Cash

If the Bills could actually convince a couple free agents to sign, Hang might be a candidate for a late training camp cut. He can breathe easy as long as we're below the salary floor, though.

I would say you focus on trying to acquire the players to form a reliable offense, not grabbing more gadget players. I realize that the two things are not mutually exclusive. Or the other option is to innovate something truly new that allows you to beat conventional strategy with less talent. An extreme example of this is the A-11 high school offense. A more moderate example would be the spread option offense in college. (The wildcat doesn't really count, because even at its peak, the Dolphins only ran it about 10 plays a game. They spent the bulk of their offense in conventional sets.) In the NFL, these kinds of innovations can only help you in the short term, because other teams catch on, figure out how to better defend them, and incorporate the best elements into their own schemes. Then you have to innovate something new. Anyway, I could be wrong, but I don't see Gailey going down this road. I think we'll run a pretty conventional offense in 2011. Yeah, we'll be in the shotgun 4 or 5 wide over half the time, but that's pretty common these days. Definitely some non-conventional stuff in there (WildBill or whatever), but probably not much more than we ran last year. We'll see. Should be an interesting year no matter what.

Yay! Nice job getting him in camp on time. No excuse for a holdout this year.

Ha! Seriously though, it might be an adventure getting up to the salary floor. We might see Akin Ayodele signed to a 2-year, $18mil contract.

I hope not. I think every other first-round contract has been fully guaranteed so far, including Miller's and Green's. The #3 pick should not be the one that bucks the trend.

In the 7th round? C'mon. There's a reason they didn't offer Levi a spot on the practice squad after cutting him last year. Levi is no guarantee to make the final roster, much less dress on game days.

John, I'm completely on your side here. These are bush league shenanigans, and I for one will definitely put zero stock in anything this blog claims to report in the future. In fact, I doubt I'll waste my time by clicking on a link that leads to the site. But I don't think you're giving blogs a fair shake. In the early days of newspapers, how rigid were the journalistic practices? Some were pretty good, some not so good. Blogs are just a different medium, and we're still in the fairly early stages of the medium. You seem to think that reliable reporting exempts a website from being a blog, and that underhanded tactics to draw attention are a hallmark of a blog. But the reliable ones are blogs, too. There are plenty of blogs that would never break a story without reliable sources, and wouldn't try to gloss it over if they happened to get it wrong. "Blog" should not be a pejorative. The guys running this queen city sports site are hacks, and they'd be hacks whether they were publishing online, in print, on TV, or on the radio. But not all blogs are run by hacks. Agreed - and I was one of those guys. I got a little carried away last night. I think I was mentally trying to prevent the scenario where we signed Clabo, but I was pissed about it. So I raised my salary expectations way high. Still, one wonders what the Bills' offer was. My guess is that ATL exactly matched Buffalo's offer. If that's how it went down, I wonder what price tag would've been high enough for Atlanta not to match? Considering that Clabo is coming off a Pro Bowl season, has no injury history, is directly in his prime, and has been a starter for 4 straight seasons, it seems like his ultimate contract was below market value. He got about the same as Colon, who (I think) has never made a Pro Bowl, and missed all of last year with a major injury. I dunno, maybe he did give the Falcons a discount. Either way, it's disappointing. It's been a pretty dismal free agency period thus far.

I predict we'll see plays of this type about 2-5 times per game. Just a guess.

Well, that's a bummer. I'm surprised the final amount was that low. Lower than Colon's deal, and he missed last year. I get that ATL matched our offer, but I thought it would be higher. Interesting to see where the Bills try to spend their money next. Hopefully they can successfully address at least one weakness in free agency.

I don't think it would cause any problems short-term, since RT is usually 2nd-highest-paid on the OL, Bell is in no position to make salary demands, and the Bills are well below the salary floor anyway. Problems could arise down the road if the Bills try to ink a decent/good LT who now wants big-time money, or if the Bills get enough good players on the roster that they can't pay them all. If Clabo's really worth $7mil and we pay $9mil, no big deal. But if he's really worth $7mil and we pay $12mil, that's the kind of thing that winds up taking money away from another position where it's needed. Whatever, this is all academic anyway. Let's hope the Bills get him!

I'm kind of thinking somewhere around $9-10mil a year. I just don't want to see another Dockery-esque situation, where they gave a non-elite player an elite contract and it screwed up the whole pay scale pecking order for the line. You can't pay elite LT money to a RT without causing some problems sooner or later.

Great news if it's true, but I don't want to get my hopes up. Haven't seen anything from a media outlet I trust yet, and most of the tweets seems to be re-stating the same story from the one source. We shall see. And for the record, I'm cool with the Bills overpaying to get Clabo, as long as they don't go totally bonkers with the contract. Anything under 8 figures/year I think I'd be fine with.

My concern is more that I don't think guys like Smith will be able to make plays without a solid foundation around them. The Jets had/have that solid foundation, the Bills don't. I look at this signing a lot like the Spiller pick last year (although not NEARLY as bad - <$4mil/year is a lot easier to swallow than the #9 pick). A lot of the justification in this thread reminds me a lot of the Spiller justification after the draft last year. Gailey designing special offensive packages, the opposing defense having to gameplan for him, etc. I think those things would be true if we had a solid fundamental offense, and could add those packages on top of it, but we don't. So we'll see. Like I said before, I'm curious to hear/see how Gailey plans on using Smith. I'm expecting him to play a larger role than he did with the Jets, otherwise it's hard to justify his contract. If it's any consolation, I think Miami is much dumber for trading for Reggie Bush and (allegedly) promising him that he'll be The Man at RB. Bush is another luxury playmaker like Spiller or Smith. He can add a very dangerous dimension to an otherwise good offense, but I don't see a lot of value unless you already have the good offense. Reggie Bush can take your offense from good to great but not from mediocre to good.

