Shaw66

I agree. It will be interesting.

Looking at that list, what does it say about where McDermott expects leadership to come from. He knows, the players know, who has to step up. Where does it come from: Milano and Taron Johnson, maybe Rousseau. Who's the leader in the backfield? Putting a lot on Rapp. On offense, it for sure falls on McGovern, who's moving to center and needs to be able to win at the position, learn to work with a new guy on both sides. And Allen, but Allen's good as a leader and just will get better. There'll be some veteran free agents, too, and they'll be brought in intentionally to be leaders. Still, it's going to be a different team.

Wow. You are on a roll. This, too, is simply excellent. And not only are these players good human beings and feel somehow like family. They also were part of one of the most memorable periods in Bills history. They were core players at a time when Bills fans were being rewarded for the two decades of disappointment. These were the guys who were there, who were anchors, when Bills football became genuinely exciting, exciting like we hadn't seen in those two decades. Yes, sure, it was Allen, of course, it was Allen, but these guys were the supporting players the team depended on to lead the others. They are part of an exciting era. And I'll add this: I think the first rock McDermott built this team on was Kyle Williams, and I've always thought that when the Bills win the Lombardi under McDermott, Williams will know, and McDermott will acknowledge, that it started with Williams. And we all will know that it went through Poyer and Hyde, and Morse, too. They'll be gone, but they'll be part of the success that's coming.

Thanks, Logic. That was great, just great.

I agree. Beane doesn't play the game from the sideline. He's always in the fight, so there will be some big deals, for sure. There might be a trade up in the first round. It could be anything.

Thanks. I think you're right.

Weren't you and I talking a few days ago about whether it's reasonable to expect much from Miller, that it looked like he just wasn't going to get back to his old self. Doesn't this say that at least Miller is confident that he will be back? That's a big bet on himself.

What a player! All I can say is thank you, and good luck!

Interesting comments. Yes, to all. I don't know, but I wouldn't say they have plans and backups and backups to the backups. I doubt they're really plans in the ordinary sense of the word. A plan is something that takes you to a defined ending. An engineer puts together a plan for the construction of the building. In that case, the end product is known, and the plan is how to get from where you are today to the final building. When the building is done, in all major respects the building comes out just like the original suggested it would. When Beane does is different. There isn't a defined end, with player A at this position and player B at that position. It's open-ended - assemble players that collectively can achieve what we want. When you say plans and subplans, I think what actually happens is like what Beane has described for the draft. He's not planning so much as he's playing out scenarios in his head. Who's likely to be available where I'm picking? Who would I take? What might I do if I trade up? Trade down? What if the guy I want isn't there? He described it well after his first draft. He had spent a day role playing a lot of different scenarios. He admitted that despite all of his preparation, no scenario involved getting Allen and then being able to get Edmunds, too. It's sort of like it's impossible to have a "plan" for a chess game. If you're playing white, you might be able to predict each of the six or eight moves, but sooner or later the available choices of moves are such that there are too many possibilities to plan for. You can think about the scenarios and what you might do, but at some point you're not planning. And I agree the draft is mind-boggling that way. The bad thing about the draft is that, unlike free agency, you have no idea how these guys are going fit in the NFL. It isn't easy to predict. In free agency, you've at least seen a guy up against Dion Dawkins, as an example, and that gives you some kind of gauge as what he might do. (For example, when Colin Cowherd asked Dion Dawkins who was the best pass rusher he'd ever faced, before Cowherd finished the question, Dawkins said, "Von Miller." That information is much more valuable than any information they can get about any edge coming out of college.) When the Bills traded for Diggs, they said to themselves, "We got our receiver." When they drafted Kincaid, all they could say was, "We hope we got a receiver." The whole process is one in which you have to make choices with insufficient information, and the information that you did have that was relevant to yesterday's choice has changed when you have to make today's choice, because other teams and players have made moves, too. And, yes, I'm sure there are times when Beane doesn't want to hear any more from McDermott, because it just adds to the uncertainty of the whole process. That's why it's so important to have a GM and coach who are real teammates in the process, guys with continuity together, so that the GM can develop a feel, an intuition for the kind of guy the HC needs. Obviously, Beane has lots of help developing all the information they have about the players who are available, either in free agency or the draft. Eventually, however, he has to make the calls. It takes a certain kind of personality to work well in that environment.

