Buffalo Rumblings
We watched the Buffalo Bills played NFL football recently. It was on my television. I saw it.
The old adage is that preseason don’t count, but it does matter. I’m inclined to agree with the wisdom of the ages, but the football matters for some of us in a different way than it matters for others.
The biggest takeaways from preseason games usually revolves around how a specific player plays. It’s a qualitative conversation. The focus is on the quality of the passes they threw, the quality of the routes they ran, the quality of the reads they made, or the quality of the reps they took. And that’s awesome. It’s great to have actual (kind of) football to analyze again.
But the most predictive observations from preseason games doesn’t lie in the quality of the play on the field. Instead, it lies in where, when, and with whom the individual players play. The “official” depth charts released by the team are largely PR items and essentially serve no purpose in helping us get a better idea of where a player falls on a depth chart or what the coaching staff thinks of them.
If a player is playing in the fourth quarter of the final preseason game alongside players that nobody assumed from the beginning of camp would actually make the team, that tells us something. Whether an offensive lineman gets all his preseason reps at left tackle instead of right tackle tells us something. If a receiver gets 100% of his reps alongside the starting quarterback, that tells us something. Put simply, “where, when, and with whom” > “how” when it comes to predictiveness and determining what the coaching staff thinks of a specific player.
In that vein, there were some observations that came out of Bills-Giants that I found interesting:
Buffalo’s defensive line has gotten a lot of the publicity this offseason for its glut of players, but the defensive backfield is also going to force the team to make some tough decisions. With both projected starters Cole Bishop and Taylor Rapp out for the Giants game, it was Damar Hamlin and Cam Lewis who manned the deep defensive halves for Buffalo.
Annually the forgotten man in the Bills secondary, Lewis once again was perceived on the hot seat after the team seemingly drafted another utility defensive back in the most recent NFL Draft, selecting Jordan Hancock in the fifth round out of The Ohio State University. But it wasn’t Hancock who was the second man up at safety, nor was it free agent signing Darrick Forrest Jr. (perceived at one point during his time in Washington as an ascending young player).
Instead, it was “old reliable” Cam Lewis, locally out of University at Buffalo, who started at deep safety and should be considered ahead of Forrest and Hancock until we see otherwise. When Taron Johnson exited the game, it was Te’Cory Couch who subbed in as the nickel defensive back...
