Orton's Arm

I fully agree that if you don't have a franchise QB and there's a chance to add one, you do it. Period. It doesn't matter what other needs you may have, or what other players may be available. No one player addition at any other position comes close to having the potential impact of a franchise QB. None. That being said, you never want to say to yourself, "I need position X most of all, so when my pick comes around I'll pick the best player available at position X." Drafting for need or perceived need is one of the reasons why none of Marv's early picks came close to justifying their draft positions. Not only that, but once you've drafted a guy you think is going to be your franchise QB, there's a tendency to not use additional early picks on the QB position for a few years. This means that drafting the wrong guy can cost you the chance to add the right guy. In 2006, the Bills had the chance to use the 8th overall pick on Jay Cutler. But they did not do so in part because they had Losman on the roster and were still in the process of giving him his chance. I like what I've seen of Luck's play, and what I've read about him from the draft experts has reinforced that impression. I haven't seen Gabbert play, but I've seen concerns raised about him. You want a QB who can process a lot of information quickly. What I've read has given me serious concerns about whether Gabbert is that guy. Another option for the Bills to ponder is using a second round pick on Christian Ponder. He's demonstrated very good accuracy and a solid grasp of the mental aspects of the game. He's also very smart and hard-working, as he's shown by completing his masters degree a year or two early. I think Ponder has as good a chance as any other QB in this draft of becoming a franchise guy. If he doesn't prove to be the answer, all the Bills have lost is a second round pick. A franchise QB is worth much, much more than a second round pick, so the risk-reward ratio associated with Ponder looks pretty good from where I sit.

I think it's worth noting that in his two years of GM, Marv Levy had one bona fide success story: Kyle Williams. Literally everything else he did was either a disappointment (Whitner, Poz) or an outright failure (just about everything else). That includes draft picks, free agent signings, coaching hires, the composition of the front office. Even the parking lot still had potholes when Marv left! You don't have to be a pessimist or a whiner to feel a sense of deep disappointment with Marv's term as GM. There wasn't a whole lot of difference between the results Marv produced during his two years and what Matt Millen would have provided had he been GM.

An excellent point. Let's say you were to find an intelligent, knowledgeable football fan and were to hand him a pile of draft day guides. Then you give him a week or so to go through those guides and determine which draft experts had been the most accurate in the past. If you were to place that fan in charge of your team's picks from rounds 3 - 7, and if you were to give that guy enough picks, he'd probably find a few success stories. Let's say you were to define a round 3 - 7 success story as a guy who's a) still in the league, and b) who's starting caliber. If that's your definition, then Kyle Williams is the only success story Marv found in rounds 3 - 7 of his two drafts. That's about the success rate I'd expect from the above-described knowledgeable fan. Marv's contributions were about equal to what a knowledgeable fan would have provided in rounds 3 - 7. Where that knowledgeable fan would have had a commanding, almost crushing advantage over Marv would have been in rounds 1 - 2.

I completely agree that the Bills squandered their early picks in that draft. There's no way the Bills should have taken Whitner eighth overall. The eighth overall pick is normally worth 1400 points. Conversely, the 8th pick of the second round is worth 500 points, and the 8th pick of the third round is worth 230 points. Vic Carruci didn't have Whitner rated as a first-round talent, let alone the 8th overall best player in the draft. If for whatever reason Marv and Jauron wanted to add Whitner-like players to the roster, they should have stayed put in the second round and gone after him there. Falling in love with one particular player and letting yourself squander really good draft value was a very serious mistake! As you point out, the Bills followed up the Whitner reach with the McCargo and Youboty busts. The first day of that draft was an absolute embarrassment to the franchise, and clearly demonstrated why Marv had no business being GM. But a Pro Bowl DT like Kyle Williams is a lot more than you'd expect from the second day of the draft. That guy provides a high level of play at a very valuable position! If we had used the 8th overall pick on a DT, and if the DT had played as well as Williams has, we'd label that pick a fairly decent success. Maybe not as big a success as Ngata would have been, but a success nonetheless. And then if Whitner had been taken in the second round (instead of trading up for McCargo), I think that a lot of people here would be okay with the selection. Using 500 points of draft day value on him is a lot easier to justify than using 1400 points! The 2006 draft was extremely frustrating for me personally because I'd wanted them to either stay put and take Cutler or trade down and draft Mangold. It turns out they could have come away with both players: Cutler at eighth overall instead of Whitner, Mangold later in the first instead of McCargo. Cutler was traded away for a pair of first rounders and other things, so the Broncos got a lot more value out of him than the Bills have out of Whitner! Mangold is the best center in the league. But even though I'm really, really annoyed at Marv and Jauron for having done a much worse job in the first round than I would have done, I have to give them credit for taking Kyle Williams in the fifth. I don't think that I would have come away with a Pro Bowl DT on the second day of the draft had I been GM.