Blonde or brunette?

Good points. And what's funny about that is that, if he could speak frankly about it, he'd say fan expectations are a tremendous distraction. Here he is working on trying to put a team together, and he hears a constant drumbeat, sometimes virtual screaming in his ear, none of which is of any value to him. And yet all the time he's trying to do the job he's hearing this stuff. He has to just shut it out, because he has to make the decisions based on the quality information the scouts have developed, not the whims of the Mafia.

Wow! That's exactly right. The thing about it is that 32 GMs are getting paid the big bucks, are probably only about half of them are really good at their jobs. I'm not saying they're slouches; they do it seriously, but the roster they end up with to start the season isn't as well constructed as the best GMs. The best GMs have their teams in the hunt every season. And there's luck, too, but the guys who get it, like John Lynch and that guy who was so great in Baltimore. I think Beane is growing into that kind of success, but time will tell. But you're so right. The size of the job, the importance of the decision making, and to just work your way through, year after year, always hunting around half blind trying to find your way from here to a roster. Good for those guys.

Well, sure, the job isn't difficult. Just show up and make decisions. It is literally true that anyone can do that. Being good at the job, however, is something else, for exactly the reason you give: To do your job well, you have to manage a lot of things that are outside of your control.

AI is an interesting subject. Getting from here to September 1 is like a big chess game, and it isn't possible for a human brain to evaluate all the possible combinations of players who are or might be available (including possible trades). AI certainly could help do that, spitting out potential rosters that could be created, given cap space, presumed contract values, etc. And AI doesn't work in a vacuum. The staff certainly could add its own biases about the heart and cultural compatibility of a player. If the Bills have AI like that, it certainly would be useful. McBeane could sit down this afternoon and look at potential rosters, decide which they like and don't like, then develop plans about how they could deal to achieve those rosters. They'd still stumble along the way, because they can't control losing a guy to another team, they can control injuries, and they can't control the draft.

I agree. I think we often tend to under-appreciate the difficulty of other people's jobs. What's interesting to me is not simply the complexity. As some have said, he has a staff that's evaluating the draft talent, evaluating the free-agent talent, running the cap numbers, evaluating the consequences of one move or another. What's interesting is that he has to make big decisions with such incomplete information. He knows, for example, that if he signs a big-ticket receiver it will affect what's he's able to do at several other positions. If he decides he can't afford it, well, a big-ticket D-tackle is waiting to be signed, too. Can he afford the impact in the receiving room if he splurges? Exactly how much linebacker help does he need? How much cornerback help? No matter how much information his staff may generate, he still has to make consequential decisions without all the information he'd like to have. First, I think the chances are that you would have done worse, and I would have, too. It simply isn't simple. Having said that, however, I know (because I thought it at the time), that when I traded up in the third round, I would have taken Russell Wilson instead of TJ Graham. That probably would have made a difference.

