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Buffalo Bills worst draft choices.


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11 minutes ago, Buffalo716 said:

Most times drafting a corner in the top 10 Is flawed. Unless it's literally a CANT MISS guy like Patrick Peterson and he even had a better rook year as returner than CB... Leodis was also from Troy.. tough transition

 

It's literally the toughest position to play on defense and usually has a high learning curve. Far from a safe position

 

Though I did love the Gilmore selection

 

Yea I loved the Gilmore pick too. I knew a bit more about the college game and the individual players by then. 

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On ‎4‎/‎7‎/‎2020 at 5:32 AM, BuffaloBills1998 said:

With the draft coming up I wanted to know some of  your guys lists on the worst players we ever drafted here.

 

mine starts off with Aaron Maybin, Mike Williams, Willis McGahee, CJ spiller, JP Losman, Trent Edwards, Dante Whitner, Erik Flowers, James Hardy, and John McCargo, EJ Manuel etc

Whitner does not belong on this list.   He was a decent player, as was Spiller, 

 

Just looking at first round:  Mike Dennis, Al Cowlings, Tom Rudd, Tom Cousineau, Booker Moore, Phil Dokes, Perry Tuttle, JP Losman,  Aaron Maybin, and EJ Manual.

 

Some of these guys never played a down, and a few played so poorly you wished they hadn't. 

 

 

Edited by Bob in STL
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5 hours ago, SoTier said:

 

McCargo had an injury (knee?) that he never recovered from.  Why in the world would any team trade up to take a player coming off a serious injury?   However, taking players with injury histories seems to have been a common thread during the years when Russ Brandon ran the show: Troupe and Koujandijo also had injury histories which likely compromised their NFL careers even before they were drafted.

True, but didn’t Thurman have an injury history as well?

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5 hours ago, GunnerBill said:

 

And he was a bad pick. Because we had Lynch and Fred. And not much at all at edge rusher or offensive tackle. There were good players on the board at both spots when we took another running back. 

The problem was that Lynch was one strike away from being suspended for a year.

 

The Bills were in a corner with him and had to find a way out, and that was by drafting Spiller.

 

I hated that we got next to nothing for Lynch, but he's the one who caused it all.

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One pick that showed how far off the Bills Scouting Department was from 2005-2016 was Derek Fine.

 

What did our Scouts see in a 25 year old, who ran a 4.95 at the Combine? What a shock, he got here and couldn’t meet the minimum physical requirements of the position.

 

Picks like Xavier Omon, Danny Batten, Ed Wang, Alvin Bowen, Reggie Corner, Levi Brown, Alex Carrington epitomized the horrendous talent evaluation of the Bills.

 

And you have to remember, Tom Modrak was leading the Scouting efforts for the Bills through the 2010 Draft.

Edited by Straight Hucklebuck
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3 hours ago, Philly McButterpants said:

 

I hate this revisionist crap - the guy literally broke his back.  it's not his fault that he got drafted.  he didn't "fail" at anything other than remaining healthy enough to play.  

 

Thats right!  You have to look at every draft pick in the context of when they were taken, what the team's needs were at the time and other players still available.  Gronk is the player who had injury concerns, not Troupe.  The Pats rolled the dice on him and won that one.  The drafting process can't be criticize retrospectively with 20:20 hindsight without context.  We did need a DT at the time.  Unfortunately after Suh and McCoy drafter #2/3 the rest of the DTs taken through the first 3 rounds didn't really turn out.   Its unfortunate, but if you look at the draft, Troupe was the 5th DT taken early in the 2nd round, so they were coming off the board.

 

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2010/draft.htm

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9 hours ago, BuffaloBills1998 said:

mine starts off with Aaron Maybin, Mike Williams, Willis McGahee, CJ spiller, JP Losman, Trent Edwards, Dante Whitner, Erik Flowers, James Hardy, and John McCargo, EJ Manuel etc

 

I have to split one hair here.  CJ Spiller could actually play football and had some good moments.  What made him such a bad choice was that the Bills didn't need him, but DID need a lot of help elsewhere.

 

Everybody else on your list was just a wasted pick, at least in the round the Bills used on him.

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9 hours ago, BuffaloBills1998 said:

With the draft coming up I wanted to know some of  your guys lists on the worst players we ever drafted here.

 

mine starts off with Aaron Maybin, Mike Williams, Willis McGahee, CJ spiller, JP Losman, Trent Edwards, Dante Whitner, Erik Flowers, James Hardy, and John McCargo, EJ Manuel etc

I'd take CJ Spiller and Donte Whitner off that list.  Other than that, it's a good list.

