Looking back -- Davante Adams vs Amari Cooper

[dave mcbride]

2 hours ago, BillsFanForever19 said:

 

The other issue is that the picks that were being offered by the Jets were better picks than we could offer.

 

The Jets sent a Round 3 Pick (#92) with conditions in the trade that could turn it into a Round 2 Pick (#42).

 

Even if we matched the Rounds in the trade, they were still lesser Picks. It would have been a Round 3 Pick (#94) with conditions that could it into a Round 2 Pick (either #56 or #62).

 

To beat their offer, we would have had to straight up offer either #56 or #62. Even then, since NYJ put in conditions to make it a 2nd anyways, there's no telling that they wouldn't have countered our offer and just straight up offered #42.

 

That would have been game, set, match - just like the offer that they got him with. The Jets wanted him and had better picks to acquire him that we couldn't match. 

 

And that's not even taking the contracts into account. Cooper we were able to easily make work. Adams would have taken a LOT of work to fit in.

 

All this to say you're oversimplifying matters by a LOT by making it just a decision of Cooper or Adams and that we made the wrong choice. Cooper was an option, Adams really wasn't once the Jets got involved.

I get all of that and I don’t think I’m oversimplifying. The issue I keep coming back to is that the Bills settled for a significantly worse player in a SB-window season where the glaring hole was WR. But maybe it was never doable given the Bills’ cap situation.

[BillsFanForever19]

16 minutes ago, dave mcbride said:

I get all of that and I don’t think I’m oversimplifying. The issue I keep coming back to is that the Bills settled for a significantly worse player in a SB-window season where the glaring hole was WR. But maybe it was never doable given the Bills’ cap situation.

 

You're still doing it but implying "the Bills settled for a significantly worse player". 

 

The cap situation is part of it. The bigger part is that we didn't have the ammo to outbid the Jets. Their picks were better than ours.

 

The Raiders weren't going to take #96 that could become #56 (if we were even willing to do that) when the Jets were offering #94 that could become #42.

Edited August 22 by BillsFanForever19

[dave mcbride]

Just now, BillsFanForever19 said:

 

You're still doing it but implying "the Bills settled for a significantly worse player". 

 

The cap situation is part of it. The bigger part is that we didn't have the ammo to outbid the Jets. Their picks were better than ours.

 

The Raiders weren't going to take #96 that could become #52 (if we were even willing to do that) when the Jets were offering #94 that could become #42.

The Bills could have offered more: a second and a 4th, for instance. Or maybe their first (unlikely) or even their 2026 first. So it’s not as if they couldn’t outbid what the Jets offered. They just chose not to, which I get.  
 

Again, I keep coming back to the fact that Adams was the most productive receiver in the league over the last five games of the season, and for a bad team.

[Breakout Squad]

8 hours ago, Doc Brown said:

Cooper only counted $806k towards the cap.  Adams would've been $11.6m.  We were tight against the cap like always and don't even know if it was possible to create that much money in restructuring just to get that trade through.

I still remember Beane talking about how the team was in salary cap ‘hell’ when he took over. And yet every year we are up against the cap and over.

 

I love Beane but I think he has an arrogance and defensiveness about him that is unflattering. 

[Doc Brown]

15 minutes ago, Breakout Squad said:

I still remember Beane talking about how the team was in salary cap ‘hell’ when he took over. And yet every year we are up against the cap and over.

 

I love Beane but I think he has an arrogance and defensiveness about him that is unflattering. 

You want a general manager to be up against the cap each season to try and put the best roster around their elite QB.  It just makes in season moves more difficult.

[NewEra]

47 minutes ago, dave mcbride said:

The Bills could have offered more: a second and a 4th, for instance. Or maybe their first (unlikely) or even their 2026 first. So it’s not as if they couldn’t outbid what the Jets offered. They just chose not to, which I get.  
 

Again, I keep coming back to the fact that Adams was the most productive receiver in the league over the last five games of the season, and for a bad team.

And we are coming back with the fact the price was too high and the cap hit was too big…. Due to those aspects, the part you are coming back to is basically irrelevant.  Making this a non issue imo.

 

apologies if that comes across harsh- wasn’t sure how to phrase it.  You’re one of my favorite posters, no offense meant.  

26 minutes ago, Breakout Squad said:

I still remember Beane talking about how the team was in salary cap ‘hell’ when he took over. And yet every year we are up against the cap and over.

 

I love Beane but I think he has an arrogance and defensiveness about him that is unflattering. 

Most contending teams paying their QB big bucks usually are

[BillsFanForever19]

8 hours ago, dave mcbride said:

The Bills could have offered more: a second and a 4th, for instance. Or maybe their first (unlikely) or even their 2026 first. So it’s not as if they couldn’t outbid what the Jets offered. They just chose not to, which I get.  
 

Again, I keep coming back to the fact that Adams was the most productive receiver in the league over the last five games of the season, and for a bad team.

 

And if we offered 56 or 62, not only would that cost us T.J. Sanders or at least Landon Jackson, who's to say the bidding war ends there? Like I said, the Jets included #42 conditionally. So if we beat their offer with one of those, it's very likely they then just offer #42 unconditionally.