I've been thinking about how hard a GM's job is. The job is almost hopelessly complex, and it requires constant, complex thinking and decision making in an environment where you don't know the answers to many questions. Think about Beane: Your team has about 70 players during the regular season, when you include guys who are injured or on the practice squad. Fifteen or twenty or thirty of the players you had at the end of last season are going to leave your team in the next four months. Your job is to fill the openings with players who, together with the guys who carry over, give your head coach the best opportunity to assemble a great team. Although 20 or 30 might leave, you don't know today which 20 or 30 that is. That will depend on decisions they make in free agency, or you make about them. You don't know which players are going to be available from other teams as the same thing is playing out in their offices. You have essentially no idea who you'll be able to draft, and you have very little idea of which guys in the draft can help the team in 2024. You talk to McDermott and Brady, and ask which guys are essential and which are expendable. Their answer is, "It depends on who you bring in to help fill the spots that will become vacant. What you do know is if you sign this guy you won't have enough cap room to sign that guy. And the importance of the positions in your consideration changes as you keep or lose guys. One guy may be your priority, but you have limits on how much you can spend and how that spending can be structured, and the player may not like the financial package, so you don't even know if you can get your priority guy. Occasionally, a guy who becomes your priority changes the whole picture for you, sometimes for multiple years. Giving up picks for Diggs solved a problem but affected the shape of the roster because a first-round pick disappeared. Signing Von Miller changed the whole picture, because he brought significant cap consequences to the equation going forward. In that environment, an environment where you're not sure who you're going to lose or who you're going to get, and all of it is limited by how much you have to spend, you have to make decisions. You have to let some guys walk, extend some guys, rework some deals, all in preparation for when free agency hits. When free agency starts, you have to start making decisions about players. Every decision you make, every deal you work, changes what you need and how much you can spend. Thirty-one other teams are making deals, too, so the players who remain available keep changing, and what they're worth keeps changing as the deals affect the market. When the draft comes along, you take a break from the free agency puzzle and run a mini-version of the whole problem in your head over three days to acquire 8 or 10 guys, each of whom may or may not perform the way you think they will (after all, you've never seen them against NFL competition). Then you go back to working deals with other free agents, based on a revised picture of the roster as the result of the draft. The bottom line is that it's impossible today for Beane or any other GM to have a plan for what the roster will look like on September 1. It's a huge puzzle the GM has to put together over the next five months, a puzzle where the actual picture of the completed puzzle keeps changing, and the pieces available to complete the puzzle keep changing too.

That's a good point. A lot of issues at a lot of positions, not knowing what positions could get shored up in the draft, and the limitations of the cap. No way that there can be a plan for all of it. More that they have to have a really good understanding of all of it and then do the best you can, day by day, adjusting your perceptions of need as guys come and go and as money gets spent.

Good luck to him. Got dealt a lousy hand.

A lovely man. He showed his love of his work, and his courage, when he returned to the microphone after his initial treatments. So sorry for him and his family.

I agree. I think one important things that separates QBs is how they perform off-script. That's what we saw in the Super Bowl. Brock Purdy is great when the play goes as designed. One read or two reads and throw. But when he gets beyond a couple of clicks, his efficiency goes way down. Against good opponents, that can be as many as half the plays, and having an inefficient QB on half your plays is a bad thing. I think Tua is the same. If Waddell or Hill opens up on schedule, he's great. The rest of time, not so much. I'll take all those guys you named over Tua.

The problem is that there are so many moving parts, Beane needs more information to decide what to do. In particular, he needs to know what talent is likely to be available to him so he can decide what to do with the people he has under contract. In other words, he needs to do some legal and illegal tampering to know his alternatives. That's why it all will come at the end.

As usual, I don't disagree with much you have to say, except that you seem value talent over coaching, and I'm the opposite. Assuming Diggs returns to form, a decent number two receiver will thrive in this offense IF Brady runs an effective passing game, as a play designer, a game planner, and an offensive game manager. If Brady doesn't do that, I don't think it matters all that much how talented the #2 guy is. At the end of the season, scheme wins out over talent.

