Buffalo tried to trade up with Cleveland and Denver before getting Josh Allen at No. 7.
By Michael David Smith / ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
The Buffalo Bills got their man, quarterback Josh Allen, by trading up to the seventh overall pick in the draft. But they wanted to trade up higher.
Bills General Manager Brandon Beane says he was working hard on trying to get the fourth overall pick, but Browns General Manager John Dorsey was holding out for too high a price.
“I probably talked to John Dorsey more than anybody through the process, but we could not come to an agreement on what was fair,” Beane told the Buffalo News.
Beane also had a deal in advance with Broncos General Manager John Elway that would have seen the Bills send the 12th overall pick, the 22nd overall pick and a second-round pick to Denver in exchange with the fifth overall pick. But Elway said he would only do that if the player he wanted was off the board at No. 5, and it turned out the player Elway wanted, Bradley Chubb, wasn’t available. Chubb was available, and the Broncos stayed put and drafted him.
“John calls me and says, ‘All right, here’s what we’ll do,’” Beane said. “We finalized the deal, but it’s contingent on his guy not being there. . . I was a little bummed when Elway told me, ‘Hey, this is our guy.’ I felt like what I had to offer John was better than anybody else could offer. I felt like I was bidding against myself, basically.”
In the end, Beane got a much better deal: To trade up from 12 to 7, Beane only had to give up two second-round picks, and not the 22nd pick in the first round. That allowed Beane to get Allen and then make another trade in the first round to get another player he wanted, linebacker Tremaine Edmunds. Beane thinks the trades he made ended up even better than the trades he tried to make.