 

Then the only way to beat it is to give #30. Which is absolutely INSANE to offer for a half year rental on a 31 year old WR. 
 

On top of that, it's been said he wanted to go to the Jets and play with Rodgers again. You say that he doesn't have much say in the matter. He absolutely did. Trading for him would have required us to rework his contract. And he had the ability to say no to that to whichever team wanted to trade for him. So it very well may have been reunite with Rodgers or nothing:

 

Quote

Adams’ salary is so big under his current deal, particularly next year, that anyone interested in trading for him would be irresponsible to not agree to a restructure ahead of the trade being finalized.

 

With that in mind, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero probably explained it best…

 

”When you have the need, quite possibly, to restructure a contract to facilitate a trade, that effectively gives a player veto power,” Pelissero said this week on the Rich Eisen Show.

 

I don't know why you "keep coming back to" this idea. Cooper was an option. Adams wasn't once the Jets became involved because of their picks being higher than ours, even more so after it became known that's where he preferred to go, and had the power to say "no" to reworking his deal (which we'd have to do).

Edited August 22 by BillsFanForever19

[Breakout Squad]

21 minutes ago, Doc Brown said:

You want a general manager to be up against the cap each season to try and put the best roster around their elite QB.  It just makes in season moves more difficult.

Before Allen was paid they were up against the cap. I’m in agreement they should spend and Pegula is awesome for opening his wallet. I’m just saying Beane complained about the cap situation and then spent like a madman. The Star contract comes to mind.

 

That being said… I think Beane is a great GM and I’ve always been a fan of his. 

[dave mcbride]

11 hours ago, BillsFanForever19 said:

 

And if we offered 56 or 62, not only would that cost us T.J. Sanders or at least Landon Jackson, who's to say the bidding war ends there? Like I said, the Jets included #42 conditionally. So if we beat their offer with one of those, it's very likely they then just offer #42 unconditionally.

 

Then the only way to beat it is to give #30. Which is absolutely INSANE to offer for a half year rental on a 31 year old WR. 
 

On top of that, it's been said he wanted to go to the Jets and play with Rodgers again. You say that he doesn't have much say in the matter. He absolutely did. Trading for him would have required us to rework his contract. And he had the ability to say no to that to whichever team wanted to trade for him. So it very well may have been reunite with Rodgers or nothing:

 

 

I don't know why you "keep coming back to" this idea. Cooper was an option. Adams wasn't once the Jets became involved because of their picks being higher than ours, even more so after it became known that's where he preferred to go, and had the power to say "no" to reworking his deal (which we'd have to do).

I should be clearer: this is more a meta discussion about what it means to go all in. To do that, you have to be willing to pay a high price. For example, the Ravens traded second and fifth round picks plus AJ Klein to the Bears for Roquan Smith. To be sure, they haven’t won a SB with him, but they became a better team immediately and have not regretted the trade for a moment. He’s truly elite -- first team all-pro in all three of his seasons with the Ravens.

 

Adams was simply the best WR available for a WR-starved offense last season, and I suspect that if the price were right, Adams would have been fine playing with arguably the best QB in the NFL on a dominant team. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Adams was and is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Cooper. 
 

I am NOT saying that this was the likely outcome or that the Bills were on even terms relative to the Jets. It’s more food for thought. But at least in terms of draft ammo and willingness on the part of the receiver, I believe they could have done it. The tricky part is the cap, and that’s where the Bills were kinda screwed. So maybe it wasn’t viable from that perspective.

Edited August 22 by dave mcbride

[ChronicAndKnuckles]

14 hours ago, BillsFanForever19 said:

 

There's been anonymous source scuttlebutt that he's "done". Implications that he's checked out. Which would explain why we didn't look to bring him back and why he's still on the street.

He looked checked out while the season was still going. I just thought he was really introverted. 

[Thurman#1]

20 hours ago, dave mcbride said:

The D and C had a story about it. Also, OF COURSE Beane is going to say that afterward. But he's no dummy - and there's no way he could believe that Cooper was a better solution to the Bills' WR problems than Adams. To reiterate, Adams is clearly the better player. It's not debatable.

 

 

 

Can we stop with the "Of course Beane is going to say that," crap. Because that's what it is, it's crap.

 

Beane is a guy who says what he means. Ask anyone in the media, they know this by now.

 

And yeah, sometime he's put in a position where many GMs would just tell a polite lie. But Beane is media-savvy, he just says he can't answer that right now or passes some Crash Davis pabulum.

 

"Which did we want more, A or B? Well, you know, A will run through a wall for the team, and B always gives 110%. We love both guys, really. Next question." 

 

As a rule of thumb, if you think that Beane lied because you can't believe he'd really disagree with you that much ... you're wrong. He did feel that way. If he didn't feel that way, he wouldn't have said it. Beane does disagree with people on this board sometimes, believe it or not.

 

If he said it, he meant it. 

