Thurman#1

Nah.

Wouldn't like to have Rexy as a coach. But no, the money issue was understated, if anything. The dead space was the result of the need to free up cap space as quickly as possible, not the cause. Whaley had a middle-of-the-road roster without a QB and yet their cap situation looked like a team near the end of a Super Bowl window. They even had a chance to put post June 1st designations on a couple of their later cuts and they didn't. They wanted to take all the cap pain that year that year so they'd have cleared the cap superbly in just two seasons.

Money absolutely was an issue. The Bills were in poor cap shape at the start of a rebuild. That was something they spent two seasons digging their way out of. Money was a huge issue for the Bills at that time.

May have burned some fans bridges, but picking a higher contract isn't burning any bridges for team personnel. Nor is saying nice things about your new team once you get there. This irritated fans, but wasn't even a pea under 100 mattresses for the FO. Price and fit would be much much much bigger factors.

I'm sure they'd love to get him. I have drastic doubt they can afford him. Totally makes sense to kick the tires, though.

We don't need extra picks. Hell, we don't need much of anything. We sure could use some extra picks, though, always, whether for trade or for use. Can't speak for him, but I'd sure be interested, but it would depend on the complete terms of the deal, and I myself doubt we get much back beyond that first and, what, a 4th or a 5th this year? Which I probably wouldn't take.

It's generally the team that trades up that has to sweeten the deal. Not always, true. But far more often. That's not the Bills who "want players who are going to make an immediate impact." It appears to be you. The Bills have shown that they love their picks, particularly the top five rounds or so. The Bills might trade up. Or back. Generally they seem to like to trade up, but only just a bit, using 6ths or 7ths to sneak up a bit, outside gathering a ton of draft capital to move up for a QB.

IMO it's not as clear as all that. That's absolutely one of the possible reasons for what they've done. There's a solid chance that's the reason. I think another reason could be that they are more confident about Dane Jackson and the guys behind him that we are. I'm not, but perhaps they are. And they also may feel that the second CB is one of the least important spots in their defensive scheme. Still, I'm with you and would like to see them upgrade. I hope we see it fairly early.

For me, still high. It would still be a top three need, since Wallace is gone.

Interesting way to put it in perspective. I hadn't thought of it that way. Nice post.

Picking one guy, one draft pick, with the possible exception of your QB (only if he's elite) and pretending that has more than a small impact on whether you win a Super Bowl is ridiculous. The question is whether he was a good pick. And if you're wondering whether a tactic is smart, you look at whether smart teams use it. From this list, it's clear they do. Correlating draft picks like Mahomes and Brady to Super Bowl wins makes sense. There are very few people who you can say that about. Was Megatron a bad draft pick because he didn't win a Super Bowl? J.J. Watt? Earl Campbell? Dan Fouts? Tony Gonzalez? Bruce Smith? Jim Kelly? Thurman Thomas? Dan Marino? Super Bowl wins are SIMPLY NOT single guy achievements. About 99.5% of guys who win Super Bowls do so because they were drafted by the right team. It's not the other way around. Pretending it is makes zero sense. You judge a draft pick by how well he played. The large majority of that list were damn good picks. They succeeded at significantly higher rates than most first-rounders. It's been said, intelligently, that win-loss record is not a QB stat. That's correct. It's a team stat. There's a reason why the actual name of that stat is "Team Record in Games Started by this QB (Regular Season)." It's not a QB stat. It's also not a WR stat. Or a CB stat. Or an OG stat. It's a team stat. Much less so is Super Bowl wins an individual stat. Again, a team stat.

I do hear you, but I totally disagree. Bates is serviceable, as we saw. But as we also saw last year, you can't count on guys playing at the same level the next year. Feliciano had been pretty good in 2020. He regressed quite a bit last year. So did Daryl Williams, who'd been really good at tackle in 2020, but wasn't the next year. If our top five do play without regression, we've got a pretty solid line. How often does that happen, that all five guys play without regression and without missing a game? And how good is our #6? If one guy goes out, we suddenly see guys moving all around, a lack of continuity and a major drop where the #6 fits in. The way we saw it happen last year. Outside CB2 our lineup looks really good everywhere as long as there is no regression and no injuries. But that's not the way to bet. IMO they have a real need for either a guard/tackle flexible guy or a center/guard flexible guy. Or maybe both. Saffold is on a one-year contract and Morse is aging. IMO at least one of those is a top three need.

