Shaw66

I'd guess that about now, Beane's shutting down meaningful free agency discussions. I mean, sure, if an unexpected opportunity arises, he'll move, but the draft is looming. I'd think his days are full directing the finalization of the board, and discussing potential draft-related moves - trading picks for players, players for picks, picks for picks. He needs to be in position to deal during the draft, and now is when those conversations are going on with other teams. He's still looking at the cap while he's doing all of that, because changes in draft position affect his cap exposure, as well as changes in the number of picks, as well as the impact of players coming or going in trades for picks. It's a big poker game. And I'd bet Beane is an excellent poker player.

I never know if people are being cynical when they say the cap is a myth. Hearing you say it confirms my view. It certainly is not a myth, it's just a black box that we can't possibly understand, because we don't know what conversations Beane is having with players, agents, the league (about where the cap is going), etc., etc. All I know is that it's more myth to me than it is to you.

Cool. Thanks. In other words, the Diggs $8 million will cover in-season needs plus another relatively inexpensive FA or two. Thank heaven for you guys who take the time to understand this. I just want to know if my GM is mortgaging the future and whether he has continuing room for moves. Sounds like he does. Beane makes it look easy - add talent, restructure, add talent, restructure, add talent.

If it's $10-11 for Diggs, and $8 for the rookies, Bills are right up against it. I thought I'd seen something in this thread that said Diggs' cap hit was going down this year. I'm not a cap guy at all, but I thought teams generally like to go into the season with a few million to cover in-season acquisitions. All this means (1) let's wait until Spotrac gets some reliable numbers and (2) Overdorf probably still has some tinkering to do. Where can Overdorf play with numbers: Not to start a wide-ranging argument on one subject or another, if they extend Edmunds, can they move any of his current cap hit downstream? I've wondered, as have others whether Poyer might get traded. Are there savings there? Is there a White restructure? Bottom line for me is I trust the process. Beane knows what he needs, both in cap space and in talent, and he will continue to work both to get where he wants to go. He's proven to be unpredictable, Saffold, Miller, and Diggs being only some of the recent examples. I'm expecting the Bills' draft picks to be changing. I won't be surprised if the Bills trade picks for a player, or trade a player for picks. If it's the latter, the Bills then will package picks to move up for a player they want in the early rounds. Beane's been the most interesting GM to watch since Donahoe.

"Start" hitting on picks? Allen, Singletary, Davis, Rousseau, Spencer Brown, Oliver, Tyler Bass, Dawson Knox, Dane Jackson, Siran Neal. Maybe you missed these, but I think Beane already has started.

A week or two ago, when asked about what the Bills were going to do about Diggs, Beane said what he often says - we have a good relationship with Diggs and agent, and these things happen when the time is right. He pretty clearly implied that we shouldn't expect anything for months or maybe even next year. The fact is that although Beane is very frank about some things that already have happened, he simply tells us nothing about what's coming. I admire that discipline in him. The table is now set for Allen-Diggs to become one of the all-time great duos in NFL history. The future isn't guaranteed, but these two guys have the talent and the work ethic of Peyton and Harrison, and the talent.

Joe raises some very important questions and then just concludes that the Bills will be able to solve them. I'm not so sure. One is that Miller appears to be much better on the left side of the defense, and the Bills don't have anyone proven to play the right. Rousseau only plays the left, Epenesa hasn't shown much, nor has Basham. Lawson plays the left, too. I don't see a solution to that. Maybe Miller will play the right more this season, but Joe B points out that the Broncos figured out that he's better on the left, and the Rams seemed to figure it out, too. More of a problem, I think, is that Miller lines up wide, without a hand on the ground. The Bills rarely put their DEs wide. Joe says they don't because they're okay with forcing the running back to the outside, because the linebackers and DBs are good at shutting down the run out there. Lining up wide lets Miller pick his route to the passer, but it also creates a gap to his inside for the running back, a gap that Edmunds has never shown he can control very well. McDermott and Frazier are smart, and I suspect they're already working on adjustments. I can't imagine that the Bills spent the money on Miller to use him in a style that limits his effectiveness. The whole point of getting him was to have a finisher, and if he's going to be a finisher the Bills have to put him in the best position to do what he does. That means a right defensive end is going to have step up (AJ, Boogie, Shaq, or Rousseau), and the Bills' back seven will have to learn to shut down the off-tackle runs that Miller's style may give up.

Dolphins forgot what GB appended when they let Welker go to NE.

Sports Illustrated did an article a month or two ago about all the guys (about 10) whose entire NBA career consisted of playing one game and recording no stats. Signed to a 10-day contract, get into one game at mop-up time, ran up and down the floor a few times, and soon were out of the league. As you say, Wade had two nifty runs and a touchdown. I would like to have been in his skin for those moments.