I'm also quite puzzled by this signing. What does Smith do at WR that Parrish doesn't? With Evans, Johnson, Parrish, and maybe Easley, how much time will Smith see at WR? And I'm guessing he's now the full-time KR/PR, but meh. We already had some pretty good return men on the roster, and the new rules limit the impact of good KO returners anyway. And as for the "he'll fill the 3rd QB position" guys, I'm sorry, but what? You can't think that's the primary reason we signed him, right? We're talking what, 5 plays a game with Brad Smith at QB? Maybe? You don't give a guy a 4-year, $15mil deal for 5 gadget plays a game. There has to be some broader plan. It'll be interesting to see what Gailey says about utilizing him when they hold the press conference. I'll hazard to guess that Gailey is planning on rolling 4 or 5 wide as much as he can next year. I guess it's always good to get a good player, but it's hard for me to get excited about another speedy skill position guy when we already have plenty on the roster. I don't think adding another one to the mix will make any impact, but hopefully I'm wrong. But excited about Smith or not, I think we can all agree that for the offense to really get better, we need better O-line and QB play.

It makes some sense in historical context. Originally the #3 QB slot was added in lieu of another inactive slot. So the NFL went from 45 active players on game day to 45 + the #3 QB. The idea being that QB is such an important and specific position that it merits a special emergency backup. On top of that, a lot of teams like to have a "developmental" young guy, so the 4th quarter exception was designed to let a guy like Levi Brown gets some reps in the 4th quarter of a blowout. Of course, in reality, if teams really think their young guy has promise, he's usually either #1 or #2 on the depth chart anyways, and most coaches keep their starters in during blowouts anyway. So the reasoning behind it made some sense, even if it never applied to reality in any meaningful way. I'm glad they just bumped us up to a true 46 active players on game day.

Nice re-signing from the Bills. Nothing to get excited about, but definitely something to be glad about. Florence is 30, so I'm glad they didn't go longer than a 3 year deal. The money seems pretty reasonable.

I'm just glad we're interested. Trying and failing is a lot more noble than sitting at home hoping the stars align (i.e., The Erik Pears Project).

Nix seems obsessed with telling people that he thinks the Bills' no-name players are a lot better than the media/fans think. But they keep losing games and looking bad doing it. Buddy, maybe it's you. Maybe your evaluations are trending a little on the high side. Think about it. Regarding Wilson/Overdorf/Littman, I'm very curious to see 1.) How the Bills get to the salary floor, and 2.) How close to the floor they wind up.

I'm far from panic mode, although I would have preferred if we retained Poz. I'll be concerned if we don't sign someone decent to replace him. Even if Sheppard pans out, you need two starters at that position, and we currently have zero. I'm also a little concerned that all we hear from Nix is that the strategy is to build through the draft, eschew high-priced free agents and the trade market, and spend nearly all of our free agent money on re-signing our own players. But then step 1 is to immediately lose our best LB, who was identified pretty strongly by Nix as someone we wanted back. If step 2 is to lose Florence, I'd have to seriously question the strategy.

Also Dallas won 2 SBs after signing Charles Haley, and another after signing Deion. Respectfully disagree. Brees turned down a 5-year, $50mil offer from the Chargers to sign a 6-year, $60mil contract with the Saints. How is that not a big time free agent? $10mil per year is not the kind of low-tier guy Buddy Nix keeps talking about. Just because spending heavily in free agency often fails (a la the Snyder Redskins) doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to fail. I'm fine with the Bills' stated strategy of spending mostly on re-signing their own homegrown talent (a la Pittsburgh), but can we stop pretending that this is the only way to be successful? Plenty of big-name, big-money free agent signings have worked out just fine -- including Bryce Paup and Ted Washington for the Bills. There's more than one way to win the Super Bowl.

I want to know who these amazing inside linebackers are who make >50% of their tackles at the line of scrimmage or in the backfield. The way people B word about Fletcher Poz, there must be a lot of them. Why don't we just sign a couple of them?

That's what I get for clicking on a PFT link. Florio is basically a guy telling you about something he read on twitter. It would be nice to see some journalism here -- is there any truth to the assertions that the owners slipped in some non-negotiated riders in the deal they voted on? If so, how about finding out what type of things they were?

Absolutely yes. Aside from this year's Grizzlies picks, there hasn't been a salary negotiation for a first-round pick in the NBA since the rookie scale was adopted, but every draftee has an agent. Not to negotiate their salary, but to get them drafted as high as possible in the first place. In a way, the agent gets the rookie a better contract by selling teams on him pre-draft. I don't see that changing, regardless of the rookie salary structure.

+1. Nix has talked up his waiver-wire pickups on the O-line a heck of a lot. Sounds like he thinks Urbik and Pears are the real deal, and we have our top 6 or 7 linemen set going forward. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if we sign an OT to be the unquestioned starter, but I would be surprised. Adding a Cornell Green/Langston Walker type (or maybe a notch cheaper) to "compete for the job" wouldn't surprise me as much.

The owners are like a basketball team that hacks everyone who drives the lane, only takes jumpers on the other end, then blames the refs for the disparity in free throws. It's not that the refs are biased, it's that you keep committing fouls. Likewise, as long as the NFL keeps bringing dubious arguments to court, they'll keep losing cases. It's not like non-Doty judges have exactly been burning up the benches with pro-NFL opinions. Other than the appeal to resume the lockout, what was the last court case (vs. anyone) the NFL won? I honestly can't think of one off the top of my head.