Hey, Hap - You've always got interesting takes on things, and this WR vs. dline comment is another. It's compelling, but I'm not sure it's right. Might be, and I can't prove it's wrong, but I look at a different way. First, the Bills were 8th in the league in yards passing per game, 7th in TDs. 20 yards per game behind the Dolphins, 15 behind the Lions, who were #2, and 2 yards per game behind the Chiefs. My suspicion (not original) is that Diggs was injured for the second half of the season; had he played up to his usual standards, the Bills would have had 10 more yards per game, on average, for the season. That tells me that there is not a massive hole in the receiving corps. It's hard to say that the Bills have had a serious negative impact on the passing game because of what you consider an under-allocation of resources to the position. I say this because unless they add the replacement for Diggs in the first round and he turns into an immediate stud, no one should expect that the Bills are going to get more than 800-900 yards out of their number 2. If that's the case, the Bills aren't far away. Factor in likely increased production out of Kincaid, and I just don't see a huge hole. Second, I'm not saying the Bills don't need receiving help; ideally, the Bills get a #1 receiver in the first round, pair him with Diggs for a year or two, and then move on from Diggs. However, if they don't hit a homerun and have the luxury of starting two #1s in 2024, they don't need a lot of talent to continue in the top 10 in passing or even move up into the top 5. I think it depends much more on Brady than on getting some stud to be another target - again, I'd welcome the stud, but I don't see that he's crucial. Third, you clearly have a different philosophy about how to build a successful team. Beane and McDermott are all in on the defensive line rotation and getting pressure with four, and that philosophy therefore demands that resources go there. That's eight players who need to be impactful, and that has a cost associated with it. The Bills were 7th in passing yards allowed per game, second in TDs allowed, and fourth in sacks. That's at least some evidence that the allocation of resources to the Dline makes sense. I've always questioned the rotation, because by needing 8, it's difficult to allocate spending to a true stud in middle, and that's the kind of player who can have out-sized impact on games. But as I say, I've been able to live with the rotation because it has gotten results. Finally (and back to #2), I think we all tend to look at the long term less critically and less thoroughly than McDermott and Beane do. At this time of year, they're thinking a lot about the 2025 and 2026 roster as they consider their choices, because their intention is that the Bills will be good next season AND in the seasons beyond. One of their big issues has to be who will be the #1 receiver in the future, and how are they going to fill the position? One answer is exactly as you say - get that guy this year, hope he can be a solid #2 by mid-season, and get a free agent who can help in the draft pick isn't the guy, or isn't the guy yet. But for all we know, McBeane see what works best for the long term is to plan to get that receiver in the 2025 draft. They may already be considering how they can stockpile picks in order to trade up. I don't have any idea, but I think there's more of a plan at work here than I can see. Having said that, what I hope to see in 2024 is a #2 receiver with decent deep speed, good route running ability, reliable hands. I want a guy like Shakir but with better size. He'll run routes better than Davis and will be a regular threat in the offense. He doesn't have to be great; he has to be smart with enough speed. After all, it's pretty clear that what works in the NFL these days is having a lot of guys on the field who can execute an offense that attacks what the defense gives them. With the Cook/Allen run threat, the defense has to give up space elsewhere, and the Bills need a scheme (Brady) and the receivers (Diggs, Shakier, Kincaid, and one more) to attack that space.

Maybe you're right, and Douglas is a lock. On the other hand, there's no denying that reducing cap and dead cap in a nice amount simply by letting one guy can be pretty attractive. Douglas is a good solid player, but he's not some stud in his prime. Other guys can do the job. That's what's so interesting and challenging about what Beane has to do over the next few months. As I understand it, he has a lot of ways he can go to get under the cap. Which way he goes depends in part on McDermott tells him he can live with. McDermott may say he absolutely has to have Douglas, given what else he has to work with at corner, the depth he thinks he needs, etc. and how easy it will be to replace the player who leaves because the cap relief had to come from somewhere. Point is that cap relief is going to create holes or issues at one position or another, and Beane and McDermott are managing that process. Trimming off veteran talent and replacing it with younger, cheaper talent is the art and science of running a program that stays on top of the league. Time will tell how good they are at it.

As I said, people can have their opinions. But you're talking about a first-ballot Hall of Fame player. At the same age, Bruce Smith, another first ballot Hall of Famer, had two double digit sack seasons ahead of him. ACL surgery and recovery from it is pretty routine now. Miller's work ethic is great. I agree. He might be done, but he's not your average guy.