I too would prefer a player with four years of college production under his belt versus just three. Obviously, more data is better than less. As for Fitz someday being within loud speaking distance of Warner, let's start by looking at the numbers. Over the course of his career, Fitz averaged 6.0 yards per attempt. This past season he averaged 6.8. To put that into perspective, Trent Edwards' career average is 6.5 yards per attempt. Kurt Warner's career average is 7.9 yards per attempt, which is ridiculously good! Even better than Peyton Manning's average, in fact. I agree that Fitz has many of the qualities you look for in your starting QB. But like you pointed out yourself, he doesn't have consistent accuracy. That lack of accuracy is why his averages have so much more in common with Edwards' than with Warner's. Fitzpatrick is going into his seventh year. Of quarterbacks with six years of NFL experience under their belts, how many were able to make dramatic improvements to the accuracy of their throws? No examples spring immediately to my mind, but maybe I'm missing someone. But even if I am, I think that we have to assume that the level of accuracy we've seen from Fitz in the past is about what we're likely to get from him in the future. That means he's no Warner. As for Ponder: prior to the start of the 2010 season, I'd seen his name thrown around as a potential first round pick. Nothing that happened in 2010 reduced my opinion of him, but he seems to have gotten blamed for things that may not be his fault. (Such as the defense playing worse, or the decline in his team's overall record.) He also played hurt for much of the year, which affected his production. Given all this, I think there's a good chance he'll still be available early in the second round. But if I'm wrong about that, the Bills could always use their second round pick on some other player instead. As for stockpiling picks, now is exactly the time the Bills should do so! Let's say you have a Peyton Manning or a Tom Brady on your roster, and let's say he's getting on in years. A player like that means you have a window of opportunity that's open now but is unlikely to be open indefinitely. In a situation like that your focus should be more on the short-term, with the idea of maximizing the number of Super Bowl rings your Manning or Brady ends his career with. But the Bills have not yet acquired their Manning or Brady, which means their window of opportunity has not yet opened. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that we're able to turn our first round pick in this year's draft into three first rounders in next year's, and our second rounder this year into yet another first rounder in next year's draft. That would give us a total of five first round picks (including our own) heading into 2012. With picks like those, the Bills could open up the window of opportunity I described (by acquiring a franchise QB) and could potentially fill other needs as well. Short-term harm to the team's record would only serve to improve our draft position. Obviously, there's no guarantee that we'd be able to do any of what I've described. But that doesn't mean it's not worth attempting. The nice thing here is that the first part of the plan makes sense even if the second part can't be executed. If, for example, we're able to acquire some or all of the additional first round picks I hope for from the 2012 draft, those picks would be great to have even if they can't be converted into Andrew Luck.

That's tempting! The third overall pick is worth 2200 points. The 6th overall pick (the one the Browns have) is worth 1600 points. So they'd need to give us their first and second round pick in this year's draft to make the trade worthwhile. But quite frankly, I'd much rather have their first round pick in next year's draft than their second rounder this year!

