender for the next few years. My point is that if the Bills were in that same situation last year, we’d probably be looking at a team fighting for a wildcard spot and hoping to catch fire in the playoffs, instead of a team that’s fighting for the top seed. Those are pretty significantly different.

Great call OP!

Love this pick!!! Good chance he becomes the full time KR/PR and could fill the McKenzie role on offense as well.

I’m sold on Stevenson. He looks faster than Etienne in their respective highlights. And the price is right.

I'm pretty sure I've legitimately never heard of this guy before today. So obviously I'm not excited, but I'm not going to dump on it either. From what I've read so far, he's apparently more of an H-back type than an in-line TE, which doesn't sound great. But apparently he's a good blocker? Those 2 don't really reconcile for me, because I usually think of TE blocking as most important when lined up next to the OT. But what do I know? I'm interested to see the $$$ on this one, especially since it's not a guy I'm familiar with. If it's very low (?), I wouldn't necessarily count out a move for Ertz still. Marcel L-J tweeted that the Bills were interested in Ertz, but not for a 3rd round pick. Leaking that to him could easily be a way to negotiate through the media. I do think this signing makes an Ertz trade (or signing if he gets cut) less likely, but I'm not ready to fully shut the door on it. I'm not kidding, I would pay a thousand dollars for a new BMW. Sure it might cost a lot to maintain, but I think it's worth it.