Thurman#1

"... overalll evaluation of talent if questionable at best"? Nonsense. The Bills went 13-3 last year. They're one of the best teams in the league. And while, yes, a lot of that is Allen, no, it's not all Allen, the team around him is very good. Yeah, Allen is a big part of it. But equally you can say the same thing for the Chiefs, Bengals, and on and on, really. Of course you need and excellent QB to compete. But you also need a good lineup. After some of the kvetching that goes on here, including yours, you'd swear they were a 3-13 team. Far from perfect, they're still damn good at talent evaluation, though they still need to get better (though every team in the league can and will say the same thing). We're likely to see RT competition addressed at some point, whether in the draft or in later FA. Certainly Brown wasn't good enough last year. But people who want to pretend that a guy with back surgery recovery and no real off-season before his second year was absolutely playing at his ceiling are just kidding themselves. Up till the end, reasonable. but to think they "returned zero" in Edmunds, Oliver, Groot and Elam is flagrant twaddle. Those were/are three mainstays of an excellent team and one future mainstay in Elam who was not there yet last year but shows every sign of being very good in the very near future if not immediately.

One of the most complete every year comes near the draft when Astro does his list of Bills meetings. He has serious connections. But everyone has different connections. Cover1 said that when the Bills had dinner with Bijan Robinson, that Roschon Johnson came along. That made me happy. I'd love Roschon.

That they know about. Ryan Talbot says Wright has scheduled a private visit. https://nfltraderumors.co/2023-nfl-draft-visit-tracker/ There are a lot of people trying to compile all of this kind of stuff.

Dawkins is very good. Not elite but very good. We have to figure some things out, but not at LT. The question is whether and how deeply they believe in Brown at RT. My sense is that they believe in him deeply enough that they don't want to draft a high-rounder to compete with him. But I could definitely be wrong about that. EDIT: I'm also generally a big fan of getting more picks.

Well, that would be yet another excellent reason - IMO - not to go RB in the first. We need to pass primarily, and should take the ball out of Josh's hands as little as possible. It's not as if we're wildly unusual about passing a lot. We were 11th in the league last year in pass percentage. We don't need to throw less. Kansas City was 8th. Cincy 5th. Joe Buscaglia has been talking up Roschon Johnson in the 4th. I finally looked at a bit of video. Yikes!! Me likey!!

He's the best cover guy we have at this stage. At that stage, he wasn't. That's why he didn't start. He was really good at man-to-man, which he did almost exclusively in college, but lacking at zone, which is most of what the Bills do. Not playing a guy who's not good enough to play yet isn't wasting time. It's making sense. It's what nearly every team will do, play their best guy. Especially for a team that made a high priority of getting the #1 seed last year. Made total sense. And you can learn on the bench, playing part time and getting coached through the week. Which showed as he got a bunch better at zone and near the last few games of the season started to look very good.

At #27? Neither.

Come on, Davis hasn't had poor production at all. Not great production is very different from poor production. Particularly for a 3rd year 4th rounder whose injury caused him to miss two games and play hobbled in two more. On Cover1 today, Ant pointed out that if that injury hadn't happened, he'd likely have put up a thousand yards and the narrative would be very different. Agreed adding a solid WR would be very good. I doubt Zerovoltz would disagree either with that part of your post. He is a Chiefs fan. He's not a troll. However, it was April 1st, and that's worth considering.

A true running machine where we run 40%? IMO, no such thing. Some of that 40% will come when we are well ahead and drastically raise our run percentage for part of several games. That would mean that most of the season we'd be running at somewhere around a 36 - 38% pace. Just over a third. Some of those runs will be by Josh, even if we don't use him on many called runs. About 120 Josh runs each of the last two years., out of 430 and 461. Cut Josh's runs down to 75, as an example, though I doubt they'll ever go quite that low while he's young and tough. That'd end with the RB carries being somewhere around just above a third of somewhere in the general neighborhood of 360 - 390 runs. I don't see anyone calling that a running machine. Nor should we try to get an offense that looked like a running machine. We should try to get better. Very questionable whether that is worth a 1st round RB. IMO, it just ain't. We platoon anyway and Cook would take a lot of carries from whoever it is. Don't see it, myself. We heartily approve this message. Hadn't looked enough at any high RBs to notice that, but if true that is a major major strike against acquiring them in this offense.

Not saying I've got to have him. But his RAS score says he's the Bills type. I'm no expert, but when I watched he was pushing the pocket a lot and physically dominating. The Bills could use a guy like that. There's an argument either way, I think, but I wouldn't mind a DT if they like him.

Fair enough. IMO he's a good enough player that I wouldn't mind.

What is wrong with you folks? Wish him the best and move on. He's got some things NFL teams want. That's why he's still around. He'll never be a starter, but he has some things that are valued. It's not like most 2nd and 3rd stringers are secret Peyton Mannings.

I'd take Mazi Smith. But to each their own. Me, I'm still thinking.

Yes, he has reason to be frustrated. So do 31 QBs every year. Football is built that way.

Um, no. Knox is excellent and Davis is a legit #2. Chiefs WRs are probably two #2s and three good #3s. Overall, KC's offense w/out considering QBs is better but not wildly so. Mahomes made that WR group look better than it was. More, looking back at KC's offense in their other SB-winning year, they had Kelce, Tyreek and not much else anywhere, including the line. Right now, Mahomes is #1. It shouldn't be a question. An uninjured Josh is close behind, and he has a chance to re-write that narrative over time.

