Bills GM Brandon Beane and his staff are beginning to enter the final phases of the evaluation of this year’s quarterback prospects. That combined with what could be an interesting free agent class and a handful of other teams looking for the next franchise QB is a dynamic that Beane embraces.
Buffalo Bills Insider Chris Brown provides the details. Here is his report:
Bills head coach Sean McDermott joked as he passed by the assembled Buffalo media following a Senior Bowl practice, as they waited to interview GM Brandon Beane.
“Ask him some tough questions,” McDermott said with a smile.
Entering their first full offseason together as GM and head coach, Beane and McDermott will come up with plenty of their own questions that they’ll need to answer as they map out the NFL quarterback landscape.
At the Senior Bowl, there are a handful of quarterbacks on which to focus and just like every other NFL club, the Bills brass will be doing their due diligence on each and every one of them. Sitting at picks 21 and 22 in round one, however, likely puts the top talents that will be coveted at the position out of reach.
So, what to do?
Beane is not one who puts the cart before the horse. Before he’s going to concern himself with draft scenarios like how high can we move up the board or who do we like more, Buffalo’s chief decision maker is going to make sure they have a solid conviction about each and every one of the prospects in this year’s draft pool.
“The quarterback is such a layered piece. Obviously, you have to have all the physical tools we’ve talked about,” said Beane. “I think you guys have heard me talk about making plays from the pocket and things like that, but you’ve got all the intangibles: the leadership, do they make guys around them better, not just themselves? What’s their command? Have they taken snaps? We talk about the college game [and] the spread [offense]. A lot of these guys haven’t. We saw fumbles today.
“Some of these guys had not taken snaps from center very often. High schools don’t even do it anymore. It’s a big learning curve for a lot of these guys, so you’ve got to predict where they’re at and then you’ve got to talk about, ‘Okay, if I do take some of these guys, what’s the learning curve before they can assimilate to our offense?’”
Buffalo is still wrapping up their evaluations of their own offense. They made a change at offensive coordinator, and Brian Daboll will likely be asked to weigh with his thoughts on how it can be improved after he conducts a review of their 2017 performance.
“We got to the playoffs so it’s a step in the right direction,” said Beane. “We have to look at Tyrod. We have to look at our offense, and I mentioned at the post-season presser that Tyrod did a lot of good things. We have to look at, what are the things he could’ve done better? What are the other things that happened? Was it receivers running the wrong route? Maybe we could’ve run a better play.
“There’s so many different things that you could do and I’m sure Tyrod knows there’s things he could’ve done better. We’re still early in the process. We’re going to continue. We like Tyrod a lot. He works hard and he does a lot of good things.”
Much like the draft prospects are analyzed and evaluated Buffalo will also assess the quarterback free agent class. Who isn’t re-signed before the market opens in mid-March? Which clubs have taken quarterback options off the market by bringing them back into the fold?
Beane and company will have a solid stance on the value of each and every one of the quarterback prospects in this draft class not long after they’re back from the NFL combine in early March. That will provide them with a road map for free agency and their level of involvement in the market, because they will have a sense of NFL clubs ahead of them on the draft board who might be willing to move out.
The only problem is there are arguably eight to 10 other NFL clubs eager to find the next franchise quarterback too, which creates a demand that far outweighs the supply. It puts teams high on the board without a pressing quarterback need in a position of strength.
Could a team blink and overpay to get up the board and get the quarterback they want? It has happened before. This is where Beane’s philosophy as a general manager will be under the microscope.
By the sound of it though, Beane isn’t one who blinks.
“We’ve got to do a good job with all positions of putting the value where they belong. If you put a quarterback, whatever position, you put a guy at the top [and] if you think he’s a top five guy, that’s the one that you would make a move for. But that’s any position. That comes with a hefty price to be able to do that from [pick number] 21, 22 [and] where we’re at. We’re not saying [that] we would do that. To go up there, we would have to feel really good about it.”
Beane has seen the conjecture and speculation about what the Bills would have to do to get to the top of the draft board and take a perceived prized quarterback prospect. But he has a firm grasp on how the business of the draft really works and that’s what keeps him level-headed in his decision making.
“At the end of the day, it’s like anything that’s for sale. It’s only for sale if somebody’s willing to move it,” he said. “I know there’s going to be all these hypotheticals of, ‘This is how the Bills could do this, this is what it could take,’ but you have to have a partner that, if we decided that it was worth it to move up there.
“Even if you want to move to [pick number] two or three or four or five or whatever number it is, they have to be willing to do it and they may ask for a king’s ransom that does not make sense for us. At the end, we have to have a partner if we were ever to choose to move up or move down. So who knows what will happen. We’re still a long way from doing that because we haven’t put a final value on each of these players.”
And the Bills will not waver from that player value. That’s why they have a college scouting department that spends nine to 10 months of the year on the road going campus to campus to gather all they can on all of the draft prospects. So their final grade on a player is accurate and unbending.
“The whole roster is super important. Obviously, the quarterback, you want to know you’ve got one for a long time and at the end of the day, that’s the job that I’m in and I’m going to work my butt off to make sure we make all the right decisions [with] quarterbacks, wide receivers, [defensive] ends, everything,” said Beane. “We’re basically looking at what all of our options are at every position. So you look at quarterback and you evaluate it and that’s what we’ll continue to do until we know we have it right.”