Cash

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.

Do we know the source of the leak on this contract? I'm wondering if the agent leaked it, and conveniently counted all incentives as part of the contract. It seems like a big overpay for Rudolph, but if $6M of the $16M are unlikely incentives, it becomes a lot more reasonable.

True. Although I wouldn't be suprised if we don't draft an RB, and instead sign a cheap veteran post-draft. I think they'll only draft an RB if they think he's a difference maker. Otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense to have 3 RBs on rookie deals, who are all roughly equally good. A vet min RB would bring experience to the RB room, which McDermott always wants, and financially would be about the same cost as a 3rd-rounder or later.

I don't think this is true. I wasn't sure about it, so I attempted to look it up. This is what I found: https://nflcommunications.com/Documents/2018 Policies/7-2018 Anti-Tampering Policy-Clean Version.pdf Not 100% sure I'm reading this right, but if I am, the permission to seek a trade only gives the Bills the right to talk to the player & his agent. (I wouldn't be shocked if the Eagles basically told his agent what their asking price was and turned him loose to see if he could get it.) I don't think the Public/Private Statements section (4) would be exempted just because Ertz has permission to seek a trade. It's pretty easy for me to imagine a prospective suitor using public statements to try to poison pill the trade and get the Eagles to just cut Ertz outright.

Yeah I'm pretty confused as to what prompted this thread. We signed a FA punter for less than what our incumbent punter would've cost. Maybe OP thinks we should've gone with an undrafted rookie, but still this is pretty tame. We re-signed Taiwan Jones, probably at roughly the minimum. Every team has a few "core" ST players that mostly don't play their official position, so again, not sure why this would provoke outrage. We let Andre Roberts walk for financial reasons. This is the opposite of what OP is upset about. All in all, it looks like we're focusing LESS on special teams in 2021 than we did in 2020.

I tend to agree. This FO has definitely earned the benefit of the doubt from me, and the offseason is far from over. So far though, it's hard to argue that this team is better now than they were when they lost to the Chiefs. Will be very interesting to see what moves are left. If it is only small stuff, I hope that the media asks them point-blank how they expect the team to get better. Both Beane & McDermott have been very up front all offseason that you need to always get better, so it's totally a fair question.

Ertz is under contract with the Eagles, so there's not much the team can say. The reporters know this, so they don't want to waste their limited time asking questions that won't be answered.

Oh yeah, definitely not taking anything as gospel. But both of these guys are pretty good at messaging, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There's more than one "coachspeak" answer for any situation, and the one that BBB/McD actually use does send a message. They could've focused more on "we're not done improving our team", but instead focused on "we can run with who we have". Now, maybe they're just trying to make sure no one trades in front of them and takes Travis Etienne. Or maybe they're planning on running it back unless something unexpected happens. (Like Etienne being available in the 2nd round, or an elite O-line prospect dropping to 30 or something.) If it's the latter, then I'm really curious what their plan is to be able to run enough to keep defenses honest. EDIT: At least against certain defenses. The run game was great some of the time, most notably to close out the Steelers game. But the Chiefs and a couple other teams basically dared us to run, and shut it down with just their front 4.

McDermott looks deeply unhappy to be having this press conference right now. This is why I usually keep my camera off during zoom meetings at work!