I believe you missed the point when you said, "The issue of it being a weak draft is really not in play. It's about perceived value, needs of the team, and a desire to get their player especially if trading up or back makes sense." It being a weak draft is absolutely in play, without the slightest question. Yeah, it's the three factors you cited, but in weak drafts there will precisely be fewer players with perceived value and lower desires to get guys with less talent. Yes, your three factors matter, but there are certainly other factors, certainly including the weak draft. If that's your premise, it's unclear what you mean. If you mean "on the cheap" compared to the traditional draft pick chart, I think you're wrong. Players at any given pick are likely to be less better than the guys available to you at your original pick than in strong years. There aren't as likely to be as many teams as usual offering trade-ups at the value they'd give in ordinary years. So if teams aren't willing to accept trade-downs with a bit lower rewards than usual, I expect we won't see many trades. If you mean "on the cheap" meaning compared to the differential of scouting scores between the players, I'd expect things to look much like normal, but with teams that want trade-downs saying, "Hey, look at the draft pick charts, you're not offering enough," and the teams that want trade-ups saying, "Hey, we want the guy, but not that much. He's not worth a #27 in most years." I can see someone trading up for Bijan, absolutely, depending how far he falls. IMO, we'll see trade-ups and trade-downs, but perhaps fewer and for less of return for the team trading down. Some teams are desperate and think they're smarter than everyone else. It's the idea behind Massey-Thaler. We'll see a few, I think.

You're missing the point here. Weak drafts don't make teams that want to trade up say, "Well, we really like this guy and his value here, so it's a weak year, so we'll only offer 10%." Weak drafts make teams say "Jesus, that's all that's left? Yes, teams always look to trade forward and back. But the weakness or strength of a draft will always affect the number of players you want to trade up or down for and the price you willing to pay. The grades teams use aren't year-adjusted. Not every team has every guy graded the same, obviously. But the reason it's a weak draft is because in a strong year you might have - for example - 23 players with first round grades and 34 players with 2nd round grades, while in a weak year you might have, as Bill does, 12 players with first round grades. Now, not every team would say 12. Almost surely there are some differences. Some teams might say 10. Others 15. But it's highly unlikely anyone has, say 23 this year. So at 27 this year you're not going to give the same thing you'd have given last year at 27 when you'd have been getting a guy graded maybe 6.9 or 7.0, where your highest graded guy this year at the same spot is graded by your scouts as a 6.7. When your turn comes, there will be probably no players with grades about 7.0, for instance. Last year there might have been eight guys left that your team grades above 6.8. This year, zero. Your highest graded player is less talented, your scouts say, than the guy they could have traded for last year at #27. Are you going to give the same amount for a less talented player? Not if you're a smart capitalist. If you're lucky, you'll have a really different grade on somebody than the others all do. But if you do, it might be because you're wrong.

Yeah, the rules you are following there are indeed rules for mock drafts. Not real ones. And add #1 picks? Plural? When we have the #26 pick or very close in each round? Please. The mock engines are fun, but they make it easier to trade than it generally actually is, because it's more fun that way for the customers, internet draft fans. There are several draft charts, but all of them give roughly the same message on the theoretical trades here. The draft engine is giving you unrealistically high values. And why not? They want people to feel like a genius and like they want to come back. #27 680 points #59 310 points #91 136 points #130 42 points #137 37.5 points #205 7.8 points That's 1213.3 points, a value about halfway between the 11th and 12th pick. Teams that trade up generally have to give a bit of a premium, 20% or so, but there are plenty of times when a GM doesn't get that good an offer. If it were really as easy as you make it look here, teams would do it all the time, especially stable GMs along the lines of a Belichick. It isn't that easy. Belichick did pull it off a few times, but found people learned from watching and didn't want to do it anymore, particularly when the Pats picks came so late in the round. As ours do.

Reasonable if you've got it. That's simply a bad argument, that Tremaine is at fault any more than anyone else. Just as easy and ridiculou to say, "Yeah, look at all those Lombardi trophies Josh Allen brought during his five years."

He does mention Harris in the 2nd paragraph and says he pointed the article towards the top financial commitments. Harris comes with only $1.7M for one year, so fairly legit. And yeah, I subscribe and think it's worth it. I love longer articles myself, if they're not fluffed out, and the Athletic articles have a ton of interesting content, IMO.

You're probably right that it wouldn't be as severe as what happened to LA. But yeah, it would start in on crippling the future. Have you seen where our cap is for next year, 2024? Even right now we're projected at being about $17M OVER the cap. Already!!!! Add in $40M over this year and next year for Hopkins and things will look a lot worse. And yes, we can do renegotiations. Which will simply add on to what we owe the next year or two. That's all these renegotiations do, is borrow money from our future cap years.

Yeah, Elam did have a good first start. Then teams figured out that he was as yet a liability in zone coverage and used that to make him look consistently bad. He learned all year how to improve himself and yeah, he had a good game against Cincy. He looked like he has figured things out and gotten a lot better. I'm expecting to see an awful lot of him next year and mostly liking it.

Possibly so. But if the Rams had had a young Josh Allen as their QB rather than an old Matt Stafford, that decision would have been catastrophically dumb. We have 12 - 15 years to be competitive. We'll win one or more. The Rams only had another year or two. It was still a desperate risk for them, but when your window obviously ends extremely soon, desperate risks that greatly handicap you in the future make more sense.

And there's always a wildly entitled fan so spoiled, so desperately believing they deserve special treatment that they are willing to deceive themselves that a 13-3 season (in a season when one of their teammates died on the field, when there was a mass shooting, two blizzards with multiple fatalities, the first time in history when a team has had three away games in twelve days) followed by a playoff win and a playoff loss with almost half the defense out or injured ... is equal to "eating a plate of poo." Easiest male Karen demonstration in the world.

A chance? Yeah, sure. But IMO if they don't bring in further competition there in FA or the early rounds, it will likely be a failure. But anyway, your draft was thought-provoking and interesting. Thanks!! I didn't agree with it all but I liked it.