Um, no I called it irrelevant because it was irrelevant. Having literally everything to do with drafting an OL in the first round doesn't mean it's therefore relevant. You could say, "The OLs drafted in the first round have all had last names starting in consonants." True or not, that would have been all about drafting OLs in the first, and completely irrelevant. You said, "My wording was lazy. I just don't think taking the 3rd, 4th or 5th best OL that early is smart. " Irrelevant. Whether your OL is the 1st, 3rd, 4th or 5th best OL has zero importance. All that matters is whether or not he's good enough to be picked as BPA where their pick is. The folks who've already been picked are irrelevant to your decision when it's your pick. Only the unpicked prospects matter. If the Bills have a guard evaluated with a grade of 8.1, and no other player above 8.0 is left on their board, it would be completely irrelevant whether before the draft the Bills had that guard as the best OL or the 5th best. If they'd had five OLs ahead of him, with grades of 8.2 to 8.5, and those five are gone, they're as irrelevant as any of the other players who'd already been taken. Completely so. It only matters who's BPA on the board at a position of need.

Dynamic players at high impact positions don't win Super Bowls. That's one factor, of course. There are many others. It's far more complicated than just this cliche above. A ton of other things are as important or more so, such as having a great QB, such as your franchise QB staying uninjured, having a roster that is consistently solid across the board, having players that fit the system, having a good system, continuity, a good strength and conditioning staff, good play callers, depth, and it goes on and on. If you have terrific skill position guys and a weak center and a decent guard whose backup is poor and that guard gets injured, your season is likely going to have great problems regardless of all those good guys at dynamic positions. Even when only roster is considered, it's far more complicated than just getting guys at the positions you're calling dynamic. Arguably our most impactful player outside of Allen last year was Bates. When he came in the improvement was palpable. Imagine if we'd had someone much better at guard right from the beginning. Which is why IOL is a need for the Bills on nearly every list you see.

Your stat shows the opposite. If out of 13 times it happened in ten years, two teams won Super Bowls, that's really really good. That's far above expectations. Only eight teams have won Super Bowls in that time. But the whole idea of examining that bit of data is ridiculous, most especially because the sample size is too small to have any significance. You can't take one draft choice and pretend that's the reason a team won or didn't win the Super Bowl. In the last ten years, maybe - possibly - ten players drafted made a significant difference in teams winning a Super Bowl. Most of them QBs or pass rushers. Maybe 10 guys. Your idea here is ridiculous. What you want to look at is this ... 1) How many guards drafted in the first were good players? And the answer to that is that an awful lot of them were. Probably because it's an easier position to evaluate for college success in the pros among highly talented guys. 2) How many smart teams have made this move? And again, the answer is that a pretty fair number of the teams that did it were smart. It's a smart move ... depending on the situation, of course. If there's a better more impactful guy there, you ought to grab him instead. If there isn't, it's often smart to pick a guard if he's BPA at a position of need. And guard is a position of need for this team.

I agree he might make a move or two, particularly using 6ths or 7ths to move up, something he does very often. But you don't need 8 rookies to make the team. Making the practice squad can be just as useful. Might we lose a guy that way? Sure, it's possible. Also very possible we would not.