First, I agree that you don't want to use a first round pick on a player who hasn't played much. A player's performance in games is a much more reliable indicator of what he can bring to the NFL than is his performance in workouts. But a lot of that performance in games is subject to random variation. You can see that same kind of random variation at the NFL level. Take Byrd for example. For a long stretch during his rookie year, he was intercepting two passes a game. Had he sustained that pace over an entire season, he would have had 32 INTs for the year. An INT rate like that is absolutely ridiculous, and is probably twice as many INTs as anyone in the NFL has ever had in a single season. But he had just one INT his second season, because the same random variation which had worked for him his rookie year worked against him his second year. Someone who looked just at his rookie year tape would overestimate Byrd's effect as a ball hawk, while someone who looked just at his second year would underestimate it. That's why, when evaluating college players, it's so important to look at multiple years of play, rather than focusing on just one good year. In Green's freshman year, he had 963 receiving yards, which led the entire SEC. In his injury-shortened sophomore year, he had 751 receiving yards. He followed that up with a very good junior year. (Though he'd been suspended his first four games for having sold his Independence Bowl jersey to some guy.) In his junior year, his team's offense averaged 24 points per game without him, and 40 points per game with him. I realize none of the above guarantees he'll be a success at the NFL level. In particular, he (like any other rookie) will find it a lot harder to do to NFL DBs what he did to college DBs. The only point I'm making with this is that he cannot be dismissed as a one-year wonder. To address your other point: prior to Warner's arrival in Arizona, their quarterback was Matt Leinart. After his departure, they went back to Leinart, as well as to other guys of that same caliber. Fitzpatrick isn't within shouting distance of Warner as a quarterback, but he's considerably better than guys like Leinart or the QBs Detroit has had recently. If we get an elite WR, it's not like his talents will be completely wasted, as they would have been with Leinart at QB. That said, I think that an upgrade at QB needs to occur within the next two years or so, and has to be part of the long-term plan. The Bills could attempt an upgrade this year, for example by taking Ponder in the second round. Or they could attempt one next year by trying to position themselves to take Luck. The latter would involve trading away as much as they can in this year's draft for first round picks in next year's draft. If the Bills walk into the 2012 draft with multiple picks in the top-10, and at least one pick in the top-5, they'll be in a position to make someone a very tempting offer for Luck! But to achieve that, they'll have to turn their first (and probably second) round in this year's draft into picks in the 2012 draft. Obviously going down that road would prevent the Bills from drafting Green. As for the effect Green could have on the offense, consider the effect Randy Moss had! In 2006 (the year before Moss arrived), Tom Brady averaged 6.8 yards per pass attempt. In 2007, with Moss around, that average jumped to 8.3! Brady's career average is 7.4 yards per attempt, so you can see that Moss played an important role in helping Brady perform at well above his usual average.

This is a very good summation of the quarterback position!

If the Bills draft him, I'll change my screen name to Ponder's Arm. Problem solved.

Just to add to my earlier post: quarterbacks aren't the only players whose performance will suffer if they're not placed in a good situation. Consider Lawrence Taylor, taken second overall. He went to the New York Giants, where Bill Parcells was his defensive coordinator and Bill Belichick was his linebackers coach. Parcells installed a 3-4 defense to take advantage of Taylor's strengths. To show what a difference a 3-4 defense can make consider Bryce Paup. While with the Packers and their 4-3 defense, Paup averaged about 8 sacks a year. But once he went to the Bills and their 3-4 defense, he was able to achieve an absolutely ridiculous 17.5 sacks for the year! Unfortunately he got hurt in a subsequent season, and was never the same player again. If Taylor had been consigned to a 4-3 defense, if he hadn't had coaches like Parcells and Belichick, he would still have been a very good linebacker. But his statistics and accomplishments would look a lot less impressive than they do. If you have the chance to add a quarterback like Steve Young or a linebacker like Lawrence Taylor to your team, you should obviously take advantage of that opportunity. But your team also needs to be well-run, so that your team won't do to your QB what the Bucs did to Young.