Apparently, she now is his wife, so he got US citizenship, which means he can stay in the US. I thought his comments about how difficult is were interesting. The details he had to master overwhelmed him - in rugby, you just have to know the rules and go play, and he had the athletic ability to do that. In football, he was way behind the curve, and couldn't catch up. If you think about it, college basketball players who become tight ends are about the only athletes who make it in pro football without having played football through high school and college. Even someone like Marquise Goodwin, who split his time between football and track, always struggled with being a fully-developed football player. Playing at the NFL level is much more specialized than it looks to us, just sitting in front of the TV.

I really wanted it to work. Such a cool story. Interesting to see if he catches on anywhere else. I'd guess not - he's had a long look, and if he had NFL-talent, the Bills would be bringing him to camp.

Among the many great things we have to celebrate as Buffalo Bills fans is Ryan Fitzpatrick. I mean, his time in Buffalo made me a TO fan and all, but whenever I see this play, I smile about Fitz. I've said here many times that TO had a long string of 1000-yard seasons that was broken the year he was in Buffalo (and restarted the next season), but the only reason that happened was that Trent Edwards was the Bills' QB for the first half of the season. Edwards proved that season that a Harvard education is better than a Stanford education, because when he was starting Edwards couldn't figure out to look for TO on every play. When Fitz got on the field, he targeted TO over and over. TO had 280 yards in the first half of that season, and 550 the second half.

You know, I've found myself have these feelings over the past month too, the pinch-me-this-can't-be-real feeling. It's so much fun. (Stop here if you don't want a serious dose of reality.) As with everything else, however, there are alternate realities than can play out from here, and they aren't all joyous. In some ways, all we're doing is having a different kind of we-won-the-off-season moment. The feeling is real, but it will be permanent only if this team seals the deal, and that is very far from a certainty. So, yeah, it feels great - it really does, but that's the fan in us that makes us feel that way. Beane, McDermott, and the players aren't feeling it. They're focusing on ten months of hard work to achieve a better result than they've had in the past two seasons. As far as they're concerned, they haven't won anything yet. I feel bad for guys like Beasley and Hughes and Addison, guys who gave everything they had to win a Super Bowl, guys who could see this team becoming a team that had a shot, and now their opportunity is gone. The Bills need to get it done. I'm sure that's the feeling the in clubhouse, not the euphoria we feel watching highlights and conveniently ignoring the final scores.

That's a great list, and I appreciate your taking the time to put it together. But you'll have to do more research to disprove my point. What your list proves is that there are good guards to be had in round one. I never said there weren't, and I agree there are. What I said was that teams don't want to spend what they have to spend to keep good guards in their option years and as they hit free agency. So, there's a greater tendency that you'll lose your first round pick in free agency. When you draft a corner back who makes the Pro Bowl, you gladly pay the price of the option year, and you extend. Same with an offensive tackle. But with a guard, you end up paying the price of a top 5 guard to keep him, and that's more money than most teams want to allocate to a guard as they plan their cap spending. There are plenty of good guards, sure, and you can draft one if you want. Look at your list. 20 guards drafted in the first round in 20 years. That's one a year. 22 starting position on the team, two of them are guards, that would suggest that 10% of the players taken in the first round would be guards. It's not close to that. Teams don't draft guards in the first round. Three or four tackles will go in the first round, never three or four guards.

Of course guards can help a lot. The point is that at 25, the best you can hope for is that you're going to a guy who turns out to be really good at his position, like a Tre White. The difference is that after four years, if you have a Tre White, you're happy to exercise the fifth-year option and pay what it takes to keep him long-term, because his position is so important. Guard just isn't that important a position. If you have good tackles and a good center, you can find people to play guard, which is exactly what the Bills have been doing. Bates, Ford, Boettger, and Saffold isn't a bad plan going into OTAs. Now, granted, when there's a true stud guard in the draft, it's a different story, but that's a guy who's going in the top 10. The Bills aren't drafting there. Some positions are more important than others. Quarterback, left tackle, edge, corner. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the long snappers and punters, which are the extreme cases, but among the starting 22, guards and tight ends are at the bottom. The NFL contract requirements make it unwise to go after a guard in the bottom of the first round. You can find a guy in the second round who's likely to be nearly as good and doesn't bring with him the contract problem that the guy in the first round does. For an important position, like offensive tackle, the contract problem is worth it, for a guard, it isn't.

The whole point is that there are five ten or more possible "best passes of his career," and the collection of the five or ten already is among the best 5 or 10 of any QB in NFL history. And, we could have the same debate about the top 5 or 10 best RUNS, and that collection already is among the 5 or 10 best runs of any QB in NFL history. Amazing.