Wouldn't it be news? It absolutely would. Because again, he didn't say it was 1st round. That's pure guesswork by folks on here hearing what they want to hear. And yet, it is in fact news, as it's on twitter and there's now a 22 page thread based on nothing but this very undetailed tweet. And if Peter King heard something, he would have been perfectly happy to say that he heard something. He does that all the time. But you said it yourself, he "speculated." That ain't news, it's educated guesswork. And there's nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with reading that King guessed, and then, as you did here, saying that he "likely heard something." Again, he was speculating. Again, he had that Giants note in his weekly, "10 Things I Think I Think" section. Not the "Factoids" section or any other. https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2022/03/21/deshaun-watson-browns-davante-adams-raiders-nfl-fmia-peter-king/?cid=nbcsports He didn't say anything about the Bills being part of that, or at least not in that same article. Nothing. Could you possible be talking about the article by Chris Trapasso mentioning King's speculation and speculates about four possible teams who might fit the bill? Totally without any idea that he had any information on it? Titled "Exploring first-round trades Giants could make to gain extra draft capital"? Subtitled, "The Giants have two first-round picks, could they actually move one?" https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/news/2022-nfl-draft-exploring-first-round-trades-giants-could-make-to-gain-extra-draft-capital/ In that article, Trapasso says this, "The Giants are starting a new era with coach Brian Daboll and GM Joe Schoen, and with the regime change comes unpredictability as to how the G-Men will operate in the draft. They appear to be ready to ride with quarterback Daniel Jones for at least one more season. We don't know much else." And this. "Let's examine four possible trades the Giants could make on the evening of April 28th." Nothing else. Nothing about any source. He's trying to put together a list of his own, of teams that could possibly be interested IF the Giants are actually interested. There's nothing here. Again, since many seem to have missed this, Zig Fracassi, the guy who put out the tweet did NOT say the trade he referred to would/could be in the 1st round. The folks here assuming that it must be about the first round are suffering from confirmation bias. If he'd meant it about the first round specifically, he could have virtually guaranteed his tweet would get a ton more attention, retweets and so on by mentioning the round. He did NOT.

No, that's a terrible perspective to see it from. Here's one that's much clearer. The ball is obscuring the official's face. Rousseau isn't even in the picture. It's only allowing me to post tiny PNGs, but here's a wider but shorter version of the same photo, screenshotted off my International GamePass video, in a side angle shot. If you could see the whole screen, you'd understand it's really really obvious nobody is even near the ball. Rousseau didn't even get close.

I also have a vague memory of him saying something like this. What he essentially meant - if I remember right - was that consistency is something he needed to work on and upgrade, that all great QBs have to have this. That great ones have to minimize bad performances.

Yup. Wildly unlikely. And as I'm sure many have noted, the original Fracassi tweet doesn't ever refer to the 1st round. The could be thinking of - for example - moving Moss to move up in the 4th.

Yeah. Doesn't seem this retweet is necessarily even about this. That's certainly one explanation, but there are plenty of equally reasonable others. IMO he could be back later depending on price and how the roster looks.

This had thought behind it. The ones that were shut down were mostly someone having a vagrant thought shoot through his mind and expressing it, generally a thought that had been expressed before many times, often nothing more than one or two sentences along the lines of "I like this" or "we should do that." This thread is a ton more thoughtful and has, as Hap has said several times, more substrate for discussion, than many of those other, far poorer threads.

Those are certainly legitimate opinions.

OL might be off the table for you folks. Doesn't mean it's off the table for Beane. Likely it's not. Guard could very easily be the pick, if they like one of the two or three or at absolute most four guards this year who appear to be good enough to be considered BPA at #25: Penning if they think he could transition to guard, Kenyon Green, Zion Johnson, and maybe Kinnard if they have him that high. Probably they think one or two of those might be a possible BPA, a guard and a fit with the kind of player they want there. They might not. Equally, they might. WR, CB, IOL and DL will probably be the positions they will consider to be positions of need at this point and reasonable first round considerations. Later, other positions will also be considered, IMO.

Regardless of who said what, the league is absolutely not about stacking offense and offensive playmakers. It's about playmakers at QB, and having a few others, on both sides of the ball. It's about eliminating major holes by putting together a roster with consistent talent. It's not about depth, until it is, and at that point, depth is huge. And it's about system fit and system resiliency. As noted above, the Rams didn't have a great offense. Both sides of the ball are big.