That was a well thought-out response! However, there appear to be points upon which we disagree. You mentioned the example of how the Bucs drafted Steve Young to replace Steve DeBerg. As long as we're on that topic, I may as well cite the example of a different QB who'd also been drafted to replace Steve DeBerg: Joe Montana. At the time, Bill Walsh's offense was based on the idea of using a deep passing game to complement the running game. A lot of NFL offenses were like that at the time. Montana didn't have elite arm strength--which is one of the things you look for in a QB for an offense like that. That lack of arm strength is why he fell to the third round. The 49ers took Montana there; and Walsh soon created a new kind of offense to take advantage of Montana's strengths: his uncanny accuracy and ability to hit receivers in perfect stride. Obviously, Montana did very well in the offense Walsh built for him. Steve Young also had the ability to play at a Hall of Fame level in the offense Walsh designed, as he proceeded to demonstrate with the 49ers. Even though Young posted lousy numbers in his two years with the Bucs--like you pointed out--Bill Walsh still thought enough of him to spend a 2nd and 4th rounder to acquire him in a trade. Walsh realized--and the Bucs did not--that Young's problems were not due to Young himself, but to the bad situation in which he'd been placed. You can make a quarterback look worse than he is by putting him in a bad situation. (As the Bucs demonstrated with Young.) Or you can make him look better than he really is by putting him in a great situation (as the Jets have done with Sanchez). The importance of putting a quarterback in a good situation doesn't mean that the importance of the quarterback position itself should be discounted. Nor does it mean that you should wait until after your other offensive problems are fixed before attempting to acquire a franchise QB. Opportunities to get franchise QBs are very rare. An analysis I did a while back showed that less than one new franchise QB enters the NFL per year, which means each NFL team gets a new franchise QB on average once every 40 years or so. But once you have a guy you feel is or might be your franchise QB, you obviously have to put him in as good a situation as possible as quickly as possible. I'm also a fan of making rookie quarterbacks spend the year on the bench, as the Bengals did with Carson Palmer. The Bucs should be lauded for having drafted Steve Young in the first place. His presence on the roster represented a golden opportunity to solidify the QB position for a decade or more with a Hall of Fame player. A player like that could have given the Bucs a significant advantage over their opponents for many years to come. But the Bucs did everything they could to squander the opportunity that having Steve Young on the roster represented. They started him his rookie year, despite the problems on the OL you mentioned. Throwing a player to the wolves like that is bad for his confidence, bad for his teammates' confidence in him, and probably contributed to the concussion problems that ultimately caused Steve Young to retire. It's also worth noting that the Bucs did almost nothing to improve Young's situation while he was there. In the 1985 draft--the year the Bucs acquired Young--they did not draft any other offensive player before round 8. (With the possible exception of 4th rounder Mike Heaven, for whom no position is listed.) Their 1986 draft was Bills-like in its incompetence. They took a RB, Bo Jackson, first overall. He never played a down of football for the Bucs, who did not sign him, and ultimately forfeited their rights to him. With their second pick in the first round the Bucs took a DB. That DB spent the first four years of his career with the Bucs, and the remaining seven years with the Bengals. The Bucs spent two second rounders and a 4th rounder on defense that year, and (other than the unsigned Bo Jackson pick) did not address the offense at all until round 5. The Bucs clearly demonstrated what not to do once you've acquired a Hall of Fame-level quarterback! Had the Bucs upgraded their offensive coordinator, had they used the 1985 or '86 drafts to make a serious effort at fixing their OL, and had they kept Young on the bench his rookie year, Young's time in Tampa would have been considerably more successful. It's also worth noting that the Bucs gave up on Young too early, despite the fact he'd shown enough at the NFL level that Bill Walsh was willing to trade a 2nd and 4th rounder for him. As for my comment about the Bills' DBs going first contract-and-out: there have been three times during this past decade when the Bills' DB with the best combination of youth + proven accomplishment has left. The first was Antoine Winfield, the second Nate Clements, and the third was Jabari Greer. Donte Whitner looks like he may leave as well, which means that over the last ten years, the total number of DBs who have done this is . . . 3.5. And that 3.5 doesn't even include first round DBs such as Jeff Burris who went first-contract-and-out back in the '90s. The Bills seem to have a split personality when it comes to DBs. On draft day they are seen as pure gold. But once their rookie contracts expire, they're seen as overpriced and easily replaced. That kind of split personality can and will create a draft pick drain/talent drain at any position on the field to which it's applied. For whatever reason, the Bills have applied it to the DB positions and the RB position, but seemingly not to other positions.

My assessment of those drafts is less optimistic than yours. 2005: Nothing except Roscoe. (Which is pretty close to nothing at all.) Terrible. 2006: Of Whitner, Youboty, Kyle, and Ellison, I discount Youboty and Ellison completely. You can obtain players like that by signing bargain basement, third-rate free agents. Draft picks are supposed to be upgrades over players like that! Kyle Williams was obviously a great pick, and covers up a lot of other sins. But other than him (and Whitner, though to a much lesser extent) the Bills came away with nothing from that draft. Respectable. 2007: Any time you draft a RB 12th overall, and he gets traded away a few years later for a fourth rounder, that pick has to be considered a bust! The 12th overall pick is worth 1200 points; whereas the 10th pick in the fourth round is worth 82 points--less than 7% of the value of that first round pick! Likewise, the fact that Trent was released outright (as opposed to being traded away) suggests disappointing things about his perceived value among other GMs. The biggest success story of that draft was Poz. And that's bad, because like you said, Poz hasn't been the player for which we'd hoped. Very disappointing. 2008: Like you pointed out, Stevie Johnson and Bell were very good value picks in the seventh round! Corner is a good nickel back. McKelvin clearly has all the physical tools to be a great CB. Whether he has the brains is another question. If McKelvin and Bell improve in 2011, this will have been a good or very good draft. If they stay the same, it's still a solid draft.