Obviously, you touched a nerve with this one. Every time I see that play and watch the release, I wonder how it was possible to throw that pass. It looks miraculous, like a cartoon of the road runner disappearing into a cloud of dust, and then the ball comes out.

The amazing thing about Josh and this discussion is that once it starts, it keeps going and going. The list of Josh's great plays already puts in the all-time greats in the category. There probably is no other player in the league who is legitimately in the running for best NFL play of the season for four consecutive seasons. Without looking through hours of video, just guessing, what players in the history of the league might we be able to say that about? Jim Brown? OJ, Sanders, and a few other running backs. Jerry Rice and maybe a couple other receivers. To be honest, probably no other quarterbacks, with the possible exceptions of Vick, Mahomes, Lamar, Russell Wilson, and Tarkenton. Maybe Deion Sanders. Obviously, this is a stupid category for ranking players all-time, but Allen already is on the shortlist of guys who make spectacular plays in the NFL. Interesting that you mention a group text. I was at the game, and the fans around me, including me, were delirious. Nobody could have imagined such a thing. Sometime late in the game I turned to my seatmate and asked, "Have the Bills scored a touchdown on every possession?" It couldn't be possible, could it? And against the Patriots! "Unbelievable" is hopelessly overused, but not in this case. It was unbelievable.

I agree with this. And there's another point that is relevant to the discussion between BullBuch and Hapless, and that is that it's pointless to try to evaluate what Beane did or didn't do in a vacuum. Beane's given us some good insights into his job, when he talked about how he had to juggle things to get the Von Miller deal done. What he meant was that he was working on multiple deals simultaneously, and while he was committing resources to McKissick, he couldn't overcommit on another guy or he wouldn't be able to the Miller deal. He's thinking Saffold and what it will take to get him, and where he has to go with the oline if he does or doesn't get Saffold. So, what resources to commit to Bates is a question mixed in and being answered simultaneously with the Miller question and the Saffold question and the Settle question, and some other questions about other players we don't know about because the deal didn't happen. Beane had to make the best decisions he could as all of that was unfolding, and the outcome of it was that he may have overpaid for Bates in some actual-value sense. But Beane could have been making the right decisions as facts presented themselves, and all it really means is Beane got through the process with one question left: how much can we spend on Bates? Chicago told him how much it had to be, and Beane just had to decide if he could, or would, pay that much. He'd already decided that he could live with either outcome.

A decade too late. The rules have been stupid for years, obviously stupid, and the NFL for its own purposes refused to recognize it. They had to wait until the whole country could see that one team was getting screwed before they changed it.

I don't disagree. The cost should be the cost, period.

Soldier field is a brand new stadium. They kept the facade and built a new stadium inside it. Wrigley field seats 40,000. If you want to remove the upper deck at HighMark and have 40,000 for Bills games, sorry, that doesn't meet NFL minimums. Literally hundreds of smart people have worked for 10 years to find the best solution to a new stadium in Buffalo. When they all finally agree on a path forward, some people think that they have a better idea. If there was a better idea, some people would have suggested it before now. And the real problem with seat licenses, as you point out, is that they often become worthless. The Jets forced a lot of people to buy seat licenses, and three years later they were selling season tickets in the same section without requiring a PSL. So why did those people have buy them?

Read the articles. It's not economically feasible to rebuild the stadium It would cost nearly as much to rebuild the stadium as to build the new one, the rebuild stadium would have a shorter life span, and it wouldn't be as nice. The options are build a stadium or lose the team. Pretty simple. Sounds like you're prepared to lose the team. I'm not a New York State taxpayer, so I'm all for a new stadium. I can see how some state and local taxpayers might feel differently.

Thanks. That's excellent analysis. Still, I'd say the trade up is still a possibility, and that's driven by the desire to get quality over quantity. Reducing the number of guys who might earn spots on the 53 helps the cap, and increasing the quality helps the team. Particularly because there are two positions of serious need, I think Beane will look for ways to move up for a stud at one of those positions. However, I also see your point. Trading out of the first round to get two guys in the second and third round also has appeal.

Yeah, I agree with that. But at 25, or at any place Buffalo could reasonably trade up to, you're not finding a generational guard. Beyond #5 or in a really good year, #10 or #12, you're just talking about good football players. So if there's a general talent at guard this season, the Bills aren't getting him. And what I said still holds. If you aren't taking a generational talent, taking a really good guard is like taking a really good long-snapper. Guard just isn't a position that you look to fill with an All-Star. Might you one day? Yes, if the stars align. But you're not looking for guards in the first round. You just fill in your guard spots as you can. And, by the way, once in a while you get a guy in the second or third round who turns out to be a great talent and you have him for a long time.