 

And it's totally possible that he thought that Cooper was a better solution to the problem than Adams. 100% possible, even if he thought that Adams was a better player than Cooper, which he likely did think. Beane's job isn't to acquire the best player regardless of other considerations. It's to acquire the best solution to making the team better, which means he is forced to include other factors such as whether he is willing to give away more draft capital than another team is, and how much each guy will count against the cap.

 

Oh, and you're right that Adams was wildly productive w/ the Jets. Couldn't a lot of that have been that he was with a guy who had thrown to him for close to a decade and knew him inside-out? Not to mention that Rodgers was absolutely forcing the ball to Adams, just the situation that we were trying to get away from, having to force the ball to a diva.

 

Game 13 (Miami): 11 targets, 9 catches, 109 yards, 1 TD

Game 14 (Jax): 12 targets, 9 catches, 198 yards, 2 TDs

Game 15 (LARams): 13 targets, 7 catches, 68 yards, 1 TD

Game 13 (Buf): 8 targets, 5 catches, 47 yards, 0 TDs

Game 13 (Miami): 12 targets, 6 catches, 88 yards, 1 TD

 

That's 510 yards in five games, spectacular. But it's also a massive force-feed of targets, and two great statistical games against two fairly weak pass defenses and then teams figuring out that Rodgers was going to him a ton and adjusting and the last three games being pretty good but unspectacular especially given the number of targets. 

 

56 targets in those five games. Over 17 games, that would have been 190 targets, far more than anyone else in the league actually received. JaMarr Chase got 175, Nabers 170 and Drake London 158 went numbers one, two and three.

 

He wasn't going to get that kind of a volume of targets here.

 

Still a good player in 2024, though, I won't argue that at all.

 

Edited August 22 by Thurman#1

[dave mcbride]

33 minutes ago, Thurman#1 said:

 

 

Can we stop with the "Of course Beane is going to say that," crap. Because that's what it is, it's crap.

 

Beane is a guy who says what he means. Ask anyone in the media, they know this by now.

 

And yeah, sometime he's put in a position where many GMs would just tell a polite lie. But Beane is media-savvy, he just says he can't answer that right now or passes some Crash Davis pabulum.

 

"Which did we want more, A or B? Well, you know, A will run through a wall for the team, and B always gives 110%. We love both guys, really. Next question." 

 

As a rule of thumb, if you think that Beane lied because you can't believe he'd really disagree with you that much ... you're wrong. He did feel that way. If he didn't feel that way, he wouldn't have said it. Beane does disagree with people on this board sometimes, believe it or not.

 

If he said it, he meant it. 

 

And it's totally possible that he thought that Cooper was a better solution to the problem than Adams. 100% possible, even if he thought that Adams was a better player than Cooper, which he likely did think. Beane's job isn't to acquire the best player regardless of other considerations. It's to acquire the best solution to making the team better, which means he is forced to include other factors such as whether he is willing to give away more draft capital than another team is, and how much each guy will count against the cap.

 

Oh, and you're right that Adams was wildly productive w/ the Jets. Couldn't a lot of that have been that he was with a guy who had thrown to him for close to a decade and knew him inside-out? Not to mention that Rodgers was absolutely forcing the ball to Adams, just the situation that we were trying to get away from, having to force the ball to a diva.

 

Game 13 (Miami): 11 targets, 9 catches, 109 yards, 1 TD

Game 14 (Jax): 12 targets, 9 catches, 198 yards, 2 TDs

Game 15 (LARams): 13 targets, 7 catches, 68 yards, 1 TD

Game 13 (Buf): 8 targets, 5 catches, 47 yards, 0 TDs

Game 13 (Miami): 12 targets, 6 catches, 88 yards, 1 TD

 

That's 510 yards in five games, spectacular. But it's also a massive force-feed of targets, and two great statistical games against two fairly weak pass defenses and then teams figuring out that Rodgers was going to him a ton and adjusting and the last three games being pretty good but unspectacular especially given the number of targets. 

 

56 targets in those five games. Over 17 games, that would have been 190 targets, far more than anyone else in the league actually received. JaMarr Chase got 175, Nabers 170 and Drake London 158 went numbers one, two and three.

 

He wasn't going to get that kind of a volume of targets here.

 

Still a good player in 2024, though, I won't argue that at all.

 

He was wildly productive with the Raiders too. It wasn't just Rodgers. I'm also not being critical of Beane; I understand why he'd say he really wanted Cooper after he obtained Cooper. What's he supposed to say? I would have done precisely the same. But in no world was Cooper a better solution than Adams, a multi-time first team all pro. I get why it didn't happen, of course.  

[jcamm1966]

Cooper won us the home game vs KC

[Bleeding Bills Blue]

Couple of nice TDs for Cooper.  I think he hurt his back on that jump ball against the jets, and didn't really do much after that.  

[Einstein's Dog]

Yes to Davante Adams over A Cooper.  In 2024 and 2025.  

 

I can understand the A Cooper move in 2024 when factoring in cost - draft capital and money.  And when they acquired A Cooper the hope was for a much more productive season than we received.

 

But for 2025 the cost was just money.  I would have liked to see the Bills outbid the Rams - who took D Adams to replace C Kupp.  For about an additional $10M you get a much more established proven productive player than J Palmer.