You could use that argument about any good player on a bad team. Steve Young didn't lead the Bucs to very many wins, but that doesn't mean it was a mistake for them to acquire him. Nor was getting Hardy Nickerson a bad move on the Bucs' part, even though his presence didn't lead to many wins either. This past season neither the Miami Dolphins nor the Cleveland Browns won very many games, but that doesn't mean that Joe Thomas and Jake Long were wasted draft picks! What it does mean is that the Browns and Dolphins had been more than just a franchise LT away from having a winning record. I agree that Losman, McGahee, Whitner, and Lynch were bad draft picks. But Mike Williams and John McCargo were bad picks as well. I'd say the Bills' drafting problems are the result of the following: Poor player evaluation Too much emphasis on physical measurables, not enough on football intelligence, heart and desire, or the other things teams like the Patriots care about. Way, way too much emphasis on the RB position! A willingness to use first round picks on DBs, and then to allow those DBs with the best combination of youth + proven accomplishment to go first-contract-and-out. A strong willingness to reach for need or for perceived need. No way should Whitner have been taken eighth overall! Too little emphasis on the offensive line. Since 2001, the Bills have used three first rounders and a second rounder on RBs. In that same span, they used no first or second round picks on LTs, and just one first rounder (and no second rounders) on a RT. General shortsightedness. Between them, the Whitner and Lynch picks demonstrate almost everything that's wrong with the Bills' front office's approach. Jauron felt he had to have a good SS to make his defense work, and Lawyer Milloy didn't fit his idea of what he was looking for. Not only that, but between them Marv and Jauron decided that SS had to be added right away so that the defense would be credible their first year. That's how they got locked into thinking that they had to take a SS with their first or second pick of the 2006 draft. That rigidity of thought is how they ended up squandering most of the value the eighth overall pick had to offer. (And all the value their second pick in the first round had to offer.) The Lynch pick represented a similar degree of shortsightedness. I realize McGahee's attitude was probably less than perfect. But Lynch has not always been an angel of perfection himself. The larger problem was the thought that the hoped-for upgrade from McGahee to Lynch would be worth the 12th overall pick in the draft. Probably, part of their thought process was that rookie RBs are often expected to have a much greater immediate impact than rookies at other positions. Their focus may have been more on that hoped-for immediate impact than on the long-term benefits of the (theoretical) upgrade of Lynch over McGahee. Typically, having your best RB out on the field implies that your second-best RB is on the bench. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that your best RB gets at least 2/3 of the carries. A situation like this means that any time you upgrade or try to upgrade your RB position, you're taking away opportunities to contribute from the guys you already have. So the net benefit = whatever your new best RB brings to the table - whatever your old best RB had brought to the table. Very seldom over the past ten years have the Bills found that to be much of a net benefit at all! But that logic doesn't apply to most other positions. A team will presumably figure out a way to get its three or four best DEs plenty of playing time over the course of any given game. Likewise, its three best WRs should expect to see plenty of snaps. That's one of the advantages of upgrading the receiving corps or the defensive front-seven over the RB position! Let's say (for the sake of argument) that the Bills project Green to have a significantly better career than any of the DL that will be available when the Bills pick. And let's also say that these hypothetical player evaluations are accurate. If those things were true, drafting Green would not represent a falling back into the error of the Bills' old ways. He'd have the opportunity to contribute, and become the best WR, without sending the second-best WR to the bench. (A situation that doesn't apply to a first round RB.) He'd presumably be here his whole career, which obviously wouldn't apply to a first round DB. His selection wouldn't have been based on a myopic, blinkered focus on one or two positions of extreme "need"--as Marv's first round picks had consistently been. You could argue that an elite WR does not necessarily represent part of a long-term plan to build the Bills into a perpetual winner. But I think a WR pick could be made into part of such a plan. Take the Arizona Cardinals of a few years ago, for example. Their defense was nothing special. Their OL had Mike Gandy as its starting LT. The only special thing about that team was its quarterback and its receiving corps. Those two things, alone, were enough to get them to the Super Bowl. If there's a chance to add an elite WR now, you could take advantage of that chance. Then the expectation would be that you'd add a franchise QB and a solid RT in a future draft. (Or perhaps the RT with a second round pick in this year's draft.) I'm not saying we should mimic the Cardinals exactly. We probably won't end up with a QB as good as Warner, or a receiving corps as good as the one they had. To make up for that, we'll need to be better at other positions than they were. But that doesn't mean that we're not allowed to strengthen the QB and WR positions, in conjunction with an effort to improve the OL and the defensive front-seven.

