uncle flap Posted September 26, 2010 Share Posted September 26, 2010 Below is an article written by a friend of a friend with a funny take on buffalo's drafting woes. Credit to Adam S. I hope he doesn't mind me posting this I know there have been discussions on this topic ad nauseam, but this article is very well written and certainly worth a read by any bills fan. Enjoy Well Bills fans where do we go from here? And no, this isn't some rhetorical question. Seriously. Where do we go from here? In case you've been enjoying the last couple weeks of summer and haven't tuned into a Bills game, let me get you up to speed. This shouldn't take long. * Our offense is ranked 32nd in the NFL in yards per game. Pittsburgh, who is currently 31st, is 65 yards per game ahead of us. This is to say that this race isn't close folks. We are getting lapped. By everyone. * Our offense is ranked 32nd in the NFL in points per game. We have scored 17 points. In two games. Digest that for a moment if you don't mind. * Our offense is ranked 32nd in the NFL in yards per play, at 3.3. (By the way, you know there are only 32 teams in the NFL, right? I mean, if this were a marathon, or the class rankings at an Ivy League School, 32 would be okay. 32 would be pretty good, in fact. But when you're 32 out of 32, that's not so good). Again, we are averaging 3.3 yards per play. Um, that doesn't equal 10 yards if we run three plays. Just short, actually. How are we getting first downs again? * Our defense is doing a little better, but when your offense is dead last in most categories, I'm not sure how the D could do worse. In fact, they can't. Anyway, we're 20th in yards allowed per game. Eh. We're 22nd in points allowed per game. Eh. Teams can win games with this type of defense if they have a really good offense. I think it's pretty clear that we don't. Caught up now? Feeling nauseous yet? Yeah, me too. Earlier this week, your favorite Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan wrote a column about the Bills and their decade of drafting woes. He must have known that I had been thinking about doing something on this very topic for a couple of weeks now, and wanted to beat me the punch. Jerry! The Bills have said time and time again that they want to build through the draft. That seems to have been the plan for the past ten years: Draft players, and then plug holes here and there with free agents. That's fine. It's a good plan, especially for a team like the Bills that doesn't spend freely. The issue is this: What happens when you try to build through the draft, and almost every draft is a whiff of epic proportions? What happens then? I guess what happens then is that you have the longest active playoff drought in the NFL. And here we are. The easy way to do this would to be to pick out a few good players we've selected over the past few years, pick out a few bad ones, and see who we could have had instead. Or we could do this the hard way, and go through each draft of the past ten years and see what went wrong. Let's do this the hard way. I mean, we are Bills fans after all. What other way would there be? Thinking that nobody on this e-mail chain would want to read about ten years of drafting woes in one sitting, I decided to break this article into two parts. This week I'll focus on our drafts from 2001-05. Next week's Part II will address the second part of the decade, or what the history books will eventually refer to as "How Dick Jauron Ruined the Bills" or "Adam's Four Year Depression while Jauron Ruined the Bills" or "The Few Years Before Adam Took a Train to Philadelphia One Day and Assaulted Dick Jauron and Adam Ended Up in Jail For A Long Time". Any of those might work. Okay, on to the show. Part I: The Donahoe Years 2001 NFL Draft Rd. Pick Player Pos. School 1 21 Nate Clements CB Ohio State 2 46 Aaron Schobel DE TCU 2 58 Travis Henry RB Tennessee 3 76 Ron Edwards DT Texas A&M 3 95 Jonas Jennings OT Georgia 4 110 Brandon Spoon LB North Carolina 5 144 Marques Sullivan OT Illinois 6 178 Tony Driver S Notre Dame 6 195 Dan O'Leary TE Notre Dame 6 196 Jimmy Williams CB Vanderbilt 7 214 Reggie Germany WR Ohio State 7 238 Tyrone Robertson DT Hinds JC The Lowdown Tom Donahoe's first draft with the Bills. I told Sen the other night that this was a "home run draft". After some consideration, I'd like to change it to a sliding triple. This was a really, really good draft for the Bills. Maybe even a great one. Let's not confuse it with the 1974 Pittsburgh Steelers draft, and it's really not as great as the 1985 draft the Bills had, but this was a pretty good draft. Clements, Schobel, Henry. All Pro Bowlers. It's rare you get three Pro Bowl players in the same draft, but this actually happened! Jennings was a very good tackle. I know that Clements and Jennings left for San Francisco via free agency, but that doesn't change the fact that these guys were terrific players for the Bills. Henry obviously ran into some problems, but when he was in Buffalo, he ran hard and played hard. Insert the joke yourself, perv. Spoon started for a season at middle linebacker. All in all, this draft paid many dividends for the Bills. Donahoe crushes it in his first draft. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Hard to nitpick here, but for the sake of argument, let's nitpick anyway. The Bills were in need at WR, and could have grabbed T.J. Houshmanzadeh of Oregon State at the end of the 6th round. Hard to predict that 7th round pick Houshmanzadeh would have turned into a Pro Bowl WR, but that ponytail would have looked good in red, white, and blue. The Bills chose Williams and O'Leary instead of T.J. Speaking of O'Leary, notice that the Bills waited and waited in this draft to select a tight end. Please take note of this, for this becomes a theme. Fun Fact Bills 7th round pick Reggie Germany finished his career at Ohio State with a 0.0 GPA in his last semester. Yeah. You read that right. When pressed for details, Germany said, and I quote, "My GPA was bad because I never attended class. It wasn't bad because I did the work and failed." Atta boy, Reg. 2002 NFL Draft Rd. Pick Player Pos. School 1 4 Mike Williams OT Texas 2 36 Josh Reed WR LSU 2 61 Ryan Denney DE BYU 3 97 Coy Wire DB Stanford 5 139 Justin Bannan DT Colorado 6 176 Kevin Thomas CB UNLV 7 215 Mike Pucillo G Auburn 7 249 Rodney Wright WR Fresno St. 7 251 Jarrett Ferguson FB Virginia Tech 7 260 Dominique Stevenson LB Tennessee The Lowdown Yikes. If a great draft could be considered a "home run" draft, what's the opposite? Let's call it a "run home" draft. As in "Run home and tell your momma that the Bills just screwed themselves". The Bills pick of Williams at #4 looked great on paper. Too bad they don't play games on paper. Josh Reed never lived up to lofty expectations, despite being the Biletnikoff Winner as the best wide receiver in college football as a junior at LSU. (Thus, also proving that college awards don't mean a whole lot when it comes to the pros. Know what I mean, Eric Crouch?) Denney's best asset was being tall, and Wire was best known for pimping WPOP. Bannan actually turned out to be a decent, productive player, but his best days were in a Ravens uniform. Funny how that happens. I had always hoped that Stevenson would become a poor man's Damien Covington (R.I.P.), but he never did. A terrible draft that looks even worse eight years after the fact. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda We can start with taking Williams instead of the University of Miami's Bryant McKinnie, who was widely regarded as the best offensive lineman in all of college football that season. McKinnie went on to become a Pro-Bowl tackle. Williams went on to have a gregarious laugh. Perhaps the only people that were happy that McKinnie never made his way to Buffalo were the employees of the Miss Buffalo. Every team passed on Aaron Kampman until the Packers nabbed him in the 5th, but that would have been nice. Oh, and Bart Scott and James Harrison were available too. For the entire draft. They were later signed by the Ravens and Steelers, respectively. And not by us. Dis-respectively. Oh, and still not a high pick spent on a tight end. Fun Fact Rodney Wright had 13 catches for 299 yards and 2 touchdowns in the Silicon Valley Bowl against Michigan State. We were also reminded several times that he was David Carr's favorite target at Fresno State. As Carr spent most of his rookie year on his back, this fun fact seemed less fun as the season wore on. For us and for Carr. 2003 NFL Draft Rd. Pick Player Pos. School 1 23 Willis McGahee RB Miami, Fla. 2 48 Chris Kelsay DE Nebraska 3 94 Angelo Crowell LB Virginia 4 111 Terrence McGee DB Northwestern State 4 127 Sam Aiken WR North Carolina 5 151 Ben Sobieski G Iowa 6 187 Lauvale Sape DT Utah 7 228 Mario Haggan LB Mississippi State The Lowdown This is where Donahoe might have tried to get a little too cute. Remember how "everyone" said that Donahoe was tricked into taking McGahee because Drew Rosenhaus had McGahee on the phone? That was lame. Obviously, the Bills had some concerns about Travis Henry long-term (and those concerns proved to be accurate), but taking a running back coming off of major knee surgery with their first pick seemed a bit risky. A playoff team could have gotten away with it. We were not a playoff team. Kelsay was described as having a "high motor", one of many white Bills defensive linemen that would be described that way, Crowell was a good starter on defense for a couple of years, and Haggan and Aiken played major roles on special teams. The star of the class is obviously McGee. Getting a guy who can start at corner and who was a great kick returner in the 4th round is terrific value. This draft was alright. Not awful by any means. It gets a little worse in the next section though. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Instead of taking Willis, we could have had Dallas Clark. Or Nmandi Asomugha. I know we didn't have a need at CB, but we didn't have one at RB either. But we damn sure had a need at tight end. (Theme alert!) And in the 2nd round, we may have taken Anquan Boldin if we hadn't already had Biletnikoff Winner Josh Reed on our roster! We did take a defensive end in the 2nd. Too bad it wasn't Osi Umenyiora, who was taken eight spots after Kelsay. Then again, maybe Osi's motor wasn't as high. Oh, and the Chargers signed Antonio Gates after the draft, as he went undrafted. Sigh. Fun Fact A little bit about Willis McGahee that you may not have known: Likes: Dave & Buster's, neck tattoos, stiff arms, sun Dislikes: Snow, Buffalo gals, two good knees, grammar 2004 NFL Draft Rd. Pick Player Pos. School 1 13 Lee Evans WR Wisconsin 1 22 J.P. Losman QB Tulane 3 74 Tim Anderson DT Ohio State 4 109 Tim Euhus TE Oregon State 7 207 Dylan McFarland OT Montana 7 214 Jonathan Smith WR Georgia Tech The Lowdown Oh boy. This was another rough day at 1BD. I don't care what the statistics say. I think Lee Evans is a great talent, and if you put him on a team with a good QB today, he would put up some really good numbers. It's a shame that the Bills are wasting his talents. I am not saying he'd be a top wideout in the Moss/Johnson/Fitzgerald mold, but he'd certainly be in the next tier with guys like Colston/Holmes/Austin. More on that another time. J.P. obviously didn't work out, but wouldn't you rather have him than Trent right now? I mean, sort of? Believe me, I am not saying J.P. was the answer. I am just saying that a lot of people wanted to run him out of town and believed Trent was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He was not. Anderson was a bust, despite the words :"high" and "motor" being used about his play. What's that? We waited until the 4th round to draft a tight end? Strange. Fast Freddie Smith had his moments, but he could never get regular playing time. Still, the Bills get bonus points for signing a tight end from Arkansas after the draft and turning him into a Pro Bowl tackle. Jason Peters should be giving Jim McNally a healthy slice of that Philadelphia contract every year. Due to the fact that they traded a future #1 pick to acquire Losman, and the fact that they have still yet to help Evans reach his potential, I would say this draft was a bomb. At this point, Donahoe is 1.5 for 4. Not what we expected. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda I had always blamed Kerry Collins for the way this draft broke down for us. If he hadn't mailed it in so obviously in 2003, the Giants would have had a better record and may not have gone for a QB. This would have allowed Ben Roethlisberger to slide to us. Yes, I don't really blame Kerry Collins anymore. I know, Ben has won 2 Super Bowls. But he's a total scumbag and one more mental fart away from us hearing the words "And fighting in tonight's UFC undercard, former Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger!!!!!" So now I am okay with him not sliding to the Bills. Sorry, Kerry. In terms of things that were under our control, we could have taken Chris Cooley instead of Anderson. Also, Matt Schaub went in the 3rd round in this draft, and a lot of draft experts had him ahead of J.P. This is painful, isn't it? And for a team that loves white defensive ends and high motors as much as we do, how do we pass on Jared Allen, who went in the 4th? Wouldn't this have been an easy pick for the Bills brass? A layup. Instead, we took a tight end. In the 4th. I am starting to get sick, and we haven't even reached the Levy/Jauron/Brandon era yet. Good God. Fun Fact Before this draft, it was reported that our defensive line coach at the time, Tim Krumrie, wrestled Tim Anderson to test Anderson's strength or mettle or sanity or something. The thought of those two strapping on singlets and dry humping each other while coaches from other teams were watching film and interviewing players at desks and not on top of them on a mat makes me weep a little. Speaking of Krumrie, there was another rumor that before he watched film with his group each week, he would always begin each film session with a replay of his injury in the Super Bowl. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it was too good not to mention. 2005 NFL Draft Rd. Pick Player Pos. School 2 55 Roscoe Parrish WR Miami, Fla. 3 86 Kevin Everett TE Miami, Fla. 4 122 Duke Preston C Illinois 5 156 Eric King CB Wake Forest 6 197 Justin Geisinger G Vanderbilt 7 236 Lionel Gates RB Louisville The Lowdown Yes, the Bills finally used a top 3 pick on a tight end. Unfortunately, Kevin Everett's career ended with a serious neck injury. His story is inspiring, and that's all that needs to be said about that. There's nothing the Bills could do about this. Parrish is a nice player, who may finally see some snaps on offense this year. One of the best punt returners in the NFL makes him a nice grab in the 2nd round. The rest of the picks? Um, no. We were able to sign Jim Leohnard after he wasn't selected by anyone, but his best days have been in Baltimore and New Jersey. All in all, Parrish is a nice player, but when he's the only player from a draft that was only five years ago that has had some success in the NFL, it doesn't look very good for the Bills brain trust on this one. This was Tom Donahoe's last draft, and in the end, our supposed Football Savior didn't deliver as we had hoped. Mighty Casey had struck out. One great draft, one good one, two stinkers, and one absolute dump. Still, the Bills felt the need to hold on to Tom Modrak. Um, why? Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Now may be as good a time as any to let you know that when I write the "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda" sections, I understand that hindsight is 20/20. It's easy for me to sit here and Monday Morning Quarterback my way to the greatest team ever built by saying who we should have selected. All I am trying to do here is to point out who may have worked out better for the Bills in certain draft slots. I don't know, it's just that we've missed so often the last decade, you know? Remember when we didn't miss so much? Bill Polian, John Butler (R.I.P.), those guys didn't miss a whole lot. Double sigh. Let's move on. Tough to really say what we could have done differently here. The whole NFL seemed to misread this draft, as the best players in this draft- DeMarcus Ware, Aaron Rodgers, Roddy White, and Frank Gore went 11th, 24th, 27th, and 65th, respectively. Kerry Rhodes was taken the pick after Preston, and he would have been a great fit for us.Jay Ratliff certainly would have been a better player for us than Geisinger, but again, you never know with these things sometimes. Literally. It seems like we never know. We took a flier on Gates in the 7th, but perhaps Notre Dame's Ryan Grant would have been a better pick? Perhaps. Oh, and just for fun. Pretend we never moved up in 2004 to draft J.P. So we would have had the 11th pick in 2005, and after seeing Bledsoe struggle, would have been in the market for a quarterback. We pick Aaron Rodgers! Think about it how it would have worked for all involved. Rodgers wouldn't have sat in the Green room all that time, America wouldn't have felt so awkward watching him sit the whole time, and we would have finally had our franchise QB. Everyone wins! Fun Fact Derrick Johnson was the 15th pick in the draft. I met him once. There is a story that goes along with that. I told the story in an e-mail 2 1/2 years ago. Here it is: I saw Big Game Torry Holt, and then saw another NFL big name player and told everyone how the guy behind me was AFC rushing stud Larry Johnson. Well, it was actually Chiefs LB Derrick Johnson, and his hearing must be terrific, because he came over and corrected me. It went a little something like this: Me: Guys, look behind me, it's LJ! Look! Guys: (in unison) Where? Me: Uh, behind me. Larry Johnson! Derrick Johnson: (now standing next to me) Hey man, I'm DJ, not LJ. LJ's my teammate. C'mon man , get it right.....I'm a linebacker (he said this part a little more firmly) Me: (crapping myself) Guys: (silence) Me: Oh I'm sorry..... (Then I was about to go with the whole "Well you guys look alike" line, but I didn't want that to be misinterpreted, and I didn't want my face to be misinterpreted for a punching bag, so I produced this gem.)......Hey, Texas right? DJ: (walking away and turns, stops and nods) Me: Um, Hook 'em horns!! (attempts to make "Hook 'Em Horns" hand signal, but instead I send him the sign language for "I love you") DJ: (confused look appears on his face and then walks away) Guys: (disappointed look appears on their face, in unison, and walk away) Me: (confused and disappointed and unsure where I can walk away to since everyone has walked away from me, so I just stood there) The NBAPA Party.......where pissing off AFC Linebackers happens!!!! It's fun to reminisce. Part II will be in your inboxes next week! Try to contain your excitement! Anyway, we head to Foxboro on Sunday, with a new leader under center. Ryan Fitzpatrick gets the start in place of Justin Bieber, and if you didn't know where Fitz went to school, he went to Harvard. Did you know that? You probably didn't. Can't wait to hear the announcers mention that just once during the broadcast. Twice, tops. The Patsies have beaten us 13 times in a row. Isn't there a saying that "The 14th time is the charm"? There should be! Anyway, the last time we were in Foxboro was last season's opening game, on Monday Night Football. We had the game locked and loaded, but then the Pats remembered they were the Pats and the Bills remembered that Dick Jauron was our coach. That one was tough to take. I still remember one of my friends, who knows nothing about football, calling me after the game to see if I was okay, becuase he heard from one of his buddies that "Buffalo lost another heartbreaker". No Chris, I was not okay. And I am still not. But it was nice of you to ask. You never know what can happen, and if the Bills catch a few breaks, they might be able to make a little noise in this game. Maybe Spiller gets loose, Fitz makes a couple of plays, and the coaches decide that getting the ball to Lee Evans is kind of a good idea. Still, we're going into a hostile envrionment against a pretty talented team that plays very well at home and are angry after losing to the Jets last week. Lucky us. We've gotta gave faith though. Go Bills! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KD in CA Posted September 26, 2010 Share Posted September 26, 2010 Bad picks can happen, which is why I've never minded the Mike Williams miss that much, but there was never any excuse for selecting McGahee or giving up a king's ransom for Losman. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JPS Posted September 26, 2010 Share Posted September 26, 2010 A monkey could have thrown darts at any draft board and come up with more football players than Donohoe. At least we had a really bad director of pro player personnel to make up for TD's mistakes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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