VW82

At what point are we going to stop trying ultra wide rushes and leaving lanes up the middle. You don't do that against this guy.

Cook taking some big hits on this drive. Might need to throw the rookie in there to finish this off.

At least we're gettng push up the middle. Good sign!

Holy crap that was a bad throw.

Well...we look like a team that chose to rest all their guys in preseason because we were afraid of injuries.

Solomon will be taking his snaps prior to the bye week.

Nice job Douglas!

Also, he had someone open right in the middle of the field and looked him off.

Way too much time in the pocket.

Where's the contact????

Taron, wrap that ***** up and get back out there

Some good points in here but I feel like you didn't quite get the critique. The comp pick component is an acknowledgement that due to Josh's increasing cap hit we aren't going to be able to pay everyone, and so like it or not there will be home grown players like Brown (or Rousseau or Bernard or Benford, etc.) who we have to let walk in the coming years. Through that lens, is Brown the right guy to pay? I'd say there are legitimate reasons to think no considering his injury history and where he currently sits in our roster talent pecking order. If we did let Brown walk, we'd be replacing him with a B- calibre player in FA or using our 1st or Minn pick not the comp pick which would presumably be BPA. It'd undoubtedly make us worse for a year in that spot, but none of these decisions get made in a vacuum - there are opportunity costs each time we do anything due to cap and pick scarcity. I also say this acknowledging that at this time we have no details on the extension, and so any criticism is clearly premature. I will also add that it's possible Brown is turning into a valuable team leader behind the scenes, and so politically there may be motivations we don't see as fans. It's an interesting decision though.

I was low key nervous about this from the moment Milano went down, but I actually think Buffalo Joe will be ok if Dorian isn't up to the challenge. There's also a chance he's fantastic - easily one of the most explosive players on the roster.

Need to see the numbers but with Josh's cap hit going way up and other more important guys coming due for extension this could be risky. We need extra picks as you can't pay everyone and Brown signing a big contract in FA would've helped on that front.

Oliver had a bit of a down year last year compared to the previous two but he's better than an average starter by almost any calculation. As for our other DL, using PFF as a neutral reference, Rousseau had an 85 grade and AJ was at 80. That's way above average. Yes, we signed Von for a talent ceiling upgrade and it blew up in our faces. We were a bit unlucky there. Diggs was also a talent ceiling upgrade, and for the first three years he was easily a top 10 WR in the league, if not top 5. You don't expect to get top 5-10 players at their position picking in the bottom half of the first round. So yes, only getting four years instead of five of team control wasn't ideal, and the dead cap is way less than ideal, but we got all pro level play for a good chunk of it, and have a top 40 pick incoming next draft because of the Houston trade. Characterizing the Diggs trade/era as a disaster is a total misreading of events imo. Beane isn't perfect. He was the one who put us in cap hell in the first place, and as you point out, none of our top picks outside of Josh have become superstars. What we've had instead is rosters stock full of quality players, including those drafted in rounds 1&2, who are mostly above average for their position with a few guys like Taron and Milano who became top guys out of nowhere. I just don't see how anyone can make the claim that Beane hasn't been way above average.

I also like our depth, though to be fair they're all completely unproven.

I've never agreed with this point. Yes, we didn't exactly hit with Edmunds, but he also got 50M guaranteed. Elam looks like a miss though there's still time. Ford and Bashum were misses. Kincaid and O'Cyrus look like hits. Cook was a hit. Josh was a home run. Trading for Diggs was at least a double. Oliver and Rousseau were hits even some around these parts have expressed disappointment. AJ looked like a miss but he keeps getting better and now he's a re-signed starter on a good deal. That's a hit. By my count, that's 9/12 in the first two rounds if we write off Elam and including the Diggs trade. Or you could be overly harsh and include Edmunds and AJ as misses, in which case it's still 7/12. It's too early to say either way on Coleman or Bishop. I'm betting most teams aren't hitting those percentages.

McGovern moved positions. Edwards is a bit of an unknown (at least with us). Spencer Brown needs to prove last year wasn't a fluke, and that he can stay healthy...Mitch Morse was our second best OL, and with Diggs and Davis gone, teams will surely stack 8 in the box. I like our Oline but we probably need more info to say they're definitively good let alone top 3 in football.

Every year that goes by, my respect for Beane grows. This offseason was easily his best imo. I'm still dubious of the Coleman pick, but everything else he did was aces. Moving on from aging vets, getting all those restructures done when it looked like we wouldn't even be able to field a team, and yes, nailing the draft. It's way too early to say that last point so definitively, but there's a chance we picked up 5-6 useful rotational pieces in that draft with several of those potential future starters. At this point, it's not an accident Beane keeps unearthing all these mid-late round gems.

At this point, it feels dumb to bet against the Josh/McBeane infrastructure. That said, we have 60M in dead cap and one of the hardest schedules in the L. Jests and Phins have injury concerns due to age/fragility, but their overall roster talent is at least on par if not better than ours. Plus, it took an herioc five game win streak to finish last season just to make the playoffs. 10 wins seems appropriate and that's probably not enough to win the division, though perhaps enough to make the playoffs.

I think all four of Kinkaid, Coleman, Shakir, and Samuel will be deep threats: the first two with their size/hands, and the last two with their speed to take the top off. The verticals in Brady's offense aren't going anywhere, and I bet we hit on more of those this year because we're going to be a good running team from the jump. My point was more that we're probably not going to see a bunch of double moves and hard digs across the middle because we didn't see much of that from Brady last year, so it's not that big of a deal that I don't trust Coleman to beat anyone with that stuff.

The more I think about this pick and what we saw from Brady last year, the more I'm talking myself into Coleman being a good fit. (I have spoken...to myself) Brady did the complimentary football thing but when we did pass it was a lot of hitches and screens...basically lots of stuff close to the LOS with some verticals mixed in, not a lot of complicated routes. Get him the ball quick and let him YAC or block/pick for guys. I think part of our collective fan problem is we've adopted the mindset that Brady is going to really open up the offense and make it his own in year 2 in which case we maybe we have a raw rookie that will struggle. But what if that's not the plan? What if Brady's 2023 offense is the offense? Coleman can do that.

I took a hiatus from Bills message boards for a good while there but I was pretty active on the team website in the early 00s. Some of the people here like Shaw obv migrated over, but lots didn't.

You'd have a better case if the idea was re-stocking the pipeline with WR prospects for for 25 and 26. Rookie WRs are notoriously unrelaible. Claiming we needed to take a second one because we lost Diggs and Davis doesn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps losing those guys means we need to look for a trade or post June 1st signing. Perhaps we should've better anticipated Diggs blowing up our plans post FA in the first place. These aren't problems a 2nd or 3rd round rookie is going to fix. It's unrealistic that Coleman will fix them in year one. We have a good amount of receiving talent in our TEs and backs. That's where we're going to look if guys flame out (and maybe even if they don't).

The collective amnesia of last season is interesting. It feels like a lot of you processed the first half as "it was all Dorsey's fault" as appose to Josh having issues staying in the pocket and taking what the defense gave him. The whole "maserati" thing flamed out as Josh repeatedly threw downfield into baits and traps that resulted in break ups, drive killers, and picks. Brady came in and re-introduced the running game which included designed runs from Josh. We had Josh spreading it around with a focus on completions and keeping the chains moving. That's when our offense stopped being so one-dimensional and we became dangerous as a contender. Now so many Bills fans want to go back to finding another "stud" so our "maserati" can be unleashed again. That isn't what's worked. That's not really who Josh is when he's at his best. That's not how we're going to take the next step to eventually contending for SBs.