I think we're 90 - 100% of the way toward being on the same page. I think that the lower-impact a position is, the more a team sets itself up for failure by drafting at that position. Let's say you draft an OG or safety or RB or even a kicker with a top-5 pick, thinking he'll have a Hall of Fame career. With positions like those, the player almost has to have a Hall of Fame career to justify where you picked him. Let me put this in more concrete terms. Let's say that I'm a GM, and I've given Spiller a grade of 9 (out of 10), and some defensive lineman a grade of 7 out of 10. Which player do I take? First, you have to realize that players like Jim Brown or Barry Sanders are very rare, and that the odds of any given RB becoming like that are very small. The odds of my evaluation having been overly optimistic are considerably larger. If I've evaluated Spiller at a 9, his actual performance will likely be somewhere in the 7 - 8 range if the pick is a non-bust. As for the defensive lineman I graded at a 7--it's true that he's more likely to be a 6 than an 8. But there's still a decent chance of this player being an 8--a far greater chance, in fact, than Spiller has of being a 10. Odds are that this player will end up being about a 6.5 (assuming he's a non-bust) as opposed to a 7.5 for Spiller. That's still a difference in Spiller's favor, but the gap between the two players has narrowed. (Due to the fact it's almost impossible for Spiller to over-deliver on his expectations, and very likely to under-deliver on them. Even players who are 9s are very rare.) Let's say for the sake of argument that Spiller turns into that 7.5, and the DL turns into a 6.5. A team like the Bills will typically give about 2/3 of its carries to its best available RB, and the rest to the backup RB. If a team like that already has a very capable RB on the roster (such as Fred Jackson) you're not necessarily gaining much by replacing him with Spiller. You could argue that there's a very big upgrade in the quality of your backup RB, unless of course your prior backup RB had been Marshawn Lynch. But the overall potential for upgrade here is fairly limited, unless of course the unlikely happens and Spiller goes on to have a Hall of Fame career. Conversely, a defense never has enough talented defensive linemen. Bill Walsh once said that the key to winning football games is a good pass rush in the fourth quarter. Everyone remembers Joe Montana's heroic fourth quarter drive in the Super Bowl against the Bengals. But the only reason the 49ers got the ball back in the first place is because they had plenty of depth on their defensive line. Because of that depth, they were able to use their pass rush to force the Bengals to go three-and-out. (Had the Bengals offense gotten a couple first downs, they could have ended the game then and there.) Adding a good football player to your DL will result in an improvement in the starting quality and depth of your DL, even though adding a somewhat better player at RB will not necessarily result in a significant improvement at the RB position. Add in the fact that the passing game is four times as important as the running game, and the answer here is fairly clear. A team may well be better off taking a DL over a RB, even if the RB has a significantly higher grade.

Leading up to the 1998 draft, there was a debate about whether Manning or Leaf was the better prospect. Several sports writers stated that Manning was the more NFL-ready and would come up to speed more quickly. But they also said that Leaf had more "upside," and was the better long-term prospect. Obviously those writers were dead wrong: the same qualities which led Manning to be "NFL-ready" also meant he had more upside. A quarterback's upside isn't in his arm or his legs. It's between his ears. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if given a choice between Ponder and any of the other QBs available in this draft, I'd take Ponder.

I don't entirely agree with your list of offensive priorities. To me, the #1 priority for the offense should be getting a franchise QB. Yes, Fitz is good enough to get you by for now, but he's not the long-term answer. If the Bills have a chance to take a franchise QB, they should pull the trigger!! I'd also argue that getting a RT is more important than a TE. If your TE is lousy you can always throw somewhere else instead. If your RT is lousy your QB gets sacked and your RB gets stopped for a loss. If I were the Bills, I'd do the following. 1. BPA (except for RBs and DBs) 2. Ponder or a RT 3. Defensive front-7

The impact a player like Green can have goes beyond just yards and TDs. If Green turns into an elite WR, defenses will either need to cover him with an elite CB, or they'll need to double-cover him. If you force them to double-cover, you take away options the defense would otherwise have had. That's one less defensive player who can be sent in on a blitz, or who can be sent to roam about the field, or who can be made available near the line of scrimmage to stop the run. An elite WR is supposed to force double coverage and still produce Pro Bowl numbers anyway! I'm not saying the Bills should or shouldn't take Green. But it's important not to understate the advantages a player like that can bring!