 

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2 hours ago, dneveu said:

 

My only criticism here is you are only evaluating based on that drafts running backs regarding spiller. The fact is - we had 2 running backs in lynch and jackson - you only take spiller if you think he is a superstar. I can actually argue Mcgahee was a better pick - he was closer to a superstar.  Spiller was not a superstar, or even particularly good.  I'd consider someone a bust when they don't really provide much discernable value to the team that drafted them.  


The Spiller pick was indeed horrible.  I agree about the BPA argument.   It really wasn’t in play as there was plenty of talent on the board (even without the benefit of hindsight).  It wasn’t any sort of surprise that Spiller was on the board at 9.  Getting a RB with McGahee and Jackson already on the team made zero sense. 

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Just now, BarleyNY said:


The Spiller pick was indeed horrible.  I agree about the BPA argument.   It really wasn’t in play as there was plenty of talent on the board (even without the benefit of hindsight).  It wasn’t any sort of surprise that Spiller was on the board at 9.  Getting a RB with McGahee and Jackson already on the team made zero sense. 

 

They wanted to break up with Lynch.  Which looking back was indicative of poor coaching, poor player management, poor ownership etc.

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1 hour ago, cage said:

 

Thats right!  You have to look at every draft pick in the context of when they were taken, what the team's needs were at the time and other players still available.  Gronk is the player who had injury concerns, not Troupe.  The Pats rolled the dice on him and won that one.  The drafting process can't be criticize retrospectively with 20:20 hindsight without context.  We did need a DT at the time.  Unfortunately after Suh and McCoy drafter #2/3 the rest of the DTs taken through the first 3 rounds didn't really turn out.   Its unfortunate, but if you look at the draft, Troupe was the 5th DT taken early in the 2nd round, so they were coming off the board.

 

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2010/draft.htm

I will state to you as I did to the other, the issue with Troup is he could not get off blocks well even in college. Maybe the Bills thought they could teach him but I think they took him to be a space eater and not much else but without a stud LB that is not going to win many games. My initial comment was about how he was a low cieling guy which i still think he was even without the injury.

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I don’t understand why no love for “AC” Al Cowlings. He was the fifth overall pick and the only reason was because OJ wanted his buddy in Buffalo. This might be the worst reason to draft someone in the history of the NFL.

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Maybin and McCargo stand out as the worst because they were first-rounders that stunk from the word 'go', in any context, regardless of who else was still available. 

 

I can see the argument that Whitner was not such a bad pick, but I thought it was pretty lame when it happened. At #8, you still have a chance to take the best player available at several positions, and they took the second safety off the board. And when you take a safety in the top 10, the dude should be a straight up beast. Whitner was good, but not that good. 

 

Spiller was a stupid pick. They had a lot of needs, RB not being one of them, and they take a glorified gadget player. He had some nice runs, but he was never really an impact player, and you just knew from his college highlight reel that he would never be able to replicate that kind of play against an NFL defense, especially when playing for a Buffalo Bills offense.

 

The McGahee pick was pretty bad, even though he turned out to be a very good RB both in Buffalo and elsewhere. On draft day it registered as a really bad idea: A big risk that he would ever get his leg anywhere near normal again after a vomit-inducing, multi-ligament shred-fest, and also knowing that he wouldn't play his rookie year at all. It's a funny one, because it was a bad pick, but it still worked out. 

 

 

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8 hours ago, dneveu said:

Spiller had a productive career?  He had fewer rushing yards than Isaiah Crowell, and Bilal Powell...

 

CJ Spiller had a Pro Bowl season where he rushed over 1200 yards.  The next season, he had over 900 yards.

He was a decent NFL player, who should have been viewed as a change-of-pace RB instead of a 3-down workhorse.

 

The problem with Spiller was expectations, since he was a Top-10 pick.  

If he was taken in the 3rd Round, people would have been fine with his career production.

 

Guys like Aaron Maybin and Torrell Troup were worthless, and had no business even being on NFL rosters.

 

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The better question is - who was the WORSR Bills GM?  So many to choose from:

 

- Tommy Donahoe

- Marv Levy

- Russ Brandon

- Buddy Nix

- Douglas Whaley

 

From that sorry group, I organize it like this:

 

1 Donahoe

2 Whaley (bad GM)

3 Nix (bad GM)

4 Russ Brandon (terrible GM)

5 Marv (sorry he’s the worst)

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