I disagree. In 2002, the Bills' offense was great, especially for the first eight games. Part of that was the deep threat Peerless Price represented, and the way his presence helped stretch defenses. Price was traded away after the 2002 season, which is one of the reasons the offense languished in 2003. Going into the 2004 draft, speed receiver was therefore considered a need, which is one of the reasons the Bills took Lee Evans as early as they did. He was considered a bit of a reach, and he hasn't lived up to his draft position. (Though he's still a good player.) Several factors may have played into the Spiller, Lynch, and McGahee picks. 1) Over-valuing the RB position. 2) The thought that it's easier to upgrade the running game with one position (RB) than five (the OL). That kind of quick-fix thinking would certainly be consistent with what we saw from TD and Marv as general managers. 3) Bad player evaluation. Neither McGahee nor Lynch came close to living up to their draft positions, and nothing we saw from Spiller in his rookie year suggests he'll be any different. 4) The thought that RB was a "need" position. Marv had obviously decided fairly early on to part ways with McGahee, which meant he had to use a first round pick on a replacement RB. (Heaven forbid that the Bills have anything less than a first round pick at RB as their opening day starter!) Gailey talked about the need for a "waterbug" player for his offense; and he seems to regard Spiller as a six-legged creature who lives atop ponds. Even McGahee might be seen as sort of a "need" pick, at least if TD had decided Travis Henry's career wouldn't last forever. As for the Losman pick: TD knew that Bledsoe wasn't the long-term answer, and therefore wanted a QB. He'd tried, unsuccessfully, to trade up for Roethlisberger. Once that failed, he convinced himself that Losman's physical tools gave him plenty of "upside," and that he'd grow into the mental aspects of the position. Several common themes emerge from those picks. 1) Reaching for need or perceived need. 2) Bad player evaluations. 3) Wishful thinking. 4) Over-valuing the RB position. 5) Short-sightedness. None of those factors would seem to apply to AJ Green. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that he's the next Larry Fitzgerald. If we take him and keep him here his whole career, then ten years from now no one will point to that draft pick as a bad decision. (Any more than Cards fans point to the Fitzgerald pick as a bad move.) One could argue that if the Bills take Green, they might pass up some other, even better player at a more important position (such as RDE). If that's true, drafting Green would still be a solid use of the pick. Just not an optimal use. If you want to argue against the Green pick, argue against it on that basis. Or, if you feel he won't become a Pro Bowl level WR, then that's a perfectly good reason to argue against the pick! But I don't think that the Green pick has very much at all in common with the McGahee, Lynch, Spiller, or Losman picks.

I would have no objection at all to the Bills using their second round pick on Ponder. I think he's the most promising of this year's crop of QBs. (Not that it's a very impressive crop!)

Yours is a very well-expressed and informative post! Nevertheless, I tend to be a bit leery about the idea of taking a RB with such an early pick. According to a regression analysis done by the New York Times, an improvement in your passing attack will help your team four times as much as an equal improvement in your running game. The same is true of pass defense versus rushing defense. Not only is your running game a lot less important than you passing game in the first place, but the success of your running game will typically have a lot more to do with your offensive line than with the quality of your RBs. Bearing both these things in mind, it's very difficult for a RB to justify the kind of draft position Spiller received. Certainly, none of the RBs the Bills have taken in the first or second round since the mid '90s have come remotely close to justifying their draft position. Antowain Smith didn't, Travis Henry didn't (especially because we already had Smith!), McGahee didn't, Lynch didn't. You could point out that if Spiller had brought elite skills to the RB position, or if he's had a Thurman Thomas-like or Marshall Faulk-like effect on the passing game, he would have more than justified his draft position. That brings up two questions: 1) did he do enough in college to justify people in thinking he'd run the ball at or near a Hall of Fame level? 2) Did he show enough in the passing game to make people think he'd have a Thurman-like effect on the passing game? I suspect the answer to both those questions is no, but I could be wrong about that. But unless Spiller either runs the ball at an elite level--not merely a "very good" level--or unless he's a Thurman Thomas in the passing attack, he will not have lived up to what a team should expect from the 9th overall pick. Somewhat recently, I read an article about the safeties that have been picked in the top-10 over the last ten or fifteen years. Almost none of those safeties have justified or come close to justifying their draft position. That's largely because safety is not an impact position, unless you have an elite player like Ed Reed who turns it into one. However, Ed Reeds are very rare, and most teams that think they've found one turn out to be mistaken. The RB position is very similar: like safety, it's a low-impact position unless you have a truly elite player or a very good pass receiver. And like safety, your odds of finding that kind of elite player are lower than you think. This is why the Spiller pick was--at least potentially--a higher risk, lower reward move than some of the other options the Bills may have had, even if Spiller was the highest-rated player available when the Bills picked.

Shanahan has always been a much better coach than GM. The fact that he and whoever the GM is in Washington traded away a second round pick for McNabb simply reinforces the fact that the less influence Shanahan has in the draft day war room, the better. That said, Shanahan is a good coach who could have a lot of success if paired with a good GM who knows better than to follow Shanahan's advice.

I remember that game! After Thurman's fumble, he sat on the bench in a state of mourning. That feeling proved contagious and quickly infected the entire team. Had it been Vince Lombardi on the sidelines instead of Marv Levy, that team would not have given in to despair! Lombardi would have done whatever he had to do to whip his team back into fighting spirit. Maybe the Bills would still have lost, but at least they would have gone down fighting! Then again, maybe they wouldn't have lost.

Marv Levy always used to say that it's easy to be tough with other people's bodies. By the same token, it's easy to be tough with other people's feelings. I'm not saying Cutler is necessarily a good guy--some of the articles posted in this thread made him out to be a real jerk. But my sense is that he didn't deserve to have his toughness called into question.

I'm a fan of the 3-4--just not the Walt Corey implementation of it. Think how good the Bills' defenses were in the late '90s when Wade Phillips was running the show! Phillips was hugely aided by the fact that instead of Jeff Wright at NT, he had guys like Ted Washington and Pat Williams. If the Polian era Bills had done just those two things--get a Phillips-like defensive coordinator and a Washington or Williams-like NT--they would have won at least one Super Bowl.

In the offense Bradshaw operated in, the emphasis was on the running game and on the deep passing game. If the defense focused on stopping the run, the quarterback was supposed to burn them deep. And if the defense focused on stopping the deep passes, the offensive coordinator was supposed to call a lot of running plays. That style of offense is going to result in a lower completion percentage than would a West Coast offense, at least assuming the quarterbacks in question provide equal levels of play. Using yards per attempt seems like a fairer way of comparing quarterbacks who focus on short, high percentage throws against quarterbacks such as Bradshaw whose job it was to throw longer, lower percentage, higher reward-type passes. That said, one could make the argument that a running back who gets exactly four yards every single carry, with no variation, is more valuable than a running back who gets 0 yards per carry four times out of five, and 20 yards per carry one time out of five. The feast or famine nature of the second running back's carries will kill a lot of drives, whereas the predictability of the first guy will let you sustain drives. One could use similar logic to argue that 7.2 yards per pass attempt from a West Coast quarterback is more valuable than 7.2 yards per attempt from a Steelers of the '70s quarterback, because the West Coast quarterback is going to give you less variation. That reduced variation is going to show up in his higher completion percentage. You made what may or may not be a good point with respect to Bradshaw's poor TD/INT ratio. The Steelers had a good running game, so it's possible they just ran the ball a lot whenever they got close to the endzone. Something like that would make Bradshaw's TD/INT ratio look worse than it should have for something that wasn't his fault. To account for this, I decided to ignore the question of TD passes completely, and look at the question of INTs per pass attempt. Bradshaw threw 210 INTs in 3901 pass attempts, for an INT rate of 5.4%. By way of comparison, Joe Montana threw 139 INTs in 5391 pass attempts, for an INT rate of 2.6%--less than half the interception rate of Bradshaw! Roger Staubach threw 109 INTs in 2958 pass attempts, for an INT rate of 3.7%. Trent Edwards has thrown 30 INTs in 927 attempts, for an INT rate of 3.2%. Jeff Hostetler threw 71 INTs in 2338 attempts, for a rate of 3.0%. Clearly, Bradshaw was not very impressive when it came to avoiding INTs. It's also worth noting that not only did Staubach have a much lower INT percentage than Bradshaw, but he also had a significantly higher yards per attempt. (7.7 for Staubach, 7.2 for Bradshaw.) I think we can safely agree that Bradshaw was noticeably inferior to quarterbacks like Staubach and Montana. As you pointed out yourself, Bradshaw's stats were also helped by the significant amount of talent the Steelers had on offense. I think it's safe to conclude that the Steelers of the '70s won those Super Bowls because of their Steel Curtain defense, and because of their Hall of Fame receivers, and their Pro Bowlers on the offensive line, and their very good RB corps, and the fact that Bradshaw sometimes came up very big, especially in the postseason. The Steelers of the '70s were a lot like the Cowboys of the '90s, in that both teams were so strong on both sides of the ball that it's difficult to use them to support arguments about whether offense or defense is more important. Someone that thinks a Super Bowl winner should have a Hall of Fame QB can point to Troy Aikman, someone who thinks the offensive line is most important can point to the Cowboys' ridiculously good OL, someone who thinks it's the skill positions can point to Michael Irvin, Jay Novacek, Emmitt Smith, and Alvin Harper; and someone who thinks defense is most important can point to the Cowboys' extremely good defense!